What Makes You Brave? Understanding The Law Of The Inner Circle

This is my baby.  Kid number four, out of four.  He turned 3 a couple weeks ago and he is sort of crazy.  Crazy brave.

See his face?  Not a trace of fear there.  His hair isn’t even wet.  This is how this kid greets the pool.

He did this stuff last year too and taking him to the pool about made me crazy.  I yanked him out of the pool, coughing and gasping for air, multiple times before he got the hang of how to right himself in the life-saving apparatus I had twined him up in. Life-saving, barely.

He was never thwarted by the coughing and gasping, as I had hoped.  Natural consequences parenting is great…in theory.  He’d just jump right in over his head again any time he got the chance.  Let me tell you, trying to keep a two year old bent on drowning himself, within arm’s reach doesn’t exactly make for a peaceful little soiree at the pool.  There is all this running and chasing and coaxing and life-saving and “oh my gosh, if I let this kid drown, my husband is going to fire me!” Real relaxing, friends.

Kids number 3 and 4 have come out a bit braver than the first two.  Increasingly braver, you might say.  I’ve always attributed this to personality.  Just as with adults, some kids are risk adverse, toe dipper inners and others throw themselves at adventure, dive right in.

And while that may be very true, the personality aspect, something happened at the pool this week that reminded me there is more to it.  You see, kid number one was hanging out in the deep end with the cool kids.  The girls took a trip to the ladies room together.  Yes, apparently the cliché starts at 5 and 7 years old.  And kid number four, the newly crowned 3 year old, was all by himself in the shallow end.  With me close by, of course.

My little guy seemed sort of lost, toeing the water a bit and just milling around.  Our town has one of those zero-entry beach-style pools where little ones can just walk on in.  It’s pretty fabulous.  Anyhow, my littlest fish who is normally all about dunking himself was now playing coy.  I tried encouraging him, drawing him out, challenging him to go down the slide as he has done countless times before, but he wasn’t having it.  He was just content being a toe dipper.

A few minutes later his sisters returned and joined him in the pool.  They quickly tossed aside flip flops and cover ups, romped right in and made a B line for the slide.  And wouldn’t you know, as if those girls left a trail of brave pixie dust in their wake, my littlest fish scurried right along behind them down the slide, dunking limbs and face wildly and never once stopping to toe dip again.

Do you see what I did?  Do you see where this kid gets his crazy brave from?  I’ll give you a clue; I don’t think there is such a thing as brave pixie dust.  I made that up.

 

 

You see this kid was born into a world of bigger kids.  Baby toys don’t exist as much when you are a fourth child.  Forget plush stuffed animals and Sophie the Giraffe, when you’re kid number four, in this house anyhow, you are teething on dinosaurs and errant Legos that you find hiding beneath furniture.

Don’t freak out and call CPS on me, friends, but this is real life.  And now I’m wondering if I should write less about drowning and choking hazards…

But here’s the thing with being the fourth kid, if you survive choking hazards and near-drownings, you get a front row seat to seeing little kids who run faster, climb higher, and move quicker than you.  You watch them ride bikes and roller skate, jump rope and cannonball into pools and have no idea why you shouldn’t be able to do that as well.

Sometimes this is all overwhelming, of course, and fourth child has, at times, thrown himself into a heaping pile of sorrow and inadequacy at the realization of not quite being able to keep up.  But more often than not, this kid just pushes harder, reaches higher, jumps farther, than he otherwise would have.  All because of who is surrounded by.

John Maxwell calls this concept the Law of the Inner Circle.  The idea is that our ability to impact the world is determined, in part, by the people we surround ourselves with.  I believe that to be true.  And while my fourth child doesn’t much get to choose the people he is surrounded by, as adults, we do.

We get to choose if our Inner Circle consist of people who encourage us, challenge us, and motivate us.  We get the choice to connect will people who push us to be brave, to live fearlessly, to lean in to tension.  Or people who simply, do not.

 

 

And, even more importantly, we get to choose if we are that encourager, challenger, motivator to others.

Maxwell, says we tend to either be lifters or leaners.  And there are probably times in our lives, seasons, where we vacillate between the two.  You just read my story.  There was a time when I was leaner, nearly crumbling under the weight of my own story.  But most of the time I choose to be a lifter, pushing friends farther, challenging my kids to be braver, dream bigger.

Your Inner Circle.  It’s something to think about a bit.  John Maxwell chooses his carefully.  I’m hoping we do, as well.