You probably don't see yourself as a role model, but whether you accept it or not, your personality and character (and everything else for that matter!) defines who you are, and this will have a significant influence on your child. If you hate work and always have, that message will quite likely be absorbed by your child and that will form part of their attitude to work.

Likewise, if you believe (and show by example) that always doing a job well is the best approach, your child is most likely to adopt a similar attitude.

How you live your life is the strongest example and encouragement you can offer any young person on their career journey. Setting a good example is often the most significant career coaching your child will ever experience. They will learn valuable life skills from:

• How you organise and manage your career and personal life
• The way you conduct your relationships and social networks
• How you show respect and concern for others
• How you set and reach goals
• How you cope with setbacks and achievements
• How you handle your mistakes and those of others
• How you manage your mental and physical wellbeing – e.g: diet, exercise, emotions and general outlook on life

Positive Role Models

The most helpful way you can support your children in their career development is by ensuring that they are equipped with a realistic view of the world and the skills and attitudes that make them employable. This involves nurturing in them sound and realistic expectations of the world of work, which are described in the High Five section.

It is very easy to expect that children will simply learn many of the skills needed to develop their own career path. This is often not the case, as making 'big' decisions and choosing their future is a relatively new challenge for them. Here are some guidelines to assist you with helping your child to develop the skills they will need as they learn to make 'big' decisions for themselves:

• Demonstrate positive choice-making
• Show by example the choices you make and the consequenses of those choices. If you show anxiety when making choices, your child is likely to feel the same when it is their turn
• Think out loud
  • When you have a tough choice to make, allow your children to see how you work through the problem, weighing the pros and cons, and come to a decision. The process of making a good informed decision, that has personal consequences, is a skill. A good role model will not only show a child that good choices can be made, but also how they came to that decision
• Admit mistakes
  • Most of us have made poor decisions at some point in time - and you may not be inclined to tell everyone about them - least of all your children. Yet, our children need to know how to handle such mistakes, the bad judgements, and how we coped with the consequences. This will help them understand that (a) everyone makes mistakes; (b) it's not the end of the world; (c) you can recover and fix most problems; and (d) you can take responsibility and act as soon as possible to make good of any damage. If you can be a role model for handling mistakes maturely, you will empower your children to do the same
• Follow through
  • If you demonstrate the ability to stick to your commitments and promises, your child will learn the benefits of such actions for themselves. Verbally expressing your intentions and demonstrating consistency will provide an excellent modelling of these behaviours for the future
• Show confidence in yourself
  • Whatever you choose to do with your life, be proud of the person you’ve become and continue to become. It may have been a long road and you may have experienced bumps along the way, but it’s the responsibility of a role model to commemorate the lessons learned, the strengths discovered, and the character developed in the process. In order for children to celebrate who they are, their role models need to show that they too can celebrate themselves regardless of the ups and downs along the path

It is important to know that teenagers often seem committed to defining themselves as everything you are not - and so it might appear that your efforts are in vain. In reality, most will grow out of this phase and this is when your influence will begin to show more clearly.