What Language Do You Speak?

We live in a time of ever-increasing uncertainty and anxiety levels are on the increase. Adults and children alike are experiencing a sense of bewilderment as they try to balance the many things happening in their personal lives and in a world that is experiencing turmoil and disaster on unprecedented levels.

In such a world, it is easy to slip into a language of negativity, yet it doesn’t need to be this way. We can learn to speak the language of optimism and help those around us to learn it too. When you learn the language of optimism, you are learning to experience life by embracing and acknowledging the things that go right and shrugging your shoulders, and moving on from the things that go wrong.

Teaching this essential skill to our children is extremely important for all parents, teachers and caregivers to understand and appreciate. As we practice recognizing our own achievements and acknowledging them in the home, we are role modelling to our children the importance of doing their best and then having the pleasure of others and ourselves showing appreciation for the things achieved. A pessimistic perspective however would look at the situation surrounding the achievements and focus attention on them, rather than on the people attaining them.

When a child (or an adult) learns to speak with optimism, they are able to take failure and turn it into the potential for growth. Instead of seeing failure pessimistically and dwelling in grief on the cause of the loss, the optimistic person can focus on the failure being a learning curve and will use the opportunity to turn this failure into an opportunity to learn new skills or to develop a new understanding of the way things work.

The optimistic thinker is able to see the problem as a temporary setback, it doesn’t affect their self-worth or self-confidence and they keep trying until they achieve their goals. The pessimistic approach would see this problem as more of a permanent problem Over time, as all problems become “bad or big”, the person eventually begins to see them all in a pessimistic way, gradually losing all sense of self-esteem and self-wealth.

Children learn from their parents. They often mimic their parent’s behaviour. As you teach your children to become successful and well-educated, they will display optimism in their own lives. They will learn to see life from the perspective of self-worth and self-esteem and even if this is over-exaggerated, it gives them the hidden courage to say” no” to peer pressure.