Effort is one of those amazing things about humans. We have this energy to use and most of us do not have conscious effort over when we can apply it towards our goals. This leaves us looking to our external world for motivation which fails us on several levels.
Most external sources will try to motivate others for their own goals. Parents, teachers, companies selling products and services, friends, social groups and political parties. This does not work.
The key to effort is to have it come from an internal locus of control and be self-motivated. When this happens effort is ‘effortless’ since we are pursuing our own goals and not those of other groups or people that we will resent over time for controlling us.
The reason that this happens is manifold but it certainly starts young out of the best of intentions. Both school and early parenting are safety focused since our little boys are so young and only operating on a partially developed cognition structure, we have to limit them and control them in order to keep them alive and uninjured. The problem is that we do not adjust this system over time and continue to infantilize our babies as they grow into boys. Coupled with this the school system is designed to take other people’s children and ensure that they are educated and unharmed. This results in a system that further supports external loci of control in a boy’s life and teaches them to apply minimum effort so that they can get back to playing and doing what they want. This hurts their learning and development over their school years and we are seeing this in the growing disconnection in larger and larger numbers of boys from their education.
Fixing this is fun. First, we (as parents or caregivers) change our mindset from “this is a helpless and stupid child” (which they arguably are) to “this is a man in training”. As men in a boy’s life we are especially important in communicating this and modelling this for our boys. Once they are aware that they are training for independence (and that this is a good thing that they want) their entire mindset changes surrounding everything. Learning becomes a step towards future goals. Independence is something that they are sequentially working towards and excited about acquiring. Higher skill acquisition over time coupled with less arguments over time makes this whole process much more productive and positive for everyone involved. When we do it right, they no longer need us and will leave us to grow into the independent men they will become. If we do it really well they come back and continue to spend time with us as adults because they want to, and like our company.
This is a complicated series of steps that one blog post cannot do justice to. If you are interested in learning more about raising better boys please feel free to contact me for one-on-one coaching calls or check out my growing channel on YouTube which has an increasing repository of materials on this subject.
modernmasculine2020@gmail.com