In this episode, I’m going to be explaining to my children why we have been very purposeful in the praise that we provide them. Specifically why we rarely, if ever, will say something like, you’re such a good kid. In order to do that, I have to go back to explain an experience that I had as a young adult.

Summary and Quotes

[00:00:50] – Self Defense training exercise story

[00:03:17] – Affirming effort, not the person

[00:04:12] – The importance of purposeful practice

[00:06:14] – Analyzing the situation

[00:09:50] – Focusing on the effort vs the outcome

Quotes from the Episode:

“We had to find within ourselves the approval of we’re doing this right now, obviously I understand it’s a learning environment, but what he saw was that we were externally focused and we needed to be focused on what we were doing. [00:02:32]

“We want to create a child who then grows into an adult who can get motivation internally and does not always have to seek external motivation and external affirmation for whatever activity it is that they’re doing.” [00:03:39]

“The more that you practice, the more you ultimately end up winning. And to the unskilled practitioner, that looks a lot like luck, but luck also happens to be the result of a lot of practice.” [00:04:50]

“The focus for us as parents is equipping them with the skill set so that they can win the largest possible number of games in whatever domain that happens to be in over the course of their life.” [00:06:42]

 

Transcript

So kids, when I had just finished up with school, one of the jobs that I had was working for the government. And I worked as a scientist and I would go around to various parts of the country and various parts of the world, and some of those parts of the world could be a little bit dangerous. So some of the training that I had was conducted, By a company that provides protection for people who go overseas, and part of that training was in how to handle yourself in a physical, altercation. Let’s just say. And it was really a very good learning experience. But what I noticed was that we would be going through these various training exercises and there were a variety of different people in the training room, and they had a variety of different levels of experience.

But what would happen is at the end of the exercise. A lot of the students, and I would be included among these, would be looking around the room to find an instructor to catch an instructor’s eye. Basically subconsciously ask them without actually verbalizing it, are we doing this right? So after about an hour of this, the head instructor came out, called us all out onto the mats and basically explained.

In a much more colorful language than I’m going to use right now. But he basically said, listen, , you guys are training to save your lives, to protect yourselves, keep yourself safe. And at the end of every exercise, I have seen many of you looking around the room searching for an instructor to catch their eye, to basically see if you’re doing it right.

Find your own approval and he added some extra colorful words in there to em for emphasis. The point being is that we had to find within ourselves the approval of we’re doing this right now, obviously I understand it’s a learning environment, but. What he saw was that we were externally focused and we needed to be focused on what we were doing.

What we’re doing is not particularly complicated or complex. It’s not that we needed a, you know, micrometer precision here. The point that he was trying to make is that the conditioning that we were demonstrating is something that would be a liability in the environments that we were potentially going into.

So bringing that back to a more parenting focused perspective right now,