become more of who you are – Page 3

Three Types of People–Which One Is Your Child?

Start-up office's hall — In his adult life, your child will likely be acting mainly as just ONE of the three types of people that Gerber explains are needed to make work life function. (Photo credit: Aleksandar Ratkovic and Altiona.com)

Guest Post by Levi Heiple:

In 1986, Michael E. Gerber wrote a groundbreaking business book called The E-Myth. This was later revised and published as the more famous E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to do About It. The book is regarded for its insights on how to plan, manage, and grow a small start-up business and turn it into a franchise business. “Work on your business, not in your business” was the key motto.

However, one insight that is just as powerful, yet often overlooked, is Gerber’s insight into human personality.

Gerber writes that inside each of us is really three different persons:

The entrepreneur – dreams and plans for the future and sees opportunities
The manager – craves order and pragmatically solves problems
The technician – enjoys work in the present and loves to get things done

The idea of three persons in one should sound familiar to anyone acquainted with biblical theology. The Scripture teaches that God is trinitarian: the Father who plans and wills all things (the entrepreneur), Christ whom was given all things and brings all things under subjection according to the Father’s will (the manager), and the Holy Spirit who carries out the will of God in the present (the technician). Since humans are made in the image of God, it should make perfect sense to biblical thinkers that we find a trinitarian aspect within our own personhood.

Though we each have a three-in-one aspect to our personalities, we will find that people tend to have a dominant “person” that directs their behavior. Identifying which aspect is dominant in your child can be a critical component in structuring his education process.

About Levi Heiple

Levi Heiple is a writer/entrepreneur who specializes in electronic training and support systems. He connected with Jonathan Harris after being asked tutor his son, Caleb. You can sign up for Levi’s free weekly tip on “reading for innovation” at BookBlitzMethod.com. You can find his professional website at LeviHeiple.com. You can find his web design service at WebPromoPackage.com.

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Your Child Will Do Better Than You

Father with child — Don’t make your child retrace the same educational path you took if you want him to outperform you in his adult life (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Do you believe that your child will indeed DO BETTER than you in his or her adult life?

If so, then would you also agree that in order to do significantly better than you, your child MUST NOT retrace your same educational path?

Think for a moment the implications of the hope you carry: if your child has the same reading list, and has the same math classes, the same history courses, etc. then it stands to follow that your child will not be able to rise above your own current accomplishments if he starts his adult life with the stock knowledge and experience you had. Your child’s knowledge and experience would not be different enough to change his life that much more than yours. So this means you need to take a hard cold look at somehow making your child’s experience significantly different enough to yours for your hope to become a reality.

Pop Quiz:

Is your child’s educational content different enough to be better than the content you learned as a child?

Are your child’s learning methods and techniques better than the ones you used as a child?

Is your child apportioning his time between different subjects in a much more judicious way than the way you did it as a child?

Is the strategy for choosing one set of classes over another set different enough from the one your parents used in determining what you should study?

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Six Common Questions by Homeschoolers

Good morning from #lakecalifornia via 10ktotalent — When your child’s daily hard work really does have an end goal in mind that is just for him, it feels like blue skies ahead.

Studying and learning with a meaning instead of becoming a recipient of data dumping, can make all the difference in child’s life. See if a focus on building real talent your child’s life can be a cure to one of these common questions:

How do I match my homeschool to my child’s learning style?
What kind of daily routines can I copy that make sense in our home?
How do I awaken my child’s entrepreneurial spirit?
What can I do to accelerate my child’s learning so he can finish school sooner?
How do I motivate my son who has no motivation to study or do anything serious?

(Question as heard from teenage homeschool students) How do I finally become really good at something, instead of always studying?

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Daily Routine Designer by MOTH

Moth — MOTH – the ultimate guide to desiging your own custom homeschool schedule(Photo credit: Fastin8)

In our early homeschool years, we came across the MOTH manual on how to design daily routines and schedules that restore sanity to your life without foregoing the goals you originally set out to meet. The guide helps you avoid creating daily routines that just fill up your day with no real big-purpose. It’s the grind and it’s bad and it typically afflicts new homeschoolers who are trying to out-do the classroom setting by just piling it deeper and meaner in the home. The other extreme is no daily routine at all that engenders sheer chaos when you have many small children living under the same roof. The MOTH daily routine designer is the ultimate customizing guide – it will even teach you how to schedule yourself to be unscheduled!

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Birthday Wishlist Betrays Desire for Talent

Are there signs of interest in your child for a talent of his own to emerge? If you have a personal system in place, ready to channel that youthful energy, you will not have to hope that an appropriate skill-set appears spontaneously. Gideon is now nine years old. See if you can spot some emerging interest in the birthday wishlist of my soon-to-be ten-year old:

wishlist — Gideon’s Wishlist for his 10th Birthday

Reasons for Hobbies that Do Not Matter

Couch Potato — Without a talent focus, the only answer is group sports and cute hobbies – but it then creates problems later in early adulthood (Photo credit: Furryscaly)

Here are the common reasons parents sign-up their child for cute hobbies and group sports that are NOT talent related:

child is restless and needs something to keep him from boredom
don’t have anything in common to do or talk about in the evenings so it’s easier to drop child off at soccer or basketball
worried about child not being physically active enough after sitting in a classroom all day
worried child won’t make friends unless he’s involved in the same activity as everyone else

Those are some good reasons to address, but you don’t need to address them by sacrificing your child’s ability to have enough time to develop a real talent. With a serious talent focus, he can gain all of the above (motivation, friends, reasons for moving his body, and an interesting personality that even you will want to be around), AND, in addition, gain a meaningful productive life in early adulthood. The exception might be if your child’s talent does not involve anything physical, in which case, you may still need to get him out the door.

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No Longer Be Boring

Zanzibar Postage Stamp — Why choose a canned geography curriculum when you could use your grandfather’s stamp collection to study geography? Play up your family’s uniqueness and your child will no longer be boring (Photo credit: write99)

If you live in a little community by the river, why do you drive into the city to take a basketball camp instead of enjoying a water-rat lifestyle? If the elderly grandfather who lives with you has an amazing international collection of postage stamps that he has collected over a lifetime, why are you insisting on discarding it in favor of buying a curriculum package for geography that has no emotional connection to your family? I would rather get to know your child who hikes and builds forts regularly along the edges of the river and the child who tells me about the changing world through his grandfather’s stamps, than spend any five minutes talking to a child who has followed the canned educational life. So stop trying to downplay your family’s uniqueness and instead play them up into your child’s life and into the construction of an interesting talent.

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Don’t Apologize

English: Panhandler in Oceanside, California. — Don’t let your child be a panhandler for compliments. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Train your child not to apologize for what is not his responsibility because it wears down on the goodwill of your child’s admirers. An example is “I’m sorry I don’t have a stronger voice like this other famous singer, but I will still sing for you this song I’m practicing.” False apologies make your child come across as someone who is fishing for compliments and sympathy when such feedback is not yet owed to him. If in the course of documenting through video an aspect of your child’s performance, there is a slightly embarrassing part that your child did or said (such as having forgotten to take care of a distracting tuck of the shirt), but feel the rest of the content is still worthy, then it’s okay to apologize. Your child apologizing for not having rich enough parents to buy even bigger or better tools for his talent is not okay, because it is not his responsibility or his fault.

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Wedding Rhyme Strategy for Joy Miller’s Fivejs.com

Cosplay: Princess Amidala (Star Wars) — What is a Wedding Rhyme Strategy for developing talent? [Costume play: Princess Amidala (Star Wars) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)]

Joy Miller, author of the homeschooling website fivejs.com website, did the crisp graphic design and layout for my ebook workshop “How to Discover and Develop Your Child’s First 100 Hours of Talent.” Because of our conversations on this interesting topic of talent development, she asked me to do a guest post for her personal blog. I happily agreed and here’s what I came up with: “How to Build Talent in Your Child: A Wedding Rhyme Strategy.” Check out the graphics she did for that post too! This is the take-away I wanted parents to get: yes, develop a traditional talent, but make sure your child finds a way to weave with a few other skills to make a real, modern, and valuable talent.

Here in a pretty little 17th century wedding rhyme, I give to you a simple strategy for talent building:

Something Old

Something New

Something Borrowed

Something Blue

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Meet SwordQuencher and ScarabCoder

Drop Hammer — “DropHammer” would be another good nickname for a child with a talent related to modern blade smithing (Photo credit: TheGoldGod)

There is a great opportunity for children on the Internet to create nicknames to reflect their talent focus. This gives them some status and allows others to easily find them online in the context of their talent. Instead of creating a user name like “BigJohn” or “John1235” which sounds like a child who still needs to find a focus, how about creating a user name that helps your child fit into the little online communities of people who have his same talent focus? Try instead “SwordQuencher” for a young knife maker who knows that you have to quench blades to harden them properly. Try for example “ScarabCoder” for a young programmer who learns by re-using small bits of code from other more experienced programmers – just like the scarab insect re-uses discards for his own purpose.

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Bonding and Blades

Talent with a skill of blade sharpening brings value — Have your child use his beginning talent to help his brother move forward with his talent. Get creative on how to find the intersection of value.

Another example of using talent development in your children to also promote friendship and bonding between your children, happened this past week between two of my sons. One son who has been developing an on-going focus on stones and metals has been following an online recorded course from 17th generation Yoshimoto bladesmith Murray Carter (long live the power of the Internet!) on the topic of how to properly sharpen knives. The other, younger son, has been developing his baking and kitchen prepping skills on a consistent basis and therefore uses knives regularly. Voila: the talents have intersected! After practicing on cheaper blades, we finally got our big expensive kitchen knives properly sharpened by our son Caleb (13) who was proud to have my son Gideon (9) be able to now use them without the previous dangerous slipping that came from dull knives. The respect they have for each other’s abilities keeps growing because the impact of what they are doing is useful and real on even a young person’s level.

Talent Progress Creates Family Buzz at the Dinner Table

At the dinner table I will sometimes recap to my wife out loud what I am excited about in my child’s talent development. I will then ask my child to speak up and add some clarifying details as to how this milestone came about. I remember one particular week where my 11 year old got several personal notes from professional programmers who commended him on his progress as they could see through his blog and online forum participation. This feedback created a real buzz of excitement as the very next day there was a renewed sense of purpose among the rest of the older children to wake up early to research and blog for their next post on their respective talent development.

Children Bond Through Exercising Talents

Your child will find joy with his family by using his beginning skill and talent in a way that brings value, even a small value, to one of his siblings. Do you remember how much bonding and admiration power there was, for example, when your oldest child used to read to his younger brother in order to soothe him? You can repeat that same strategy between teenage children as they use their serious talents to learn how to serve the needs of their brothers and sisters who are respectively growing in their own talents. An older sibling who has a core baking skill of a couple thousand of hours behind him, for example as part of a larger developing talent, can also use it to boost the silversmithing club activities of the status his brother through amazing food and hospitality. Another sibling who has developing computer skills can work on upgrading his sister’s online art portfolio and said sister can in turn work on digital logos and ad graphics for all the other sibling blog postings.

She is Drawing, Not Talking Her Way Through History

What if your arts talented daughter could draw through most of her history curriculum, instead of talking and writing her way through it? Wouldn’t that accelerate her talent development?

What do you do with an arts oriented daughter who is having difficulty following a standard history curriculum? Instead of keeping her at a disadvantage, put her talent back in service by having her sketch or trace scenes from that time in history using the many available art history books. Because artists will have specifically focused on important points from that era, it will be easy for your daughter to draw her way through history, rather than primarily talk and write her way through it. Instead of losing time building her talent while she is doing traditional schooling, she is actually gaining ground and learning how paid artists apply their trade to bring value to others.

Acquire a Personality While Acquiring a Talent

Speaker's Society Presentations — If you want your child to attract the attention of others with talent, then make sure your child is also developing a talent. Photo from Speaker’s Society Presentations (Photo credit: MDGovpics)

Your child is acquiring an attractive personality while also acquiring a talent if you can report something similar to fictional “I-got-my-eyes-on-you-Dad”:

“It was clear that our daughter was well-rounded educationally, but she had nothing specifically of her own that she could be proud of to show off to friends and relatives. No wonder she was just wanting to hang-out so much at the YMCA. She gave my wife and I lots of extra ideas on parts of the talent discovery workshop and she completely and enthusiastically bought into the idea of developing a talent of her own. Wow, her conversations with us and other people lately are a lot more intense and focused and she blogs to her passion regularly. She is clearly developing herself into that ‘interesting’ girl that no amount of logo-wearing T-shirts and summer camp activities were doing for her. ”

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Finding Focus Will Build Child’s Talent

Airplane vortex denoicefied — Finding focus is necessary in order to build a real talent for your child – there’s a big difference between enjoying watching planes in the sky vs knowing how they operate (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Your child is finding talent-worthy focus if you are reporting something similar to fictional “Frazzled-Mom”:

“At first, my 13 year old son panicked at the thought of not seeing all the many friends in his different programs, but once he realized how much more interesting the two remaining activities were because he was able to focus, he quickly forgot about the other (shallow) friendships. One of the activities we kept involves participating in the Remote Control Airplane Club of our town and getting pointers on how to fine tune gas and electric motors from older retired men. He feels like he is ‘one of the guys’ and is getting all scientific on us at the lunch table talking about aerodynamics. We don’t understand all this new found knowledge he is explaining to us, but we love it!”

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Family Bonding Through Building Talent

English: My lab coat and scrubs -- Samir धर्म ... — Look into your extended family’s skills and abilities and you might be able to strengthen family bonds while developing your child’s talent (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Your child is strengthening his family bonds by developing his talent if you can report something like this fictional ‘Love-My-Alma-Mater-But-Not-That-Much-Dad‘:

We had always felt that if it wasn’t an official course taken at an official school, that somehow it had little value. Once we realized how shortsighted we were, we redesigned six months ago a “custom curriculum” of our own that involved me, my sister who is math professor in another state, and my father who is a retired pharmacist. The children’s grandpa sent us by Fed-Ex his old microscopes and even some old-fashioned lab coats. Skype came to the rescue with lots of fun late night conversations and tutorials and I was surprised by the amount of family bonding that has come out of this.

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Use Your Family Goals to Develop Child’s Talent

Hiking — Use family goals and togetherness as opportunities for your child to develop parts of his talent.

Use your family’s identity or family goals to help your child develop a talent. You might think that only looking at a child’s current interests is sufficient to start building a talent at a young age, but you should consider that if it does not support the family spirit, that it will be that much difficult to get things started. For example, if your family likes to hike together because of a long tradition with grandparents and easy access to beautiful forests, then it would make sense for a child’s talent to incorporate the use of those family hikes or the outdoor excursions. A child could use his personal interest in biology to gather specimens along the way and document the findings in a science journal. A child interested in art, could learn to sketch or paint scenes of their excursions to share with friends and grandparents.

Do Not Passively Consume

At the airport — Children developing talents depend on their parents to clear the way

Planning to make room for talent development in your child’s life is not the same as creating good study habits, creating good work ethics, or learning a trade while homeschooling. Talent development in your child’s life is building up a set of skills and insights in a field of human endeavor that is so profound that it will cause your child as an adult to one day be a world leader in that area. This means that your child cannot passively consume what is given to him in a curriculum or nonchalantly take whatever summer job presents itself. He needs your authority as a parent to make it happen. He needs your willingness to prepare the way to find, use, and manipulate the resources and advantages in his environment to a coordinated purpose.

Six Benefits to the Talent Mentor

The Karate Kid — The Karate Kid - a Talent Mentor story (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Your talent mentor will get these benefits from helping your child:

he impacts the future
he gains camaraderie from an energetic & respectful younger person
he looks good to professional peers for his ability to transfer talent
he gets an opportunity to teach
he gets an opportunity to give
he has his own personal Go-fer!