We talked yesterday about the importance of some skills that our children must acquire and that will help them fully develop and also achieve their vital goals, personally and professionally or socially. If we talked yesterday about the ability to work in a team today we will do it with passion, understood as choose our passion and devote ourselves to that activity passionately.
True excellence, understood as doing something in an extraordinary, different and creative way, is born from passion, love and dedication, from pleasure. Yes, pleasure, as the engine of our actions. We surrender to what fills us and makes us feel that we can offer something personal, unique and good. Increase self-esteem and the idea of own competition. The well done swim of passion.
The passion for what we do
And with what has been said before we reach the second indispensable skill: the passion for what we do or, rather, to find what arouses passion and dedicate itself to it intensely.
In the photo is my son Hector with the science books he read last year, as it is a subject he is passionate about, so much so that this year he will take a distance course at the University of Edinburgh on Astrobiology. It is what you have to follow a passion, you become an expert and you enjoy it, with no more limit than what you find in yourself.
Ignoring the value of individual passion is perhaps one of the causes of the failure of the Spanish education system and personal dissatisfaction in adult life. Don't you think?
When, in school or, later, in working life, motivation is sought, prizes, compensation for effort or incentives are offered: be they notes, smiley faces, public recognition, bands, prominent groups for the best students, travel trips company, gifts, money ... but the scope of these incentives is limited.
No prizes, no punishments
What really makes us give ourselves to an activity with enormous interest, taking the best out of it and giving it our best, with creativity and effort, It's not the prize, nor is the punishment, it's the passion.
There are all things that we are passionate about and turn the effort into deep personal enjoyment. That center of interest, that activity, can become the vital and professional objective, but, of course, for children, it will be what makes them grow, surrender, improve, learn by their own desire to learn.
What parents and educators have to do is help the child find that object of his passion and make it easier for anyone who can explore it, learn it and motivate it: play an instrument, read about mythology, write poems, sing, play tennis, make models, paint, understand how computer games work, design wooden swords, animals prehistoric, cooking ...
But without our help and support they can stay between the compulsory and compulsory learning of school books and non-creative leisure, without passion. Let's encourage them to find your passion and dedicate time. It is an enormous wealth what this experience will offer you for your personal development.
Difficulting the passion to create and learn
But when we choose the activities and the contents from outside, and above all, we make them mandatory, we kill the ability to choose and boredom arrives. However, when we work from the center of interest of the child, their energy increases and recovers the desire to deepen and surrender fully. Therein lies the mystery of creativity and excellence, of the interior, not of the awards.
We can observe in young children that intense passionate concentration when they investigate a new toy or when they paint, scale or look at a story. Breaking that moment is a sin and one should take great care to do it if it is not really indispensable. Do not interrupt them. Then we allow them to discover how important mental work can be and how satisfying personal achievement is.
Another mistake, coupled with interruptions, which is very harmful to children's passion for learning, is rate your work. Things are not right or wrong as parameters are met, but by effort, the search for new solutions, the intensity of concentration. It is not necessary to tell them if they have painted well or badly, much less qualify their work whether or not they have left the margin of the drawing to be colored.
Discovering his passion
Children are born with an innate curiosity. They ask, they investigate, they touch, they want to know everything and everything possible. That impulse is born from themselves, it is not external, but it does have to receive the correct response from outside.
Y the passion for a subject or an activity, that's the big challenge. Offer the child possibilities of discovery and let them explore them. Allow them to decide and have time to surrender to their passion: be it Nature, music, painting, science, stories, sports, computer science ... when a child is passionate about something we should allow them to do so, without marking external objectives, without forcing and without judging.
We do not know what will be born of a passion, but without passion nothing new or valuable has been achieved. But the discovery of a passion itself is already an element of enormous, incalculable personal wealth. And so passion is about the second skill that children have to learn.
In Babies and more | Ten things your child needs to do, do we let children be children ?, Happiness and love as the basis of education, make today a special day for your child
