About a year ago, I started writing an article series about the journey of raising our teenage son. Working together to help him become the best version of himself and trying to be the best home team we can be is challenging. Taking the lessons learned to the workplace and vice versa is an interesting topic with plenty more to discover. Have a look at the Introduction article to find out how this all started and easily find all episodes.
For those of you who have been following, you must have noticed that I suddenly stopped writing. That was not because there was no inspiration left - on the contrary - but because things went wrong pretty badly early last year. Despite all the time, energy and creativity we put into the boy’s school career, he somehow lost it completely. No matter what we did, he did not put any effort in studying anymore and his results went down to, well, submarine levels. An accident waiting to happen, at the end of the year his scores had gotten so bad, that he did not get the necessary attestation to stay in his current track.
In a sense, that felt like failure at the time. Not only for and from our son, but also for us as parents who had apparently not succeeded in helping turn this around. And so, since this is a really personal story, it took me some time to give everything a place. I needed some time to find out for myself if I could and wanted to publicly write about these struggles while we were still very much in the middle of them.
Now, with this pretty painful episode a couple of months behind us, I think there may be a lot of value in continuing the story. We’ve moved on. Our son is in a different school and in a totally different field. The change appears to have done him good, as there are slight sparks of positivity about school nowadays. And while there’s plenty of room for improvement, his school results are a lot better than they were last year.
Most importantly, I needed the confidence to see that things were going in the right direction again before I felt I could write about this journey again. But at the same time I realised that you can learn the most when shit hits the fan. When all is going well, you may sometimes feel as if you know what you are doing. But in reality, how many times is that just a coincidence? But if you fail, you tend to invest much more energy to find out why and to turn things around. That is exactly the same at the workplace …
So stay tuned! New episodes are coming soon, starting off with how we dealt with this bad news, trying to turn it into a positive!
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