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Dear Parents,
I am presently in Prince Edward Island on a wonderful two week vacation with my 6 and 4 year old and my ever supportive husband. We are having an amazing time!
My husband and I went last night to see the newest island musical, “The Nine Lives of L.M. Montgomery”. It was a musical biography of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s life. Maud (as she preferred to be called) was our famous Canadian author of the beloved, “Anne of Green Gables“ book. The musical was absolutely incredible.
As we were watching this incredibly accurate account of her life I was inspired to focus on the life lessons that we can learn from Lucy Maud Montgomery’s life story that we can share with our children to help them to grow up to become strong, independent, entrepreneurial souls.
Here are some of the lessons that I learned last night:
1. Although Maud grew up in a world that was quite negative and dreary she was determined to write stories, novels, and poems that would inspire readers. She chose optimism over pessimism in her writing. It was a place where she could live the life that she really wanted to live, with no limits.
Here are the lessons of perseverance, determination, and the desire to leave behind her a better legacy than was her actual life experience.
How often have you become upset with your circumstances and wanted to just ‘give up’? Use Maud as an example of someone who lived the life she wanted to live, even if it was only in her stories. She found her escape and she was determined to give all of her heroines a happy ending even if her own life lacked happy endings.
Teach your child never to give up, and to find a way to make the things happen that they wish to happen.
Teach them to create happiness for others even when the going gets tough for them personally.
2. Near the end of the play, one of Maud’s characters, Marigold, mentions how Maud may have suffered her tragic life because she expected all of the negative things in her life to come true.
She made life hard on herself by keeping her true emotions locked up inside and only ever letting go in her writing (but even there, she always kept her walls up). She expected bad things to happen to her because they always had. She assumed that good things could only even happen to her in her stories. And so she lived up to her expectations.
I was very impressed with this insight, and refer it to the “law of attraction”.
She expected bad things to happen and so they did. She felt she wasn’t deserving of good and so she wasn’t. It wasn’t until after her death, when she could no longer assume only the negative, that she is finally given the full credit she so thoroughly deserved while she was alive.
What are you doing in your life that is stopping you from achieving your own happiness.
Keep a close eye on your child and how they are reacting to life. Are they expecting good things to happen to them or bad?
Make sure you step in and point it out to them, in either case, so that they may see for themselves what their thoughts are doing for their actions.
3. Maud was shown in this musical portrayal to take charge of her career. When the publisher she had signed her contract with for “Anne of Green Gables
Through years of suffering and endless lawyers bills she finally won the right to her writing freedom.
It took persistence and the absolute attitude that she knew she was being treated wrongly and that she deserved better to finally win this victory. But now her family and her PEI island are able to continue to receive their much deserved royalties and literary rights rather than her corrupt publisher.
Who in your life is taking advantage of you? What are you doing about it?
Are there any bullies in your child’s school taking advantage of your child? Are they fighting for their rights or just letting themselves be run over?
There are school and private programs that help teach bully victims how to cope with bullies, and I would encourage you to look into these support groups if your child is being victimized.
Don’t let your child grow up letting others take advantage of them. They will need good strong independent characters to become successful entrepreneurs.
They will need a strong sense of what is right and what is wrong as well as the instinctive insight to what is really in the grey areas of life.
These are only some of the incredible lessons to be learned from Maud’s life but these were the ones I felt were most important to pass on to our kids to support their future entrepreneurial souls.
Here’s to your child’s ongoing financial success!
Cheers….Amanda van der Gulik….Excited Life Enthusiast!
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To Learn More Great Lessons on How to Teach Your Children About Money,
Take a Look at My “Insider’s Secrets to Raising a Future Millionaire” eBook.
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