018: 3 Adult Mindset Tools We Implemented with Our Three-Year-Old | Fri-Date With The Wifey
Today’s Topic: Applying adult personal development strategies to your children
Today Kim and I are going to discuss creating meditation and gratitude practices for your children, teaching them to change their own state (Tony Robbins style), and how they can use power poses or affirmations to achieve more.
Meditation & Gratitude
In addition to cleaning up and a bedtime story, our evening ritual includes a gratitude exercise. Every night our daughter shares three things that she’s grateful for. It’s a small thing, but we can tell she’s getting it.
Our intro to meditation was similarly simple: we just started by sitting down with her, crossing our legs, and putting our hands on our knees. Then we slowly started adding additional pieces of a meditation practice, including the Headspace app (both Headspace and Calm have a children’s section that include very short meditations). You don’t need to try getting your kid to sit still for 30 minutes to lay the foundation of a good meditation practice!
Changing Your State
Our child was throwing a lot of tantrums, and we knew there had to be a better way to help than yelling at her or sending her to her room. One day, when she was upset, we tried something new: we asked her to take a handful of paper snowflakes, thrown them in the air, and make them snow.
She smiled, threw them in the air, and started laughing – it literally changed her state. And it’s important that you use the words “changing your state” when introducing this to your child because then, as an adult, you can add onto that.
Power Poses & Affirmations
We brought our daughter to her first swim lessons last year, and after being dunked under water on the first day, she lost it and said she wouldn’t come back.
We decided to go for a hail mary here, giving her an affirmation and power pose, and it worked!
But what affirmation can you possibly use for a child? We asked who her favorite Disney character was, or her favorite character who had to overcome something difficult even though they were scared. She said Poppy from Trolls.
We taught her to stand up, put her hands on her hips, and say, “I am Poppy. I can do anything.” (She said, “I am Poppy. I can do everything,” but close enough!)
We’ve never had a problem getting in the pool since – and we can see she’s using it on her own!
If you’re consistent and you can get your children to practice these techniques, it will be part of their life and they will reproduce these actions naturally themselves.
