Eight Coaching Questions to Get Off To A Great Start with School
Hope you’ve had a good summer.
We had fun taking ~3500 mile road trip through CA, AZ, UT, NV, ID.
Hadn’t been to Disneyland in 8 years, it’s changed! And we had a chance to go to California Adventure for the first time as well as Monterey Bay, the Grand Canyon, the Narrows at Zion National Park, the Hoover Dam and Las Vegas.
As with most year, summer seems to go by so quickly. With our kids, every year is a formative year.
John Maxwell teaches that we don’t grow just from getting older and going through things, we don’t grow just from our experiences. We grow from evaluating our experience. We can’t control what we go through but we can control what we take away from our experiences.
And we can process our experiences in a way that grows and teaches us by choosing what we underline and highlight what we take out of hard experiences and positive experiences. They don’t have to be painful, challenging experiences. We can grow from mundane, every day, positive things too. With our kids, we can take it for granted that they are doing well or that they are managing the stress and challenges of the new year.
Sometimes kids can be left to fend for themselves, without being intentional as parents to check in with them. Sometimes we can get busy and focused on activities and results and we may neglect asking how they are doing emotionally. One way to process and support your kids is to debrief with them and listen for what they are going through, what they are experiencing.
Our kids learn more what they go through together with us, than what we tell them. Experience is one of the most powerful ways our kids learn.
So, what are your kids experiencing?
This year, ask your kids questions and listen well to what is going on in their hearts and minds. Doing it early is a way of showing them that you care about them, that you’re with them, that they’re not alone.
When you do this early in their lives, later when they are questioning whether they want you around, or whether they want you involved, when they’re struggling with whether they want to be transparent and disclose what’s really going on with them, they will because there will be a lot of trust, a foundation of lots of support and encouragement that you’ve built up. They’ll know that they can always come to you.
One of the joys, one the best parts, of parenting is when your kids trust you and are open with you.
Here’s eight questions for debriefing and coaching your kids:
1. What was that like?
When you observe them going through something with a sibling or someone on their sports team, ask them what was it like? You can ask this in the car, around the dinner table.
2. How did you feel?
Asking them this helps our kids develop self-awareness, an awareness of what is going on inside themselves. Being able to understand what is going on inside and giving them a vocabulary, an emotional vocabulary, to understand and express themselves can be very helpful for boys and girls. Not only will it help them identify their own emotions but it will help them develop empathy and emotional and social intelligence. It will help them increase their other-person perspective, an awareness of how they impact their peers, how they impact other members of the family, how what they do affects you.
You can over do that, you can be overly concerned with other peoples’ feelings, you can become enmeshed. But taking the first step of being aware and communicating how you’re feeling can also help with exploring and choosing healthy boundaries. It will help teach them the difference between being empathetic and feeling guilty and responsible for other peoples’ feelings.
Pixar’s Inside Out, if you haven’t already watched it, can be helpful in going deeper with this.
3. What did you notice?
This question sometimes is answered with physical observations, internal or external. This question can help you see what your child is focused on or concerned about.
4. What did you tell yourself?
This introduces the concept that we have some control in way we respond to different situations; how we react and respond emotionally or behaviorally – whether it’s what we do or what we say – is greatly influenced by our self-talk. We can also increase self-awareness with this question. Sometimes when I ask counseling clients this question they respond, “I don’t know. I didn’t tell myself anything.” If you’re kids respond that way, that’s fine, just give them some time and space to figure it out and answer. Sometimes they don’t intentionally or willfully tell themselves anything. Sometimes automatic, core beliefs or our emotions drive our behavior. Going back to question #2 How did you feel? And working backward can help reveal what is driving that emotion and reveal what they are telling themselves, maybe subconsciously. This can help with teaching anger management and self-soothing.
Brene Brown has described this in her book Rising Strong describes this as “the story I tell myself”, she notes that when we are in pain our brain searches for meaning to try to cope with the pain. And our brain will make up a story to try to make sense of and deal with the pain. Even if it’s wrong. It feels better than not having a story.
So, what did you tell yourself?
5. What does that say about you?
This is something I’m really passionate about, helping dads to speak truth into their kids’ lives. How your kid answer is one of the keys with whether they struggle with self-worth or self-confidence, with worry and anxiety. Or on the flipside with whether they become confident, compassionate, generous or brave. What does that say about you? When they are going through things.
It’s tough. When our kids are struggling or going through pain, our knee jerk reaction is to jump in there and reassure them. My girls and boy have had different insecurities and have different struggles as they grown and are growing up. It’s just like listening and being there for your spouse, instead of jumping in, allow them to express the depths to which they are struggling, try to listen a little longer. Allow them to open up even more. What they start with may actually not be the most important issue, it may just be today’s symptom of it. Often, with hard things, our kids will test the water. If they put out something and we jump all over them and cut them off too quickly, you may not get to what you need to get to. We have to handle it well. If we minimize their feelings, tell them how to feel and think or what they need to do too soon, we disempower them. We have to let them struggle. Allowing them to struggle allows them to put down their mask and take off their “costumes”.
When we take the time and don’t rush, we earn the right to suggest other things that are true, other things that they could tell themselves. We can point them to the truth of Scripture. We can hold space for them when they are discouraged and bear patiently with them as they wrestle with decisions and ambivalence or sadness. When they feel that you’ve understood, when they’ve had a chance to vent without judgment and being shut down, you’ll feel the shift. They’ll start to talk about what they might do.
6. What do you think you’ll do next time?
You’ll know you’re asking this question too early if they “Yes…But…” you.
Asking this question, What do you think *you’ll” do?, instead of Have you tried this? Or Why don’t you do this? Will reveal whether they are done venting and if they are ready to talk about problem-solving and what they’ll do next time.
7. What went well?
This question can help your child get unstuck and shift to problem-solving mode (Again, don’t get impatient or manipulative and ask this too early).
Most situations, if it’s not just something awful, have something to learn, something to takeaway, positive or strength, something that they did well. This helps our kids to get comfortable with ambivalence. For example, if they go to a party or you have a Thanksgiving Dinner, parts of the time or day may be great and fun and there will be parts that didn’t go great or didn’t meet your expectations. This question can help your kids with negativity, criticism and allowing the negatives to erase the positives with experiences and with people.
8. What would you like to try next?
This question helps our kids not worry about perfection. This introduces or reinforces the principle of a growth and learning mindset. We evaluate our experiences, highlight the positives, learn from the negatives and think solutions or adjustments and courageously try again, trying an experiment, trying to observe and improve and what we’ve been through. This question helps them understand that we don’t expect perfection, that we understand that they are growing. And we can say, honestly, that “You did a great job. You’re awesome.” And there’s to experiement with, adjust and learn. We want to give our kids truthful feedback. We don’t want our kids to be like the poor people on American Idol who they thought they are great singers when they are terrible. Somehow, no one’s been able to tell them the truth. I guess their friends and family were well-meaning, they probably wanted to support them unconditionally but in the long run it doesn’t help our kids to not tell them the truth about where they are at. Their self-worth or how much we love them isn’t based on them being perfect.
Finally, when you ask these eight questions, it takes time. To do it well it takes focus. Cutting down on distractions, carving out the space and time is important. When you do this with your kids, they will learn that they can put themselves out there and take risks. It will also help your kids not to quit when things get hard.
Our kids used to do musical theater. It always amazed me that they would do auditions in front of a panel of judges and their peers. They’d prepare a scene of dialogue or a song to present. And they learned that when they didn’t get the part that it was ok. And they were going to be ok and that was fine. It was still fun because they would find a way to still participate or be a part even if they didn’t get a main part. And that was a beautiful thing that has translated to other challenges they’ve faced, like applying for jobs or taking on leadership roles.
How do our kids get brave?
They do that by having a sense that we are there for them. That we are going to walk through the risk with them. We’re going to listen. We’re going to tell them the truth. We’re going to hold them accountable. We’re going to call them out when they’re getting off track. (It’s something my kids have told me they appreciate. It’s hard because I want my kids to like me. It was really a struggle when they were younger. But we’re learning.) We’re going to cheer them on. We’re going to honor their unique perspectives and their choices.
We help our kids by going through stuff with them. And we listen and support them better when we’ve worked through our own anxieties, fears and insecurity. So, maybe run these eight questions by yourself.
I hope these questions will help you coach, connect and support your kids in a deeper, more meaningful way this year.
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