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Today’s Generation and Their Unseen Strengths

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Like other parents, I’ve been concerned about the future of today’s generation. As I specifically work with teens struggling with anxiety, ADHD, delinquency, depression, and other issues, it can be easy to become stressed about my children’s future.

Yet, as I have guided and watched my children grow into their self-identity, I’ve been consistently amazed by strengths which many news pundits discount when discussing today’s younger generations.

Younger Generations Embrace Technological Change

One of the hallmarks of younger generations is their enthusiastic embrace of changing technology. While Gen Xer’s around my age began to experiment with technology in our teen years, I still vividly remember the sound my dial-up modem made, the inability to make phone calls while online, and how intimidating creating an AOL account was for me. This is not the digital world my children have grown up experiencing.

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6 Hacks to Learn Anything Faster

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In life, there are people who can learn anything faster in the blink of an eye and others might need a bit longer to learn a simple concept or theory. In this article, however, I will highlight and showcase the 5 hacks anyone can use to learn anything (yes, anything) much faster than usual.

1. Review your errors

It’s a life truth that you learn better from your mistakes. Any mistakes you have made in the past act as a pinpoint reference for you to better yourself. Reviewing them even for the shortest amount of time will help understand where your problem-solving skills let you down.

This hack is fantastic as you gain a pure understanding of how you approached the problem before, where you went took the wrong turn and you become stronger at the problem.

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How to Take Action and Care for Your Body

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It’s quite easy to become lax when it comes to taking care of ourselves as adults. Normally, we don’t have that nagging voice in the ear telling us when to sleep or how to eat as our mother’s once did. This sad realization comes to many of us as we stand in front of the mirror after stepping out of the shower. The phrase, “What happened?” usually crosses our minds. Right there is when we make a crucial decision. Do we commit to taking better care of ourselves, or do we put it off until tomorrow? You must fight the urge to procrastinate decisions affecting your physical needs. What do you do when it comes time to take action?

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A Lesson in Proportion

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Sometimes, the things we expect the least – both good and bad – can teach us the best lessons in life. Last month, I said to a group of 26 child leaders that in many things of our life, the important thing is not what others give us, but what we choose to take. When I said that, I did not consider the possibility of taking a lesson from others without any intention on their part.

Two weeks ago, we learned a very valuable lesson from a good friend of ours. Tom, our friend, had never planned on giving us this lesson. In fact, if it was up to him, I think he would gladly not teach us this lesson at all because of the heavy price he had to pay for it.

I hope that when you read this story, you will choose to take as much as possible from it. Remember, it is not about what I write, but what you choose to receive.

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Winners and Losers

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I like to walk around our beautiful neighborhood in the morning. It is one of the things that make me happy. I do it to warm up my body and mind, get my creative juices flowing (into the voice recorder on my mobile phone) and be ready for another great day.

About half way through my walk, when I was already going at a good pace and feeling pretty pumped, I saw a young Chinese woman leaving one of the houses and saying goodbye to a young man standing on the doorstep.

Suddenly, the young woman noticed a bus at a stop about 200 meters away. She became visibly uptight, her pitch rose and she looked like she was asking the young man what to do (as I do not speak Chinese, this is all my interpretation).

The man gestured towards the bus and looked like he was urging the woman to run for it and try to catch it. She kept pleading with him until he joined her and they started running toward the bus stop.

By the time they decided to run and crossed the street, I had been half way to the bus and it was still there. There were no passengers in sight, its doors were closed and it kept waiting.

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I See Good People (and you can too)

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In our time, pressure seems to be everywhere. There is a wealth of information like never before, which means we could find out about anything we wanted, only this takes time, so we look for “drip feeds” that will give us up-to-the-minute updates and we assume our sources do a reasonable job at finding and telling things as they are.

Reality is a bit different, unfortunately. Most of our information feeds are controlled by a fairly small group of huge profit-driven conglomerates, which make their money by selling. To sell well, they need people to “see red”, so they inspire fear via TV news broadcasts, bold newspaper headlines and various other methods.

The result of this is the general view that violent crime is everywhere, that different people cannot live together in harmony and that all too often, the only way to sort things out is to wage war on another ethnic group or country, even at the cost of “friendly” life.

So what can you do?

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Projection

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Picture yourself sitting in an old cinema all by yourself, watching a movie. Turn your head towards the back wall and see there a big window. Behind the window, there is a projection machine. In that machine, a long, wide film is running, a film you have created.

A strong light travels through the film towards the screen. You can see the beam of light getting wider as it travels through the air, showing flickers of colors and movement inside it. Follow the beam of light with your eyes as it keeps on going and getting wider, until you are facing forward and looking at a huge screen, which practically fills your entire fields of vision.

As you look, you become absorbed in the movie, finding yourself emotionally attached to some of the characters, fearing some of the others, hating a few and getting carried away with the story.

Real life is very much the same. We become absorbed in our own story, which we project onto the world. When we interact with other people, we each look at our own “film” and can get into all kinds of trouble.

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Hitting Rock Bottom to Succeed

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At the end of high school, my teen daughter Eden took a personal development course for teenagers and came back very disappointed. In a two days workshop, every speaker talked about hitting rock bottom before finding the light and that light, for some reason, was a way to make money.

She paced back and forth and stormed, “I never see myself not having money for food or sleeping in my car because I have no home to sleep in. I never see myself without a family to support me. All I got from these presenters was that I must get very low if I want to be successful, which means I’ll never be successful. What kind of motivation technique is this?”

I said to her, “I’m sure that’s not what they meant” and tried to convince her to find something she could still learn from her experience, but it was no good.

4 years later, I think this course has done more damage to her attitude than I thought initially (although it may still contribute to her personality and attitude towards life in a positive way).

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I’m proud of me

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“Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves; vanity, to what we would have others think of us” – Jane Austen

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