There was a mother and father who brought their 3-year old child saying, “The girl is banging her head against the wall. I looked at the parents and asked, “Where did she learn that from?” The father looked at the wife and said, “But she doesn’t do it in front of the child.” The parents thought that if the mother closes the door and bangs her head against the wall, the child won’t pick up that behaviour.
The truth is that our senses are much more developed than we think. There are stories of blind people stepping into a room, clapping their hands and telling the dimensions of the room. The capability of the neurology is so high that if a person has to depend on his/her hearing only, he/she can tell the dimensions of the room only by clapping their hands.
Since the capability of the neurology to see and hear is so high, children are able to see, hear and smell more than most people think they do. And they pick up behaviours and attitudes from parents and other people around them without even being consciously aware of it most times!
I call this phenomena ‘Unconscious Transferrence’. It means that we transmit behaviours, beliefs and attitudes to people around us. If the other person has deep, unconscious trust on you, like a child has on parents, then the person will pick your beliefs and behaviours, both empowering ones and disempowering ones.
And Unconscious Transference is actually a great thing because that is how children learn incredibly important behaviours like walking or language. That is how many a time, children whose parents have a rich background in music or business end up becoming excellent musicians or businesspeople themselves. But that is also how, so many children who belong to dysfunctional families where parents are filled with the feelings of inferiority, anger and sadness also grow up to become sad, depressed, angry and sometimes, psychologically challenged as well and the sadder part is that they don’t even know where they picked up these limitations from.
So I want to suggest a radical perspective to you: You cannot not influence. Your states of mind, beliefs and behaviours will have an undeniable impact on people (especially your own children) at any point in time, whether you like it or not. And when you realise that, you start taking full responsibility of who, what and how you are influencing. You also start taking responsibility of your own states of mind, learning, character development and personal growth. And that is absolutely critical for not only being an awesome parent but also an awesome, indispensable, centered leader who makes a huge impact!
A critical question I want you to ask yourself is - what limitation in your own life can you fix or what habit / behaviour / trait can you develop that will evolve excellence in your own children and others you care about? What one or two skills or capabilities can you evolve that will change your ecosystem significantly?
By the way, wonder how I got the child to stop banging her head? I got one of our specialists to do an NLP technique to get the mother to stop feeling that pain that gets her to bang her head in the first place. I worked on the father to stop driving her that crazy. And within 6 months, the child stops banging her head as well.
