Tips to help you raise a future leader

CAIRO – 15 August 2018: All parents want their children to become leaders in the future but have they thought about how to make it happen?

Parents must focus on teaching basic skills at the beginning of their lives such as courage, decision-making, self-confidence, positive self-image and self-acceptance.

In August 2017, Mustafa Abu Saad, a professor in Educational Psychology and a Global Trainer in NLP specialized in education, said in Arabiya Magazine that raising and preparing children to be successful, happy and beneficial to their community is a great challenge for every family in the presence of external influences that parents cannot control. These external influences affect the personality and background of the child.

Abu Saad added that parents must prepare a generation of leaders who trust in themselves and challenge the obstacles that stand in the way of their nation to teach them consistency and commitment, noting that the following are the most important qualities required in preparing a leading child:

1. Scientific excellence, intelligence, and promptitude.
2. Commitment to responsibilities of any kind.
3. Self-confidence.
4. Ambition and activeness.
5. Decisiveness.
6. Articulateness.
7. Wisdom.
8. Humility.
9. Tender and continued commitment.
10. Positive influence.
11. The ability to identify and reach objectives.
12. The ability to persuade and manage a group of students.
13. To be characterized by order and timeliness.
14. Honesty.
15. Thoughtfulness.
16. Open-mindedness.
17. To care about their general appearance.

How do we focus on the child in his/her early years to enable him/her to become a leader?

About 90 percent of a child’s personality is formed in the first seven years; where the child begins to form a self-image, according to Abu Saad. Abu Saad added that between 7 and 18 years of age, 10 percent of the child's personality is formed. The personalities of children must be restructured through persuasion, soft understanding, decision-making, power and time value.

TalentSmart has tested more than a million people and found that being emotional is responsible for 58 percent of a leader’s job performance. Some 90 percent of top-performing leaders have are to a degree emotional, Forbes reported in August 2015.

According to The Independent, children need love and a sense of safety to help them overcome hard exams; they will associate love and security with achievements and will enjoy their success more.

Furthermore, resilience with children is essential for learning. Martin Seligman, a professor of American psychology, said that resilience helps children to think more realistically and become more creative.

Parents should give their children the chance to choose an appropriate specialization in accordance with their personalities; they should allow them to study what they like and should refrain from choosing for them.

Research shows that parents have to develop the hobbies of the child such as drawing, dealing with others, competing with others, to develop in the child the love of leadership.

Problem-solving skills in children need to be developed without hesitation and reliance on others. According to Forbes, “Children who always have someone swooping in to rescue them spend their whole lives waiting for this to happen.” Leaders take action and they are responsible and accountable.

Important advice for parents

According to an article in Forbes magazine, children need to be praised for building a healthy sense of self-esteem to become successful leaders. Show your children how proud they are, it helps them understand the true meaning of leadership and will do so in turn when they do become leaders.

The article also added that parents must teach their children that every one makes mistakes; leaders need to be able to observe mistakes, learn from it, and move on to become better people.

Parents should not use cruelty with children. Children not treated with tenderness become unable to empathize, which in turn makes them unsuccessful because of their inability to connect to others, according to Amani Al-Omar, a psychologist at the Ministry of Social Affairs.

Omar added that children have to take responsibility early on, they have to practice hobbies. Parents must praise their successes to give them more confidence in themselves, noting that parents should teach children that violence does not make them successful leaders.

Parents mistakenly believe that the higher the IQ of the child, the better grades they will get, but it is not true, Omar assures. Emotional intelligence is more important than mental intelligence, the most powerful example of which are geniuses such as Einstein, Da Vinci and Edison who were expelled from school and were told that they were failures.

In August 2017, Khaled Mahmoud Abdel Latif, a writer, said that European and Asian countries such as Japan and China were able to rise because of teamwork and leadership, and the concept of strategic planning.

Finally, children must be encouraged to love challenges, since they will face many throughout their lives as they grow older.