I believe all of us are constantly pursuing happiness throughout our lifetime. Now, here’s the question. Do you know that some happiness can be short-lasting and some can be long-lasting? Don’t you eager for happiness that can sustain over a longer period for you and your children too?
Happiness usually comes to us in the form of pleasure. Ranging from going to a nice café and enjoying a cup of coffee to buying nice clothing and accessories, pleasure allows us to experience momentary happiness. However, we cannot constantly depend on external events or experiences to be happy. This leads us to discover a higher level of happiness, which is about passion and purpose.
Both you and your children need to engage your passions to achieve peak performances to achieve a longer lasting happiness. If you are eager for the longest lasting of happiness, both you and your children need to search for life purpose and meaning. Think about who you are and what you can do to contribute a better world.
To ensure that both you and your children are constantly pursuing long-lasting happiness, we need to learn how to be effective. Thus, how can we guide our children to be effective to achieve their life goals? Here are 7 efficient steps on being an effective and happy kid. You can equally become effective too with these steps.
7 Simple Steps to Become Effective and Happy Kids
1. Be Proactive
Highlighted
How would your children react if they face any challenges or problems in their school work? Do they throw tantrum to avoid their responsibilities or they take actions to solve their problems? If they are throwing tantrums, they are in fact being reactive towards the problems they face. They let the situations or problems to take control over them.
However, as parents, you should guide your children to be proactive. How is being proactive gets your children to be effective? The reason is simple: they learn to take full responsibility of the situation. Get your children to learn how to choose the correct attitudes to face the problems and how to take initiatives to solve the problems. As time passes by, they will learn to make wise and responsible choices, even if you are not around.
2. Begin With The End In Mind
I have tried this eye-opening visualizing activity to discover my purposes and life roles. You should try out this activity with your children to know who they want to be in their lives. Imagine this scenario.
Close your eyes and imagine yourself in your own funeral. Think deeply about what character would you like your family members, relatives and friends to have seen in you. Think about what contributions and differences would you like to have made in their lives.
You may need to repeat this activity for several times as your children might not be familiar with the activity initially. I am sure that after this activity, both you and your children will be able to find your life purpose.
Why is this so important to your children? Your children need to be clear of what their goals are and where they are now so that they can continue to take steps in the right direction. Guide them to start doing what matters the most to them. Once they are certain about their final goals and destinations, they will automatically start doing what should be done and you can be sure that they stay away from procrastination.
3. Put First Things First to Be Effective
I bet all of us face this issue – there is never enough time to do everything you have to do. You might not be able to stop the time from flowing, but you can control the tasks and activities that you spend your time with. Now, educate your children on the proper time management strategies.
It is not about crossing out what’s on the to-do list. Instead, get your children to think about tasks that are most important to them. Then, guide them to make a timetable to pursue their interest consistently.
With this, they would be able to organise their time and follow their planning. They would not be distracted by other activities that do not bring them any benefits. Most importantly, they would get the sense of satisfaction of achieving tasks and goals that they initially set.
4. Think Win-Win for Effective Relationship
Helping your children to think win-win will help them to develop effective friendship with their peers. Additionally, it will help them to develop trust in any other relationship in their future too, especially in their family lives and future career.
So, what is to think win-win? It is about reaching agreement and solutions that are mutually beneficial and satisfying for both parties. With this, we can ensure that both parties are being considerate about different perspectives and views.
To guide your children to think win-win, you should first help them to see the problems from other points of view. They should learn to understand and address others’ concerns. Next, you should guide them to write down some options for the solution and decide on the options that will bring mutual gain for both parties.
5. Understand Others, and Get Others to Understand You
To understand others, you need to first teach your children to listen. Not just pretend to listen, but you need guide them to listen emphatically. You can model and practise emphatic listening with your children through their daily interactions. Guide them to mimic and rephrase the content and then guide them to reflect others’ feelings during the conversation.
On the other hand, you should educate your children on expressing their opinions and feelings during their interaction with others too. They should learn to be self-confident and at the same time, considerate about others’ feelings when they voice out their opinions to seek for others’ understanding.
6. Work Well with Peers
Image credit to Unsplash
Cooperation and collaboration is an essential element that your children need to learn to be effective in both school projects and future career. Thus, they need to learn to work well with their peers.
First, guide them to appreciate others’ strengths and ideas and opt for different solutions to solve the problems in their projects. They should also learn to get along with their peers, even those who are different from them.
As they are aware that ‘together is better’, they will be more willing to develop trust and collaboration with others. With this, they will surely be more effective and efficient in completing their tasks and more importantly, they will gain happiness and satisfaction along the working process.
7. Sustain Healthy and Balanced Lifestyle
Image credit to Pixabay
To constantly stay effective, you need to have a healthy and functioning body and mind. Therefore, it is essential for both you and your children to take good care of your body and mind. Feed your body with healthy meals, regular exercises and sufficient rest. We also need to feed our mind with beneficial information and positive thoughts.
Guide your children to develop themselves physically and mentally by consistently involving in physical activities and reflecting on their past experience. After the reflection, you should guide them to review and reorganize their daily activities.
They should learn to eliminate daily activities that do not contribute to the development of their goals. At the same time, they should include more tasks that bring out the higher value to their goals.
Effectiveness Matters In The Long Run
Never wonder why the others achieve more success than us as the reason is rather simple: they have found ways to stay effective. Thus, we urgently need to educate ourselves and our children to acquire these positive habits to be effective.
Remember, only when we constantly stay on the right track to pursue our life goals effectively, we will be able to sustain our long-lasting happiness.
Stay tuned with Motherhood Story for more parenting tips and advises.