The single best thing my parents ever did for me
It's been integral in defining the adult I have become
Hi! This is Leyla from A Day Well Spent, a newsletter seeking pathways to more purposeful living.
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My parents are the absolute best and they have sacrificed huge amounts for both my brother and I. We are incredibly lucky to have such a loving mother and father in our lives, who have always provided us with support and guidance — I am grateful for them every day and love them very much.
(🥰)
But there is one thing specifically my parents encouraged us to do as kids, that my brother and I believe has been integral in defining the people we have become as adults.
We regard it as the single best suggestion they ever made to their children and had they not made it, we are both pretty certain we’d be quite different and less accomplished people today.
I’m not sure my parents realised any of this at the time; I think they just went with their gut and it turned out to be an excellent move.
My brother and I
There are a number of characteristics both my brother and I believe we possess healthy doses of, which we largely attribute to what our parents suggested we do all those years ago.
These are: resilience, adaptability, discipline, initiative, organisational skills, emotional intelligence, confidence speaking to anyone from any background, belief in our own abilities, good communicators, great work ethic, we’re not easily phased, we enjoy public speaking and performing and we do a decent job of keeping our nerves in check.
My brother – who works at the University of London as an Employer Engagement Consultant – tells me these traits are referred to as ‘soft skills’ and that recruiters lament they are often lacking in the people applying for the jobs they advertise.
I wouldn’t know much about that, I haven’t been in the world of employer / employee / job applications for some time. But I found it interesting to hear about this seemingly downward trend in developing these soft skills.
It mirrors a conversation I recently had with an architect, who told me that the interns they receive in their office — who are academically perfect on paper — ‘possess little initiative’ and ‘expect everything to be done for them’.
My brother and I were talking about all of this the other day, conjecturing as to why the both of us are fairly well versed in the above mentioned traits. We figured it was something to do with our upbringing. And we pinned it down to a specific event, which lasted a couple of years.
We believe it was the single best thing our parents ever suggested we do.
Our parents
They both arrived to the UK as immigrants from their respective islands on opposite sides of the world, my mother from Mauritius and my father as a refugee fleeing civil war in Cyprus.
They met each other in London in 1973 at the age of 19 and got married in secret four years later in Bloomsbury registry office with just two witnesses. I followed a few years after that, and my brother a few years after me. My Mum and Dad eked out a life in this strange new land and they have been here ever since.
This year they will be celebrating their 48th wedding anniversary! I’ve included a picture of them back then and now further down – it’s super cute.
My Mum worked various multi-lingual PA and receptionist roles in banks, firms and estate agents in the city and stopped not longer after I was born to look after me.
My Dad worked in a combination of Wimpy Bars and kebab take-aways from Old Street to Waterloo for over two decades, before training to become a driving instructor which he did for eight years, working for himself.
He left that to open up his own café in Woolwich, followed by a move to a larger café in Sidcup, running those for almost twenty years.
I come from a working class background and I’m proud of these roots.
The single best thing my parents ever did for me
I tell you all this about my parents because you need a bit of context to help set the scene.
When I reached the age of 13 and when my brother reached the age of about 15 ten years later, my parents presented us with a proposition that we like to regard as the single best thing they ever did for us.