Tips for Teens: How to Make Good Career Choices

Wrench and a note saying "job search" in the back pocket of jeans

Teens have a bad reputation. Many people believe that they generally make bad choices, misbehave and lash out in ways that hurt them (and others) later. Among other things, they think that teens do not know how to make good career choices.

I have had the honor of working with many teens. This has given me a chance to prove to many of them, and to their families, that the bad reputation teens have is wrong. There are always teens who choose well, behave well and do well. And if they can do it, so can other teens!

Many of my clients share teen horror stories, like “You know teens. They never have any money”. I do not know what they are talking about. My own teens have always had money, and it was their own money.

Another common belief is “You know teens. They don’t want to work”. No, I do not know, because my own teens have always wanted to work. My kids also have friends who started working as soon as they could and are doing very well.

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Use Your Self-fulfilling Prophecy to Help Your Kids Succeed

What does “self-fulfilling prophecy” have to do with good education and helping your kids succeed? Everything!

To raise our children to be successful, happy, healthy and productive grownups, we need a holistic approach. Yet our society and education system take a different approach. Governments spend billions of dollars every year to establish and run educational institutes where kids learn literacy and numeracy. Children dedicate 13 to 15 years of their life to learning things that will play a small part of their adult life.

Do not get me wrong, I think it is important to learn to read. I am also a qualified math teacher and think math is important. But tell me, out of a week of your life, with 24 hours a day and 60 minutes every hour, how much time do you analyze poems or find square roots of numbers? Do your amazing English and math abilities determine how happy, successful, healthy, friendly and productive you are?

I wish!

Learning depends greatly on the self-fulfilling prophecy of the teacher. Yes, I know, it sounds harsh, but the quality of the learning is highly dependent on what goes on in the teacher’s mind (and in the holistic approach, parents are also teachers). Every time I finish a day of professional development for teachers, the teachers are surprised to discover that what they think of the students manifests itself in the students’ behavior, social interactions and academic achievements.

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Your Child’s Subconscious Mind Has No Sense of Humor

When people ask me to summarize my studies, I say they were all about how the brain works. The first four years focused on how to use this knowledge to stimulate learning. Later on, I learned how to work with the subconscious mind to avoid misery and have more success and more happiness.

Learning about the brain is a never-ending quest. There is much research in the world about the brain and its functions in health, in success, in relationships, in learning and in everyday life. Over the years, I have tried to share my learning about the brain and its functions through this blog, especially in relation to parenting and education.

Why parenting and education? Because these two areas are very close to my heart. Since you are reading this, you probably care about them too.

Today, I would like to share some insight that is very important in parenting and in education. I want to tell you how the conscious and the subconscious minds work. Specifically, I want to tell you about how the subconscious mind deals with humor.

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Raising Children with “The Disease to Please”

Children are affected strongly by their emotional state. When I work with children, I can see their performance decrease when they are emotionally preoccupied. Some kids are affected more and others less, but all of them drop in performance when they are down.

Kinesthetic children are typically affected more, because they are very sensitive to the people around them. These are the kids who can “sense” others around them and all they want is for “everyone to be happy and nice to each other”.

Children who are highly sensitive to pressure are at risk of developing “the disease to please” – dependence on external rewards and oversensitivity to pressure. It is the perception that other people’s feelings are so important that they trump your own.

In most cases, “the disease to please” comes from fear of rejection, which most people want to avoid. Many people have this disease and they got it during their childhood. We can say that this kind of disease is contagious and we catch it from our parents…

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Life Coaching Tips: Quote Cards

When it is obvious that the goals cannot be reached, don't adjust the goal, adjust the action - Confucius

Today, I would like to share with you, my coaches and mentoring clients (and even parents) a tool I have for working with my life-coaching clients. This tool is also useful for every form of therapy and even for teaching and parenting. This tool is quote cards.

Sometimes, it is hard to start a discussion with children, teens or adult clients, and we want the messages to appear as if they are coming from somewhere else and not from us. Quotes are a wonderful way to do that.

Generally, quotes are a wonderful tool in motivation, because they typically communicate an idea powerfully using a very short and concise format. Many times, when you read or hear a great quote, it reinforces a belief you already have, or already want to have, and you think, “I couldn’t have said it better”.

In coaching, our goal is to help our clients switch from one emotional or mental state to another. We need to be very careful about helping them get to where they want to go, not to where we think they should go. This is why getting to know them and their coaching targets is essential to our work.

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Find Your Inner Child and Discover Your Intuitive Wisdom

I have been working with children all my life. I think they have some wisdom that fades over the years. This is “thanks” to the education system, which teaches kids to ignore their intuitive wisdom and focus on memorizing, analyzing and following external rules. I always see my students as my greatest teachers, because they teach me what I once knew and forgot.

Children live from the heart. When they do something, they do it with every cell in their body. When they are happy, there are happy with every cell in their body, and when they are sad, it is heartbreaking to watch them.

My own children have made it easy for me to examine this purity, which is later lost. I have three of them, and they are totally different. Although they are 6 years apart in age, it was easy to notice that inside, they had a free spirit and only used the intuitive voice inside to guide them. When they played, they played with all their senses. They were not afraid to be silly or loud. When they ate, they never counted calories and I could see the satisfaction on their face when the food smeared all over it. I have hundreds of photos of them eating with a mess and looking very happy, which makes me wonder, “What do they know that we don’t?”

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Parenting Focus: Point Your Flashlight and Magnifier at Good Things

Parents want to raise happy children. In all of the many parenting workshops I run, regardless of their parenting style, cultural background or socioeconomic status, all the parents want their kids to be happy, healthy and successful. The problem is that parents whose kids are not happy, healthy and successful do not understand how they contribute to this. They just cannot see how their parenting focus and the attention they give to problematic things creates these problems.

When children do not behave like we want them to and when they do things we do not like, we tend to pay attention to their behavior more than when they behave like we want them to and when they do things we like. This attitude only makes them continue to behave “badly” and creates a never-ending cycle of attention to “bad” behavior.

When pay attention to the problems, the problems keep growing, and then we pay attention to them more and we trap ourselves and our kids in this dysfunctional parenting style. In life, we get what we focus on. Some call it “the law of attraction”, I call it “the flashlight model”.

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Children with the Auditory Communication Style

In my child assessments, I check children’s communication styles. I have been doing this for so long that my family members can sometimes identify the kids with auditory communication style right away, because they talk. A lot!

I usually pay attention to the way they use verbal stimulation to memorize things, if they whisper as they work and if they can repeat numbers and sounds. I also check the way they respond to verbal encouragement. Generally, they do much better when they can control their auditory space than when they are restricted.

Auditory kids are very influenced by the sounds around them and are unable to block them. They are very sensitive to arguments, shouting, yelling, crying, whining and scolding. Some of them say they feel pain when their teacher or parent shouts. Communicating with them in a loud voice may cause them to shut down completely. On the other hand, speaking to them in a soft, calm voice supports their learning greatly.

Children with the auditory communication style can learn anything, as long as it is associated with sound effects, a funny voice, an accent or even a lisp.

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Biological Parents are Best for Child Safety

When children are born, their parents are typically concerned for their safety. People spend a fortune making sure their children use the safest beds, the safest car seat and safest stroller. This is very natural and very important. For some reason, when the same parents’ relationship breaks down and they separate, the importance of their kids’ physical and emotional safety is often neglected.

Why?

Because once they separate, the decision-making process about the children is divided. Unfortunately, in some cases, parents’ separation means that one parent raises the kids and the other poses a risk to their safety. In other cases, the conflict between the parents puts the kids’ emotional, and sometimes physical, wellbeing at risk. In severe cases, both parents are a risk to their children’s safety and there is a need to remove them from their home completely.

My sister is a social worker in a special unit that takes kids away from their family and puts them in foster care. This always happens because the emotional and/or physical safety of the child is at risk and none of the parents is able to keep them safe. My sister claims that this just moves the kids from one unsafe place to another unsafe place. Unlike Cinderella’s fairy tale, their stories never end in living happily ever after. Instead, stepparents and foster parents struggle greatly to supply a safe environment for the children.

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10 Tips for Traveling with Kids this Summer Vacation

Summer vacation is an exciting, yet anxious time for many parents. Every year, parents want a break from taking care of getting up in the morning, preparing lunches, following timetables, driving the kids, checking homework and enforcing sleeping times. At the same time, they are scared of having to fill the huge amount of free time that school handles so brilliantly during most of the year.

I have 3 children and have those feelings every school break. In some of the places we lived around the world, our kids had many holidays besides the summer vacation, so the challenge was even greater. I count the days to the next break with my kids and mark it on our family calendar. As we get closer to it, I get a bit anxious, imagining them wasting time, watching TV or sticking their head in their computer for hours. Preparing and making plans for the summer vacation is the best way to get over this anxiety.

One of the greatest things to do with your kids during the summer vacation is take them on a trip. I have written a lot about traveling with kids. Gal and I traveled with our own children a lot and not only during the summer vacation, but throughout the years, even during school months.

We believe it is meaningful to do in every age (Tsoof was 2 years old when we traveled to China). It is good to have short and long travels (longer trips are better). Travel is good whether you are camping or staying at a fancy hotel. It is beneficial for your kids whether you travel in the same country or overseas, in the company of others or just with your family.

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