Making Mistakes Is Good! Here’s why.
https://youtu.be/tdNW9T1DIlA
Our children (and us, included) will make many mistakes in life.
Here’s how we can reframe thoughts and motivate them/ourselves once something ‘wrong’ is done!
4 Basic Ways to Bounce Back from Embarrassing Mistakes and ‘Failures’ (Resilience)
https://youtu.be/BUXj0v8MoI8
Why is resilience important ? Let’s face it, we can’t avoid certain stressful events from happening.
At times we will make mistakes and fail at something. This is normal and part of life.
For some of us, we brush away challenges and failures very easily. For the rest of us, setbacks make us feel depressed and we give up.
So how do we be more resilient?
When I was a school counsellor, I noticed a few key factors which set strong students apart from the not-so-strong ones.
Firstly, strong-minded people practise reframing. How do we reframe? Ask yourself after a setback: ‘What do I learn from this setback?’. ‘What will I continue to do or not do after this experience?’ ‘How can I be a better, stronger person after this?’
Secondly, gain perspective. On a Scale of 1 – 10, how would you rate this unpleasant experience? How will you feel about this 1 year from now? Will this event still matter 1 year from now? There will be some of us who will worry what other people think of us and our ‘failures’. Well guess what. Other people are too busy living their lives to think extensively about you. So don’t let your past mistakes haunt you till today.
Thirdly, recall your past successes. You have had many successes – big and small – in the past. Recall them to build your esteem. Ask yourself to remember a time when you had to cope with a difficult situation. What helped you to overcome that challenge? If you could overcome your fears and setbacks in the past, you can overcome this.
Lastly and fourthly, lighten up and see the humour in setbacks and mistakes. Even the most successful person you know has made mistakes. In fact, successful people are likely to make more mistakes than the average person. They learn and grow very fast with every mistake they made.
As you can see, building resilience takes practise and takes time. It does not happen overnight.
I hope these 4 resilience tips are useful to you.
Reframe your thoughts, get perspective, recall your past successes and see humour in your situations.
See you and have a good week.
How to Handle Difficult Relationships in 2 Steps
Our teens are not spared from relationship challenges in school.
They communicate with friends, teachers, school staff and classmates on a daily basis.
They are unlikely to get along with everyone everyday – there will be people whom our teens don’t have a smooth relationship with.
This is normal – even us adults face challenges when interacting with people whose personalities are not compatible with ours.
However, having a conflict-free environment in school is very beneficial to our teens, as we know. They may not get along with their classmate John, for example, but that doesn’t mean our child has to pick a fight with John every time they meet or skip school in order to avoid seeing him. There are better ways to handle such situations.
With proper guidance, our teens can interact with people they personally dislike with grace and manners.
So how can our teens take control of negative relationships (in 2 steps)?
Reframe the situation
Reframing is incredibly powerful. Instead of labeling a classmate as ‘irritating and selfish,’ for example, they can reframe some negative words as stated below:
- ‘Irritating’ – persistent
- ‘Selfish’ – focused, goal-oriented
- ‘Loud’ – vocal, extraverted
- ‘Strict’ – caring
and so on. They might require a thesaurus for this exercise. (just kidding!)
Highlight the positive
We can encourage our teen to highlight the positive aspects of facing challenging relationships.
For example:
- ‘Our teacher may be strict and fierce, but it has pushed me to be more careful and double-check my work in class.’
- ‘Kayla likes to make fun of my curly hair, but it has taught me to be a more patient person over time.’ (admittedly, this particular example is challenging for most of us. Many of us will be tearing our hair out to remain patient with such a character!)
- ‘I have a lot of homework today. However, this will ensure that I get ample practice before the exams next month.’
It takes time for our teens to grasp and practise concepts #1 and #2 above.
However, do not give up and praise him or her whenever a small positive change is noticed.
All the best
A Little-Known-Way to Boost Your Child’s Confidence
Today, we are going to learn how to boost your child’s confidence, spur him or her to achieve more successes and give him courage to take on new challenges.
As humans, we are preprogramed towards negative bias – we easily take stock of where we fell short, where we made (even the smallest) mistakes and so on.
It’s not easy for us – and our children – to recall and appreciate our (big and small) achievements.
This is the secret of many successful people. Successful people are often aware of their strengths and talents and are secure enough to acknowledge their past wins.
Research has shown that the more we celebrate our own successes, the more confident we are when facing new challenges.
This applies to our children and teens. In this exercise, we will be celebrating your child’s successes – no matter how small they may seem.
Step 1: Download the Success Log here.
Step 2: Complete the Success Log with your child.
Examples of successes: ‘I am good at drawing and my art teacher praised my work in front of the class before.’ ‘I scored a B – my ideal grade – for my Maths test last year.’ ‘I like helping my teachers and they appreciate it.’
Basically, include any achievement which your child or teen is proud of. It doesn’t matter if we *think* the achievement is small!
Further actions for you and your child:
Coax your child to re-read this Success Log when your child or teen feels doubtful or insecure about his abilities
Coax your child to re-read this Success Log when your child is fearful of taking a new challenge
When your child scores a new achievement, add it to this log!
I will guarantee that your child will feel good about himself and boost his or her self-confidence with this powerful exercise alone.
All the best.
5 Ways to Know if Your Child is Destined for Success
We know that IQ is needed for our kids to get into good schools, get good jobs, earn good money and lead good lives in future.
Do you know that there is one other factor which is as important – if not, MORE important – than IQ in determining your child’s success?
This factor is EQ – or emotional intelligence.
I don’t wish to bore you with details of how a high EQ equates to success (that will be for another blog post at another time).
Suffice to say that a healthy EQ will lead to
- better relationships
- better decision-making
- better conflict-handling
which brings
- better opportunities
- the best of careers
- the best of friends
and much, much more.
We’ll start with the basics.
Having the 5 EQ traits in the infographic below can predict your child’s success – even more than a high IQ (according to renowned researcher Daniel Goleman).
Unlike IQ, we can up our EQ levels through learning and experience.
And that’s good news for us!
