Absolute identity with one's cause is the first and
great condition of successful leadership.
Woodrow Wilson
To be a good leader, you must be a clear thinker, and part of developing the clarity of thought required to lead is to be an “intentional thinker.”
Planning and Practicing in Your Mind’s Eye”
One of the most overlooked areas of study in psychology is the psychology of intention, but hopefully, it will not be overlooked for that much longer. Research over the last fifteen years or so is showing how important intention is to success in many areas in life.
Intention can be explained in a lot of ways, but the simplest way is, the more you think about something you want to achieve, the more success you will have at achieving it.
However, the thinking must involve planning, “practicing in your mind,” strategizing about the outcome and goal being goal directed. Intentional thinking is not the same as “wishing for success,” or blindly “visualizing,” -- these are components of magical thinking more than they are the building blocks of goal directed behavior.
One bit of good news about the power of intention is that, it appears that the harder the chore, or the more complex the goal, the more effective thinking about it seems to be -- and parenting can be a hard chore.
The skeptical amongst you might say, “Are you telling the only thing I have to do to be a better parent to my kids is think about it more?” The answer is: “No, but that’s definitely where you should start. ” When you think about parenting your kids (and to be a bit more precise we are talking about thinking about doing) you should focus on the following:
• knowing what your intention is
• interacting with kids in a calm, assertive manner (tough to do but always possible to get better at)
• being brave enough to end ridiculous conversations by saying, “Sorry, but that’s all the conversation we are going to have about this,” and ignoring the rest of the pestering, the tantrums and the whining that follows
• understanding that immediate action-reaction (your action leading to a child’s reaction or improved behavior) payoffs can be few and far between
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Identifying Your Intentions
Can a person think about absolutely nothing? I, for one, would be very envious of anyone who could think about nothing! The
brain is quite a busy organ. It processes information, some estimates say, at a rate of 20 million billion calculations per second.
Actually, the problem is the opposite, especially in the the lives of busy people with a lot of responsibilities. People, it seems, are thinking about everything, so much so, that their thoughts jump and race, with no particular priority until something interrupts that flow of information which requires action. The result of being in that particular mode of behavior is that we become very reactive, and a problem with reactive thinking is that it permits the demands of the immediate environment to have priority over goal-directed thinking. Of course, that is not the only kind of thinking people do, but I think a liability of faced paced lifestyles is that the faster we move, the less goal-directed thinking we tend to do, and therefore we lose the benefits that intentional thinking can provide.
Some might disagree and say, if I am listening to demands and knocking things off my “to do” list, certainly I am “goal-directed.”
The goal directedness people achieve when they multi-task is not the same as the kind of intentional thinking I am talking about, which is highly concentrated and very focused on achieving what I call a “local” goal.
Local goals are specific problem solving efforts, which might very well be part of a larger strategy, in this case the strategy being the global goal of , “how do I create a really desirable, happy, confident person in my child?”
To gain these benefits we have to practice two things:
• thinking
• thinking about thinking
Thinking versus Thinking about Thinking
Practicing thinking is a simple matter of focusing your attention on one thing -- for the purposes of this book, that one thing would be parenting your children as a good family leader. The tips and discussions we have throughout this book will give you lots of food for (focusing your) thoughts on leadership.
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Thinking about thinking, (the fancy word for this is “metacognition,”) is a bit more difficult to explain, but the best way I have found to share this idea with people is to say that thinking about thinking is “quality control for your inner voice.” We do this by knowing what we are thinking about, and asking:
• What are the possible outcomes associated with acting on that thought?
• Now that I have considered these outcomes was that really a good thought?
• Can I put my minds eye on performing actions that will lead to good outcomes?
Most people do this some of the time, but not nearly enough, and when you are trying to change your behavior you have to thinking about thinking with extra effort.
To get the best benefit from intentional thinking, sit in a quiet place (some people can even make a quiet place in their minds even if they are in a distracting environment), pose a problem to yourself, for example:
“ How can I get my five year old son to be more polite and not so fresh?”
Then run through various scenarios for how to deal with it, for example:
• I will take away his favorite toy
• I will ignore him when he talks in a fresh way
• I will sit him down for a good talking to
• I will give him a time out
• I will encourage him to communicate the same thing without the freshness and model the appropriate behavior
It might even help to write your strategies down in a list like the one above.
By the way, those ideas are good ones, in case you are trying to get your five year old to be more polite and less fresh.
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Parenting Intentions
To make it a bit more specific to parenting, and thinking about parenting here are some points of reference for focusing your parenting intentions:
• I intend to make my child’s difficult behavior stop.
• I intend to ignore the feelings of frustration and anger I am experiencing and even ignore the behavior of my child, as long as he or she isn’t doing anything harmful to himself or someone else.
• I intend to reward good behavior more frequently.
• I intend to be a good model of self control.
• I intend to judge myself not on a single action I take, but on the more important whole process of how I treat my children.
• I intend to show my child the relationship between freedom and responsibility.
• I intend to interrupt any violent or aggressive behavior shown to a child who has done nothing to warrant it.
• I intend not to give into whining and other oppositional behavior.
• I intend to stick to the consequences I lay out.
• I intend to be a good model of forgiveness and a better model for apologizing for regrettable behavior.
• I intend to help my child show anger with words more than with actions.
• I intend to teach my child the importance of confidence and the shame of arrogance.
• I intend for “no” to “mean “No.”
• I intend to show my child how to see the beauty in what other people often overlook.
• I intend to lead by example.
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• I intend to be a better parent than I am a friend, because friends come and go, even good ones, and you often need to be popular to be someone’s friend.
This is not an all inclusive list, but I would bet if you could accomplish the outcomes related to these intentions and you did it with love and affection you would have a better than average if not fantastic kid.
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