…to show this father how coaching had helped his son.
Last Saturday I faced a rather frustrated and dissatisfied father of a teen son. He had prior to the session sent me an email reminding me about the issues he had wanted me to address while coaching his son. So I invited him for the latter half of the session and asked him to share the positive changes in his son who was on his eight coaching session out of ten.
He stated his son had (in the father’s words):
- become conscious of his studies
- positive about his abilities
- knew what his challenges were (in academics)
- there was more interaction between him and his son thanks to his teen joining cricket
- his teen had become more ‘consultative’ and discussed with them (his parents) what his friends were doing and what he wanted to do
- since the exit of their maid he was more involved in doing household chores
- he had become more positive in his outlook
Given that this was the first time in over five years of coaching children and parents I had a father ask me rather bluntly how my coaching sessions had contributed to all the above positive changes, I felt rather defensive and asked him to what he attributed the change to. So he very proudly stated that it was because of his efforts in becoming more emotionally intelligent via reading books over the summer that his son had changed!
WIN! I felt I might have failed as a coach to stamp my ‘intangible and un-measurable’ results but net net my client (teen son) was the winner and as a human being I had won. It is immaterial for me that the father through his own emotional growth began to see his son’s positivity, my client benefitted and I do not want any brownie marks. Such a long list of positive changes in the teen, more than the father’s earlier list was fulfilling enough!
1)To encourage your child to create a new habit it is important to pick up andacknowledge every tiny effort he is trying to make.
2) Parents acknowledgement increases the self confidence of your child.
3) Parents tend to be more critical of small mistakes and make them bigger than they are, instead of picking small positives and making them bigger.
4) When you call your child “butter-fingers” he will live upto that name. Choose to call your child other names – kind, caring, loving, dedicated, conscientious etc and see your child encouraged to live up to those.
5) Be genuine with acknowledgement for your child– he will feel your truth when you mean it.
6) Maybe you have had a tough childhood where you were not acknowledged for your actions, its time to unlearn that by spending some time with yourself and letting go of your past and building a new era of parenthood.