Walton Goggins shared some perfect parenting advice on how he taught his son gratitude
It's a lesson we should all learn.
Walton Goggins in "The White Lotus."
Thirty years ago, Walton Goggins came from Georgia to Hollywood with $300 in his pocket and a dream to one day become an actor. After having unforgettable roles in TV shows such as The Shield, The White Lotus, and Fallout and on the big screen in Quentin Tarantino’sThe Hateful Eight, Goggins is now firmly on the A-list. Goggins' slow rise to fame from humble beginnings has to have taught him a lesson or two. In a recent interview with Not Skinny But Not Fat podcast, he shared why imparting the practice of gratitude was important to him as a father.
Goggins is the father of a fourteen-year-old son, Augustus, with his wife, filmmaker Nadia Conners. On the podcast, Goggins admitted that his son was having a hard time when he was ten, and he had to dig deep to teach him about the importance of gratitude.
“There was a moment when he was being an a**hole for a period of time. His mom, my wife, had to go out of town for a couple of days and we had a conversation about two different roads that he could go down. One, your life would look like this, and the other, your life would look like this,” Goggins told host Amanda Hirsch.
Whether Goggins knows it or not, he tapped into a powerful psychological force by helping his son identify with his future self. Research shows that if you don’t identify with your future self, you’re less likely to put the correct effort into securing your desired future. But when you can see your future self, you’ll do more things in the present day to benefit yourself in the long run.
“Basically, if my future self is someone I can truly see myself becoming or if she has a life that resembles one I genuinely desire, I’m going to make choices today that will help make that future a reality,” Melanie A. McNally, Psy.D., writes in Psychology Today.
“I said, ‘Well, it's a big choice. This is kind of how you've been acting, and you could continue to act that way, and this is probably what your life will look like,” he said, gesturing with his hands. “‘Or you could wake up with gratitude, you know, and really look around and be thankful for your life and participate in our life as a family, it was an active member, and your life could look like this,’” he continued.
Goggins told his son to sleep on it before making any decisions, and Augustus had his answer the following day. "Dad, I thought about it, I really thought about it, and I want to wake up with a life of gratitude every day, I promise that's what I want. I want to be that guy,” Augustus told his father.
Augustus made a wise decision by choosing to develop an attitude of gratitude. Gratitude can be hard to cultivate because people are wired to look for what’s wrong in the world, as a survival tactic, instead of appreciating what they have. But practicing gratitude leads to greater happiness, less stress, and prevents physical disease. It’s the difference between content people and those who always want more. Without gratitude, you can have everything and feel like it’s nothing, but with gratitude, you can have very little and feel like you have the entire world.
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Fred Rogers advocating for public television programming in front of the Senate. Public domain
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