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Life Skills: Teaching Children to Make Choices with Confidence

Every day everyone of us have choices to make.  Have you ever thought about how you feel about the choices that you are making?  Do you feel confident in those choices?  Our children go through the same questions and the confidence they show every day in making those choices will be tested.

There will be times when the decisions they have to make will be more important than just what they are wearing or what they will eat.  They will be making choices about who their friends are, how hard to work in school, if they will smoke, drink or do drugs.  They will have tough choices to make about standing up for what is right or just ignoring what is happening right in front of them.

Our children need to know that we are there to help them and that we want to know what is going on in their life.  But we should not assume that they want us to jump in and rescue them from every situation or solve all of their problems.  In fact doing so will not teach the problem solving skills or give them the confidence to make the harder choices later in life.

Build Confidence in Choices

There are things that we can do though to help build the confidence our child has.  Here is one suggestion.  Be aware of the type of self talk going on with your child.  Are they putting themselves down, suggesting to themselves that they are not good at anything, or not good at something or not able to make friends.

Help your child change the voice that they hear on the inside with practicing positive statements and seeing themselves solve problems that they now might believe to be unsolvable.  Role playing with them and letting them know that you understand the anxiety that they may be feeling will go a long way as they begin to believe the more positive statements.

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Life Skills: Confidence Raises Self Esteem

When you think of confidence what people, words or images come to your mind?  I see a person with a smile who is working on something that they know they do very well.   I have watched my wife working in the kitchen preparing a meal, with what seems to be a thousand things happening at the same time and in the end the meal is perfect and served together.  She does it with an easy concentration and with confidence of the outcome.

When you are confident you have a special energy about yourself, you are not easily distracted from the task at hand and if an obstacle does come up, you deal with it without being flustered by the challenge.  Since we cannot be confident in everything that we have to do in a day sometimes we have to put on the face of confidence, we must have the “I Can, I Will” attitude.  How do we accomplish that?

We start with our physical self first.  Our body will stand straight and tall, look others in the eyes and walk in a manner that looks like we know where we are going and that we will not be stopped, with a strong assertive voice. Continue reading “Life Skills: Confidence Raises Self Esteem”

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Life Skill: Confidence- The Definition

Each month we define and discuss a word of character development and life skill with all of our students.

This month the word is Confidence and will be defined this way.

Young students: Confidence means: I believe in me!

Older students: Confidence means: Complete trust in ourselves or others.

Here are the worksheets for our students:

Confidence TT project confidence 5- 6 project confidence 7-12 project Confidence Teen Adult project

If you would like to see how we will deal with this subject with our students please follow our discussions here during the month of March or come in and TRY A CLASS.

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Fairness: Definition

Each month we define and discuss a word of character development with all of our students.

This month the word is Fairness and will be defined this way.

Young students: Fairness means: We all get what we need and deserve

Older students: Fairness means: Treating others according to what’s needed, deserved, and appropriate.

Here are the worksheets for our students:

Fairness Tiger Tot project Fairness 5-6 project Fairness 7-12 project Fairness Teen & Adult project

If you would like to see how we will deal with this subject with our students please follow our discussions here during the month of February or come in and try a class.

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Vision: One month into goals – where are you?

During the month of January we have been talking to our students about setting goals and how to achieve them.  This is a process that many of us parents have gone through for many years.  Unfortunately for many, here in the third and fourth week of January we have already gotten off track from the goal that we pictured in our mind early in the month.  So why did that happen?

Goal setting and vision need to go hand in hand.  Setting a goal without really being able to see it and imagine what the goal would look like and feel like as if it already has happened, most times results in our goal only being a dream that quickly fades as the day to day happenings start to take place.

If we want our children to be able to set a goal, plan for it, examine how it is working and adjust as required to stay on track for achieving their goal, we must model that for them.  As a parent we can do that by  talking about our goals with the family.  Talk about what the family goals are, when and how you work on them, even about the roadblocks that you are working through.

The more you show the importance of goals personally and for the family, the more likely it is that our children will set their own goals and envision them too.  Here is a slogan I heard that is great for encouraging us to stick to our goals, “Each day should start fast, finish strong”.

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Vision: What if our vision needs to be changed?

We have been talking to all of our students about using vision, visualization, or imagination to see themselves accomplishing a goal that they have set for themselves.  Using all of our senses to make it as real as we can in our head.  Most of us have played a game or sport that we pictured in our mind  that we were up to bat in the 9th inning with 2 out and the bases were loaded, or a scenario in basketball, football, tennis, swimming or other activity.  We can create the feeling of  the pressure as we make the shot or swim the length of the pool. It becomes very real.    That is vision.

What should we do though if the vision we have is filled with thoughts of fear and doubt.  If we only see ourselves failing, falling down or not achieving?  This would have a negative impact on our success, and we would likely not do as well as we wished.  So what can we do?

We need to change the vision.  Yes we need to go back and remake the movie in our mind.  If we are having difficulty in seeing a better result, it is within us.  We may not be seeing beyond the ‘limit circle’  that we have created around ourselves.  If we will permit ourselves to push beyond the limits we have set for ourselves, to visualize larger opportunities and possibilities and achieving them, the more power we will find in ourselves to accomplish our desired outcome.