Teaching Honesty to Your Child
Good afternoon everybody. We are going to be starting the new life skill of honesty in the karate school for the next two months. It’s going to be our life skill of this cycle.
Level one that we start to work on is being honest with ourselves. And it’s an all too often neglected skill. Everybody focuses on what we call level two, which is being honest with our parents. But all too often parents never teach their ninja how To be honest with themselves. And that’s basically the the core level of what we really need to start. So what we mean by that is teaching your ninja to really understand and evaluate themselves all of the time, in a good way. So all too often people are going to be critical. You know, I’m not as handsome as that person, I don’t have as much money as this person. I’m not as smart as that person. That part’s easy. But we want to do is we want to teach the ninjas to be self evaluating in a good way. That means, am I really trying my hardest right now? Did I really do my best? Was that the best effort that I could have done at that time? By rephrasing the questions and evaluating if we did our best, we’re going to be teaching the ninjas not to accept mediocre or sloppy behavior. But when they do it, that they own up to it. And that’s another important part of honesty.
Honesty with ourselves is really, truly knowing and feeling where we are at at that particular time. Maybe I’m not feeling so great today. So I didn’t do the best pushups that I could ever do. I did them and I got through it next time, it’s going to be even better. That would be a basic example of what we want to start to teach our ninjas. Did you make your bed the best that you could have done it? Did you finish that chore? The best that you could have done it? Did you study the best that you could have done? Did you complete and earn that grade that you could have done. So by always evaluating you need to be teaching your ninjas to be the thinking and planning to do their best before.
Too often people wait to see what happens and then either accept the results or more often make up an excuse.
“I didn’t do that well on the test because well, I’m not a good test taker.”
“I didn’t do that well on the test because I didn’t get a good night’s sleep” or this happened or that happened.
They start to find excuses so that the honest part doesn’t hurt so much. That’s basically what lying to ourselves is all about. What we want to be able to do is teach our ninjas that it’s important to accept responsibility for the results that they get on whatever activity it is, and then make the adjustment do better next time, always try to do your best.
We are seeing it here in the karate school already. A lot of the times the ninjas will answer “Yes, sir.” But some of the times it’s not their best they are saying it because they know they are supposed to. But they are not really putting any effort into it. That’s not acceptable. When you you are here, you’re 100% here. That is what we expect from the ninjas. Therefore, we hold them to that standard.
Now, with our honesty life skill, it’s pretty simple.
“Hey, that was awful. Let’s do it again.”
And we correct the behavior right there and then so that they understand what we are going to expect from them in class. Once that expectation is set. They know what they have to do in order to get through class in the best way possible. So we will be spending the next couple of months working on honesty.
Number one, being honest with ourselves and always in all possibilities.
Level Two is being honest with our parents and our family. And we’ll be talking about that in an upcoming video. But for right now, ask your ninja was that the best that you could do? And get their answer? The answer is no. Then you can have that conversation. Well what could you have done to make it better? And then expect that from them next time and have them check and make sure that they’re meeting their own expectations?
So there you have it being honest, it’s going to be a great life skill, looking forward to helping the ninjas become honest with themselves and then honest with their parents. Have an awesome day!