The one life skill I want to teach my sons.

BY ALESHA SINKS

Alesha is a wife and a stay-at-home mommy to two lively boys, living in sunny South Florida. She loves cooking, reading, the beach, and long conversations with good friends. She writes essays and poetry to encourage herself and others to daily reset their perspective on truth.

From the earliest days of my motherhood, the days of butterfly kicks in my uterus and aches in my back, I’ve had the overwhelming desire to teach my sons this one life skill.

Perhaps it’s because it’s because I’ve spent my life watching my mom excel in this area.

Perhaps it’s because I struggle so deeply in this area.

Perhaps it’s because of the friends I have who have had to dig themselves out of the dark hole of addiction, and I pray my sons never know that struggle.

But wherever the source of this motivation, the  one life skill I want to teach my sons is...

Make the choice now that is the one you later will wish you had made.

Or to put it perhaps more simply...

Make the choice now that will make your future good decisions easier the next time.

We all struggle to develop habits and patterns in our own ways. We all have areas we want to make progress but can’t seem to. And most of all, we all have relationships that struggle and strain that we wish we could fix.

I think the simple application of this principle is in habits surrounding our bodies and self care. It’s easier tomorrow to make the decision to go on a run if I already made that same decision yesterday and the day before. It’s easier to stop after one bowl of ice cream or one handful of chips or one bottle of beer when I have made that decision before. It’s easier to wash my face and brush my teeth before bed when I have already made those choices before.

But I believe there are more complex and more impactful applications of this principle as well.

It's easier to admit that I am wrong when I have developed a habit of honest self-evaluation.

It is easier for me to choose to reevaluate my closest held beliefs when presented with new evidence if I have chosen before to listen and learn.

It is easier for me to consider and hold empathy for strangers when I am in the habit of doing it for those in my day to day life.

It is easier to walk away from a fruitless fight when I have chosen before when to stand and when to step aside.

It is easier to keep scrolling past that inflammatory post when I have made a habit of only having the hard conversations in person, not online.

It is easier to step out of myself and my comfort zone to reach out to a stranger when I have done it before. And before. And before.

As a mother, I, of course, have the highest dreams and aspirations for who I want my children to become. But as I look around at my own life, I realize that the best thing I can do for them is not necessarily forcing habits and behaviors onto them (although there is that aspect -- hello teaching my three-year-old to hold hands in a parking lot), but rather to teach them to self-reflect. To think about their life and actions and how those will affect them and others in the long term.

I want them to think about where they want to go in life and to be able to identify the actions and habits that will help get them there.

I want them to be able to self-reflect on who they are and the kind of person they want to become and then begin to practice those things in whatever way they can.

I want them to develop a habit of self-reflecting and self-evaluating so that they can look ahead and make the choices today that will serve them best in the future.

So this habit is far less about self-control and regulating their behaviors, and much more about teaching them to be self-aware and long-term thinkers.

Perhaps, the very simplest way to put it is...

I want to teach my sons (and daughters if I ever am blessed with them) self-reflection and long-term thinking.

I want to teach them to point themselves in the direction they want to go, and to teach them to stop and regularly self evaluate to make sure they are still on track.

I pray that I can model and teach this well for them. I pray that they can learn this young. And I pray, most of all, it will serve them well throughout their lives.