Guest Blog - Our friend Mike Lindstrom with some words of Wisdom

Your Future is Now

Writing Down Your Goals

By Mike Lindstrom

Author and Performance Coach

www.mikelindstrom.com

I remember when I was a teenager about 14-15 years of age and I had heard about successful people “setting goals” in life.  Admittedly, I didn’t really know what that meant at the time.  All I heard was to write down on a piece of paper all of the things I wanted to accomplish in my life over the next couple years.  So I grabbed a blank piece of lined paper and starting writing out things I really wanted to accomplish.  I remember writing down things like:

--To be the first person in my family to graduate from college.

--To attend a major top university in California.

--To maintain at least a 3.80 GPA.

--To be the MVP on my baseball team.

--To be elected to student body leadership in the next year.

I remember being somewhat nervous and yet excited when I began to write these things down on paper.  I also remember the time my Dad found the piece of paper and asked me about it for the first time.  I almost felt embarrassed about him seeing my goals like that. It was like he was able to step into my young mind and get a glimpse of what I truly desired as a young person.  I explained to him my goals and he was surprised to see how serious I really was about achieving these actions.  I then felt proud of my goals and wanted to share them with those around me.

Well, just like many of the studies on goal setting had already proven, writing down specific measurable goals worked for me.  These five goals were just a few of the many others I wrote down that year and I accomplished all five of these and many (not all) of the other ones as well.

Fast forward to 2013—I now consult professionals, famous people and even students on the power of goal setting and developing a unique and consistent system in order to achieve their goals.  I also speak to a lot of youth and teenagers around the country and share the same message.  I love challenging young minds to dream, think big and to write down their goals on paper.  If you start writing down your goals now and do this every single year until you graduate from high school, you will be amazed as to how effective it can be---IT WORKS!

The key is to think about each area of life (I call “pillars) that is important to you like family, friends, fitness, school, etc. and write down specific goals under each area.  Be specific and put deadlines or timelines on each goal. For example, “I want to get straight A’s this next semester.”  The key is to constantly review these goals and keep them in a place where you can see them all the time.  The future is now and setting goals WILL help you get there and accomplish your dreams so dream BIG!

Missing Lucas being this small!

How do you expand your child’s food repertoire?

Yes, that's cheese...

Our son, Lucas, is both a picky eater and a stubborn eater. He wants what he wants, and sometime, as parents, we can get frustrated with his lack of imaginative eating. Thankfully, he loves the cooking process and we do eat a variety of cuisines, so eventually, we feel he will come around on the spicy Chinese food, sushi, and varieties of fish that we tend to favor in our diet.

It does strike me as odd, though, that so many children eat such similar foods at different ages. Most of the children in our families, around the age of 4 like Lucas is now, have liked the bland, easy foods; your pizza, mac and cheese, etc. Also, some children have a hard time eating vegetables. We are asking our parent readers to give us some suggestions as to how to encourage healthy food with a variety of choices, rather than sticking with the typical meals. Here some choices we have made.

1. The Vegetable Trick

Most parents attempt what I like to call the vegetable trick. This involves mixing vegetables inside mashes or smoothies that include other sweeter or tastier treats as well. In Lucas’s baby food, we would mix strawberries with broccoli, peaches with butternut squash, etc. We have friends that make smoothies full of kale and spinach, but also add some Nutella and milk to turn it into a milkshake. This can be a great way to make sure your child is getting the health benefits of vegetable, but may also be encouraging a child to not develop the taste buds to appreciate the complexity of vegetable flavor.

2. The wait until their hungry Approach

This involves offering up only vegetables or fruits as snacks, and providing mostly vegetable and fruit options for dinner. It is really not that necessary for children to be rabid meat eaters or overindulge their sweet tooth, so this can be effective in helping children understand that this is all they will be eating. We use this method with Lucas’s snacks, and try to offer carrot sticks and celery sticks with hummus as a preferred snack.

3. Give them a good example

As with most parenting examples, modeling the proper behavior is the most important thing you can do. If you do not eat your vegetables, how can a child think that they have to eat their vegetables? If you never eat fruit, why should your child? Make sure you make healthier choices, and more often than not, your child will grow up choosing healthier foods to eat and sustain themselves.

Parents, give us some more suggestions!

Damir & Nicole

Response to Something Serious

Recently, I read an article by Randi Zuckerberg written as a blog on Huffington Post about a mother who put pictures of her cross-dressing 6-year old on the internet. Zuckerberg’s reaction is twofold, both agreeing with the mother for not being afraid for showing her son to the world, but at the same time disagreeing because putting something like this online in the permanent internet profile of her child may cause future bullying or unsuspecting damage to a child’s future reputation.

The way I see it, I think Randi Zuckerberg is bringing a valid discussion to the foreground of the way we view our children and what happens in the future. Parents have always taken and shown embarrassing photo’s of their children, however, in the advent of the Internet culture, how wise is it to start your children off on this foot. As Zuckerberg says, it is certainly not this child’s decision to share pictures of themselves with anyone.

Should we, as parents, censor our desire to share our children’s foibles and humorous life moments because of how this might affect their future social relationships or lead to any unnecessary bullying? My answer is that we should never censor our desire to share our children with the world. I am in full favor of this parent, and hope she shares more pictures of her cross-dressing son. The more we break down the walls of what is acceptable with regards to this, the more inclusive our society becomes.  Will this take 20 years, as Zuckerberg postulates? Maybe, but it is more likely to take a shorter time than that.

The best part of the article was a quote from Kanye West, describing how strange it is that we don’t automatically let kids like whatever colors they want or else it somehow strange that a boy prefers pink to blue. As West says, “Of course pink is a better color than blue.”

And my son’s favorite color is pink, and I love that prefers bright, happy colors to dark, gloomy colors. Life, at its center, is a matter of perspective, and if you’re perspective is inclusive, chances are, so your children will be!

Happy parenting!

Damir

Does your puppy sleep on the bed?

Luca's doggy does!