How Life Coaching Can Help Young Teens Get Back On Track

How Life Coaching Can Help Young Teens Get Back On Track

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 The world that teenagers live in today is much more complicated than many years back. There seems to be so much pressure from everywhere around them to live seemingly perfect lives. If you don’t wear the latest fashionable clothing, you get bullied. If you don’t drive the nicest car, you can’t get the girls. If your social media posts don’t show that you wake up looking like a superstar, or that you are on a beach holiday, you don’t fit in.

These standards make teenagers so much more pressured that, often, they tend to have depressive or suicidal thoughts, they tend to rebel to be cool or to get attention, or that they just lose the will to live. As much as parents would like to solve their teenager’s problems by themselves, it is also difficult for these teenagers to open up to their parents, or to any of their family members, because they feel ashamed, or that they think they would not be understood at all.

To help you out in this situation, a life coach is one great approach. A life coach can help these teenagers in their personal development by acknowledging their strengths, and by working through their anxious and depressive thoughts or weaknesses. Here are more ways how life coaching can help struggling teenagers:

1. Life coaching can help develop smart decision-making skills.

Teenagers need to learn how to make smart decisions on their own. The problem is that in the world today, they are surrounded by temptations that make it difficult for them to make wise decisions. Remember that the choices they make today can significantly affect them in the future, as they are nearing the age of independence. If parents help them through this process, however, some teenagers tend to rebel even more. Hence, with the help of a professional, they can have the much-needed guidance in decision-making while your relationship as parent and child remains smooth.

You have to start this training as early as possible so that when they finally leave your roof and stand on their own two feet, you can sleep better at night knowing that your young adult can make better choices for their life. A positive outcome that might result from this is that when your confused teenager becomes enlightened about how life-changing the life coaching profession can be, they might just want to enter this profession as well and earn a decent income as a life coach.

2. Life coaching can help build up your teenager’s confidence.

The problem with the peer pressure experienced and felt by most teenagers today is that their self-esteem or their self-confidence tends to be trampled upon. A life coach has the specialised training, such as the iNLP Center’s online life coach certification, that you don’t have, hence they can better deal with your struggling teenager when it comes to giving the latter a fresh start with their diminishing level of confidence. A healthy amount of self-esteem is very important for teenagers to feel that they have what it takes to carry on all the challenges that they will be facing. Without this renewed self-confidence, teenagers will likely continue to sulk and sink even lower in the mire of negative perceptions they have built inside their minds.

3. Life coaching can help your teenager learn how to find a job.

It is usual for teenagers to have after-school jobs. Whether you believe it or not, having this form of independence is actually so much more beneficial for teenagers in order for them to feel that they have a sense of purpose, and that they are contributing something to society. If your teen has been slacking off at home or has ended up on the streets doing irresponsible things, or has developed extreme behaviours, one of the solutions to combat this is for them to find a job.

Additionally, when they have a job, they have something to keep themselves busy with, whereby their mind is taken off whatever negativity it is they have been previously thinking of. Also, when they start earning money, they learn the value of the same. They know how hard it is to earn every single dollar. Hence, there is a higher chance for your teenager to transform into a responsible young adult.

4. Life coaches can help teach your teenager how to develop and achieve goals.

It is a common problem as well for teenagers today that they lack goals. Most teenagers only look to the near future and fail to consider the possible effects of a future farther than what they can perceive at the moment. Hence, goal setting to them is never a priority. If your child has fallen into this path, it is more than likely that they are in danger. A life coach, then, becomes their life-saver in this case.

Let’s face it: most teenagers shy away from talking to their parents about their goals because, sometimes, some parents tend to make the goals for their children themselves. For example, if both parents are doctors, there is a high chance of their children getting forced into the medical field as well. As a parent, you may not be aware of it, but you may be pressuring your teenager too much into an area that they aren’t even happy about getting into.

This above situation is where the services of a life coach can come in handy. The life coach can help encourage open communication with your child, whereby your teen is taught to create goals. These goals aren’t just any goals, but they are smart, attainable, achievable and time-bound goals. When your teen is finally back on track with their goals in life, they have something to look forward to and work hard for. The positive effect, therefore, is that they are led towards a clearer destination when it comes to the path they want to take in the future.

5. Life coaching also allows your children to learn basic life skills.

Especially if you live quite a comfortable life, you may have access to a cook or a weekly cleaner to come and take care of the meals or the laundry for you. It is mostly in this case where teenagers fail to learn basic life skills. Whether you are rich or poor, your teenager must be equipped with these basic life skills before they head out to university. Without these skills, the tendency is for them to slack off even more with their health by eating out regularly, and with their cleanliness by sleeping in a messy and dirty environment.

After sessions with a life coach, this coach can determine what it is that your teenager needs. They may be fine academically, but are lacking in these skills. When a life coach can positively determine this, they can also help out in giving room for your teenager to learn these important skills. After this, your teen will get back on track feeling that, indeed, they have a purpose in this life, too, even if it is in something as simple as helping out with daily chores.

6. Life coaches can teach your teenager how best to manage stress.

As already mentioned earlier, teenagers today live in so much stress because of peer and social media pressure. The problem is that there is very little emotional guidance when it comes to managing stress in the best way possible. The tendency, therefore, is for these teenagers to lose focus by going for destructive stress-management methods instead. For example, instead of studying or working hard, they tend to sulk and drink.

Each person manages stress differently from others, and a life coach can help in this matter. After a few sessions with a life coach, they can tell what coping methods work best for your teen based on their lifestyle, preferences, and personality. Hence, they know how to encourage your teenager to manage their stress in a more positive manner.

For example, your teenager may be a natural-born artist. However, while living in your household, art wasn’t encouraged much, as the focus was more on bringing them up to become a lawyer. The life coach can help your teenager rediscover this love for the arts, whereby while studying to become a lawyer, they can use their passion for painting as a stress reliever instead of partying out and going for destructive vices.

7. Life coaches also spend time to talk to you.

When your teenager is falling away from the right track, they are not the only victims. Everyone in the family should be concerned as well as a troubled teenager will naturally affect family ties and entire family system. Therefore, if you want your teenager to be healthy and well, you should also do your part. Often, as parents, it is very easy to point fingers at the teenagers themselves without realising that, as family members, there are errors or faults committed on your part as well.

Here you should expect that the life coach will be there to help all of you as a whole. There will be sessions when the life coach is going to speak with you so that whatever concerns they may have will also be brought out to you and the rest of the family. Remember that the family is the whole support system your teenager needs. For example, your life coach may do the following sessions with all of you:

• How to best practice open communication
• How to talk to your teenagers about their interests and passions
• How to understand the needs of teenagers
• How to cooperate in a family system as a whole

8. Life coaches allow your teenagers to open up about difficult issues.

Say, for example, your teenage daughter has gotten into a relationship that she is sure you will never approve of. Or, that your teenage son has gotten a tattoo that he knows you will be so furious about when you see it. Or your teenager has been bullied at school for her braces but has never gotten the chance to talk to you about it because you were always so busy. These difficult issues and stressful times of your teenager can bring them even farther away from the right path, simply because they have nobody they can openly talk with about these situations. It is during these difficult times that your teenager needs you the most.

When talking to a life coach, your teenager has a higher chance of opening up about these difficult issues, simply because they know they wouldn’t be penalised or judged for opening up. Sometimes, all they need is a listening ear. After they have gotten these issues out of their system, they often feel lighter and better about themselves.

Plus, the bonus is also that these life coaches are trained to deal with these situations. For example, as parents, you may freak or scream immediately. However, these life coaches are trained to respond calmly, in a very loving and inspirational manner. You can also learn from this example as parents, by observing how to best respond and react to difficult situations, so that during the next time your teenager tries to approach you regarding complicated problems, you already know how to respond properly and with loving arms.

9. Life coaches can help your teenagers in this difficult transitional phase.

The factor that makes a teenager’s life so difficult is that it is full of transitions. First, they transition from pre-teens into teenagers, while going through physical and hormonal changes that can also sometimes be very difficult for them to handle. For example, their change in hormones may bring about pimples or acne, which may, unfortunately, lead to bullying.

Apart from this physical change, there are also emotional changes that make them go through feelings of falling in love, getting rejected, or failing to create relationships. These changes also bring them under so much stress and peer pressure, making them feel that they are the only ones left without a girlfriend or boyfriend. When they have finally settled into the teenage life, they now have to make another transition of focusing more and being serious about adulthood, as they currently are in the legal age and are thus filled with so much more responsibility. Examples are graduating from high school and getting into university, and passing their driver’s license exams.

All these transitions can often leave teenagers confused as to how they can best go through the same. Luckily enough, these life coaches are there to ensure that whatever difficulty teenagers may face during their transition stages will be better managed and addressed.

Conclusion

The worldly and earthly standards in the world involving teenagers today make them feel like they are in a never-ending roller-coaster of negative emotions. Often, the pressure to belong and to fit in becomes too much for them to handle that they begin to lose the real meaning of life, as well as their identities. All the pressure surrounding them makes them lose hope for a better and brighter future. If your teenager is facing any of these concerns, the good news is that it still isn’t too late. There is hope for them to have professional help through the services of a life coach.

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