In This Competitive World, How Do You Help Your Child Develop A Unique Edge To Succeed?

We as parents always want our children to excel in whatever they do. In this immensely competitive world every parent ensures that his/ her child joins the best school,  best available  classes, refers the best study material. But there is something more that needs to be taught to children to survive and thrive in this extremely competitive environment and  give them a ‘unique’ edge over competition?? An edge which only they can have.

Their mental steadiness and resilience is that edge. There are so many students who  are studying day and night  for their exams but are just not able to deliver their best on the exam day. Some are not able to prepare to the best of their abilities as personal, social, family distractions, thoughts of failure and its consequences haunt their mind frequently and stop them focusing 100% on studies.  In such circumstances how  do you  help your child prepare and cultivate mental habits during preparation and the time of their  examination that can make a tremendously powerful difference to the way they can write their exams and top them.  

As a guide and mentor, let me share 5 powerful tips that can help your child cultivate this “unique edge”. Since matters of the mind sometimes sound complicated, let me draw a simple parallel between mind and  body for better understanding. In simple words, a healthy and fit body is the equivalent of a steady mind.

What would you do to ensure your child is healthy?

Help Your Child:

a. Excercise Regularly

b. Intake adequate nutrients

c. Maintain a healthy diet

d. Develop immunity towards external infections

e. Take adequate rest 

When it comes to the matters of the mind the solution is not very different. Here is what you need to do to help your child to develop a steadier mind.  However, it is not something that can be cultivated in a day. It takes time, patience & the right techniques to achieve this. 

1. Exercise  Will power:

As a student preparing for exams, your child  is exercising one major aspect of mind i.e. his/ her intellect. However that is not enough. To really increase the strength of one's mind, it is very important to exercise will power frequently. Will power is like a mental muscle that grows weak if you do not exercise it daily. One simple way to do it is to help them fight their impulses. Be it an impulse to watch something on you tube , check their smartphone, logging into social media or could be just binge watching while studying . Try to keep a track of how  many impulses they could fight off using  their will power and encourage them to continue this process. Frequently exercising  will power over a considerable time will help your child gain a certain amount of control over their thought process and will help them stay focused during preparation.

2. Intake Adequate Nutrients: 

The two most powerful nutrients for your child's mind to be successful in any career he/she is pursuing is:

1: Having a very specific goal in mind (yes, more specific than just clearing the exam)

2: Having a very strong reason to achieve the goal

These two help organize the child's mind bottom up. These nutrients will help them ward of distractions of any kind. They will  also enable them to put in that little extra bit of effort .Once they have these two in place their drive to work hard will be strong enough to not let any temporary setbacks demotivate them.

3. Maintain a healthy mental diet:

When you are maintaining a healthy food diet for your child, you cut down on junk food isn't it? Junk food means food that is highly tasty but has no nutritional value. Most instant gratifications be it whats app, social media, you tube  serve as  this junk food for your child's mind. Most of the audiovisual and video content on these platforms acts like junk food. While you may not realize it on the surface, the mind keeps processing all this unnecessary information throughout the day which wastes its bandwidth. Do not believe me? Try cutting down on all types of video content for a week for your child and ask him/her to see the difference in their performance be it academics or any other field. Instead  encourage them to spend some time doing a creative activity like dance, sing, draw, paint, write, etc. any creative activity that makes them feel joyful.

4. Develop immunity towards external infections:

A body remains healthy when it has developed immunity towards external infections such as cold, flu etc. Similarly there also are a lot of external factors that cause unsteadiness in a child's mind. Most  common among these external factors is what the world thinks and says about them (friends, family, teachers, strangers). Other external factors include future uncertainty, unpredictable situations, high expectations from their closest relatives or unwanted events that happen around them. These external factors increase their fear of examinations resulting in stress. In such situations, the ability to focus naturally goes down. To stay focused it is very important to have daily routines and practices in place that help your child  stay immune to external distractions. Practicing simple forms of meditative exercises (mindfulness, Yoga) for 10-20 minutes daily can help your child develop this immunity. But this needs to do be done consistently and under guidance.

5. Take adequate rest:

Just like our body, our mind also needs rest. When we sleep our body rests but our mind doesn't. In fact it is even more active. It works on all the impressions it has accumulated during the day sorting, processing the important and relevant information and discarding the irrelevant information. It is common sense that if any machine is used nonstop without regular rest, it is bound to perform sub optimally and inefficiently. That’s what is happening with most students who just focus on studying all day and not providing adequate rest to the mind. A well rested mind can do way much more than a tired one. So how do you your rest your mind. The answer again lies in meditative practice. Meditative practices such as mindfulness or breath based techniques  help your child rest his/her mind. But just doing it once in a while is of no use. It must be done daily under proper guidance to experience the  boost in one's performance.

Hope you found the above five points useful.

Please visit https://www.antarlakshya.com/focus-enhancement-for-co to know how we can help your child develop this unique edge over competition.