BraveGirl Teen Coaching

The teen years can be full of tumult, as well as, excitement! For sure, it is full of plenty of strong emotions, constantly changing by the minute depending on hormones, social missteps and other types of stress. Some common areas are performance, school avoidance, and test anxiety.

Performance Stress

Does your child experience extreme nervousness and anxiety when in performance mode? This could be seen as stomach upset or headaches before a game or competition; getting sick on “test” day; crying before, during or after competition; Behavior that seems over-competitive; trouble with handling losing; “stage fright”; wanting to perform well, but freezing or “choking” under the stress of it all.
School Avoidance/Stress

Does your child hate going to school? Would she rather be at home with you? Does he “fall apart” on some days and not others? This can be due to social anxiety or pressure, but can also be related to performance stress. Some younger children just don’t want to leave the safety of “mommy”.

Test Anxiety

She studies all night and every time you quiz her she knows all the material, but then when the test is scored it’s another disappointment. Why can’t he show what he knows in the testing environment? How much frustration can your child take and still keep going? How much disappointment before new ways of dealing with this pattern are learned?

General and Social Anxiety

Life is stressful and we all need to learn of ways to cope. The situations where people slowly avoid the anxiety producing environments can lead to a very restricted life down the road.

All this relates to our belief system and what those beliefs communicate to our brains. If we believe that the world isn’t a safe place we will constantly be cycling between the fight/flight primitive reflex. We can use movement to change our body/brain response patterns and social-emotional coaching to retrain our cognitive response patterns.

According to Joan Deak, Ph.D., author of Girls will be Girls, raising confident and courageous daughters, self-esteem, or confidence in oneself relates to what she calls the three Cs: competence, confidence and connectedness. Deak points out that these three components can’t be taught, received or “improved by discussion.” This tells us that experience is the key. Developing competence is a pre-requisite to confidence; and confidence is a pre-courser to courage. Having the knowledge in your body of self-competence must be experienced to be achieved.

Teens need to learn to make cognitive shifts for real change to take place; interestingly, often if the changes happen on a body/mind level concurrently the change time be quite quick. Regardless of their speed in growing through life stress to a place of confident calm, it’s important to know that there is hope for change. Transformation is possible.