8 Ways To Grow In a Competitive Environment

Competition has penetrated all walks of life. It has even affected children who may not even be able to pronounce the word correctly. What to speak of them knowing its meaning. It doesn’t take long for them to figure out though. While doing so they must learn the difference between the healthy and unhealthy versions of it. Take some tips from Jake Neuberg and Ramit Varma to help your child excel in this competitive world. 

Neuberg and Varma are members of Young Presidents’ Organization (YPO) and founders of Revolution Prep. It is the leader of high-quality tutoring in the United States and around 30 other countries. Their expertise will give you some valuable insights into good parenting. This will promote children’s survival in a healthy competitive environment.

Praise Correctly

What you say to your child after a job is done well is crucial. These words create a great impact on the child and contribute to self-image formation. An experiment conducted by Growth Mindset (a body of research) at Stanford University revealed interesting facts. It showed a performance drop in students after being called ‘smart.’ The body of research led by Carol Dweck, showed interesting responses of kids to praise from parents. Choose your words wisely while praising. Ensure you praise the kid for his/her efforts for the results instead of the results itself. Praising a kid with a remark like ‘smart’ after a test takes away his/her motivation to continue working hard. Praising hard work reinforces its importance in a child’s mind.

Don’t Be Shy To Ask For Help

Normalize asking for help. Let your child know that it is okay to ask for help when stuck in learning. It is never mandatory to figure out everything by themselves. Knowing this will help them confidently approach a co-student for help without any feelings of inferiority. This behaviour develops a positive personality in a child. He or she is as good as anybody else is even if he/she doesn’t know things that others know. Inculcate the desire to learn from each other rather than a desire to be better than each other.

Eliminate Fear Of Failure

It is the fear of failure that keeps children from achieving goals. When the fear magnifies children stop exploring and learning. Experts say teaching kids to embrace failure is better than making them feel bad about it. Failure, being inevitable, is best handled with familiarity. Tell kids that it is okay to fail. Teach them that true failure is not learning from mistakes. Children need to know that failure happens to everyone and that they’re not alone. Telling kids your failure stories helps a great deal. However, remember to focus more on overcoming the failure than the failure itself.

Encourage Critical Thinking

Children learn best when they figure things out themselves. Spoon-feeding makes them dull and dependent. Allow kids to think of possible solutions to situations around them. Be available to give timely guidance, but be careful not to dominate the situation. Encourage children to question things in their surroundings. Try to answer these quests as aptly as possible. Use counter-questioning to get them into the thinking process. Extract answers from them as much as possible.

Incentives Are Performance Boosters

It is important to let children know that their achievement is appreciated. A treat at a restaurant or a nicely gift-wrapped present can greatly motivate you to do anything. This is why coaches ensure they appreciate their team after every victory. Children work harder at tasks when they know that a goodie is awaiting them in the form of a reward. You have to be very careful when using this trick. There is a chance that the child will get addicted to the reward and refuse to function without it. Frequent rewards could lose their value too. When that happens, they do not bring out the desired results. Use incentives wisely for the best outcome.

 Use Competition To Make A Team Player

Competition is not always a negative term. Change the context and the perspective changes. Encourage kids to compete with each other and mould them into team players. Teach children to learn from each other when working in a group instead of dominating each other. Completion should be taught as a method of self-enhancement. Teach children to be better than their past selves. This is the best form of competition that exists.

Dealing With Losing The Game

When competing with other children, they must know how to deal with losing a game. If this aspect of the competition is not taken care of, it can have adverse effects on children. Telling children that it is okay to lose is important. Encourage children to participate in celebrating others’ victories. Kids must know that learning a lesson from the loss is the biggest return gift even when you lose. Inculcating this attitude helps in developing a positive personality as the child grows.

Identify Relaxation Techniques

Leaving an event where it ends creates room for unwinding activities. Teach children not to continue carrying the events of competition home. They may be physically away from the competition, but if it is still playing on their mind. It is not a good sign. Identify techniques like yoga, dance or music which divert the child’s mind to something else. Identify a child’s interests and you will surely find many activities around it.

To excel in a highly competitive environment, a child must be assured that winning is multidimensional. It is not measured in just one way. Besides, there will be endless chances to win. The key is to keep trying.