I’ve learned that it is very rare to find someone who is thrilled with every card in their hand of cards. My older daughter is no exception.
In November 2012, Cailyn learned that we weren’t going to be stopping her weekly chemo regimen in two years. Considering that she had been doing weekly chemo since February 2012, she was devastated by this news and told me that her “life officially sucks”. A few weeks later, I was asking Cailyn to focus her attention on the math sheets she had brought home in preparation for a test. I asked her to choose a couple of questions per section and to write out the answers formally with a clean sheet of paper.
Over thirty minutes later she was still sitting there, having done nothing except complain about having to do homework. I shared that she could have been finished if she had applied her energy towards doing her math. Next time I came over to look at what she’d done, I noticed that she’d scribbled answers in the margins of the prep sheets. Not only was it difficult to decipher, she had been unsuccessful showing that she knew the material.
I asked her to honour her strengths and take the prep seriously. She looked at me indignantly, with no intention of following through. I had a lightning bolt thought that this wasn’t about any specific homework… it was about the fact that she thought her life sucked and she didn’t care how well she did on her math test.
I changed my approach. I sat down and told her that I appreciated how difficult it must be to care about something like math when her life sucked. She nodded.
I told her how sorry I was that she had such difficult and unfair cards in her hand, and that I’d take them away if I could. I also shared that everyone has crappy cards, even if we don’t know what the specific cards are. I asked her to consider the other brilliant cards in her hand… her intelligence, her sense of humour, her determination, the love and support she has from all of her family and friends, etc. And I asked her to accept the idea that she has complete control over which card she chooses to focus on. I told her that she would experience so much more happiness if she focused her attention on one of her brilliant cards.
Her math sheets were finished with no further argument or hesitation.
It’s very easy to focus on the negative stuff. We do it as individuals, as teams, as organizations. It’s one thing to understand our “negatives”, but to give them power over our strengths is a disservice to all involved.
“You can’t capitalize on strengths that you aren’t acknowledging.” (Ann Hovey, 2015)