Empowering the Next Generation – Shelly Lefkoe

As a parent, you tend to get caught up in the day to day minutia and may forget what your dreams for your children are. If we told you that your job is being responsible for the physical, spiritual, intellectual, emotional development of a child would you say “easy peasy?”

We lose sight of how what we say and do impacts our children. We don’t realize how our actions today affect the rest of their lives. Beliefs form at a young age and they’re rarely outgrown. It is far easier to instill strong positive beliefs early on than to reverse negative beliefs as an adult. In this module, we’ll explore the single most important thing you need to know as a parent and how knowing this one thing can make or break your child’s future success and happiness.

During this session you’ll:

• Discover what you really want for your children (and it may not be what you think you want)!
• Uncover the single most important thing that is stopping your children from having happy, successful lives.
• Learn the keys to raising a child that is happy and conscious who will make a difference in the world.
• Understand how beliefs (what your child believes to be true about himself, life and people) will keep your child from moving forward and having a quality of life – not just self-esteem or confidence are the main predictors of future success.
• Learn which beliefs will empower your child, how beliefs can help or hurt your child.
• Discover the 10 worst things you can do to a child – these are the things that many parents do unknowingly that create the worst of the worst beliefs.

Damaging beliefs keep a person from living their fullest, best life. In this module we’ll talk about the 5 most harmful and common beliefs that people develop (even people you may think are successful) and how you as a parent can prevent their formation in your children. We will also look at the positive side of beliefs, the beliefs that help people excel in life, live out their dreams and be happy, positive contributors to society.

In this session, you’ll:

• Uncover how beliefs determine a person’s reality, shape their actions and behaviors and determine the choices they make and what they attract into their lives.
• Discover the 5 most damaging beliefs and how they sabotage a person in adult life.
• Learn why almost all problems in school, issues with friends, depression and underperformance are tied to a child’s beliefs.
• Learn the techniques to ensure that your child grows up with healthy beliefs. For example, “I am capable” and “I make a difference” will allow them to make a positive impact in the world.
• Discover the 2 Key Questions every parent must ask themselves before they speak or react to their child.
• How teaching children “the right answers” stops them from learning.

Often as parents we want our children to be or react in a certain way that is not possible with their current stage of development. In other words, often our children actually cannot think the way we want them to or expect them to because their brain is not wired that way yet. At each stage of development children are forming beliefs about themselves. If you have unrealistic expectations about what they should be able to do – and they are physically or emotionally not developed enough yet to perform – your unrealistic expectations can do major damage to their developing self-esteem and confidence. Children will start to believe that something is wrong with them because they can’t be or do something you are expecting them to do.

In this session you’ll learn:

• About the stages of development and what you can realistically expect from your child in each phase.
• Why thinking teenagers are already adults and expecting them to act and behave like adults leads to the development of one of the most dangerous beliefs.
• How you can help children become world-centric adults.
• A harmful belief that 90% of children develop that causes resentment and robs them of their free will.

In this module, you will learn how stopping your stress leads to better parenting. No matter how committed we are to being parents who help our children form positive beliefs, when we are undergoing significant stress we are more likely to get annoyed, get upset, get angry and just plain blow our tops. The same behavior from our children can be laughed off if we’re in a good mood or lead to losing our temper and yelling if we are experiencing extreme stress. So anything that will significantly reduce your stress will improve your relationship with your children.

As you discovered in the previous module, if your expectations are more consistent with what your child is capable of doing, you will significantly improve your interactions with your children and reduce your stress.But there is something else you can do to reduce your stress even more. Down to virtually none.

In this session you’ll discover:

• How events have no inherent meaning and can’t cause feelings.
• How almost all feelings come from the meaning you give events.
• If you stop giving meaning to meaningless events, you can stop your negative feelings.
• Stress is the result of negative feelings – no negative feelings, no stress.
• How to distinguish meaning from events so you can realize that you added the meaning.
• How to dissolve meaning.

In this module you’ll learn how to help your children be free to express themselves.

And, that even with all our uncertainty, how we as parents can still ensure that our children grow up with a sense of freedom, joy, resilience, fearlessness and innovation.

In this session you’ll discover:

• How beliefs you form keep you from having freedom in your life (hint: it has to do with being at the effect of life instead of being the driver of your life!).
• The real definition of self-esteem – what creates it and the link between self-esteem and beliefs.
• What one word you should remove from your vocabulary – and with what word to replace it.
• How self-esteem comes from the self and not from others.
• How to facilitate an “I Can” environment and why it is the most powerful tool in your parenting toolbox.
• Why resilience is so important and how to instill it in your child.
• How you and your child can experience freedom.
• Modeling being in the present moment.

People with a strong value system who know what they stand for have it easier in life than those who are ambiguous or have not clearly defined their value system. When your values are clear, your journey is more fulfilling. The context in which you parent and live your life affects everything. Most people – even the most well-intentioned people – parent arbitrarily and it has devastating effects on our children.

You will learn:

• Why everyone is living should lives and how to make the change to a Value-Generated life. When you know what your values are, decisions are easy.
• How to make sure your child knows who they are and knows their own personal value system.
• How to build your family around the premise that each person contributes to the whole and why each individual is better for it.
• Why creating a clearly outlined “Family Context” should be at the top of your list.
• The importance of teaching kids about sufficiency – they are enough, they have enough.
• How to escape the trap of entitlement – how to teach your kids to produce satisfaction and ask how much is enough?
• How to turn complaints into requests.
• The importance of apologizing and remaking commitments.
• The power and importance of creating and nurturing relationships.
• The importance of integrity and how to model it.
• The three myths of scarcity and how getting rid of them empowers children.