Entrepreneurial Culture
Fostering an entrepreneurial culture in your children is an essential factor in supporting them to become self-reliant. It enables them to become financially independent as they grow into adults. It’s a gradual process. But it requires you as a parent to be actively and effectively involved in your child’s development.
Though formal education is essential and we can’t avoid it. However, relying on it alone is no longer enough to deal with the changing demands in our life. You have to help your children to understand money and how it works. You need to begin early enough to deal with the obstacles that deter educated people from achieving financial independence. These obstacles include mainly fear, cynicism, laziness, bad habits and arrogance. By fighting against these behaviours early enough, you foster an entrepreneurial culture in your children.
Fear is a significant obstacle to success. You should fight early enough for the fear of losing money or losing anything. Understand it clearly that there is no rich person that has never lost money. And there is no successful person that walked his way to success without any challenges. But there are a lot of poor people who have never lost money. Whom do you prefer?
What About Cynicism?
Cynicism, a belief one may have that something good will not happen, prohibits many people from venturing into business. Being doubtful about success is a significant hindrance to financial freedom. Guide your children to be optimistic about what they set their hearts to do. Opportunities are so sly that cynics tend to wake up when it’s too late. That’s one reason why they remain poor.
And Laziness?
Fostering a spirit of laziness in your children is a terrible tendency among some educated and well-to-do people. They tend to provide everything that their children request, thinking that their children will be happy. However, they forget that by so doing, they ignorantly kill the children’s ability to solve problems. They spoil their capability to make good choices and to be creative.
Then Arrogance?
Arrogance kills the spirit of seeking information. Many people tend to ignore the things they don’t know. They ignorantly consider them to be avenues for losing money. If you find yourself ignorant in a subject, the best way to become knowledgeable is to find an expert in it to coach you. Alternatively, look for a book and read it. Similarly, help your children to seek information on what they don’t know.
Fifthly, our habits are reflected in our lives more than in education. For instance, if your parents loved you, you are more likely to love other people. But if you didn’t get loved in your childhood, you will find it difficult to love others even if you are highly educated. We learn to love through association with lovely people. Practising value-adding habits is one of the basics of fostering an entrepreneurial culture in your children.
How Can You Then Foster an Entrepreneurial Culture in your Children?
1. Train your Children to Learn Assertive Communication Skills
The ability to communicate so well helps your children to become successful entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurial culture development entails acquiring excellent communication skills.
The way people communicate is usually a reflection of their behaviours and beliefs. Most successful people are always assertive. Unsuccessful people are either aggressive or non-assertive.
People who communicate aggressively tend to think that they have to win at all costs. Additionally, they believe that the people they interface with have to lose. They feel that they have more rights than others.
On the other hand, people who are nonassertive think that other people are winners and they are losers. Their submissive nature makes them develop the feeling that other people have more rights than them.
But assertive communicators believe that they have the same rights as others. Believe me or not, they are the best communicators your children should emulate.
The best way to foster the entrepreneurial culture in your children is by resorting to communicating with them assertively. They will learn from you and end up being assertive communicators. Let them learn to say “No” to others assertively. Let them learn to receive and respond to criticism. And let them learn to react to aggressive or nonassertive people. It will eventually help them to live an independent life and to venture into any life. Assertive communication is one of the characteristics of successful entrepreneurs. The onus now is on you to communicate assertively to your children so that they can learn from you. By so doing, you will develop the entrepreneurial culture in them.
2. Raise Entrepreneurship Awareness to Inculcate an Entrepreneurial Culture in your Children
You can purposefully expose them to various situations where they will informally learn about entrepreneurship. For instance, take them to events on entrepreneurship like trade fairs. Organise outings to places where they learn something about entrepreneurship. Engage them in some good talks geared towards discovering something new. Use entertainment like showing them videos on entrepreneurship. Look for other ways of raising awareness.
3. Entrepreneurial Culture Development Requires You to Instil in your Children a Spirit of Hard Work, Irrespective of Whether You Are Rich or Not
Let your children learn that it takes someone to work hard to earn money. Instead of just giving them whatever they request you, let them work to achieve what they want. For example, set clear goals for them. Reward them with what they crave upon reaching the goals. By so doing, you will be training them to become achievers and hard-working people. It’s a great way of building the entrepreneurial culture in them.
4. Another Practical Way of Fostering an Entrepreneurial Culture in Children is by Starting a Home Business
By starting a home business, you will become their role model. Secondly, you will also enable them to acquire many entrepreneurial skills. The skills they get early will eventually help them to start their businesses.
5. Train Them to Learn New Skills
It’s important to interest your children to learn various skills. This practice does not only unlock their mind but also helps them to engage themselves in meaningful activities.
6. Associate your Children with Successful Entrepreneurs
Learning through association is another beautiful way of developing the entrepreneurial culture in them. Be friends with people who have worked through to riches or financial freedom. Eventually, these will act as role models to your children.
7. Guide Them to Take Meaningful Decisions That Can Impact Positively on their Lives in Future
For instance, guide them to differentiate “needs” from “wants“. While needs are essential items you cannot live without, such as food, wants are things without which you can live. Guiding your children to make the right decisions based on what is essential to their life as opposed to luxuries is crucial in the development of the entrepreneurial culture in them.
8. Take Them to Schools That Organise Programmes on Entrepreneurship
Such programmes may range from activities like music, dance and drama to programmes like essay writing competitions, funding winning business proposals, debates and entrepreneurship award schemes. These help to sharpen your children to acquire behaviours of successful entrepreneurs. They can become innovators, problem solvers, hard-working people, information seekers, committed persons, persistent and many others.
9. Teach Your Children a Reading Culture to Get Knowledge and Apply It
Let your children know that knowledge is useless unless it’s applied. Applied knowledge is what makes a difference in people’s lives.
How Else Can You Teach an Entrepreneurial Culture to Your Children?
If you could share with us, we shall be happy and proud of you. Kindly share with us through the comment section below!
As I conclude, I would like to reemphasise the need to help your children to develop the behaviours of successful entrepreneurs. Formal education alone is no longer enough to lead people to financial freedom. A doctor who has entrepreneurial skills is more likely to begin a business in his field of expertise. The one without any entrepreneurial behaviours finds it hard. The onus is now on you to put into practice the above practices as a way of developing an entrepreneurial culture in your children.
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