YOU Life Skills and Leadership is committed to teach leadership as a life skill. So why self-leadership and not self-control?
Perhaps I can give an example using my Sharperean Husky. Juno was made to fly, as Sharperean Huskies are. She can leap over a sofa in a single bound. But put up a child safety gate and she won’t cross it. In fact she will stand there on her hind legs with her front paws draped over, looking forlornly into the room she’s being held back from.
This isn’t so different from our teenagers. They’ve been taught you can’t do this, and you can’t do that, until they are left with only two options:
Do what they are told (Self-Control?)
Or rebel and don’t do what you expect of them (We claim they have no self-control).
So self control really means control yourself the way I want you to be controlled, doesn’t it? Wouldn’t it be better if we taught our teenagers to make decisions and lead themselves to making choices to do the right things at the right times?
Here’s another example – Pretty simplistic, but it demonstrates my point. While our children are growing up we teach them not to cross the street when the light is red. They cross the same street every time, going the same direction every time, and wait for the same green light. Now they are teenagers. The school they need to get to is catty cornered from where they are standing but the light is red for the street they need to cross. Your teenager looks at the cross street and sees a green light. Now there is a decision to be made. Do I do what I have always been told and stick to the same path and wait for the same green light and cross the same street, or do I cross the street with the light that is currently green, and cross the street that is parallel to the one I usually cross? Most decisions in life are a lot more difficult than which street to cross, this is a skill our teenagers have to be taught. It doesn’t come naturally.
Failure to teach self-leadership creates adults who we lovingly(or perhaps not so lovingly) call failure to launch. We wonder why they can’t move out or make decisions on their own. On the other hand there are those who walk through doors blindly, not even questioning what’s on the other side, and then wonder “gee, I didn’t expect that to happen” because they were never taught to make decisions.
Teaching self-leadership takes youth from I can’t to I will, and helps them make better decisions because they know who they are, where they want to go, and helps them figure out how to get there. They can then stand proudly and say “I DID!”