Ending The Cycle of Bullying

If we do not learn through and from bullying, if we are not able to view bullying in the right context and challenge the situation, then the tragic reality is that bullying will recur throughout your child’s life and into adulthood.?

Regardless of where you are right now in the journey, the age of your children, your level of understanding and involvement, or the date that you happen to be reading this, there are some things you can implement right now that can help you take the first, or further, steps toward helping your child break through bullying.

Getting In Training

We believe that a higher value should be placed on a child’s character than on their grades or academic success. So much emphasis and pressure is put onto ‘scoring’ children, from an early age, on their academic ability, but there is little focus on applying a progressive structure to the development of their character. Yet there is striking evidence that from an early age, measurements of executive function and cognitive fitness are highly predictive of children’s future achievement, even when controlling for IQ scores or socio-economic status.

We passionately believe that developing your child’s character should be the number one goal for all parents, teachers and the education system.

A child’s character is their moral compass and ultimately affects every decision they make, from the relationships and friendships they form, to the goals they set, the vision they aspire to and the daily habits they follow. It’s the most important aspect of a child’s development and yet it’s so often the missing ingredient in their education.

But what exactly is a child’s ‘character’ and how can we ‘develop’ it??

In 2017, we conducted a survey with over 2,000 parents of children in the Warrior Academy to identify what constituted character. The result was the 3Cs: conduct, confidence and concentration.?

A child will typically have high levels of one or two of the 3Cs, but rarely all three.

By developing all of them to a high level a child achieves what we call a ‘black belt character’, which will set them up for a successful and happy adult life.

Your first task is to identify, in your child, which C needs bringing up to the level of the other two. We call this the child’s ‘breakthrough area’. It’s the area you need to focus on first to achieve the quickest development in your child’s character. You can discover your child’s breakthrough area by visiting www.notavictim.co.uk.

Next, it’s time for some mental training.

Michael Gervais says that there are only three things we can train: our craft, our body and our mind (which we will call our brain). Society is focused principally on our craft and in different ways also on our bodies. Our mind is only just beginning to come to the surface.

This may be to do with how easy it is to measure progress in each of these three areas. Craft is easy to measure. You go to school, where you either pass or fail your exams, and there are things you can do to improve your ‘score’. When you work for a company, your performance is tracked and measured, and you have annual conversations with your employer where you discuss ways you can improve.

Similarly, when it comes to the physical, we have so many ways of measuring our bodies.

We have images of what is the ‘norm’. However, some of these can be misleading. We might see a person who looks athletic and muscular but has a limp because there’s something wrong with their balance or coordination. We are told that if we feel stiff, we must be getting ‘old’, but these two things don’t necessarily go hand in hand.

Training the brain, on the other hand, presents certain challenges.

We can’t easily measure or observe the capacity of our brain because we can’t easily look inside it. Even if we could, we wouldn’t know what to look for. If we can’t measure something, the judgment as to whether we are improving it or not becomes subjective. Yet through science, it has become possible to monitor how our brains work and to measure how efficient our cognitive functions are – in other words, our mental fitness.