Are You Preparing Teens For Life?

Do you have trouble understanding teenagers?  Do you remember your teenage years?  Seven powerful years make up the teen experience.

Teenagers want to be accepted and included.  They want to be part of the group.  Peer pressure is the big challenge to survival in the teen years.  What are some of the issues?  A few of the pressures include: cars, sports success, college acceptance, acquiring all the best and most current clothes, and being invited to the “in” parties.  What about other issues like: alcohol, drugs, exercise, nutrition, getting along with parents, summer jobs, boredom in school, school dropouts, both parents working, and a hunger for friendship? 

So how do we communicate with teenagers for seven years to prepare them for life?  How do we speak their language?  Teenagers have their own language.  We need to learn everyone’s language if we want to communicate at the highest level.  However, teen language changes from day to day.  How do we keep current?  Advertisers need to appeal to teenagers, so research discovers the new language, to guarantee billions of dollars of product sales.

Teenagers learn the language so they can survive those seven trying years.  I believe we need to teach Self-Esteem language to teens.  Would you like to learn a universal Self-Esteem language to help your communication skills?  Are you interested in releasing words that can cut to the core?  Is it important for you to model behavior that can serve you and your teenagers?  Are you willing to practice even if your teenager chooses not to participate?  

In our personal development seminars we show people how to begin by eliminating three words.  These words can be harmful to you and others’ Self-Esteem because they set people up to compare.  Comparison destroys Self-Esteem.  The three words you want to begin releasing from your vocabulary are “Should”, Ought”, and “Must”.  Have you or your teenager ever been told, “You should do this.  You ought to do that.  You must do it this way.”?  The replacement for these word are: “Need”, “Want” and “Consider”.

Test these words for the next 30 days and then, watch what happens!