Author Archives: Aelita Archbold

From Struggle to Strength. Learning & Growing Through Life’s Challenges

By Bonnie McDonald

Life’s challenges are not mere hurdles but pivotal moments that shape our character and direction. Each hardship carries the potential to catalyze profound personal transformation. Confronting and overcoming these trials can fortify resilience, enhance empathy, and inspire significant life shifts. Embracing adversity refines our abilities to handle future problems with increased skill and confidence, setting a foundation for success in various aspects of life.

Cultivating Resilience in the Face of Adversity

When you face difficulties head-on, it doesn’t just test your mettle—it strengthens it. Each challenge you surmount reinforces your ability to cope with future stresses. This process lays a robust foundation for enduring resilience. It equips you with the grit necessary to tackle the unpredictable paths of both personal and professional life, enhancing your capability to manage and rise above future challenges. As resilience builds, so does your assurance in your capacity to navigate life’s unpredictable storms.

Expanding Empathy Through Personal Hardships

Navigating through periods of hardship expands your understanding and sensitivity toward the struggles of others. This enhanced empathy makes you a more compassionate and supportive community member. You start to relate deeply to the pains and challenges others face, which in turn, enriches your interactions and relationships, providing a deeper connection to those around you. Empathy cultivated through personal trials is a profound tool that enriches interpersonal relationships and fosters a supportive network.

Reflection and Realignment During Trials

Challenges often compel you to reflect on your values and priorities. This introspection leads to clearer insights about what is truly significant, guiding more purposeful decisions. By reassessing what matters most, you can realign your life’s goals and actions toward more fulfilling endeavors that resonate with your core values. Such clarity is essential when making decisions that influence both personal growth and professional development, ensuring that your paths align with your deepest convictions.

Inspiring Creativity and Flexibility

When initial plans falter, the necessity to adapt fosters creativity and flexibility. These skills are invaluable in a rapidly evolving professional landscape, helping you to thrive in various circumstances. Learning to pivot and innovate in the face of obstacles not only keeps your projects afloat but also drives you toward finding unique solutions that might have otherwise gone undiscovered. Creativity thus becomes a critical asset, enabling you to navigate through complex challenges with innovative strategies.

Stepping Into Entrepreneurship with Confidence

Overcoming challenges not only prepares you for the uncertainties of starting a new business but also instills the resilience and adaptability necessary for entrepreneurial success. To start a business, you should identify a viable market need, develop a business plan, secure funding, choose a legal structure, register the business, set up financial systems, and market your products or services to attract customers. Establishing a limited liability company (LLC) can be a strategic move, offering benefits like limited liability, tax perks, and operational flexibility. Opting to self-file or using a reputable formation service can ensure your business is set up correctly without incurring excessive legal fees.

Expanding Your Comfort Zone

Being thrust out of familiar confines by adverse events often leads to unexpected personal growth and self-awareness. You discover latent potentials and new passions that may redefine your life’s trajectory. Getting outside of your comfort zone is essential for personal evolution, allowing you to uncover strengths and interests that were previously hidden. Such discoveries can be transformative, opening up new avenues for personal satisfaction and professional opportunities.

Motivation to Act from Adversity

Sometimes, it takes a significant upheaval to disrupt detrimental habits or complacency. Adversity can be a powerful motivator for pursuing new ambitions or making pivotal life alterations. It provides the push needed to explore new avenues and take actions that can lead to substantial changes in both personal and professional domains. This motivation from adversity is a compelling force, driving significant life changes that align with your renewed perspectives and goals.

The journey through life’s challenges is inherently transformative. Embracing these experiences as opportunities for growth prepares you not just for personal advancement but also for entrepreneurial success. As you learn to navigate through trials with grace and resilience, you set the stage for future achievements and new beginnings. The transformative power of adversity should not be underestimated—it is often the catalyst for the most significant changes in our lives.

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How from your child do you raise a leader? Techniques

   

How from your child do you raise a leader? Techniques

by Aelita Archbold

These techniques will help you with your child’s self-esteem and self-confidence.

1. On a piece of paper write down your child’s big goal and ask him/her what belief stops your child from achieving that.

For example:  your child should say aloud: “I think am not smart enough, I think am slow, lazy, disorganized…”

Then ask your child: where does your belief live? What or who made you think this way?

What do you feel when you think this way?

Then, this is important: Ask your child to describe the feelings. What does it look like? How does it smell? What size is it? What color, shape?

It’s important that your child keeps focused and doesn’t get distracted.

2. Take a paper bag and a few paper boxes. (you can use other materials, it’s up to your creativity)

Uncover the first box. Ask your child to throw each negative feeling into a separate box, cover it, and place it into the big paper bag. When all negative feelings are have been placed into the boxes, take the paper bag with boxes, take your child to the backyard and say: “Now, all of your bad feelings and negative beliefs will be burned forever and never return to you back”.

Burn it and let your child to see it.

This symbolic procedure will help your child visually and mentally get rid of negative beliefs.

3. Replace each of the written negative statements announced by your child with positive statements.

Each statement your child should say aloud and at the end of each statement to say out loud his/her name.

For example:

“I am smart, I am Peter, I am beautiful, I am Mary, I am confident, I am Sarah.”

The statement should be very short.

Repeat it several times a day and support each statement with little nice “visual anchors” written on a sticky small piece of paper with different markers. Stick them across your child’s bed, on the mirror in the bathroom, on the child’s Ipod screen, on the closet. It will work! Every time your child sees these little “visual anchors”, it will seed the positive sprouts in your child’s conscious and subconscious mind.

4. Anchor A

Mother comes to the child from behind and gently whispers one of the statements to the child’s left or a right ear while putting gentle and short pressure on your child’s shoulders.

5.  anchor B

Ask your child to say several positive statements with his/her name at the end of each phrase while smoothly step from one leg to another leg while saying the positive statements. This will really help your child and help the subconscious mind to absorb and anchor all positive statements.

During the running, jumping, ask your child to say loud the same statements. All these little anchors will do their amazing job and over time will rebuild your child’s self-confidence.

6.  anchor C

Ask your child:  “ What does he/she sees when they say: I am smart, I am beautiful, I am fearless?”

Ask them to draw a picture for each statement, (the one statement at the time) ask them to draw several copies, and place it in different parts of the house, on the computer, iPod, inside of the dresser, closet, everywhere where your child will frequently see it.

All these symbols anchor reminders your child will be surprised to see in different places in the house, will bring great results.

Never let your child criticize himself/herself out loud! It’s extreamely NOT GOOD because it will bring negative beliefs and settle it in his/her mind. And if a child has other kids or adults next to them, a child can convince others to believe the negative statements.

It’s important to keep your child away from destructive criticism coming from his/her child care providers, peers, friends at the playground and instead bring your child to places, where he gets encouraged, supported, and motivated.

Sign up your child for any sports activities: swimming, figure skating, tennis, running, jumping, martial arts. Their self-confidence will be drastically increased along with physical strength, immune system, and physical and mental health.

At the end of the day, together with your child write down in a separate notebook all great things he/she achieved during the day and give them a reward. And set goals for the next day.

If you post pictures with your child on Social Media, make sure to post only those pictures where your child looks happy and smiling.

These priceless techniques will help your child to restore self-confidence, self esteem and will open the long and beautiful road of a leader.


How from your child do you raise a leader?

How from your child do you raise a leader?
The most important thing to consider is to build your child’s self-confidence.
What is Self-confidence? Simply saying, Self-confidence is how confident you are in your ability or skills.
Before doing that you have to understand why your child has low self-confidence?
If your child is 4-6 years old and you are raising your child yourself. Take a piece of paper and write down those statements that diminish your child’s self-confidence that you say frequently to your child during the day.
These are the self-confidence damaging statements you want to avoid.
  1. Endless Comparison with other children: “Look at Mary she is so smart at Math and look at Peter he is so talented, he plays the piano so well!” Or being consistently compared unfavorably to a sibling.
  2. Deprecation, putting down your child. Worse yet, if you do that in front of other adults or children. “Look at yourself, you look like…” “If you will continue to be lazy you will not succeed”…
  3. Overprotecting or being careless to your child. Both extremes are not good.
When your child becomes an adult, low self-confidence can manifest in a Constructive or Destructive way.
Let’s see the Constructive way, first. The percentage is very small.
In this situation, according to Alfred Adler, the hypercompensatory personality function gets activated! And this is great! 🙂
For example, Napoleon. He was short but he compensated for his short height through his military wins. Marilyn Monroe suffered from low self-confidence and compensated through her fabulous movie roles and sexuality.
Many great achievements are built on low self-esteem and low self-confidence foundation.
From one side it can be good because those low self-confidence kids sometimes achieve great things in life and become very successful. “Look, Papa, you told me that I will not make it, that I am stupid, but looks at me, I own this huge network”. However, any major problems such as: divorce, financial crash, losing the house, business, betrail of a family member will immediately bring you to your childhood belief: “I am nobody”…
And it will take a lot more time to recover from the stress and or depression if compared with a self-confident person.
Life would be built on a constant fight, proof to himself/herself and to the parents, that “I” can make it.”
Low self-confidence can be Constructive & Destructive.
Let’s see the Destructive way. The percentage is much bigger.
Such an adult will afraid to date, afraid to ask for better pay, afraid to find a better job he/she deserves, in another word, this adult will follow his/her fears and achieve very little in their life. And the cause of the fear comes from their childhood!
If on Social Media you see the nasty comments, now you will know that people with low Self Esteem and Self Confidence will be happy to leave very negative comments.
This is their way of self-assertion over other people.
Another extreme.
People who have low self-confidence can become dictators! They feel good when they put down their wife, husband, employees, verbally and physically abusing their family members.
Look at the life of Adolf Hitler. As a child, Adolf Hitler was often sick and his mother was overly protective to him, while his father was physically and verbally abusive to Adolf Hitler. And look what we got! He became one of the world’s most terrible dictators!
Now that you learned a lot about self-confidence, I want to share with you the technics on how to build, restore self-confidence in your child.

Top 10 Reasons Every Child Should Learn Leadership Skills

It’s so extremely important to develop leadership skills at an early age. The benefits of having leadership skills are crucial for each child. Why? Here is why.

To develop control of their lives.
Learning leadership skills allows a child to see opportunities where other children wouldn’t see them because they develop different mindsets with the habit to think critically and act effectively.

To build self-confidence.
The time it takes to develop self-confidence is different in each child because it depends on their childhood experiences, parenting habits, communication with other kids, and relationship with teachers at the pre-school or child care. And for each child it takes a different amount of time to build, or to be more exact, to reestablish the natural self-confidence that each child initially born with.

To solve problems creatively.
The ability to solve problems creatively doesn’t come immediately although it can be developed with time, proper exercises, and training. The earlier your child starts training, the earlier it will come.

To withstand bullies.
If your child comes to school with a good amount of self-confidence and self-defense and leadership skills, bullies will leave your child alone because they will not offend a child who knows how to deal with bullies and defend themselves.

To lead the team.
It takes time to learn how to lead others with the right tasks and ideas. The earlier your child gets involved in such activities, the better they become as they get older.

To learn how to lead the conversation with difficult children and adults.
This is an important skill for every person. And the best time to start learning about it, while in childhood. These exercises help your child to feel in control while dealing with difficult individuals.

To learn how to make decisions in difficult situations.
These are also trainable skills that can be developed in any child with the use of proper training.

To learn public speaking skills.
The more your child speaks in front of others, the better and more comfortable he or she will be at public speaking. Your child will learn to manage different types of audiences and what to say to rude individuals.

To learn how to negotiate and delegate things to others.
This is a fun skill, that develops during the practice inside to the family or at the leadership classes for children.

Leadership skills give many opportunities in life to your child that are not available to those who don’t have developed their leadership skills. With this being said, sign up for leadership classes and see your child growing into a confident and positive leader.


How to regain your childhood self-confidence?

How To Regain Your Childhood Self-Confidence?

How can you achieve that?

This is the story of my life.

Before I went to school, I was a happy & lively child. 

At school, I got bullied by some peers that would make fun of me, simply because I was different. And I often just staid by myself, and listened to music that played in my head.

Because I didn’t fit into the crowd, and I liked to be by myself, or with one of my few friends that I still have today.  

I had a good voice and would frequently sing and play the piano, perform at the different city events, while attending the school of music, with a full-time curriculum.

In my regular school I was an introvert: closed and not social. 

Paradoxically, when I would attend the school of music, in the blink of an eye, I would immediately be transformed into a happy, lively, and outgoing extrovert leader!

But not every child has this opportunity.

With this being said, my best advice to you based on my own childhood experience is:

1. Do the “I am Mary”  exercise for 5 minutes every day. 

 2. If as a child you didnot learn how to defend yourself verbally, with humor or verbally, it’s never too late to join my individual or group leadership classes where your child will learn unique technics on how to regain self-confidence, to build communication skills, and learn to take action.

If you have a child with low self-confidence, it’s your responsibility as a parent, before they go to school, to train them to defend themself with verbally, with humor, or physically using different technics.

By the time they go to school, children should have smart templates in their heads (just memorize them) and be able to provide an immediate intellectual or physical defense to bullies and abusive children.

Sign them up for judo or karate classes. It will definitely boost their self-confidence. 

3. Create a vision board, where your child can pin the pictures where he/she looks as fearless winners. Leave it next to their bed. This way, every time your child enters their room they will see their positive and encouraging images. 

The purpose of all technics is to prepare your child to take action against bullies, abusive and toxic children.

These technics will perfectly work for adults as well.

Gradually, your child will learn to stand up for himself/herself and their values. And all bullies gradually will leave them alone and your child will gain the respect of their peers and will win the battle.