How does your childhood unconsciously impacts you, your children and business?
Everyone knows how important childhood is and what it takes to have a happy child. It is not always easy however to maintain calm when you have competing priorities or a busy work schedule, so how can you remain firmly in control and ‘get things done without overwhelm or disappointment’? It is so easy to make excuses and put things off but what happens to the issues? Nothing, they simply don’t go away by themselves, this includes sleepless nights and bad behaviour. When ignored small problems usually merge into something else, go to the bottom of your ‘to do list’ or get bigger and cost you far more in time, effort or money in the long run.
It is so easy to bury your head in the sand and not want to face things. It the same for your child who doesn’t want to go to nursery, sleep at night or makes excuses not to do their homework. We all know and love that feeling of satisfaction when we have achieved something, especially if it seemed insurmountable at the beginning. You may have perhaps felt scared too. Just because we don’t know the outcome, it is not a good reason to avoid doing the task or action required. In fact, when we do, we often surprise ourselves at how easy it was or say to our friends, ‘it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be or I feel amazing, I can’t believe it left it so long’!
The truth is, much of our behaviour today, is something we unconsciously learnt in childhood and unknowingly passed down to our children or next generation. Until we get present to what is driving our daily actions, we can’t possibly expect to change them. The first step is awareness, which is not always obvious when we are close to a problem or emotionally involved.
When things are not going well or according to plan, most intelligent adults will look at their child or colleague often with hidden frustration ask, ‘why on earth are they doing that or behaving that way?’ The real question they need to be asking is, ‘what actions have I done to bring about this situation or behaviour’ and ‘how can I take positive steps to change things’? When this happens, no matter how wrong you believe they are, everything changes for the better.
Here’s an example,
“Kim why are you doing that, have I not made my instructions clear enough for you”? Instead of “I told you what I wanted, I expected more or a better job from you”. Can you see how taking the pressure off the person, taking personal responsibility for the issue opens up a new channel of communication and presents an opportunity to fix the problem, by allowing the other person to fully express what was going on for them and enables them to speak the truth which sets you both free.
These language patterns are learnt in the early years. Simply by shifting the emphasis and re-phrasing a sentence you can have a far more positive outcome. This works exactly the same with young children, provided that you have spoken to them in an age appropriate manner and your expectations are not too high or too low.
Have a go and see how the results change for you. If you need some help please get in touch Juliet@sanitynanny.com