Success Assets for Children to Tap Their High Potential



When you think about it, you are the sculptor, shaping your child’s life. You are Picasso painting the picture of your childs future. We are the general designers of our children’s outcomes. Ultimately they will paint their own canvas. However, we need to provide the brushes, paints and possibly help them understand their subject matter. We give them skills to shape and mold their outcomes and the colors for their attitudes and responses.

I’ve found that it helps to know yourself well before attempting to help someone else, including our children. One of the keys to knowing yourself and motivating your kids is to have a well-thought-out destination. In other words, what outcome are you after? What do you want to accomplish? What do you want your kids to do? Do they have the tools and understand what is expected of them? If they have the tools and understand what is expected of them, do they have a reason for not doing what’s expected of them? Can you think of more compelling reasons and motivations for them to fulfill their expectations and responsibilities?

After the launch of my program How To Motivate Your Kids A Three Step System For Parents A friend suggested it would be a good idea to re-post the video series on Success Assets for everyone to see. Unfortunately, the comments from the original posting are not connected any longer. These 3 videos give you an idea of my personal motivation for doing this and a system I have helped other use over the past few years.

We all want the best for our children and we want them to have every opportunity to shine. The Success Assets are for parents who want their kids to tap into their highest potential.

What is School For?


What is school for?

Schools Kill Creativity

Below are a couple of videos that really inspired me a few years ago. In them, Sir Ken Robinson argues that school kills creativity. In an industrialized society, we strive for fitting in and getting the right answer. But as he waxes eloquently, that’s not what schools should be doing.

For me, it has become very provocative to think of education reform in the sense of creative destruction and getting to the core of helping kids really achieve their potential. I believe that education reform will actually come from a grass roots effort. It will come from unlikely sources, much like the technology that fuels it.

It will come from parents, and creative employers and entrepreneurs and the kids themselves. In many cases, the kids themselves will be the entrepreneurs who force the change.

Make no mistake change is coming

And all the political crap will continue to produce nothing, except very expensive

If your interested, and I mean interested like vested in the future, then you may also get a great deal of value from Seth Godin’s new manifesto Stop Stealing Dreams (what is a school for?). In it, he sets a slightly different tone for us to listen for in the winds of change. He is a marketer that I have followed for years and his forecast on media and trends like education reform have been dead on.

If you are more interested learning about education reform in an audiovisual way you have the following videos that I highly recommend.

Smart is Not Enough


What is the number one “Success Asset?”


A recent Search Institute survey of 1,800 parents, educators, youth workers, and community leaders responded to questions about young people’s noncognitive skills, most of these respondents commenting on their own how these attributes are more important than hard skills, rote learning or cognitive abilities. They were not asked to choose one skill over another but rather asked respondents to indicate how important they saw each of the abilities on a scale of 1 to 5.

Avg Interest Ratings

The research engaged participants in thinking, talking, and ultimately acting on the following five big ideas, each of which is rooted in research and demonstrated through data.

  1. Developing young people’s noncognitive skills is an essential aspect of preparing them for success in some type of college, a career, and citizenship.
  2. There are at least five critical noncognitive skills that studies show matter most to educational success.
  3. Young people’s noncognitive skills can be strengthened by adopting one of the growing numbers of programs that focus on those skills, and by more intentionally integrating the development of those skills into the ways that adults interact with young people in existing programs and organizational structures.
  4. One of the most powerful ways to strengthen noncognitive skills is to build developmental relationships with young people that grow deeper over time.
  5. There is a perseverance process that is a practical way to build developmental relationships and to strengthen the foundational noncognitive skills of motivation and persistence.

Building Noncognitive Skills through Developmental Relationships also exposes participants to Search Institute’s long-standing research on Developmental Assets and Sparks, though which the Institute’s scientists and practitioners have studied and worked to strengthen the acquisition of noncognitive skills for more than two decades.

A breakdown of the respondents