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!

Making Mistakes Is Good! Here’s why.

https://youtu.be/tdNW9T1DIlA

Our children (and us, included) will make many mistakes in life.

Here’s how we can reframe thoughts and motivate them/ourselves once something ‘wrong’ is done!

The 4-Step Shortcut to Good Communication Skills (The R.E.A.P. Formula)

https://youtu.be/4DQySecbFXg

All of us know that having effective communication skills is important, although some of us may not be sure how and why.

We are used to hearing that getting a high salary and scoring high marks in exams are indicators of ‘success’ – but we might not be aware that our communication skills have a huge part to play in our ‘success’.

Effective Communication Skills Might Land You a Better Job or Get Better Grades

According to research, ‘Excellent Communication Skills’ is one of the topcriteria that employers look for in a potential employee. This means that Communication Skills should be taught from a young age.

Sadly, many educators strongly prioritise the academics and exams – and sometimes, life skills such as communication skills are taught as an…afterthought.

When I was a counsellor, I noticed that students with stellar communication skills tend to be more cheerful, more resilient, surrounded by reliable friends and are well-liked by teachers.

From a practical point of view… it helps a whole lot when we have people willing to help us, willing to cooperate with us and if we are well-liked and respected. Having a satisfying school life, work life and social life become (almost) effortless.

Strong communication skills, coupled with good grades or work ethic, is a recipe for excellence.

Most of us would want this for ourselves and our children.

So how do we start attaining ‘effective communication skills’?

The R.E.A.P. Formula for Effective Communication Skills

1. Respectful

Being respectful to others is a no-brainer. This means viewing everyone – regardless of status – as someone who has something valuable to teach us.

(Even the seemingly nastiest person we know teaches us something – for eg: patience, tolerance and resilience.)

People might have different opinions from us – but this is not an invitation for us to argue with them to prove that we are ‘right’. It takes immense strength to not react when someone has a different opinion from us regarding a topic.

It helps to accept that people may not view the world through the same lenses as we do. We don’t have to agree with everyone, but we respect that everyone has a right to their own viewpoint.

2. Empathy

This means to be sensitive to other people’s feelings. If a colleague just got demoted (and is upset about it) whereas we received a pay raise, this is not the best time to go to that colleague to ‘share’ our good news.

Some might argue and say that we should express our happiness no matter what – and the other upset colleague should automatically be ‘happy’ for our good news.

Let’s do a role-reversal: Would we feel better or worse if a colleague flaunts her pay raise to us when we just got sacked? It probably feels terrible as much as we want to be happy for our colleague.

Human beings are complex in nature. In theory, we know that we should feel happy for that colleague… but in reality, we’ll most likely feel down in the dumps.

Emotions tend to drive most of our decisions as human beings.

Being empathetic means being able to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes. And being able to decide which questions are appropriate to ask and which aren’t. How to give negative feedback. And when to stop talking about a certain topic and move on to the next.

3. Active Listening

What is active listening? In simple terms, it includes paraphrasing and asking questions.

Paraphrasing is a common technique used by counsellors. Basically, you summarise your partner’s story in your own words. This means that a) we need to listen closely and b) the other party will feel understood when talking to you.

Asking questions is another way of showing your interest in the other person’s story.

You can ask close-ended questions, open-ended or specific questions. The best questions to ask are definitely open-ended and specific questions.

Example of a close-ended question (or a ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ question) : ‘Did you go to work today?’

Open-ended question: ‘What do you like about the food at that new Italian restaurant?’

Specific Question: ‘You mentioned that you started a consulting business. What is your niche area?’

I think the examples above are pretty self-explanatory.

4. Positive statements

It’s easy to criticise and pass negative judgement about something or someone. That’s because our brains have a ‘negative bias’ – a tendency to focus on the negative aspects of life to ‘protect’ us from harm.

Having effective communication skills means that we utter more positive statements than negative ones. In fact, according to research, the ideal praise-to-criticism ratio is 5 to 6 positive remarks to 1 negative remark.

If you are a leader of sorts, you might want to consider giving your colleagues 5-6 affirmations before giving that 1 constructive criticism.

This makes it more likely for your colleagues to listen to you and be open to your suggestions. This high praise-to-criticism ratio is a characteristic of high-performing teams.

(The low-performing teams have a praise-to-criticism ratio of 0.36 positive comments to 1 negative comment).

People are also more motivated to perform well when they are affirmed or acknowledged to have done something right.

The R.E.A.P. Formula is a basic but practical start to attain some good communication skills.

As mentioned above….

Effective communication skills + Good Grades or Work Ethic = Big achievements

Have a good week!