How To Raise A Future Leader

(source: http://www.stylelist.com/watch/oprah-winfrey-media-mogul-and-philanthropist/)

While education plays a great role in grooming your child, certain skills are required to become a well-rounded person. The best way to look at it is as a house. The foundation required to support leadership abilities are targeted internally: self-awareness, self-management, and attitude. The pillars holding up this house are skills that are targeted externally and are interactive: creativity, critical thinking and communication. Here's our guide to the structure to help you in raising an incredible future leader.

The three pillars that hold up every successful leader are: 

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Creativity

The opposite of creativity is stagnation. Creativity is the first on this list because it is an incredibly important skill for a leader to have. We define creativity in business as doing something better than the way it’s traditionally done. Growth, innovation and development all require a creative mind. Creativity is quite important in businesses; everything from marketing to product design to consumer engagement requires creativity. It is an incredibly cost-effective way of increasing innovation, and by extension, productivity.

Helping your child develop a creative mind requires patience. Creativity isn't something that can be taught, only encouraged and nurtured. Teaching your child the skills for developing their creativity requires giving them the time and resources to explore new areas for innovative ideas and solutions. The easiest way is to instil a love of reading, art, and puzzles within them. Since these are all activities that children normally enjoy, all you need to do is keep encouraging them till they develop a habit. As we discussed last week, reading will benefit your child in countless ways. This is one of them. The mind is a muscle, and brain teasers, as well as books, exercise the mind.  

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Critical Thinking

Critical thinking and groundedness are key to balance the unlimited creativity a leader needs. Critical thinking has become an indispensable skill in today's world. Leaders of the futures need to be able to take challenges and analyze them carefully. Weighing the benefits against the costs and thinking about all the impacts of a decision requires strong critical thinking skills. Other than the decision making side, many daily interactions also require critical thinking. Business negotiations, unexpected events, and even cultural nuances require strong abilities to navigate through.

A good way to develop your child's critical thinking is to encourage his/her questions. By allowing them to question everything around them, you condition them to critique everything around them. They will wonder why things are the way they are and keep thinking of whether or not there are better ways for things to function. By planting this seed of critical thinking early on, you are raising a future leader who will be inventive when tackling new problems.

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Communication

As a leader, it is extremely important to be able to influence and move people. It is also difficult to be a good leader if your beliefs and plans are unclear to those around you. Being able to conduct yourself well in meetings, networking with new clients, conveying your goals and ideas to large groups of people all require strong communication skills. As a leader, your child will need to be confident and articulate. He or she will also need to be able to judge a situation and be considerate of cultural sensitivities influencing the situation. Good communication skills are therefore one of the key pillars in being a good leader.

Children tend to be naturally communicative. To help them open up and develop a healthy and respectful way of communicating, it is often important to lead by example. Parents who encourage dialogue with children show them that communicating, not fighting or scolding, will solve more problems.

Supporting these pillars, the key bricks in the foundation of any great leader are:

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Self-Management

Self-management is the key to success. A leader who isn't capable of managing himself or herself clearly won't be able to lead anyone. Self-management requires the ability to plan ahead meticulously. It also requires discipline to follow through on these plans.

Schedules are, of course, a great way to teach your child discipline. But self-management requires a degree of independence as well as good judgement. This can only come after years of practice. As parents, you will be responsible for them, and children can't be expected to manage their own lives. However, small amounts of responsibility in supervised settings (like chores, taking care of pets, planning out a holiday or the itinerary for a family trip to the amusement park) help children practice and learn how to plan and follow through on plans.

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Self-Awareness

A crucial prerequisite to managing oneself is to be aware of yourself. As a leader, you need to know your flaws, weaknesses, and strengths. Self-awareness is important to succeed. If you are not aware of your beliefs and opinions, they could cause problems, both with the way you think and also with business decisions that don't work out as expected. Developing this skill will help your child manage themselves better.

Self-awareness is a skill that needs to be taught and developed in children from a young age. By communicating with them and teaching them to reflect upon their daily life, you teach them to take stock of their actions. A simple way of doing this is to ask them to write a journal at the end of the day. They could even list out what they did during the day and how that impacted themselves or somebody around them. Self-awareness also increases the sense of responsibility. As they take stock of their actions, your children will learn to be accountable for their choices, big or small.

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Attitude
While this is the last point, it is also the most important. A person's attitude not only determines how they personally deal with situations, but also how they interact with those around them. A person with a positive, unbeatable attitude will chase their dreams and fight till they are living their dreams. Whereas, the same person, but with a defeated attitude will accept failure and never use their mistakes as lessons. They will shy away from great risks and chances, settling in for a steady, stable and secure path. While this is not a bad thing, it is also not something that brings many opportunities.

Great leaders are tough. They have a contagious attitude, full of determination, positivity and resilience. To develop your child's spirits in the right direction, always remember to teach from rather than punish mistakes. If they start to think and learn from every experience from a young age, they will take it in stride as they grow older. By accepting their mistakes, you show them that consequences exist, but they can always pick themselves up after they fall. Like many great leaders, they will then learn to take their setbacks and use them as an advantage.