Be prepared

“Be prepared” is a motto we hear a lot.  Two simple words.  In every facet of your life, there is something for which you need to prepare.  You’ll need to eat sometime today, right?  Have you been to the store?  Do you have money in your account?  You have a conference call coming up in a few minutes that will last two hours.  Have you been to the restroom and filled your water glass?  Nobody needs to remind you to do little things like this.  It’s automatic.

If you’ve mastered these essentials of daily living and working, then it shouldn’t be difficult to extrapolate these concepts to being prepared for the more challenging curve balls that come your way, but I am seeing a lot of difficulty with this.  Maybe you were never taught how to plan ahead.  As a parent, my job is to prepare my kids for life without me.  Lessons are learned most easily at a young age when the consequences are small. 

For example, I am doing my best to coach the boys through their summer projects.  You might say, but school just let out a week ago, give them a break!  I disagree.  The last message I want my kids to get is that it is okay to wait until the last minute to complete a project when you have the ability to do it now.  We didn’t know how long we might be on the waiting list at the library for the books to come in, so we put the books on hold as soon as we got the assignments.  We talked about how the reading would need to commence as soon as the books come in, because you only get to borrow them for three weeks.  A renewal might not be available since lots of kids need to read these same books.  Since we talked through these contingencies, when the books arrived, the boys were ready to go.  Dodge finished his today and Hank is almost there.  Now we have time to enjoy the summer and maybe even check the books out again in August as a refresher.  Better safe than sorry.  The boys understood all this.  They never complained.  Each morning and afternoon trip in the car this past week has been spent reading.  It was automatic and it made sense.

It’s not so easy to coach an adult to be prepared.  There are so many excuses – I have other priorities, it can wait, I’ll get to it tomorrow, that’s someone else’s job, I don’t like that task, maybe it will go away.  Well, tomorrow is here, and you still have to do what you always needed to do.  Is it going to be any easier now that you’ve waited until the last minute?  Will you have time to do your best?  Do you know how many people are relying on you?  I'm not sure how well Love & Logic works on adults, but we're about to find out.