Grow Through Failure—A Gift That Keeps On Giving
Laws and rules are created within organized societies to regulate interaction and protect citizens. A classic example is the American system of traffic laws. They are designed to promote consistent traffic flow while reducing accidents. When everyone understands how a four-way stop works, expectations follow. We learn how to conduct ourselves properly and to anticipate how others will behave. Likewise, the public school curriculum nurtures expectations—expectations regarding skills which are culturally valued. Our schools promote a model of success in our society. Our students are taught how to succeed, not how to fail. Unfortunately, it’s only through adversity that we grow; learning from failure teaches one to recognize mistakes, adapt, and evolve.
Grow Through Failure with Grace
Intentionally or not, our institutions do little to prepare us to make it through failure with grace. Particularly in the middle and upper strata of our society, we are not taught how to deal with failure. There is such a focus on success that many of us have developed aversions to crisis and conflict. So how can we prepare for adversity? Since our culture is built around success and we are largely taught to avoid failure, how do we learn to overcome it? How do we learn to confront failure, and more important grow from it? This is where your conscious awareness comes in.
Guiding Children to Fail The Right Way
As a parent, it’s your number one job to get highly aware about what you are passing on to your kids and how you are doing that, especially when it comes to models of success and failure. Most parents simply don’t consider what they are handing down to the next generation, beyond thinking about how much money they’ll leave behind. We hope to support you to be among the minority of parents who understand there’s a much bigger consideration here.
Maybe you can remember back to a time in your childhood when you thought to yourself “I’ll never be like that when I’m a parent”, only to find yourself now repeating those exact same patterns. Yes, this is how it happens. But, now that you’ve noticed it, you can begin to do something different. It won’t necessarily be easy, many of these patterns — especially around success and failure — are highly deeply ingrained. You can shift them though with consciousness. I’ll be writing more about this in future articles.
Fail, But Grow from That Failure
The first step is for you to just notice where you are repeating the patterns of thought and action around success and failure that your parents passed on, that you hated as a kid, and that you want to change for future generations.
We think that this is the most important part of parenting. It’s why we don’t just focus on passing on your money through estate planning, but have a process of passing on your whole Family Wealth (intellectual, spiritual and human assets in addition to money) into the legal life planning process. Through doing so, we help you consciously pass on what you really want.
This article is a service of Bridge Law LLP. We are an award-winning law firm that specializes in business and estate planning for clients like you. The goal for every family is to stay educated on all topics like this, avoid probate, avoid estate taxes, and build a legacy for you and your loved ones. What sets our firm apart is that we build lasting, lifelong relationships with our clients. They rely on us to keep them updated, provide sound legal counsel, and be there for them immediately if any problems should ever arise. The best part is we don’t charge hourly fees to our families, so you never have to worry about speaking to us.
If you’re ready to keep your family out of Court, contact us today to schedule an initial consultation.