What separates children who do good in school and those who don’t? Aside from disparities in the results of IQ exams, a more important component should be examined: whether a child is amply noticed and rewarded. Rewards don’t really have to come in the form of material things. Praise is the most powerful form of reward system for children.
When someone gives praise, it means that the giver of the praise has been paying attention and appreciates completely what the other person has done. Children crave this attention because they need to know whether they are doing something correctly. Later in life, the social recognition would come from other people as well.
The next time you think of skipping a family meal for a night out with friend, think about this: your kids would do better if they see you at night. In the final analysis, the kind of support that children require can be acquired from simple things like family dinners. When you’re there, the children can tell you their problems and their difficulties outside the home.
Once again, the role of a good parent cannot be tied solely to the capacity for material acquisition, but also with the active participation of the parent in the children’s lives. If you keep ignoring your children, you end up losing their connection with them. You also end up losing their trust and interest.
The Jonas Brothers is a band backed by millions of fans. Most of their fans are young teenagers fresh from puberty. Because of the adoration of their fans, how do you think they adapt? According to the drummer of the band, they keep up by simply taking things in stride and not taking everything too seriously.
By being relaxed all the time, they’re more capable of connecting and performing for the fans. This is actually a good practice, since most young bands often fade with time. When this happens, there wouldn’t be a precipitous drop from the ivory tower to the dusty ground. This can be applied to personal living, too.
In order to formally identify the skills a professional coach must have, the International Coaching Federation has come up with a list of core competencies. Discussed below are the four major competencies, but all of them have sub-competencies that need to be considered. There are a total of eleven core competencies for coaches.
The first competency is setting the foundation. This involves considering professional standards as well as ethical guidelines. Next is co-creating the relationship. Here, trust and intimacy are crucial to be able to establish a good relationship between the coach and the client. The third competency is communicating effectively. Active listening, powerful questioning, and direct communication are needed here. Lastly, we have facilitating learning and results. It is not enough that the client is understood as this competency requires designing actions as well as planning and goal-setting.
We all know that children are like sponges. They assimilate and imitate things that are from the immediate environment. This is both a good thing and a bad thing for children. For one, you have to make sure that what children see is beneficial for them. If you want to educate your child, you have to create the instances when and where your child can fully learn something new.
Therefore, you have to be an active parent. An active parent intervenes in the learning process not to limit it, but to make the horizon wider and more fruitful. An active parent in the learning process makes full use of available resources for learning and more.
It is very important that we realize that there is a big difference from personal coaching and giving advice. The former focuses on the client while the latter is biased by the coach’s opinions and beliefs. A good coach never lets his biases get in the way and makes sure that he gives the best possible support to his client.
For a personal coach to succeed in helping his client realize his potential, he must first understand the needs of the client. Empathy is a fundamental concept and the coach must be able to see the world from the eyes of his client. The goal of a coach is to help his clients realize their own solutions, and not to ask them to follow a prescribed to-do list. In this regard, a coach is definitely not an advisor.
Do rewards work with children? Some people in the old field of behavioral, psychological analysis point to a peculiar fact regarding disciplining. It appears that punishment is quicker to teach than rewards. However, how happy would a child be if punishment were always used? Remember, most of what is traditionally done to children is not natural.
A French thinker, Gilles Deleuze once said that adults repeatedly treat children with infantilism that is not theirs. That means that most of the restrictions we place on children’s actions are not really beneficial for the most part. So the next time you want to be critical of your children, why not try rewarding first?
It is very easy to advise people. All you need to do is look at his or her situation and come up with suggestions on how you think he or she will be able to improve it. But this is not the essence of coaching; coaching requires a relationship between the coach and the client wherein both are in the same place and move towards the same goal together. Here are a few qualities I feel a good coach must possess, but my list is not at all exhaustive.
Communication and listening skills are obviously necessary so I won’t be discussing those two. An important quality of a good coach is the ability to build rapport. By doing so he is able to get to know his client personally and is able to seamlessly move from small talk to actual coaching. A good coach must also be able to inspire and motivate his client. I feel that the only way this is possible is if the coach has a genuine desire for the betterment of his client. Lastly, coaches must have confidence—the belief in themselves and the effectiveness of their methods which will surely rub off on their clients.
Some parents clamp down hard when it comes to friends. They want to know who the kid is with, what the new friends’ parents do for a living, etc. While it’s fine to be safe with the child, such actions are actually detrimental for the social development of the child.
If you want your child to be wise about the friends that he or she chooses, then you have to inculcate the right values and skills. Don’t do the choosing for your child. Instead of choosing for your child, make sure that your child knows how to select the friends himself. Doing this would make your child more open to the world and to your family.
I was able to find an article on the internet that lists down the principles good coaches have in order to achieve successful coaching sessions. I chose the best ones among the list and here they are—a sort of mantra that can be recited by coaches before each session.
Talking is not more important than listening. Past is past; it is not necessarily indicative of the future. Understand what motivates the client. Everyone can achieve more. A coach must provide full support without criticism, and without bias. A coach does not provide answers and the needs of some people can’t be met by coaching. Above all, everything said during coaching is confidential; nothing gets out.