Parents tell me that they want some tips on how to coach their child. They don’t want to have to send their son or daughter to child behaviour coach. They want to be able to get their child to open up more about how they’re feeling and help them be happy.
So today, I wanted to give you some really great questions to support you and as you support your child to develop their confidence, their self-esteem, their resilience to bullying and ultimately, their happiness because all roads end up in happiness. That's what we are ultimately about. That's what I am ultimately about. That's what you tell me as parents that you want, ultimately, you just want your child to be happy and who doesn't.
My mum is 82 and she keeps on saying to me, ‘All I want for you, Simon is for you to be happy.’ Okay, I'll tell you what makes me happy. Supporting you, helping kids be happy. And the work that I do directly in schools from time to time, obviously not the moment. I never thought that I would enjoy the work I do with parents as much as I do with kids. But boy, was I wrong. I absolutely love it because it's all about touching that fantastic space of openness and happiness. You know, what makes us happier than talking about happiness? Yes. Okay.
So straight into it. Some great questions. And the first one that came up was what to do with confidence. So what we want to do is take the child back to previous events when they weren't sure that they could do something. They had a go at it and they succeeded. And so that's one thing that we can use to kind of remind them of when they were wrong about themselves and their ability to do something. Taking them back into the past with a question is a great way to do that.
Questions are the answers. Questions are the answer. Because if we try and force any information into anybody's head, 10 or 53, that information is just going to bounce straight back off. It's not going to sink in, not going to get into the ears and into the brain and into the heart of the other person. We all do a lot of that. We try and push him for push stuff like a salesperson trying to push you to buy stuff with his quote, I'm trying to push you now, can you really feel it? Push, push, push- get away! I don't want you to push me into anything. Okay, it's like an exclamation mark at the end of something, you know, at the end of a sentence. A question.
I said this yesterday, but I don't think you can hear this too often, write a question as a question mark. A question mark hooks the answer out of the other person. That's what coaching is about, getting their answers out of them. So you know when we say the best way to influence somebody to make them think like it's their idea. Yeah. And that's when it is their idea because it's come out of them. It's not us trying to shove the information and shove the statement into their head. It was drawing that information out. So that's one way a question can take somebody back in time to when – it’s the wrong way around in the image- take them back in time. To when they've achieved something that they didn't think they're capable of.
What else could we do on a question? So questions are about getting people to experience things. So if they experience them inside themselves, experience, you know, take them back to an old experience. And then this happened in the past. If they experienced them, it makes the thing, whatever it is, real. So, one of the things that I do with when I'm working with parents is I get them to talk about that first. Moments, or the first moments, the moment when they're really in love with their kids, when they're really in love. So, being in love is like a big bath of loveliness.
We're talking about deep, deep, unconditional love. Seeing the perfection, the true self. Not the tantrums, not the worried personality, not the poor self-esteem, the true self. And we're touching the perfection of who we truly are. And the great thing is that you can take exactly that same approach with your child, so child's a little bit older. I've done this with kids, 9, 10.
And they've told me about their favourite moment. And that moment was seeing their little niece or nephew for the first time or their little sister, little brother being born, seeing them for the first time, not seeing them being born. They’re not there for that, are they? So they see the perfection in another, for us to see the perfection in other people. And then it's a hop skip and a jump to seeing that perfection in ourselves. And it's Q day today in our A to Z of happiness, Q. We touched that point. So to be talking about questions, where I really wanted to go to with this was quiet. The peace and quiet of that lovely feeling and the contentedness that's at our very core.
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