Issue Number 13.

Our mission is to give you the latest information on how to raise self-reliant, emotionally healthy, highly successful children and to help you maximize the benefits of their participation in sports.

Here is the number one piece of advice to start the New Year:

Commit to having more fun.

That’s right, fun! Sports psychologist James Loeher advises all the professional and Olympic athletes he trains to ask themselves at the end of each day whether they had fun. The reason is that, when you work hard towards a goal, it is easy to become so single-minded that you lose your balance and neglect your other commitments. When life becomes a drudgery you become ineffective and when you are ineffective you decrease your chance to meet your goals, not to mention burn out relationships.

So if you haven’t done so already, my suggestion is that you make it a goal to decide on a great vacation this year. Pull every member of your family into the decision making process so that they feel a sense of ownership and participation. Plan something unusual and challenging, not just passive and entertaining.

I remember doing this when my boys were young, asking them to help me brainstorm for ideas. “I’d like to climb Half Dome in Yosemite,” my older son Benjamin, then just eleven, said.

“Where did you get that idea from?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I just want to climb it,” he answered.

We looked up the trail, its steepness and distance, and I pointed out that it was a seventeen-mile uphill trek, culminating in a walk over a narrow gorge overlooking a sheer precipice.

“I still want to do it,” Benjamin said.

We spent several months preparing for the journey and accomplished our goal, arriving at the summit just before it was struck by an unexpected thunderstorm. By the time we got to the bottom we were thoroughly drenched and exhausted.

“How do you feel?” I asked Benjamin.

“Great.”

“If you had a choice of taking any other another type of vacation, doing anything you wanted with your friends instead of climbing Half Dome, what would you do?”

“I’d climb Half Dome,” Benjamin said without hesitation.

“Why?”

“Because of the sense of accomplishment.”

This is how I put the GO APE method in action while raising my boys – setting goals, overcoming obstacles, asking for my family’s help, planning carefully and then asking for feedback. How surprised would you be if I told you that Benjamin was named President of his senior class, voted Most Likely to Succeed, earned a Black Belt in Tae Kwon Do, and became one of the best players on the varsity water polo team despite barely knowing how to swim when he started?

Please excuse me if I am bragging a bit. But the real reason I mention this is to prove McClelland’s point: that successful kids are made, not born.

In their book, Learning to Achieve, David McClelland and Eric Johnson suggest that you become familiar with the eleven attributes of high achievers and evaluate where your child stands. Since this information is out of print and almost impossible to obtain, I reproduce it here with kind the permission of the authors.

Score each attribute as follows:

How I Act and Feel

1. I almost always act and feel like this.
2. I often act and feel like this.
3. Sometimes I act and feel like this.
4. I seldom act and feel like this.
5. This is not at all the way I act and feel.

Characteristics of High Achievers

1. Achievers are self-reliant. They make their own choices and they make good ones.
2. Achievers feel responsible for their own actions. They are determined to find out what mistakes they made and try again.
3. Achievers set high but not impossible goals for themselves. Recall what I wrote about goals you have a 75% chance of achieving.
4. Achievers think about success and failure. They imagine how they would feel if they make their goal or if they fail to make it. 
5. Achievers plan carefully and intelligently to meet their goal.
6. Achievers take obstacles into account.
7. Achievers know how to find and use help to reach their goal.
8. Achievers check their progress as they work towards their goal.
9. Achievers don’t waste time and they use their skills efficiently.
10. Achievers enjoy achieving their goal. They like to feel successful and are motivated by their successes to set more goals.
11. Achievers want to do a better and better job.

I would feel a bit intimidated if I had to rate my child according to such a standard. But it is useful to keep these traits in mind, starting with the first one: teaching our kids to become more self-reliant.

I have lots of great information to share with you on this in future newsletters.

Wishing you a happy and productive week, this is Rafael Beer