The best-laid plans…I wrote earlier about helping children set goals and helping them learn how to become self-motivated in their life pursuits, so I thought it would be fair if I talk a bit about the flip side of things–when plans go awry, goals change, and it becomes necessary to re-group…
If I had a dollar for every time I have found myself saying, “Alright, we’ll just have to try something else” in my parenting “career” I could spend a month-long vacation basking in the warm suns of Tahiti. Instead, I find that even though you would think I have grown used to the process of re-grouping, there are definitely those times when I wonder why things just can’t run smoothly!
I think there is a certain skill, and maybe a little bit of an art to re-grouping. How do we know when to gather the wagons and take an alternative fork in the trail, and when to nudge our children to forge ahead? How can we really tell what is best for our children and the situation? Well, often times it really is just a guess or intuition, but that doesn’t make the fact that we do need to re-group and change directions disappear. I like to think that there are valuable lessons for our children in learning how to “bounce” and try something different too. We have to learn how to deal with disappointment when things don’t go the way we had hoped or planned; and we have to learn when to quit and went to give things one more try. These are important life lessons. As is learning HOW to re-group and keep focused while letting go of old plans in order to make room for new ones.
Learning that just because we really want something or set our sights on something, it doesn’t mean we will necessarily reach the finish line (at least not right away or in the ways we had planned) can be a tough life lesson–and one that many of us learn over and over again. But, often re-grouping helps us find our way to something wonderful we had not even anticipated.