‘What Do You Wannabe, Son?’

The proud mother never tired of asking her 7-year old son, “Tell Uncle what you want to become when you grow up.” As if on cue, the boy says, “Astronaut.” That is followed by a heavy prompt from a beaming mummy, “What will you do as an astronaut?” The boy goes on to tell us about going to the moon, then Mars and growing potatoes there. Everyone shows adequate admiration, and the mother launches on other exploits of the son, and her own activities as the protector of a ‘hyper-energetic’ bundle who is always thinking of big things to do.

A few weeks after that encounter, mother and son were visiting us at home, and one of us, recognizing the child, asked him the same old question, “So, what do you want to become when you grow up?” The child said, “I want to drive a tourist bus.” The mother, who did not expect this, went berserk. She was all over the 7-year old, “Who told you this?” “What about astronaut?” When she did not get very coherent replies from the child who was taken aback by this unexpected belligerence from his mother, she held his cheeks in her hands, looked sternly into his eyes, and said, “I don’t want to hear this bus driver nonsense. Do you hear me? You will be an astronaut. Is that understood?” The boy vigorously nodded his head in complete and abject agreement.

“How can I keep him safe from bad influences? How can I be with him all 24 hours of the day?” The distraught mother is completely missing the point. This was a classic case of the adults violently gate-crashing a child’s world, totally unwarranted and uninvited.

Why do we have to moderate a child’s thinking using our scales and standards of ‘good-better-bad’? What makes adults wiser in drawing the lines of propriety for a child’s imagination? If not as a child, when is one to let dreams run and form, unfettered?

A child that practices visioning, dreaming, fantasizing and imagining gains enhancement of its creative faculties. This lesson is lost on most parents, who believe that the purpose of such ‘chats’ with their kids is to ‘find out what is going on in those little heads’ so that corrective measures can be unleashed before it is too late. There is a huge opportunity that is missed here – of exercising and expanding the frontiers of possibilities and imagination in the child to make him/her inquisitive all through life.

The alternative is stark and unattractive – always tailoring one’s expectations and dreams to meet some authoritative figure’s approval of outcomes and results.

Working with 2 dozen middle managers to get them to think about where they wannabe in a few years from now, one was struck by this recurring adult behavior. Almost all of them drew pictures of their futures that will be admired and approved by their colleagues, and more importantly, to please the bosses when presented to them later that day. While such behavior could be attributed to the ‘corporate’ milieu in which they were asked to do the exercise, there were two other notable attributes to the quality of their individual and collective thinking about the future:

      i.         The description of ‘current reality’, the first day of the rest of their lives, was strictly work-related. Despite mild prods and loud reprimands, not one of them, while describing ‘where we are’, ventured to juxtapose their ‘personal’ dreams with their ‘work’ plans.

     ii.         Their ‘futures’ were securely tied to their present. In an acute case of ‘sunk cost’ mentality at work, they couldn’t envision a possible alternate future that may not be linked to whatever they are doing in the present.

Parents are to blame for not letting their children expand their thought horizons. When these children grow into employees, their enslavement becomes an easy task for the employer who now takes over from the parent.

Can the organizations of today be the new, ‘enlightened’ parents who will let their people be who they wannabe?

Ramesh is a Corporate Speaker for Leadership and Strategic Meets. Ramesh’s approach and style are largely to do with interpreting and elaborating the factors that affect organisations, trends in the industry that the companies need to watch out for and the methods that they can use to achieve their goals.