Sampling

With school starting and the fall season coming, many parents are now actively trying to figure out their family schedule for the year. Hours can be spent on this as they try to "get everything in". Some reflection may be needed at this time of year to discover why families select their children's experiences they way that they do. After all, it is very hard work and management on the parents part for sure.

Parents are always seeking great experiences and events for their children. So much so these days that children are now in the habit of only attending classes and training, such as dance, gymnastics, swimming, music, martial arts, sports, etc, for a short time before going off to the next adventure. The major excuse that they give is "all their friends are doing something else and they want to be a part of it".

If children are constantly wandering from experience to experience, never staying long enough to learn the full scope of the experience and only sampling, the world will change drastically and not necessarily for the good. After all, if little Michael Jordan wanted to play every sport and only sampled basketball, he would of never of been as great as he was when playing for the Bulls. Same for Kevin Durant of the OKC Thunder. If Tiger Woods only sampled golf instead of putting hours of training in, he would of not made such an impact on the golf world at such a young age.

Think about it, no more Misty Copelands, Travis Walls, Maria Tallchiefs for the dance world. No more Michael Phelps of Nancy Hogsheads for the swimming world. No more Nadia Comaneci or Gabby Douglas for the gymnastic world. How horrible would that be?

Our world needs heroes and leaders in all parts of our lives. If Mozart or even the Beatles only played around at composing music, instead of working hard at mastering it, there is no telling what we would be listening to today.

Can you just hear Mozart saying "but mom.......everyone else is doing soccer". Or how about  Shirley Temple crying "but mom..... Sally's mom says she can pick and choose what ever she wants to do".

The point is this. Children will sample at everything they do if they are allowed to, and are not guided towards finding one or two things they can become great at. Children will continue to want to follow their friends, not because they really want to do what the friends are doing, but because they are afraid of being left out of the group. Children will do this because it is what they do. Unless they are guided towards those experiences that have the greatest life value, they may continue the pattern even as an adult.  Parents have a choice of guiding them towards possible greatness, or allowing them to wander from one thing to the other, never becoming great at anything.

Becoming great at one or two things, instead of mediocre at many things, is how leaders and heroes are trained for the future. Finding experiences that teaches self esteem, self confidence, self trust, team work, cooperation and yes even  how to be an individual that is not afraid to go out on their own may be a better direction for our children. This means selecting one or two experiences and helping them to dive in and swim around for years so that they have time to fully train and develop into great leaders and possibly even heroes of our world.

Sampling may be fine at a buffet to find out what you would like to eat, but over sampling many different experiences with no direction and guidance may be just as detrimental as over eating at the buffet in the long term.

Progressive parents, and parents of grown children that are now doing fantastic things with their adult lives, know and understand that if the adults of our world cannot guide and set standards to follow, children will never grow up to step forward to take leadership of their lives, business, country or world.

Guidance is a good thing. Learning to be an individual that can make strong choices they can follow through with is even better. Let's leave sampling to the buffet.