Coaching and Mentoring Your Teen to Find Their Own Answers

It is a great temptation to give your teen advice about what they should do in a given situation. As parents, we may believe they will benefit from our experience and direction. It may even feel like they want us to tell them what to do. It will serve all of us better, especially in the long run, if we focus on coaching and mentoring our children on how to find their own answers. It can be a fine line between offering support and allowing your teen to fall into the habit of letting others, (including you), make decisions for them. What can you do to help a teen who is struggling, without making a decision for them? When they are faced with a challenging decision or stressful situation, it is important to remind your children how to access and trust their Internal Guidance System. Encourage them to take some time to get into alignment, and remind them that the answers will become clear once they do. Let us say your teen is really conflicted about a particular class. She hates the class, but doesn’t want to drop it because it is a requirement to get into the college program she has chosen. She asks for your advice. There are several things you could do in this example that would place you in the coach and mentor role, empowering your teen, while guiding them to make their own decisions about what to do. You have been teaching her that practicing appreciation is an important part of getting more things to be appreciative about. Your teen tells you that she has struggled to change her attitude about the class, but it isn’t working. At this point you could help her understand that trying to change her attitude from hating a class to loving it is a really big emotional stretch. Perhaps that is why her attempts at changing her attitude aren’t working. You could suggest that she try to take some small baby steps instead. Ask your child what she might consider to be a small step towards appreciation. It could be difficult for her to come up with anything positive at first, so you ask some clarifying questions, or even offer a few suggestions. Perhaps she sits next to a window and has a beautiful view, or her favorite friends are in the class, or the classroom is well-lit and a comfortable temperature. Explain that even minor appreciations help create an appreciative vibration towards the class. Suggest she take time to notice how the room feels, the energy of the other students and the teacher, and find even the smallest point she can appreciate about being there. In this way you are guiding your teen with suggestions for how she might approach a difficult situation. You are teaching her how to look for ways to feel better about the situation, to find solutions for herself, rather than telling her what to do. By teaching our children to focus on appreciating even small things every day, we help them learn an empowering skill. This is a skill they can use to apply the law of attraction throughout their lives, and transform any challenging situation into a positive one.