I wear many hats. I’m a husband, owner, writer, speaker, high performance coach, time management expert, and consultant. While it’s hard to put into words how proud I am of being a best-selling author and the creator of the One-Bite Time Management System, I’m proudest of my work as a father.
10 years. That’s how long I’ve been lucky enough to be a father and seeing my son grow up is truly one of the great joys of my life. He’s well-mannered, hard-working, athletic, happy little guy. As my wife is Japanese and I’m English one of my fears was that he’d be bullied growing up so at the age of four we started Karate as a family, his decision. Around the same time, I also found him a swim coach. My thinking was this – either might save his life one day.
In recent years, there has been a push for giving kids more freedom. Letting them decide what they want to do. I couldn’t disagree more.
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This past week, he participated in his first ever Junior Olympics. What an honor to be able to compete against the best swimmers in Japan. His relay team came in ranked 23rd out of 25, just narrowly qualifying, but proved they deserved to be there coming in 15th and getting their best time ever. If that wasn’t enough, we also found out that my son had passed his black belt test. And he’s not even 11 years old.
I remember Jim Rohn once saying “Kids can do the most remarkable things, if… they have remarkable things to do.” Kids at a young age don’t really know what they want to do. Scratch that, they want to do so many wrong things.
Here’s what they want to do
- They want to watch TV
- Play video games
- Eat potato chips
- Study
That last one was a joke. Kids don’t want to study. They don’t want to train hard. They don’t want eat healthy foods. They want to do what’s fun and easy, not what’s tough.
That’s where we come in. It’s our job as parents to give them the right options. Unfortunately, some parents take it a bit too far by forcing their kids to do what they love, rather than what their kids love. I believe in giving children a few options to choose from. My son loved the water, so swimming was an easy sell. As for Karate, I simply told him we were going to learn a martial art together, but which would he like to learn – Karate, Aikido, or Judo. He was adamant, so our Karate journey began.
Swimming started off as a once a week thing, but now is five or six times a week while Karate has been once a week pretty much once a week. What sports have given my son is a sense of achievement and courage. They have taught him the importance of dedication and hard work. He also understands the pain of losing as well as the joy of winning.
My parents gave me an incredible life and never once did I question their love for me, but they never pushed me which is something I took full advantage of. Kids will do that if you let them. Growing up, I wanted him to have a strong relationship with his mother, so I was often the enforcer. However, even at a young age, I took the time to explain to him why I was angry. The key was I wouldn’t stay angry, 10 minutes after blowing up, I’d be back to being a super-cool dad. The result, my son loved me even more. Doing Karate and swimming together helped us stay close. I wanted him to understand that I would be right by his side learning, not sitting on the sidelines.
At the age of eight he surpassed my swimming abilities (I wasn’t bad). Now he’s caught up to me in Karate. Incredible.
In recent years, there has been a push for giving kids more freedom. Letting them decide what they want to do. I couldn’t disagree more. We need to present good options and guide them away from bad ones. We have the power to influence children more than we realize. And as Albert Einstein once said, “With great power comes great responsibility.”
Photo by Berwin Coroza on Unsplash