Sunday, Aug 1, 2010Nurturing Excellence In Others

Most women will acknowledge that there are women’s specific issues and that our challenges are many.  Men also experience these challenges, but when it comes to parenting, the nurturing of children generally fall to women because women are more nurturing creatures.  We recognize that in nurturing excellence, our child must first trust in himself and his capabilities.  We begin early in his life as a nurturing mother through praise, encouragement, appreciation, listening with full attention to him, wording feedback so it doesn’t sound like blame, and by being well rested ourselves to be at the top of our own women’s health game.

One of the ways mothers in particular nurture their children and their friends is to acknowledge the ways in which they are great or talented.  Women find it easy to find excellence in others.  I will acknowledge this great quality in you and I’d like to offer some ideas about this acknowledgment capability that might nurture you.

It is impossible to recognize excellence in others without possessing it yourself.

When you recognize excellence, have you ever questioned why you are capable of recognizing it? How do you know it is excellence? How does your child’s talent catch your eye? When you see your baby unfolding a larger sense of himself, how is it you know that is happening?

What happens (and it happens so fast that unless we slow ourselves down to examine these issues with a high magnification in a slow environment) is that we see our child doing something wonderful.  We go inside ourselves and we tell ourselves this is wonderful.  We check to be sure it’s wonderful so we can tell our child the absolute truth by checking inside ourselves to see if it’s good, true, perfect, harmonious, beautiful and loving.  Remember, this is at light speed, so we don’t consciously recognize all this is occurring.  It’s similar to the small print on a balloon that has to be blown up in order to be read easily.

The unfoldment through our own women’s issues and experiences is what permits us to see progress in another.  Both you and your child were born with all that you could possibly express “infolded” inside your baby being. Your parents nudged it to come out and show itself, but the important thing to recognize is that it was always in there. Part and parcel of women’s issues is to recognize what is there, why it is there, and how to begin nurturing excellence in others.  That is how we foster our own women’s health and how we foster the health of our children as well.

“To understand your parents’ love you must raise children yourself.”  ~ Chinese Proverb