One took the well-beaten path of climbing up a corporate ladder and is now in a comfortable position of wealth.

The other took the path less beaten and went into several businesses and is starting to find success.

Education played a part in helping these two men find success. But so do their mindsets, soft skills, business sense, experience and negotiation skills.

The next time you’re exasperated in helping your child do his homework, a long-term horizon would help.

In the long run, none of his grades would ever matter.

A formal education is but a stepping stone to the University of Life. That’s what everybody is graduating from.

A father came to our centre and was obviously upset with the son as evidenced through arms crossing and stare fights.

In a calm but sure manner, the father intoned, “The bigger you’re, the less obedient you have become.”

The reply came fast and furious, “The older you’re, the more you love Hans (the youngest brother)”

It didn’t have to stop there. But it did. This scene could reenact itself if the father didn’t take stock, in other words, apply empathetic listening to what the eldest son had just said.

It was a cry for attention. As I knew the child personally, he said that it had been months since the father had spent any time with him.

I had learnt since then that this is not the first time the son had an argument where it involved the youngest son.

A simple time out to listen would have changed the situation.

Sometimes, it really it’s all about listening. A formula I’ve learnt in all my interactions with parents:

Quality time = Attention + Listening.

Take quality time out today. Perhaps it has been a while. Perhaps it could solve your conundrum.

Enjoy listening!

One consistent point that surfaced in the talks I have conducted to parents in schools’ Parents Support Group (PSG) is that they have overlooked the importance of acknowledging the thoughts and feelings of their children.

Haim Ginott, the renowned child psychologist from Israel who later moved to U.S where he wrote his classic, Between Parent and Child, said, “We need to listen to all kinds of truths from our children, pleasant or unpleasant. It is just that parents do not want to hear the unpleasant truths.”

When children don’t feel secure in expressing their thoughts and feelings, they show it in their behaviour, moods, actions and even speeches.

It is hard to find consensus on the amount of heart-to-heart talk that parents need to have. Especially in a time-pressed society like Singapore. However, all the experts agree on one fact (which is rare, considering that they are experts), calling it moaning time, timeout, spend time or quality time; basically, they mean the same thing – time needs to be invested in children.

This time is not in font of the TV either. Careful listening needs to take place. Listening is an important skill where paraphrasing, repeating and acknowledging feelings and thoughts are all needed for a quality time.

The communication that involves this kind of empathetic listening will go like this:

Harold: What a miserable life! The teacher called me a liar, just because I told her that I forgot the homework. And she yelled at me, and did she yell! She said she’ll write you a note.

Mother: You had a very rough day.

Harold: You can say that again.

Mother: It must have been terribly embarrassing to be called a liar in front of the whole class.

Harold: It sure was.

Mother: I bet inside yourself you wished her a few things!

Harold: Oh, yes! But how did you know?

Mother:That’s what we usually do when someone hurts us.

Harold: That’s a relief.

It’s deep comfort to children to discover that their feelings are a normal part of the human experience. The key is listening and if the mother had dismissed it or scolded the child, the effect would have been quite different. Compare the above with this below:

Father: Where is your new car?

Dennis: It’s somewhere.

Father: I didn’t see you playing with it.

Dennis: I don’t know where it is.

Father: Find it. I want to see it.

Dennis: Maybe someone stole the car.

Father: You are a damned liar! You broke the car! Don’t think you can get away with it. IF there’s one thing I hate, it’s a liar!

If the father would have stated the truth of the event, rather than character assassination, ” I see that your new car is broken. It’s a pity as you really enjoyed playing with it.” The child will know that:

1. Dad understands
2. I can share my darkest secrets
3. I must take care of my gift
4. I have to be more careful.

Valuable lessons will perhaps be learnt. Each child is by no means the same. But the summary is this that they all need validation. Of their feelings, thoughts with a listening ear. Even as adults, don’t we?

For all his vision and ingenuity in leading Apple to where it is today, Mr Jobs will always be remembered.

He bequeathed a lasting legacy of sexiness in simplicity, of client engagement, of an easier and better way of using technology.

Without undermining his achievements, Mr Jobs’ legacy is more than that. It was his convictions. I am sure that was what sustained him throughout his career even when he was ousted from the very company he has created, when he had to undergo cancer treatment so that until recently did he pass the baton on to someone whom he has worked with.

Back in 2005, Jobs revealed some of his thoughts on death in at Stanford University, telling students: “Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.”

He walked the talk by expecting perfection in all parts of his life. By expecting that of his 12,000 employees; by expecting that of his core team in revisiting concept; by expecting that of himself so that until the last moment he held on. He gave his best and fought the good fight.

Thank you Steve, for giving us all the benefits that the technological prowess that’s Apple has given us. But more than that, thank you for showing us what it means to be human. You will always be remembered.

According to Dr Jeffrey Young, one of the most important needs of a child is self-belief.

In Malcom Gladwell’s book, Outliers, he described how high-performance adults had engaging parents who took an active role in communicating their beliefs in them ; whether it be through deeds, like relocating for a child’s education or in words, through daily communication.

So, in first diagnosing a child’s underperformance, we should examine the root cause.

A few simple questioning techniques will help us to uncover if it’s a lack of self-belief:

Would it help if …
Is it because…
What if …
How does … sound?

In other words, we have a far better chance of helping our children solve their problems by doing a simple needs analysis.

Often times, it is not the ability per say that is lacking. Especially when the problem has been faced before.

We all know that under stress, when facing deadlines for example, create a physiological change in us. We are more compelled , our attention spans increase and energy levels go up in an attempt to meet the deadline. What is not commonly known is that when stress becomes far too common and frequent, cortisol inhibitors, a type of neurotransmitter, is emitted, triggering a fight, flight or fright response.

Under the best of intentions, both learner and guide will be frustrated as emotions hijacked higher cognitive functions, rendering any learnt ability and acquired knowledge literally useless.

Studies have repeatedly borne this fact out, that happy children learn most, that a classroom that is filled with fun is one of the best ways to engage learners – adults and children alike. This eliminates the sentinel-like emotional controllers like cortisols and instead produces positive neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine that gives the learner the ‘feel-good’ effect.

The best thing then is that if the student is underperforming, repeatedly failing and frustrated in solving hitherto easy questions, it is time to take a break and re-examine the reasons for failing the task. If it is due to performance issues, learn the skill before trying or more often than not for repeated tasks, motivational issues, clarify the underlying feelings about the task. We have a better chance of scoring a hit with a couple of well-placed questions than just forcing the task through.

Children love your attention. They like to grab your attention. At times, they demand it.

A cloud of evidence points to this. Two cases in point:

Tests show an improvement from 55% before the program to 68.5% after it began.

In a separate test in Salk Institute in March 2011, 11 healthy adults underwent a three-month aerobic exercise regimen.

They did MRIs of their brains before and after. They also measured the fitness of each volunteer by measuring oxygen volume before and after the training program. Exercise generated blood flow to the dentate gyrus of the people, and the more fit a person got, the more blood flow the MRI detected, the researchers found.

“The remarkable similarities between the exercise-induced cerebral blood volume changes in the hippocampal formation of mice and humans suggest that the effect is mediated by similar mechanisms,” they wrote.

What both tests show is that movement, exercise for example, or a walk in the park to ‘clear the mind’, aids learning and memory formation. In the movie, ‘Akeelah and the Bee’, Akeelah was made to skip ropes while memorising Spelling Bee words. The next time when your child needs a boost in his memory power, take him for a walk or an exercise. It may prove better than Chicken Essence.

News of Osama bin Laden’s death was spread via Twitter, beginning with a message by Keith Urbahn, the chief of staff of former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld. “So I’m told by a reputable person they have killed Osama Bin Laden,” he wrote. “Hot damn.”

While Urbahn was not the first to tweet the news, he was the one who gained the most trust from the network. So how exactly did this happen? Social Flow, which creates technology to determine the optimal way for companies to tweet, looked at 14.8 million tweets and bitly links to determine how Urbahn’s single tweet could be amplified to reach a massive scale. Their study resulted in an amazing visualization of how the news spread in the Twitterverse, and which handles were most responsible.

From Keith Urbahn’s tweet, almost 80 people retweeted within a minute, including the New York Times’ Brian Stelter, who’s twitter handle was the next major hub of the information.

By zooming in on various sections of the visualization, we see how other prominent twitter accounts such as @andylevy, @ObamaNews and @laughingsquid were able to get their followers to retweet and react:

The visualization is accompanied by a fascinating article that details how speculation turned into information over Twitter, including how rumors that President Obama’s announcement had to do with Qaddafi rather than Bin Laden rapidly swelled and then decreased around the time of Urbahn’s tweet. 

This shows only that quick response to a explosive newsbyte, twitter-style, followed by a critical mass of followers who trust in your expert opinion can quickly help make your message viral. What can quickly garner respect and trust takes only a split second to destroy. What goes up quickly, comes down quickly too.

When retweeting, this applies too. So the old adage with a modern spin, think twice before tweeting.