by Tahlia Mandie, Direction Exploring     With the school year beginning, students and parents are most probably gearing up for the year ahead. Students beginning their VCE or final years may be thinking about the journey ahead, possible challenges and even maybe career and life decisions. Achieving a sense of success is on everyone’s mind.

Success has so many individual and different meanings – what it means to one individual is not necessarily what it means to another. It encompasses many different areas of life, including family, education, and career.

For parents, this might be about raising smart, good hearted and generous children. Starting a small business and growing in profits on a yearly basis may be a career success to some. But to get to a point where individuals believe they are successful and have reached their best, is a journey that takes hard work, dedication and persistence. This journey may have many different twists, turns, challenges, ups and downs, depending upon who the individual is. There is not always one way to reach the top of the mountain – you may go around, you may go straight up, you may do it in a team with each member hiking different sections.

For teenagers, this journey begins with the encouragement for them to explore themselves. Without knowing the destination, it is very hard to find the steps to get there. For teenagers, not knowing who they are and what is important to them can make finding the destination even harder! Figuring out where they want to go can be hard. Figuring out the steps to get there can be harder! Not knowing what their strengths and values are can make the discovery even tougher.

Although parents may feel their child’s stress and confusion, they can also help their teenager take their first steps in striving to success. Teenagers need encouragement, inspiration, confidence and reassurance from the ones they love and admire most. Discovering and exploring who you are is not an easy journey, and is even harder without support and assistance from others. 

If teenagers have a sense of what is important to them, deciding their destination and where they want to go in life can become much easier. If they understand their values, strengths and interests, it helps in deciding which direction they may want to pursue, and ultimately, which career pathway to take. If teenagers have a fuzzy understanding of these things then their decisions, including their life decisions, may similarly be fuzzy.

“I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life and that is why I succeed.” Michael Jordan

Striving to success is also about facing challenges and coming out ahead on the other side. This can be tough for teenagers, especially with the many expectations and pressures they face. Inspiring teenagers to think about their role models and their challenges, failures and set-backs can help them realise the possible benefits and different perspective set-backs can take.

Some simple and easy steps parents can take to help their teenager through their journey to success and self-discovery include:

1. Have a regular dialogue about strengths, passions and values: Enquiring and asking about their interests not only shows curiosity but encourages them to think about their personal qualities that may make a difference in the world.

2. Create a family project that is about making a change: If you could make a change to one thing in this world, what would it be and how would you do it?

3. Encourage and focus on the positive achievements and not the negative: It is so easy to focus on student’s weakest exam result instead of the best ones. Encourage that weaknesses are okay and strengths are empowering and motivating.

4. Inspire teenagers that they don’t have to be the best, but they have to be their best: Only they will know when they have reached their best.

About the author:

Tahlia Mandie is a psychotherapist, family counsellor and mum who runs her own private practice, Direction Exploring and now runs her own blog, The Parenting Files - because families matter. Discussing all things parenting and family matters to the serious stuff to the not so serious stuff, the parenting files is spoken with a little witt, quirk and humour. Tahlia also writes regular columns and articles for magazines, newspapers and other online forums.

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