Words are powerful! How you talk to people is just as important as what you say! This is no truer than when you are speaking to your children. Often however, we relegate this thought simply to the negative side of the equation. I want to encourage you to utilize this reality to powerfully build up your children.
We’ve talked about Name Calling …but Reversed, and last time we discussed turning someone’s mindset around with an endearing name, like Sweet and Low. Today I’d like to bring to your attention, that America was build upon this concept… not conceptually, but quite literally. The men who won American freedom were build up by this same method of bringing out their best.
The first president of the United States, George Washington, when he was “General Washington,” used to address his men as “my brave fellows,” not because they were brave in the midst of their peril, but because he needed them to be. He knew they would live up to the challenge. Washington brought out the best in those around him by challenging them to achieve the potential of what he knew was inside them. George Washington was a great leader, and he got his men to be brave by telling them that they were.
Richard Brookhiser, in his book George Washington on Leadership*, explains how history remembers this truth:
The most consistent example of the turn is a battlefield phrase that appears in numerous memories of talks he gave or shouts he made before or during combat. Washington’s reported comments in the filed cannot be accepted word for word: No one was taking notes; old men wrote them down, years after thy had been young. Time and memory and Washington’s posthumous reputation put them in capital letters. We have the sense, not the exact sounds. But one phrase appears so often that it has the ring of accuracy – ‘my brave fellows.’ My brave fellows, I ask you to reenlist. My brave fellows, fight. Each time Washington says it, he is asserting that which is to be proved. Maybe they will go home or run away, and not be brae at all. But he get them to be brave by telling them that they are.
… Washington preferred to say, My brave fellows, meaning, My fellows, be brave.
Routine accomplishes a lot; so do the levers of interest, if they are skillfully pulled. But sometimes a leader has to see a person’s best, tell him what it is, and then let him do it – because, without the best efforts of others, what can a leader accomplish?
Imagine the potential you have, being your child(ren)’s father to be able to see what they can be – the best they can be. With this knowledge I am encouraging you to “bring out the best” in your child(ren) by the way you engage with them, the way you speak to them, and the way you believe in them. Get to know them, and know them well enough to see their best. Then use that knowledge to lead them to be the best they can be.
*like this book? click on the picture to buy it now!