3 Skills You Need to Set A Growth Tone and Encourage Engaging Screenagers To Their Best
Engaging By Encouraging Screenagers Or Breaking Them Down?
3 skills you need to set a growth tone and Encourage Engaging Screenagers to their best.
Are you continually encouraging screenagers?
Are you continually telling them how to improve? (Doesn’t his imply they are not good enough?)
The highest level of encouragement is to make Screenagers (and we’re all Screenagers) feel awesome for wanting to do more.
It’s about setting a tone; it’s about creating an environment.
Have you ever had a teacher, coach, manager, or trainer who everyone respected (loved, feared, believed) and yet expected from you (and you achieved) more than you thought you could? They created an environment of high value, optimal engagement.
Those leaders in your life were able to set a tone, where everyone around them excelled in what they did.
As I was leading the Dale Carnegie Public Speaking Course, that’s what I was to do with each of the 35-45 class members every day.
I focused on 3 skills you need to set a growth tone and encourage Engaging Screenagers to their best.
We were doing as Dale Carnegie himself said, “Praise the slightest improvement and every improvement.”
1) Focus on what was important to them.
By combining what is most relevant or important (previous blog: You Know, Screenagers Aren’t Engaging If It Isn’t Relevant?) and encouragement, we instructors found class members would produce fantastic results.
What did we encourage? We looked for the tangible (what we could see hear and measure)
We highlighted the strength or improvement.
Although there is positive intent when you hear someone say, “You are good,” though it has little impact because it is less tangible and therefore less credibility. Basically, that’s often seen as flattery which is junk-engagement.
2) Build on strength or improvement to challenge for more.
Then for the less skilled, we mentioned their strength and how it could help them build confidence, or skills to further build their same strength or improvement area so they will be stronger.
For stronger class members we mentioned their strength or improvement and how it could help them build a different weaker skill area to make them even stronger.
We rarely just told them they did well without using the positive leverage to help them going and growing.
We took the momentum of success and built it into confidence to do more/better.
The success was the focus of the statement and doing better part was a much smaller focus so the students knew that momentum.
This is an individual thing as some of the stronger students wanted the focus to be more on the improvement part.
3) We continually trained to look for and share strengths.
We
- had role play sessions
- had refresher sessions
- talked about strengths
- reflected on strengths
- refreshed strengths before class
- discussed strengths with class members during class
- reviewed strengths after class
Also, we rehearsed different language as using the encouragement words could get very old very quickly.
When my kids were going through their earlier primary years, they had what their teachers called, camera words, and these words were rehearsed so well the kids didn’t have to think about them (or sound them out.)
As instructors, we rehearsed lists of strengths words, and we knew these words were so well that any time when one of the class members showed a strength, we had several different words , terms, or phrases we could use to articulate the value of that strength.
Remember we were doing this in front the entire class.
At first it felt impossible, but as I rehearsed a little, and got a lot of real time practice, it became easier.
Have you ever noticed, after you have done something that you said to yourself was impossible you feel a little bit stronger? When you look in the mirror you feel more confident and say to yourself, “I can do anything!”
This is similar to when I support new teachers to use eWorkbooks for interactive engaging Screenagers, and at first one of them said, “This is impossible!”
Spencer Johnson talks about making major changes in our thinking in his book, Who Moved My Cheese.
Who Moved My Cheese?: An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life
Who Moved My Cheese?: An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life
Yet, three weeks later, he was teaching others to Mass Customize eWorkbooks for engaging Screenagers. Who knows?
Imagine, what kind of environment you could create if you were rehearsing continually, strength and growth language and then encouraging everyone around you with that language.
What kind of family would you have? What kind of teacher (we are all teachers) would you be? What kind of manager (we are all managers) would you be? What kind of leader (and we are all leaders) would you be?
As always, keep it simple, vary your words (variety is the spice of life,) and make sure you are being appropriate to the person/situation.
Build tangible strengths into momentum for improvement.
Remember, come join tomorrow to see more Improving Your Engagement with Screenagers and others inspirational experiences and ideas for Optimal Engagement in the ScreenAge.
Remember to engage tomorrow.
Following with you.
Keep it simple.
All the Best, Warren
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