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| https://www.instagram.com/lydiaandherpony/ |
My adult life has been about business and marketing and
bringing businesses from the English speaking world to Finland. I am bilingual
and spoke English to my daughter ever since she was born and when she also had
a daughter, I spoke English to her as well. I remember that when speaking
English to my daughter in public places in Finland 40 years ago, I had to
whisper, because in those days it was frowned upon that another language was
spoken to children. It was commonly thought that if you spoke more than one
language to a child, they would end up being very confused. Therefore you
should only speak the same language as everyone else was speaking, which was
Finnish.
To me that didn´t seem right because my family moved
to Canada when I was young and all of us had to learn English while we also
spoke Finnish at home. So I just went ahead and spoke English to my daughter
when I was again living in Finland and as a result, my daughter has had a
broader view of the world at her disposal all her life and I am very happy
about that.
Today, my daughter lives in a Swedish speaking area of
Finland with her family and her daughter is going to a Swedish speaking school,
while she speaks Finnish at home and English with me. My granddaughter is now
11 years old and speaks three languages fluently and is teaching herself other
languages online and constantly surprises me with konnitsheva, spasiba, vielen
dank and many other words I need a translation for. She is a wizard with everything online. She draws
and photographs a lot and makes her own movies because she has been able to tap
into the English world and learn so many things on what you can do with a
computer, unlike many of her friends at school.
This brings me back to my conversations with my
father, who spoke five different languages because his parents were emigrants
too. In those days, it was not common to be foreign in Finland but as children,
we didn´t realize that we were, since my mother was Finnish and we had a very
Finnish life.
One day when I as in my teens, I was speaking with my
father, who was a business man at the time and we were discussing what I want
to do when I grow up. We touched on several subjects and my father was
recommending different occupations to me on the basis of what his experience
was. When I told him that I want to be a rock star and have a ranch by the sea,
he laughed with tears in his eyes and said to me that it sounds very good but
that is no way possible because, for one reason, what would I do when I was 50
years old and no one would be interested in hearing my music because I was so
old?! He told me that nobody wants to hear old people sing rock and roll!
Our parents are doing the best they can with the
information they have accumulated during the time they were growing up and
trying to make sense of the world. That world has always changed and always
will with new people. It is difficult for anyone to know which advice they
should take and which advice was going out of style fast. It is also very
difficult for people, who have always given advice, to stop doing that and give
room to young people, who are living in the present.
For quite a few years now, I have been focusing on
different things just to stay in the game and to understand what is going on in
the world, even though things have not fallen into place in a way I thought
they would. It has often felt that I have been smashing my head against the
wall doing things in the same way I have always done.
I wrote a book because I had never written one and I
was thinking that the information I was able to write about, would be of
assistance to many people. Then I studied online with many of the best people
out there who teach different seminars on marketing online, writing books,
launching books and marketing them, doing online trainings, studying funnels,
concept marketing, how to write blogs, made web pages and you name it.
It is a big world out there and everyone is trying to
coach everyone on everything. Nothing wrong with that but looking back, I think
I went about everything in the old school way. I was doing my due diligence and
reading up on everything I could find.
Still, at the end of the day, I did not succeed in
getting the attention of the people, I thought would benefit from what I had to
offer, to make a difference in their lives to have a better and a happier life.
I had all that information and experience and integrity and it made no
difference. Hardly anyone was interested. Mind boggling.
My daughter takes a lot of pictures of her life and
posts them on social media and she has lots of followers and people interested
in what she is doing and that is great. Her daughter, my granddaughter, Lydia, 11
years, has grown up with computers and online communication, unlike me. She also took up riding a few years ago and
this year, she got her first own pony because she was so excited about learning
to ride better. The horseback riding was not a new activity for my daughter or
her husband because they had both spent their teen age years riding their own
horses and sometimes competing with them. Since Lydia had proven to them that
horse-back riding is not only a passing “nice to have” hobby, she finally got
her own pony.
A couple of days ago, my daughter made Lydia her own
Instagram account so that she could post things for her friends about her
riding stuff since so many of her friends were also interested in horses and
some of them were riding too. Lydia has been taking pictures ever since she was
three years old so this was no problem for her and she knew how to post them and
do different things online using different programs. She actually showed me how
she had learned coding.
24 hours after her account
was put up, we were all blown away because there were 50 followers and two days after that there were 70
followers! I saw her write on her site that “every time she has another 50
followers she will post a video of herself jumping obstacles” and someone even
commented that it is a good idea! WHAT HAPPENED??!
How did she reach all those people, someone even from
Australia, to follow and even comment!? Lydia lives in the archipelago of
Finland in the middle of nowhere! She must know something I don´t!
Just this
morning, she was going to publish something again and was talking to her dad
about what she was going to say and post.
Her dad told her to be careful of what you are writing and not to write
just anything and to think carefully about what to put out there. Sound advice,
if you ask me.
Her dad does not have a social media account of any
kind and still he thinks he needs to give advice to his daughter about how and
what to write on her Instagram account! It was a déjà vu for me. Just like my
dad threw a wet blanket on my dream of becoming a famous rock star, he was
doing the same to his daughter. Of course they both meant well but there really
seems to be a huge generation gap between parents and their children. The world is always changing and as it turns
out, old advice is not always the best advice in every situation. That is the
reason we must support our children to be strong and to follow their own
intuition instead of doing blindly (like I did) what they are told and what
they can dream about. They have their own truths and ways, of which we, the old
generation have no idea about. (Never thought I would say that…). My regret is
that I could have been a rock star but instead struggled many times and many
years before finding another passion!
About the other dream I had, the ranch by the sea.
That one happily turned out and actually it is the basis for my granddaughter
to focus on her learning more and more about horseback riding and to keep
horses, if she so wishes when she grows up. Somehow I feel that this is all part
of a bigger picture and when looking at the world today and seeing all that is
happening, I feel good that there are still people wanting to make a living off
the land and are willing happily to work at it.
If you want to see what Lydia is doing in her
Instagram account and want to learn her secrets of success marketing online, have a look HERE. Her mum and dad are not interfering, she is doing it
herself. It will be very interesting to see where it all goes.
So, what is the key? As far as I can see, it is passion and
again passion. It seems that the rest will somehow take care of itself.
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