Shaping Future Leaders — Day 7 of 365 Leadership Blogging

Education is the key. Education is the key. That was the line drilled into me from a young age and it was the same line I drilled into our firstborn daughter from the moment she could skip. My expectations were high so getting her and her younger sister into independent school made all the sense in the world. Vanessa and I agreed this was a step in the right direction.

I had butterflies at the thought of her being an accountant or lawyer or banker and the competitive nature of the school helped fuel those beliefs. As I look back now, it was great for our girls to experience that level of education but it wasn’t the answer to all of their future dreams. The added pressure to keep up with the ‘Joneses’ and field the girls off to extracurricular activities was part and parcel of the lifestyle. Lifestyle?

It was on a Saturday afternoon after the girls had just finished their English grammar tutoring that we realised we had fallen into a lifestyle. The trigger was their tutor informing us that in order to get to an exceptional grade in her high school entrance exams, we would have to pick up the pace and start tutoring sessions twice a week. Oh, and by the way, he just put up the hourly fees that same week. The clincher in this surreal moment seeing his next client walk in, a tall lanky 17-year-old boy weighed down with his rugby gear walk passed us and say hello to the tutor. At that moment I realised, this could go on for the next 6 years. Gulp.

We pushed for our daughter to sit a few entrance exams, one for an all-girls school to which she got in and they offered her a place. However, we decided against it and felt she would do better in a mixed public school where there was more chance of her becoming more rounded in her character. We assumed because she was naturally good at certain subjects that she would follow a certain academic path so we pushed her along setting our expectations out from the beginning. We had both studied business so we expected her to do the same and she did and earned a fantastic grade in her exams.

However, we had discovered that her heart wasn’t in the academic pathway and more in the creative pathway. She had come top of her class in Art and was a natural but how could we harness her gift and talents? By letting go, we had concluded. In the moment that we let go of our expectations of her, she was able to breathe and set aside the limiting beliefs we had passed on to her and then ask herself what she really wanted to go on to study at university. After months of deliberation, discussions and exploring out popped ‘Fashion’. We saw the sparkle in her eyes when she realised she had found her mojo, her creative outlet and pathway. It was hers and no one could take it away from her.

We had given our daughter permission to:

1. Let go of her limiting beliefs that we had put on her
2. Let go of any doubt that she would disappoint us
3. Let go of a lifestyle that would lead to a career that wouldn’t make her happy
4. Breath and explore her gifts, interests and talents
5. Step forward into fulfilling her passion
6. Be bold about the decision she was going to make
7. Feel confident that we would be with her every step of the way.

One of the biggest lessons for us is that we know our pathways are pre-determined and by helping our children shape their futures by nurturing the things that they are naturally good at, we began to see that same perspective for our clients. We actually use the same steps to work through issues that our clients face in leadership and it’s been a major success for us both as we have helped others explore who they really are, rather than who society wants them to be.

I believe that life lessons like these can help leaders become even more in their business or workplace. How about you?