As a licensed family therapist, I have had the pleasure of working with many teens and young adults who struggle with the balancing act of academic pressure, social pressure, and sports pressure while finding ways to manage and regulate all of it healthily.
Going back to school can be overwhelming for some kids. I have put together some skills to help prepare your child for the upcoming school year and help make it more manageable.
So much of this challenge is about strengthening our mindsets and perspectives to work to our advantage.
There are 6 skills or characteristics we need to build to strengthen our mindset and our ability to find balance mentally, physically, emotionally, and socially.
1. Self Awareness - The first skill is the ability to understand our thoughts and emotions and know why they are showing up and what they mean. Our thoughts lead to our feelings which lead to our actions (the thought-feeling cycle). The feelings feed back into more thoughts or beliefs.
EXERCISE - Write a self-reflective page per day. This helps you recognize patterns in the thinking/feeling/actions cycle. You’ll start to make connections about when you feel balanced versus when you feel anxious. It’s in the why. Write about the day and everything that contributed positively or negatively to it. What caused your thoughts? What thoughts and feelings made me feel worse or better? What happened before and after the thoughts? The behavior?
2. Self-Confidence - Do you look to other people for your confidence? “You did so great today!” Are you strictly concerned about your performance or what other people think of you? This can be dangerous. The second skill is learning how to build our confidence from within.
Confidence in understanding (I have the skills… I have been working hard…I know I can do this).
Confidence in execution - (I trust myself to go out today and do my best).
BOTH OF THESE REQUIRE TRUST IN OURSELVES.
EXERCISE - Positive Self Talk Practice. Give positive encouragement to yourself. This will generate positive feelings/emotions. It all starts with our thinking. Habits take repetition and time. Create a list of 10 positive statements. Put it somewhere where you can read it every day.
3. Focus - Most of us focus on the future. What might happen…What could happen? We are usually more focused on results and performance than we are focusing on what’s right in front of us. But is that mindset hurting me or helping me? For skill number 3 ask yourself these questions.
Am I focused on long-term goals or the process of my path?
Can I retain concentration on what I’m doing at this moment? Or do I get distracted by the crowd? My score? An Opponent? A test score? A tough conversation?
When we focus on the process and we stay in the moment - we can concentrate better and we don’t get as distracted or overwhelmed. What do you need to be doing every day to get to your long-term goals? Focus on the small daily steps. They will help you reach your long term goals.
EXERCISE - Mindfulness Meditation trains our ability to calm our minds and our racing thoughts. It helps to give us the Be Here Now mentality. We need to be able to control our attention in this moment.
Sit down in a chair. Close your eyes. Focus on your breath. Nice deep rhythmic breaths. You’ll start thinking. You’ll have thoughts going every which way. That’s ok. Just recognize that thought and then bring your attention back to your breath. Recognize, pull back …. repeat. And the more you do that - the more you are strengthening your ability to hold your attention in the present moment.
4. Resilience - Skill number 4 helps us be able to bounce back from injury, or failure or help us to manage mistakes made. When frustrating situations or things happen during the day, how can we turn this seemingly negative situation into as much as a positive one and get back onto our path toward our goals? How do we respond to mistakes? Everyone makes mistakes. When you practice this on a smaller scale - you develop a habit of looking at things differently and you can change your perspective. When you do this repeatedly - it makes it easier when you are faced with a bigger setback to handle it more positively.
EXERCISE - Every time you make a mistake or you are faced with a setback. Ask yourself the question, “What can I learn from this?” It’s simple but it takes these negative situations or mistakes and it gives you the opportunity to reframe it into more of a positive or productive helpful mindset moving forward. Mistakes provide us with the opportunity to get better, stronger, and wiser. If you can learn from your mistakes - you start to bounce back easier and faster.
5. Calming your Nerves - If your heart races and your palms sweat - you can still be mentally tough. Skill number 5 teaches us that we don’t want to eliminate all of our nerves, we want to accept what we feel in the moment and learn to manage it and breathe through it. If you resist the anxiety or the nerves (I shouldn’t feel nervous), you are focusing on the anxiety and the more you focus on something the more it grows. Instead, accept the feeling/emotion and breathe.
EXERCISE - 5 by 5 breathing. Breath in for 5 Breath out for 5. Do it over and over again. Instead of holding your breath or having shallow breathing, you start to take deeper breaths and it helps you to be in the present moment. This also helps slow down your nervous system and your body will eventually release the tension and you’ll feel much calmer.
6. Self-Management - The sixth skill helps us be able to manage and control our thoughts, our emotions, and our actions and respond in a way that we can be proud of. All of this begins with our thinking.
EXERCISE - Practice consciously responding. Go throughout your day and choose some moments where you want to respond in a more controlled manner. Start with small frustrations throughout the day and try to choose how to respond. Pause, take a breath, and consciously make the choice. The more you do this exercise, the more you are practicing the skill of managing your reactions. The more you do this - the more you will change the bigger moments where your frustrations and reactions are bigger.
My hope is that these skills are helpful for you and you are able to share them with others who may find them helpful as well. May this be a wonderful and manageable school year for all of you!
With much love,
Allison
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