Swim the Lake Before You Row the Boat: Awaken a Boy's Success Mindset, Unleash His Confidence and Give Him the Foundation for a Great Life

By Deborah Canja and Tess Canja

Raising, teaching or mentoring boys? Create a Success Mindset, build Self Confidence, raise Self Esteem and teach the most important Life Skills by focusing on the ONE thing that drives all other results

• Language: English
• Publisher: Spencer White Publishing
• Release date: Jul 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781733837217

Deborah Canja

Deb Canja is a mom of two successful young men, an attorney, best-selling author, and the founder and CEO of both Bridges4Kids, a comprehensive website of information and resources to help kids from birth through college, and Success4Kids, helping adults create a child's "success mindset." For more than two decades she has made it her mission to help parents find the information they need to help the kids they love. In Swim the Lake Before You Row the Boat she helps parents and mentors understand the real secret of success that powers all others and how, when they understand how and why it works, they can avoid well-intentioned mistakes, make the best use of the time they have, and put help put children on an unshakable path to happiness and success. After helping thousands of parents and mentors through Bridges4Kids and Success4Kids, Deb's mission now is to share a tried and true formula that gives kids the inner strength to withstand life's most difficult social and emotional challenges and gives parents peace of mind knowing they have done their best to put the children they love on a path to achieving their dreams to be, do and have all they desire. You can connect with Deb at www.spencerwhitepublishing.com.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

I’m ninety-two years old now, but I was eighty-three when I started writing this book with nothing more than an idea and a dream. I guess that shows that it is never too late to follow your dreams.

When I look back on my life, I’m surprised that some of the things I did had a greater impact than I ever imagined they would. I have learned that any of us can make a profound and positive difference at any time.

In 1956, as a young married couple with two small children, my husband, Alex, and I took a leap of faith and bought a summer camp for boys on beautiful Crooked Lake in Northern Michigan. Although the American Camping Association called our camp exemplary and exceptionally fine, the real gift came many years later when we heard from former campers and counselors who told us that we, and the Camp Flying Eagle experience, had changed their lives in positive ways that had a lasting impact.

This is the story of our secret to creating the magic in the lives of young boys that puts them on a path to becoming wonderful fathers, husbands, teachers, and community leaders. I want to share it because if we could do it, so can you. And our world surely needs more fine young men.

The magic of Camp Flying Eagle lives on in the hearts and minds of the boys and men who shared it with us and who have passed it along to their sons and families. I hope it will live on here, too, in lessons passed on to those you love.

All best wishes and love,

Tess

Tess and grandsons Brian and Scott at Crooked Lake

PART ONE

CREATE A

PATTERN of

SUCCESS

p-22

CHAPTER ONE

ATTRACT

SUCCESS

Snow was falling outside our classroom and the night was cold and dark. It was the winter of 1993 and even though I had long since graduated from high school, college, and even law school, here I was sitting at a desk in a familiar-looking high school classroom with a bunch of other parents. Our eyes were glued to a video playing on a small TV perched on one of those rolling carts they have in schools. We were there to participate in a program about drug abuse prevention called Parent-to-Parent.

Two volunteer parent trainers stood at the front of the room leading our discussion and answering questions. Somewhere, in the back of my mind, I decided I wanted to be just like one of them—the one who was also a Debbie. She looked chic and beautiful, yet was so warm and friendly. And she seemed so confident! It made sense that I was drawn to her. I thought she had the answers I’d come to find.

My boys were eight and ten and I was there to learn how to keep a problem from starting in the first place: how to prevent drug abuse in the boys I loved—how to keep them safe from the unknown territory of the future. I was doing my best to learn all I could about giving my sons a foundation for a great life—and about how to protect them. I wanted to be a good parent—a really good parent.

In Parent-to-Parent I learned a story about navigating unknown territory. Maritime legend says that in days of old, as mapmakers drew their maps to guide sailors across the seas, they added a warning in the blank spaces beyond the bounds of the world they knew. They said, Here be dragons. Although no one has yet found a map with those actual words on it, a copper globe from 1510 has them and a number of old maps do have drawings of dragons waiting in uncharted waters.

Maybe that image challenged me. I didn’t want any dragons to get my kids—or any other kids I knew. Not only did I finish the class, I went on to become a Parent-to-Parent Trainer where I was awarded my own Certificate of Dragon Slaying Proficiency. It says,

Be it known to all persons that the above named person…

is qualified to train others in the fine art of dragon slaying.

I don’t think I ever became as chic and sophisticated as Debbie, but since then I’ve spent a lot of time training parents and teachers. Along the way I’ve learned a thing or two about dragon slaying. There can be a lot of dragons lurking in the unknown future, but dragon slaying is all about confronting the unknown with a plan. The trick is finding a plan that works. And that reminds me of another story about maps.

In 1513, a man named Admiral Piri Reis created a map of the known world for the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. Only about a third of the map has survived, but what remains is a beautifully inscribed, gazelle-skin parchment colored in black and red. In crafting it, Reis said he’d relied upon twenty other, older maps. Some may have come from the Library of Alexandria, the fabled repository of the ancient world’s knowledge. The piece that survives shows the coast of Brazil on the left and the coasts of Europe and North Africa on the right. Scholars generally agree that those depictions are fairly accurate. But there is a lot of controversy about what it shows at the bottom.

At the far south of the map, stretching across the bottom of the world, is an expanse of coastline that some believe is a match for the pre-Ice Age northern coast of Antarctica. The only problem is that Antarctica was not discovered until 1818—more than 300 years after Piri Reis drew his map—and it is now covered in ice over a mile deep. If the map does show Antarctica’s northern coast, it had to have been surveyed and charted sometime before 4000 BC, which is the last time it was ice-free. And that would mean that ancient wisdom about the coast of Antarctica had been lost for centuries.

I tell that story because it reminds me that the wisdom of past generations—whether it is a map, a plan, or important knowledge—is sometimes lost as fads come and go, only to be found and then lost and found again. At the heart of what we teach in this book is ancient wisdom. From time to time it fades from sight, becomes popular for a while, and then fades again. Maybe one day it will become common knowledge, but for now, each generation has to learn it anew.

In fact, we’d already written this book when I happened to read a great book by the journalist Paul Tough called How Children Succeed. His reporting and writing focus on education, child development and poverty. In How Children Succeed he tells the story of new research that is revealing new knowledge about what creates successful outcomes in young lives. It was interesting and surprising to see that most of the new knowledge this research has uncovered is what drove the success of our summer camp in the Michigan wilderness sixty years ago and guided success seekers a hundred years before that. It still works today.

For your journey through the uncharted waters of the future, we have a plan—a formula—that will be your map. The Flying Eagle Formula is a 10-step approach to guide you. But it is so much more. When you follow the Flying Eagle Formula, you tap into wisdom of the ages that will equip a boy with the very essence of success. Our proof? Thousands of successful men who learned the lessons of the Flying Eagle Formula as boys. It just works.

Maybe you’re like me—wanting to get it right and be a good parent. Or maybe you are haunted by the thought that we only have a short window of time to make a big impact on our kids. A friend told me he almost panicked when he realized he’d only have eighteen Christmases with his son before the boy left for college. Then he whittled that down to eight, reasoning that his son might only listen to him between the ages of five and thirteen. He’s trying to make every one of those years count. I remember how that felt! Or maybe you want to do all of the things your parents or teachers did well, but somehow avoid all of their mistakes. Perhaps you want to protect the boys you love from drug abuse, bullying, gun violence and sexual exploitation. It seems that every day the news is filled with one horrible story after another that make us just want to do something. Or maybe you want to give your son every advantage and do all you can to equip him with the skills he’ll need to navigate an unknown world ahead: the job market, relationships, and a lifetime of fast-paced change.

Whatever your motivation, this program will help your son and it will change you, too. I can pretty much guarantee that if you apply the lessons in this book you will become a better parent, a happier person, and that success will find you in ways you never expected.

A lot of books have been written about raising boys and most are very good. Some suggest doing some of the things that we outline here. But none of them deliver a program designed to create and harness the power of a success mindset the way this book does. Why is The Flying Eagle Formula different? What is the ancient wisdom at its heart? Just this…

Who we believe we are, and who we decide to be,

determine our life.

Success comes to those who believe they are successful.

Confucius is thought to have said, Those who think they can and those who think they can’t are both usually right. However, we often don’t even realize we’ve decided we can’t. Those decisions are buried deep inside of us and may come from long ago. Yet they rise to the surface when we interact with children because how we see ourselves is how we see them. How we interact with children reflects what we believe about ourselves. The limitations we think we face influence the limitations we think they face. That’s why having children can be so challenging. We come face to face with our past. Our children come to us as mirrors.

The amazingly successful Camp Flying Eagle program worked because it suspended judgment about who the boys were and what they were able to accomplish and allowed them to be and become who they chose to be. Swim the lake before you row the boat was a real part of camp life, but it is also a metaphor for the formula that transformed boys into confident young men.

And, while this book is about a summer camp, the truth shared here is about much more. Every spiritual path teaches it in one way or another. In the Bible, Jesus is quoted as saying, If ye have faith as a mustard seed, you can move mountains. That faith isn’t about size or how much faith one has. It isn’t about how great you are in stature or how blessed your table may be. It’s really about a deep sense of knowing who and what you are. A mustard seed doesn’t question what it is. It simply is, and grows. If we know who we are, if we truly understand what beautiful beings we are, we can step into that same kind of knowledge.

The Flying Eagle Formula is a very practical way to share a sense of confidence in who our children are so that they can step into that state of knowing that they are successful, able to tackle new things and succeed, respected, liked; that their contribution is valued, that life is fun, that people like to be around them, that their opinion counts, that they are beautiful and complete and that, in a very fundamental way, they matter.

It’s that sense of knowing that can move mountains.

It works because the human mind is THE most powerful force for shaping lives, destinies and the world. That’s the message of books such as The Law of Success and Think and Grow Rich. As Napoleon Hill tells