As adults we look at the things our kids do (and don’t do) and just have to shake our heads. If you’ve got a kid between 14 and 25 you’re frustrated, I’m sure of that. Remember back when you thought having a new baby was difficult! What a laugh! Keeping a teen or young adult on track is exhausting! If you don’t stay on them constantly they will forget, neglect, ignore and incomplete everything. And then they look at you as you’re blowing your top and say, “I don’t know why you’re so upset. It’s (ready for it…?) no big deal!” Aaagghh! So then you have to keep yourself from building a time machine and going back in time to give them up for adoption!
This generation is very lazy. Their attitude is to not take anything too serious. They are “chill” about everything and nothing is urgent to them. But don’t worry, help is available (but not for time-machine building). Life-coaching prepares people for change and goal achievement, because without proper motivation, goals will never be committed to. A life-coach is a motivator and the secret is to help the client get in touch with their own, very personal reason to change or achieve. Until that very personal motivation is felt, nobody will do anything! But once an individual sees and feels a personal reason for change it becomes automatic (almost–strategy building is the second part of life-coaching). Motivation is within each person, buried in the subconscious and the job of a life-coach is to uncover it so it can be felt.
Explaining and demanding things to kids (which they perceive as lecturing, by the way) is not proper motivation. Creating motivation within someone is a process, not a singular event, and it takes skill, objectivity and above all, experience. You must speak their language and trust me, unless you hang out with kids almost all day, like I do, you don’t speak their language. I am multi-lingual: I speak adult, professional, parent and teen and young adult (the last two are harder to learn than Cantonese).
So, rather than waste a lot of time beating your head against the wall of your kids maddening perceptions, get some assistance. College and high school is teaching them academics, but life-coaching teaches life; life-skills, life-experience, life-expectations, life-perspectives… Academics can teach kids the facts and figures, but it will never teach them how to apply themselves and those facts to be truly successful in… life.
Coming Soon: Workshop/Seminar for transforming your life. Please call or email for details at 661-904-5353 and scott@lifemind.com.