For your children, trying new things can present an exciting new opportunity or an insurmountable barrier.
Often times the fear of failure is what keeps children from trying new things and gaining new skills, which can lead to low self-esteem.
You certainly don't want to force your child to do something he doesn't want to do, but you also don't want him to miss out because he is too shy to try something new.
What you need to do is teach him about the three factors that will make confronting new situations easier: confidence, attitude and opportunity.
Your child can do anything he puts his mind to, as long as he believes in himself.
Confidence is the foundation for anything your child wants to achieve.
You can increase your child's confidence by offering praise whenever they make a good choice and offering suggestions for improvement, rather than criticism, when they fail.
When they learn the value of failure and how much we can learn from our mistakes, they will no longer fear failure.
They will have the confidence to try things without worrying about what happens if they are not good at it.
Another way to build you child's confidence is by giving him small responsibilities around your home or community.
Start with something small, such as being responsible for cleaning his room every week, and gradually increase the responsibilities as he gets older.
Doing things on his own and knowing that you trust him to do them will help him feel more independent in life and allow him to do things on his own he might have been too shy or scared to do before.
Attitude is all about how you appear to others.
Your attitude is the difference between walking into a room with your eyes on your feet and walking into a room with your head held high.
When your child exhibits an attitude of confidence it will be easier for him to meet new people, make friends and stand up for his choices.
A strong handshake, a firm voice and smile simply exude an attitude of confidence.
Even if your child isn't feeling particularly confident, they should "fake it 'til they make it.
" Acting confident, even when we're not, can actually make us confident.
Few people are natural born leaders.
Leadership is more often than not a skill that is learned rather than inherited.
For this reason, it is important to give your child the opportunity to be a leader.
Helping around the house and volunteering in the community are great places to start.
These are just small ways to build responsibility, which leads to leadership.
Putting you child in charge of something like decorating the house for a party or making the salad for dinner can help them learn how to take charge of situations.
Encourage him to take leadership positions in school too, like volunteering to be a lunch monitor or running for class president.
Let him know that you can be like his advisor who he can come to any time he has a question.
The most important thing to teach your children in order to get them to try new things is to embrace failure, rather than be afraid of it.
Some of the world's greatest success stories have risen from failures.
The key is to use these failures as learning experiences for how to do something better or differently than you did before.
We should use failures as guides that point us in the right direction toward success.
The only true failure is to never have tried at all.