Bringing Heaven Home

14 Identity (3)

Welcome back to our session on Bringing Heaven Home, ‘The World Needs A Father’. In our last session, we learned about what it means to be a child of God, and the importance of developing family value, and to understand our primary and secondary identity. Today, in our final session about identity, is to work out table of support based on our primary and secondary identity. So here we are. Values to means decisions, and decisions determines behaviour.

We will not know who we are unless you have determines your top 5 values. That’s why it is important for us to choose our own values.

Secondly, is the friends that we choose. Even when our children are small. Obviously it is more important when our children enter into group adventure phase that is teenage phase. Helping them to choose the right friends is absolutely important. How do you choose your friends? What are the value system they have? Is there something that you can contribute to their lives? What you want to be to them and not what they want to be to you! These are things that you want them to choose the right friends that you want to surround their lives to be with. Our children know in our lives that our life is surrounded with a table of support  filling with key people who demonstrate who I am.

“You are the people that you surround yourself with.” The people closest to you not only determine who you are, they also express who you are. Your children will understand much more about you by the people that you allow close to you. And other people will know much more about you by the people you surround yourself with. These people take responsibility to help you develop holistically in all the spheres of your life: spiritual, emotional, social, intellectual, physical, and even the environment of your life.

So who do you have close to you? Here’s the table of support that indicates the kind of people you should have close to you to make a real impact on your life and through whom you may make a real impact on other people.

They are:

The Mentor – he or she is the person who is our whole life coach.

The Mentee – he or she is the person who we do whole life coaching with.

The Coach – he or she is someone you train us in a specific skill.

The Trainee – he or she is someone you train in a specific skill.

The Hero – he or she is someone we have the highest admiration for, though we may not be able to become like this person.

The Family Member – he or she is the person in the family who has very close emotional intimacy with us, almost like a soul mate within the family. This will be someone in the family with whom we will be totally transparent.

The Inner Circle – he or she are friends who are real soul mates (same gender) Your spouse may not be one of these people.

The Successor (Validator) – he or she is the person who will take the baton of our mission in life and run with it when we are no longer around.

The Cross Culture Friend – he or she is a person from a different culture to yours who can enrich your understanding of life by helping you see things from a different perspective.

Look at the figure below and see how many chairs around the table of your life are filled and how many are empty. Write down the names of each person sitting at a chair around the table of your life. Then start making an intentional effort to fill the empty chairs by approaching possible candidates with the request that they fill these chairs and assume their respective roles.

If your children know that their lives are surrounded with all these important people, their live will be secured of their identity cos there are people around to keep your family accountable to.

Implemented choices determine identity

We actually work on our identity on a daily basis.

Make a choice! When you have to make a choice and don’t make it, that is in itself a choice. Then the world we live in make the choices for us and defines our destiny. Very often, we allow our children to grow up with a victim mentality. They fall into blame game or shame game and take very little responsibility for their destiny in life. We should be intentional n teach our children to take responsibility by making and implementing right choices. For example, Victor Frankl learned from challenges of the Nazi concentration camps that if a situation cannot be changed, if suffering cannot be avoided, what is retained is the freedom to change ourselves.

Determine who or what will be your head office. When you have to make any decision you, consciously or sub-consciously, reflect the decisions determined by a head office. Your head office is the most determining influence on your life. What or whoever that is will determine how you make your choices.

Make choices for each facet of life. The choices that you make in all six dimensions of the human being are a clear expression of your identity. Fathers should help their children to make the right choices in each dimension of life. You should make an effort to understand which aspects of your child’s personality are biological and are unlikely to change and which can be chosen and worked on.

The Six dimensions that make up the Human Being are Physical – cool, slim, fit, attract attention, fashionable, nutrition. Spiritual – committed, influencer, principle bound, disciplined, faithful. Emotional– stable, enthusiastic, exciting, different, intense, relaxed. Social – warm, fun, solid/genuine, listener, adventurous, caring. Environmental– create new culture, fit in with culture, rich. Intellectual – hard worker, creative, sharp, philosophical, calculating, knowledgeable.

Everyone should make his or her choice and understand the consequences of each choice.

Choices have consequences. And every choices that you made from the lists above has consequences. For instance, if I decide that I want to be physically fit, I cannot dream myself into fitness, I have to train myself into fitness. This means hours of pain and sweat.

How do we implement choices? We have seen that identity is derived from our past and the values, friends and choices that we have made in the present. Now we move to what determines my identity in the future.

Identity in the future to live the right mission. Who do I intend to become in the future? It is the dream you live for and the calling you have. That is your future, you become - that is your calling. And that identifies who you in process of living life.

Every child should start knowing their purpose and identity at 10 & 11 years old. This is my purpose and this is my identity. I am so secured in this therefore, I can enter my teenager phase and not only feeling established in my identity, but also confers some identity into this identity list of group.

I think you want to make your child a leader among others. Best way to do this is to confer identity to your child. Your child will know who he or she is and that they will establish an imprint to their peers.

In conclusion, a father confers identity by one, helping his children to sift the past and hold only on to the beneficial parts of their heritage. Two, holding on to the right values, associating with the right friends and implementing the right choices in the present. Three, directing his children to stay the course of the beneficial mission they have embarked on.

As parents, we must help our children to answer the question on identity, because they will look to us for the answer more than anyone else in their lives.

All the family members should have a mission statement. This should be the subject of the most regular discussion in the house.