One Way to Excite Ourselves about Work (or School)

One way to plant motivation in our children (and ourselves) is to encourage them to dream big.

What’s the link between big dreams and motivation?

It doesn’t matter how ‘crazy’ their goals seem.

Any goal which excites our children to study, get good grades and take part in school activities is a good one.

Successful, all-rounded teenagers dare to dream big.

Underachievers usually don’t have clear goals.

Neil Armstrong dreamt of flying to the moon since young. His mother encouraged him although it was an impossibility back then. We all know the ending to this story – he became the first man to walk on the moon

It doesn’t matter if our children’s ambitions seem far-fetched right now. Ambitions will change as the years pass.

As long as the goal excites them about school, it’s a good one.

We can apply this tactic to ourselves so as to motivate ourselves to be more excited about our work and business.

Have a good Monday ahead 🙂

The 1 Thing Holding Potentially Successful Students Back

Let’s talk about about limiting beliefs today. When I was a school counsellor, I noticed many students believing they were bad in English, Maths, History and so on simply because they have failed a test or an exam once.

This ‘failure’ episode could define their lives for years. They went around saying and thinking, ‘It’s hopeless lah. I’m bad at English. I failed last year leh!’ Something which happened years agocan still have power over them.

Since they genuinely believed that they were bad at English, for example, most of them did not put in much effort to improve themselves.

(It’s even worse when someone – especially an adult or authoritative figure- actually told them that they were bad at a subject.)

A Story About Limiting Beliefs 

I’ll use a story to illustrate how harmful limiting beliefs can be.

Once there was a man who walked past a group of huge elephants. Each elephant was tied to a tree with a thin, flimsy rope. He was surprised that none of these elephants tried to escape even though they were enormous and could break the ropes at any time.

So the man asked their trainer: ‘Why don’t these elephants break free?’

The trainer replied, ‘We’ve trained them from young. They’ve been conditioned to believe they cannot escape. When they were small, we tied them with the same flimsy ropes but they were too small to break free back then.

‘As they grow bigger, the belief remains and they still don’t try to break free….even though they can!’

So those poor elephants remained prisoners because of their past experience.

So don’t let our children keep thinking that they are lousy or bad at something because of 1 failure, 1 mistake or 1 unpleasant experience.

For all they know, they have grown wiser, learnt from that ‘failure’ and have improved now.

Be Confident of Achieving Exam Goals with the ‘3Cs’ Formula

You might be wanting your child to set academic goals for 2018 as the new year is fast approaching.

Thus, I’ve written a quick guide for your child (or for yourself!) to set goals which are realistic, achievable and encouraging.

 Clarity Your child’s academic goal has to be clear, written clearly and if possible, displayed prominently. Set a specific numerical goal and a specific timeline to reach said goal.

For example: “I want to score 65 marks for my English mid-year exams in 2018

. Certainty We need a sense of certainty to feel motivated to reach our goals.

How do we or our children get that certainty? By having a mentor of sorts.

An example is having a reliable tutor or teacher who can monitor your child’s progress closely and steer your child in the right direction when he or she goes off track. This helps your child to keep the eyes on the prize and not give up easily.

You can be your child’s mentor too.

.  Commitment

This is toughest part of goal-setting. Once the ‘New Year’s Resolution’ effect fades off, our children (us included!) are likely to slip into their old ways and habits.

How do we avoid this? I have a bold suggestion: Tell people about your goal and your timeline.

When you tell others your goals, you will feel some pressure to achieve them. This will spur you to give your best and not easily give up.

That’s all for this post!

A Basic At-a-Glance Guide When Facing Negative Thoughts

All of us have negative thoughts at times. This is an at-a-glance guide for your child (or even yourself) when experiencing self-defeating thoughts.

The ABC Formula Which Makes Your Teen Feel Empowered When Facing Problems! (Positive Thinking)

Let’s discuss how we can switch negative thoughts to positive thoughts using the ABC formula.

Why would we want our teenagers to learn this? It’s because optimistic teenagers can bounce back from failures or mistakes fast. When they recover fast from mistakes, they can plan and strategise their next action, instead of drowning in embarrassment, anger or sadness – which is not very productive.

Optimistic Teens Do Not Break Down When Facing Problems

Optimistic teenagers can handle problems calmly because they don’t think that every failure or mistake is a disaster. So if a positive teenager fails a Maths test for the second time in a row, he or she will change studying methods, choose to be more active in class, form a study group and so on.

On the other hand, a negative teenager will start beating himself up by thinking, ‘I’m a failure. I’m a loser. I can do nothing right. I’m useless…’ and so on.

This negative attitude will most probably drag and in the end, the negative teenager is likely to do nothing to change habits, strategies or studying methods. That’s because he or she believes he or she is born a failure and nothing he or she does will help.

What happens after that? With this mindset and attitude, the teen is likely to keep failing test after test, exam after exam.

How to Use the ABC Formula to Switch to a More Empowering Mindset

In short, a positive student believes that his or her methods and habits need to improve, whereas a negative student believes that he or she is the problem – and is helpless about it. In some cases, a negative teen believes that the teachers, parents, tutor, friends (and basically everyone else except himself or herself) cause the failure. In other words, a victim mentality.

So in the ABC formula, the ‘B’ – which stands for ‘Belief’ – needs to change.

A stands for Activating event (in the above example: failing a Maths test twice in a row)

B stands for Belief (in the above scenario: A negative teen believing that he is a ‘loser’ and is ‘helpless’ about it)

C stands for Consequence: (in the negative teen scenario: He or she will keep failing Math as the teen chooses not to change any studying habits)

For an optimistic student, the ABC acronym looks like this:

A stands for Activating event (in the above example: failing a Maths test twice in a row)

B stands for Belief (in the above example: A positive teen believing that he or she needs to change studying habits, be more proactive in class and spend more time revising Math)

C stands for Consequence: (the positive teen will feel more in control of his or her life and more empowered to face problems head-on. Changing strategies = a change in results = possibly a pass in the next Maths test)

 

In conclusion…

That’s how we can change our thoughts from negative to more positive using the ABC formula. We have to change our beliefs about a particular event or incident.

Our methods, habits or strategies might be causing the ‘problem’. So we change these and keep tweaking until we get the results we want.

I hope this sharing helps you somehow. Please share this post with your friends if you find it helpful!

Have a good week!