“Success is the peace of mind and self-satisfaction in knowing that you did your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming.” John Wooden
Your preteen’s growth and personal development should not be pressure-free because life is filled with pressure. Therefore, to best deal with life’s pressures, they have to be mentally hard and strong like a diamond to deal with pressure. If they are not hard and strong they will break like a fake glass diamond.
While no analogy is perfect, I will use how diamonds and glass are created as a metaphor.
Every diamond started as a somewhat soft piece of black coal. It took intense heat and pressure as well as 1 to 3 million years under the earth’s crust to turn that soft piece of black coal into a beautiful, strong, shiny diamond which is one of the hardest minerals on earth.
Every piece of glass started as a pile of sand. Like a diamond, it takes about 3,000 degrees to turn the sand into glass. But the making glass didn’t experience millions of years of pressure. The fact is that glass can be made and shaped to look like a diamond, but it is not anywhere near as hard as a diamond.
It isn’t as hard because it wasn’t created with the same kind of pressure over millions of years.
Parents will benefit their preteens tremendously if they allow them to experience age-appropriate pressures and consequences. Their preteen will benefit greatly if they are required to work hard, under pressure when trying to succeed at overcoming their challenges doing their best in school with teachers they don’t like or being cut from a sports team, etc. If parents allow this to happen their preteens will be much better prepared to withstand their adult challenges like paying their mortgages loss of loved ones etc.
Preteens can benefit from the wisdom of one of the more outstanding, fundamentally sound thinkers, like John Wooden who coached U.C.L.A’s Men’s Basketball team to 10 national championships in 12 years. Coach Wooden continually preached a very important phrase that went like this, ” Failing to prepare is preparing to fail.”
Wooden believed that his players should always try their best and if they failed they should try again and again. They might not be successful at everything but he knew that they would improve with each attempt and that giving up and complaining would not benefit them at all.
But, no matter how well your preteens plan and prepare to accomplish something, they are not guaranteed that they will be successful and reach their goal especially if it is the first time they try something.
They will make mistakes when they are working and what they are trying to achieve will be challenging. But, if they keep planning and preparing and trying their best, they will not be a failure until they choose to give up.
Even if your preteen’s complaints appear to be justified, make it clear to them that complaining serves no purpose except to waste time and worry about events in the past that they cannot change.
Finally, remind your preteens what Thomas Edison said about failure every time they want to give up because they failed at something. Thomas Edison was asked, how did it feel to fail a thousand times before he invented the lightbulb.? Edison replied I didn’t fail a thousand times I discovered that a thousand ways will not work.”
There is no success without failure and the greater the success the more failures there will be.
There is no one perfect way for preteens to deal with failure but here are some good rules to focus on and practice when faced with failure.
- First, forgive yourself because if God is willing to forgive you what gives you the right not to forgive yourself?
- Take responsibility for what you did to contribute to your mistakes, but think of your mistakes as an opportunity to learn what not to do next time.
- Always, remember your present situation has nothing to do with how successful you can be; instead, think about it as a starting point for your future successes.
