What is Teen Coaching?
Teen Coaching is a professional relationship between a teen and their coach, designed to help the teen realise their capabilities, learn skills to build resilience, navigate challenges and move towards their goals.
When I coach teens, we cover all sorts of topics, including:
- How to improve concentration and focus at school
- Getting organised to reduce feeling overwhelmed
- Improving self-confidence
- Navigating challenges at school, or work, or with friends
- Improving communication skills
My program also embeds 5 key concepts throughout the coaching journey – gratitude, self-talk, vision, habits and compassion. We explore these together, noticing the impact small changes can have on our outlook, our behaviours, our moods.
Coaching is not a one-off appointment. It takes time to build new habits. There’s trial and error along the way; unexpected challenges that may change focus; the simple fact that as humans with emotions we all occasionally choose unresourceful behaviours.
What’s most valuable in the coaching relationship is consistency and honesty.
Consistently turning up to appointments, consistently keeping parents in the loop with the week’s focus, consistently working on whatever tasks have been set for the week.
Owning mistakes and learning from them. Learning from challenging situations. Building emotional intelligence by acknowledging feelings rather than trying to suppress them. Being open about what’s been easy, what’s been tough.
Equally valuable is noticing the small changes. We call them the 2mm shifts. What’s one thing you can do that will move you towards your goal by just 2mm? Good. Do it. What’s next?
This is what I love about coaching teens. We’re not looking for massive shifts in behaviour. We don’t expect that of ourselves, so why would we expect it of our teens? Instead, we notice the small changes, and we celebrate them. Consistently. Which generates momentum.
Imagine if your teen’s confidence in themselves was say, 4/10. They spend a school term working on shifting that confidence by just ½ a point each week? By the end of a school term, it’s well on the way to 9/10.
Small changes, week to week, building and gathering momentum.
Here are just some of the breakthroughs I’ve witnessed in my teen coaching sessions:
- Taking ownership for turning up to appointments without needing mum’s reminders
- Increased confidence to try something new
- The positive impact on our mood when we practice gratitude
- The power of movement (dancing to a favourite song, a short burst of exercise) to motivate us to study
- Noticing resourceful and unresourceful behaviours – and choosing the resourceful option
- The power of mental rehearsal for a challenging situation
When I ask my teen clients what they find most valuable about our sessions, their responses are as varied as the teens themselves are:
“The different perspective helps me to step back and take a look”
“The visual learning helps a lot”
“It helps me reflect on my choices and think about what I’m doing, what the outcome will be”
“Improved confidence means I can now try new things”
“There’s less stress around situations outside my control and I have more power over my responses”
Just as important as the teen feedback is what their parents notice. Here’s what they tell me:
“She definitely approaches things differently and is more comfortable with herself. She likes the strategies you gave her”
“It has helped him recognise his patterns and make decisions to help himself”
“Thank you for all of the support … I can see a marked improvement in his mental wellbeing.”
“He came downstairs with a big smile on his face… and he took the initiative to make a call he’s been meaning to make”
“His friends noticed he was way more confident interacting with others”
“It’s an opportunity for them to focus on themselves, learn strategies for different situations”
“Having a toolkit and a mentor is valuable for anyone wanting to focus on self-improvements, especially our teens”
If you’d like to explore how teen coaching can help your teen, book a free call via the Consultations page and we’ll chat.