On her own two feet…

A mentorship and internship programme I know of recently ran its selection process. It’s an unusual one, not tied to any single industry, but built around exposing young people to what “work” actually feels like, before they’ve had to commit to a career.

Here in Sri Lanka, we are no strangers to influence. A name dropped in the right ear, a call made on someone’s behalf, a CV that quietly mentions whose son or daughter the candidate happens to be. It is so common that most of us barely notice it happening anymore. It has simply become how things are done.

So when the shortlist came out, something caught my attention. A name I half recognised, from a face I’d seen somewhere online. A hunch. I wasn’t on the panel, so I asked around, and I was right. She was the daughter of a friend of mine, someone I’ve known for years as a fellow trainer and coach, a man who has spent two decades doing for other people’s children what he was clearly also doing, quietly, for his own.

Here’s the part that stayed with me. She hadn’t mentioned him. Not once. Not in her application, not in the interview, not to a single panelist along the way. When someone finally asked her about it afterwards, her answer was simple: she wanted to get selected on her own merit, not her father’s.

No coaching required for that answer. No script. Just twenty years of watching someone live a certain way, and deciding, on her own, that this was the way she wanted to live too.

We talk a lot about a generation that’s supposedly entitled, soft, unwilling to earn anything the hard way. And whenever I hear that, I want to ask: whose fault would that actually be, if it were true? Not theirs. Ours. We are the ones who opened doors and then told them they’d walked through on their own. We are the ones who made the calls and then acted surprised when they expected calls to be made.

So when I see the opposite, a young person choosing the harder, slower, less certain path of being judged only on what she can actually do, I pay attention. Because that isn’t an accident. That’s parenting, done right, over a very long time, in a thousand small moments nobody was watching.

If you ever want to know what kind of parent someone has been, don’t ask them. Watch what their kids do when nobody’s checking. Watch what they choose when the easier route is sitting right there, unlocked, theirs for the taking, and they walk past it anyway.

That’s the whole report card. Everything else is just decoration.

Everything teaches. Standing on your own two feet is a lesson best taught by watching someone else refuse to lean.