One of the biggest gifts you can give your kids is to be comfortable in your own skin.
Most of us parents are good about telling our children how wonderful they are and how much they should be confident in themselves when they go about their business around friends and at school.
We encourage them to take risks and go after things they’re passionate about, whether others are interested or not.
We tell them to develop their own style and be their own man or woman.
We parrot all the right words around body image and physical appearance.
Unfortunately, it’s not all that important what we say.
Yes, we need to speak the above encouraging truths into their lives. We owe it to them to remind them as often as possible about their potential and their uniqueness.
What Is More Important…
I’d venture (assuming some research somewhere backs me up on this) that it’s almost more important how we speak to and treat ourselves.
The biggest gift we can give our children is that we act in a way that shows we actually believe about ourselves the way we want them to believe about themselves.
If we tell our daughter that she’s beautiful and encourage positive body image, yet we continually complain about our own physiques, which will she pick up on?
If we tell our kids to take calculated risks at school, yet settle for status quo in our own lives, which message will they pick up on?
One of the biggest things we can do for our children is to celebrate our own dang selves and to get after it in our own lives.
Set the example, don’t just say the words.
Give this book a try…. I think this post has been vaguely influenced by it: Personality Isn’t Permanent by Benjamin Hardy (This post was also more directly influenced by the ideas in the book).
