Encouragement

I hear ‘You can do it brudder’ as I look over to see Zi’s face completely overjoyed.

Brother was thinking about eating an animal cracker and sister was beaming.

To be clear, Tennessee has been eating on his own for a while and this instance was not rare.

That said, Zizi was so excited to cheer on her brother in doing this.

Encouragement is a key focus in our parenting style, because Zach and I both view it as vital in our lives.

We are fortunate to have a great support system but (in my experience)

as you get older, the encouragement of others becomes rare.

Most of us have experienced an abundance of praise.

When you get a job, a promotion, get married, get pregnant, etc., people love to give praise. ‘Amazing, wonderful, good job’

Praise is awesome but I genuinely believe that encouragement ranks a thousand times higher in importance.

Praise happens when things are great,

Encouragement is needed when things are not.

School was never fun for me. It was difficult from start to finish.

I was a B student and genuinely remember counting down the minutes to get out of there.

My sister’s were better at school, which is awesome and I was definitely jealous.

I say this because through my struggle my mother showed me what it meant to be an encourager. When I would have anxiety about testing and class and my future, my mom would always go out of her way to encourage me.

As a kid, I just thought ‘cool, that’s my mom’ but in looking back I realize how monumental that truly was for me.

On the worst days, my mom would be there to say,

‘Haley, I love how much you love others’ and at the time I remember thinking, this has nothing to do with my anxiety over my shitty SAT scores but my mom knew, encouragement goes a long way. And it did.

Throughout my academic struggle, I was able to be confident through encouragement from the people in my life.

As a wife and a parent I try to be extremely conscious of times that I encourage vs. times that I criticize and I think this can be applied to all relationships.

You never know what someone is going through and instead of waiting until they announce something great, why not just take one second to send or say a word of encouragement?

It goes a long way.