Do you know your character strengths? It took me a long way into my life to appreciate mine. But once I had my own kids and they started to walk and talk, my mind seemed to naturally focus on training character, building their individual strengths, and helping them improve traits that would add up to a good life. In the exhilarating moments from temper tantrums to accolades, and I have plenty of stories on both ends, I always zeroed in on two things:
What was the character trait I wanted to cultivate in them?
2. What was the character trait that they were displaying in the moment?
Sometimes it was a matter of shifting things, others a time to build on what seemed to come naturally to them. How could I steer stubbornness towards tenacity, or timidity towards confidence or encourage him to build leadership skills without being heavy handed, which isn’t my style at all. One of my earliest and most fundamental decisions was holding Lauren back in preschool because, observing some timidity, I thought if I pushed her forward to kindergarten she may have been inclined to follow instead of lead. Although her whole senior year of high school I sensed she was ready for college, all those years in between, I saw her more sure of herself and able to hold her own space in relationships, academics, and team positions.
As the years went on and I coached young athletes and continued raising my kids, my decisions centered around building their own awareness of their character strengths and although I’m not close to finished, I have watched them grow in confidence and emotional strength through difficult situations. I realized that it wasn’t shielding kids from challenges as much as supporting them through any obstacles that they face that turns them into mature versions of the kids I knew, ready to leave for college and equipped and excited to face the unknown.
I’ve been influenced all my life by great coaches, teachers, and my own parents and am extremely grateful for the years that I was able to spend at home with my kids. I’m inspired to take the things I’ve learned and help people apply them to their own game of life. Do you want to experience more fulfillment & flow state in your life - with your family, in your parenting moments, with your team?
There are 24 Positive Psychology character strengths that every human possesses in differing degrees. Do you know your personal mix? Whether we are on the job, at home, in a moment with our kids, or with our team, in order to experience flow state, our top 5 character strengths must be in play.
Knowing our kids and what they need from us emotionally, physically, and psychologically is a game changer and although we need to trust our own gut, we also need to train it.
The VIA Character assessment is the tool I use to help people get a tangible understanding of their kids or players. The cool thing about Positive Psychology is that it is grounded in growth mindset, so these traits are flexible and there are specific things we can do if we have areas we want to build. I have taken the VIA three times over the past five years and watched as my character strengths that were near the lower half, especially bravery, rose as I conquered things like coaching and public speaking that I was afraid of. They also helped me form my own personal philosophy,
“To create calm and connection with every breath and movement.”
I have been amazed how having a personal philosophy at the front of my mind helps me make decisions and adds more purpose and awareness to my day.
Purpose, clarity, meaning…all of these qualities help us create flow state and the moments that become the highlights of our life. These moments help motivate us when times are tough and teach us infinitely more about our strength and the unique qualities we each possess that give us the ability to be great…if we believe in ourselves and are willing to put in the work.
If you are looking to shift, transition and create more flow in your life, I would be happy to help. We only get one go around, we aren’t here just to battle and survive. We all go through hard times, it’s when we use them to learn and motivate ourselves that we break through to another level of our potential. It’s in you, your kids, your players…it’s everywhere you look. The backbone of good choices in our lives centers around our own self awareness, and single choices made over and over again are the building blocks of generations. Give your life and the people you love the gift of your own journey to self awareness.
Although I’ve come a long way in the just over ten years when I pulled Matthew from the bottom of our backyard swimming pool, it will forever be the day that my perspective on this journey began to change. Because we were afforded the miracle of his survival, I haven’t experienced the bottomless heartbreak of someone who has lost a child, but I have been to the very edge and can still feel the sense of dread that was there as I contemplated that kind of loss. I don’t go there too often anymore, because the anxiety it creates clouds my decisions and my ability to live in the present. It took me years of faith, therapy, and him getting older and wiser to let go of the frantic feeling I would have when he wasn’t in my sight. But in a ironic way, that was the day that I began to get it:
slow down and appreciate what I had been given.
It shouldn’t take a near death experience to appreciate the simple joy we can find in the mundane, but it was after Matthew’s accident that I found myself grateful that I had his laundry to fold or that the dinner bill is more expensive because he eats so much meat. It taught me to slow down and appreciate the moments I have with each one of them because you never know when life is going to change with one misstep or conversation…I’ve learned that one many times over by this point.
The thing about parenting is that it is a live experiment. We don’t get to study every move and take our time to make each decision. Things come flying at us and we have to learn to trust our guts and respond instead of react. Matthew’s near drowning left a mark on all of us. I know I babied him, his siblings did too. It was as if in some way we saw that he needed an extra layer of protection. On that devastating day in 2009, he did, no question about it. But since then, some of the protections I leaned on to protect my own heart created some learned helplessness in him that I now have to guide him out of. He is so capable, so emotionally intelligent, and works hard. But many times in his life he has been given the out instead of being taught to dig a little deeper. That’s where my gut comes in…knowing just how hard to push, finding that line where the challenge is hard enough, but not above his pay grade.
This is one of the characteristics of flow…finding the sweet spot between challenge and skill.
The good news is that the opposite of learned helplessness is learned optimism…something that I feel like I was born to train. In order to be able to really teach something in a way that it sticks, we have to be able to break it down into small pieces so it take take root and grow into a full mindset.
As an optimist, I teach three P’s:
Permanence: Challenges come in life to teach us, we move through them, they don’t last, but we are stronger and wiser for having had them cross our path. With an optimists point of view and determination, bad events are much more temporary than permanent, it’s all about acquiring the skills to move through them.
Pervasiveness: We are not our mistakes. Yes, bad things happen in life, every day will not come up roses. But how we learn to separate an event in our life from who we are at our core is what sets an optimist apart.
Personalization: Optimists believe that we can make good situations great and bad situations better. Optimists love a reason to celebrate the good and know how to apply their grit and wisdom when hard times fall upon us. Understanding that we have the skills and training and the confidence to use them is what makes us game changers in this life. Optimists may have temporary set backs but know how to come back stronger because of a life test they were given.
One of my goals of 2020 is to achieve more flow state experiences within my home with my kids. As I said last week, I’ve felt them, they are right there under the surface waiting for a perfect set of conditions to be realized and, with focus, I understand how to make this goal and reality.
I’ve felt it in sports, I’ve felt it writing, but for the past few years I have been stirring with the thought of whether it exists in parenting? I’m convinced that it does.
Flow state is characterized by being fully immersed in the moment, where time and space fade away and our self conscious nature that is usually present takes a break…we are present, free and high functioning. In flow state we are not thinking about the result, what could happen, or what someone else might think. It’s a transcended feeling and I know I have felt it in moments with my kids, it’s the coolest gift of parenting. It’s those times when the words and the understanding back and forth are so clear. We are locked in a moment and the bond between us is tangible, like the best hug without even needing to touch. It comes with deep knowledge of ourselves and our children, which leads me back to the gift that true self awareness brings to ourselves and the world.
A week or two ago one of my readers commented on the concept of self awareness and how it should be taught from the youngest ages and it got me thinking. Helping a child discover her gifts and interests and then figuring out how to honor them and teach her to use them to their fullest expression, is an integral and fulfilling part of parenting. When we start out, we teach from what we know. Without our own journey to know our values, our patterns, and to expose our subconscious tendencies that are there from our earliest days, we run the risk of repeating patterns that we would be better off to correct and learn from before we pass them on to our children. Learning generational patterns that come from the stories of our families that happened long before we were present is not about blaming, shaming, or creating a reason to say “we are who we are”. The double edge sword of self awareness is our ability to know ourselves intimately and understand that people do the best they can with what they know. In short, the work we do on us comes with a healthy dose of compassion, understanding, and forgiveness for those that are part of our story.
For those of us who have been there, you know that there are a lot of times in parenting when we ask ourselves,
“Am I doing this right?”
The idea of unintentionally hurting our children based on a bias or lack of understanding can be anxiety inducing. Sometimes we can even push in the wrong directions trying to have control over an outcome instead of staying present and letting our intuition guide us rather than our fear. But control as it relates to flow state is defined as a state of security and relaxation with the complete absence of worry. This is the paradox a Zen Buddhist calls ‘control without controlling and more and more I realize this is where my best words of advice and conversations come from with my kids…no expectation of end result, just put your phone down and listen to what they have to say.
When my marriage ended, I thought that I had lost all I had worked so hard to create in, at that time, almost 17 years of parenting. Let’s just say I wasn’t feeling the flow and learning to operate independently. But what I have realized is that flow doesn’t orient itself with shame, only self awareness. With this in mind, I find myself focusing on what I hope to achieve in a moment with one of my kids…whether it’s an experience like going to a play, or watching them play a sport that they have so much hard work sunk into. it’s a feeling between us and let the action, and hopefully the flow, comes from there.
As Lauren goes back to school, I’m thankful that this past holiday season included so many flow states with my kids. These moments, whether sitting in the kitchen over dinner, attending a great play, or walking the dog in the neighborhood, produced amazing conversation and clarity about how we are connected to each other and the bond that we share. The great paradox of parenting is that if we do our jobs right, we teach the ones with the deepest bonds to us to separate from us and learn to flow on their own and that’s the generational pattern that I can get behind.
