One of your greatest contributions to yourself and your family is to serve as a role model of how to locate, anticipate, and adapt to irresistible forces. You'll help yourself by becoming better in this area. You'll also help yourself by providing a valuable example to others you care about. This role will provide pride and joy in their progress, as well as the ability to enjoy practical advantages from their effectiveness.
Although people learn best by doing, they can learn even faster when they have a role model. Think about how foreign the irresistible force concept will be at first to your family members. They'll see the world as mostly unchanging and hard to fathom.
Share with them your ideas about how these irresistible forces, especially the ones that seem threatening, can be helpful to you and your family. Encourage them to share their own ideas about what these forces mean. Ask questions to guide their thinking into more productive lines of inquiry.
For example, if a child is having trouble at school with a teacher, the child may feel totally helpless in the situation. The teacher can be a very formidable irresistible force to a child.
Your child may not know that teachers like supportive attention as well as the child does. Help your child to see that having a problem with this teacher is an opportunity to learn how to get along better with adults.
Encourage the child to visit privately with the teacher to ask the teacher's help in overcoming the trouble. People, and especially teachers, loved to be asked for help, unless you catch them at a busy moment. To ask for help means you respect them, want to be with them, and want to have a better relationship. What can be more flattering?
With your spouse, irresistible forces present wonderful opportunities for intimacy. Most of the irresistible forces will be ones that affect both of you and the family. By jointly considering how you can best take advantage of the energy and direction of these irresistible forces, you can forge a greater closeness and sense of cooperation that is loving and mutually rewarding.
If you have siblings who are stuck on unprofitable paths for their lives, helping them appreciate irresistible forces can be like a compass providing a lost person a way to get home. Feel free to reach out to the older generations of your family as well. |
