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Teen mindset training is left to happenstance. Parents train it usually unintentionally by modeling behavior or through their child rearing practices. Schools pay lip service to it. Schools, public schools in particular, haven’t really thought about what a growth mindset really entails. Their approach is to have teachers learn some rudimentary strategies for training mindsets. There are some well-done professional development programs for teachers to learn how to build a growth mindset in their students through the teaching of their academic subject. This is well and good, but they are really missing the boat or evening counter-acting the very positive steps they take by unintentional practices classroom teachers often aren’t even aware of. Further, they are so concerned about the feelings of the students they often set up policies designed to protect the feelings of students, which actually negatively influences their mindset and cripples them, even cripples them for life.

With my master’s degree in special education and nearly 30 years working in public schools, I can tell you one of the great problems with Special Education laws is the diagnoses at the core of special education puts the student not at cause. I am not saying students are at fault for their learning or behavioral struggles. I am saying that too often the message becomes I can’t because of this “disability.” In actuality, the message becomes a limiting belief and makes progress increasingly difficult. This does not just happen to special education students. Far too often, well-intentioned professionals and parents unwittingly embed or reinforce negative beliefs or limiting decisions in teenagers with tragic consequences.

Let me give a quick illustration that happens far too often. A teacher is about to begin a unit in their subject area that from personal experience they know students have struggled with the concepts and it has been difficult for many students. They open the unit by saying, "we are about to begin probably the most difficult and confusing unit for students. It takes more time and dedication to understand this so be sure to seek me out and to do all your assignments. Be prepared to work hard at understanding these concepts." This teacher has embedded the idea that this unit is hard and confusing. It will take more time and extra help to understand it. For students with a fixed mindset this reinforces that mindset. 

If instead of hearing the type of language used above repeatedly over years a student heard what follows, they would be far less likely to have a fixed mindset embedded or reinforced. "We are about to begin a new unit. I can't tell you this new unit will be easy or you will quickly understand it, but I can tell you that being engaged in class and doing your assignments will cause you to understand it sooner and easier than if you didn't. Furthermore, regardless of how easy this subject has come to you in the past, everyone can come to understand these particular concepts maybe even with more ease than they themselves expect." Notice all the positive embedded suggestions in this over the former. Unfortunately, the norm is the first example but with the proper training students can learn to undo the unintentional consequences of the negative beliefs and emotions they have buried in their unconscious. Then they can begin to build much more purposeful and supportive beliefs.

Teen Mindset Training: It begins with good habits

A teen mindset training program must include training habits. Parents, it becomes your responsibility to help your teen develop lifelong success habits. I encourage you to work on them yourself. In fact, the ideal would be to work on them together. The family bond that comes from this is priceless. The crucial element to train is the morning and evening ritual. A ritual is not a routine. A routine you do with little to no purpose behind it. A ritual is purposeful and planned. The earlier teens begin mindset training the earlier these habits can be put to use. 

The over-arching purpose of the morning ritual is to prepare the mind and body to start the day. For most teenagers, this should be the shorter of the two rituals because they tend to not be morning people. The purpose of the evening ritual is to reflect on the day, manage your emotions, check your attitude, and prepare for a good night’s sleep. We discuss more on this topic later on the page for a mindset of well-being.

If you have been checking out the other pages, you know that for people to become their very best the importance of first doing a personal breakthrough program cannot be overstated. When done properly that program will help teenagers discover and remove hidden (unconscious) obstacles to their peak performance. While teenagers haven’t been alive long enough to accumulate as many obstacles as adults, removing the obstacles they have accumulated will allow them to enter their young adult years unencumbered with unnecessary baggage. The breakthrough training when done properly will lay the habitual foundation necessary for proper mindset training, and it will teach and train the emotional management and attitude that makes up the mindset of a champion. The fact is, as mentioned in other places within this site, habits are vital in mindset training, not the least of which is teen mindset training.

Habits take time and dedication which requires discipline and creates self-discipline. One of the reasons a good training program should be premium priced is you need all the external leverage you can get to internalize the motivation, building the self-discipline to create this life-long pursuit. The value of mindset training cannot be over-emphasized. A high school diploma or even college diploma is lacking because it assumes that because you finished school and earned your diploma you have what you need to succeed in life. It doesn’t. With mindset training you will become a life-long learner. Teen mindset training becomes life mindset training, which encompasses... a lifetime.

Teen Mindset Training: Training Your Emotions

After a teen has gone through a personal breakthrough they will have been introduced to emotional management tools. Those tools will be used to train their emotions on a daily basis. One such tool is breathing. Another is meditation, prayer, or mindfulness. There are others such as Time Line Therapy [Time Line Therapy is a registered trademark of Tad James] techniques, anchoring, cognitive behavioral therapy reflective practices, and journaling. These practices become part of the essential habits.

According to Carol Dwek, there are some fundamental characteristics of someone with a fixed mindset. They avoid challenges, become defensive and give up easily, see effort as pointless or worse their success is outside of their control, ignore useful negative feedback, and feel threatened by others success. Typically, the negative emotion of fear is a significant contributor to this fixed mindset. Learning to control emotions, such as fear, anger, hurt, guilt, and sadness among numerous others, teenagers learn to deal with the challenges of life in a much healthier manner. Far too many don’t know how to deal with the stresses of life and the emotions attached to them. That takes training.

A morning and evening ritual that includes breathing practices and prayer and meditation is incredibly important for helping people maintain their health and well-being as well as perform at their best. Train yourself to manage your emotions by learning life lessons from negative emotions, and using positive emotions to support your life and achieve your desired outcomes.

Teen Mindset Training: Training Attitude

Purposefully and intentionally training your attitude toward life is also incorporated into your daily habits. It is the final component of applying HEAT. It is about building beliefs, aligning values, and adopting virtues that will support your life’s mission and desired outcomes. An attitude of a champion will get you farther in life than an attitude of defeatism. The attitude must be trained. There are beliefs and virtues that need to be ingrained. There are skills that need to be learned. 

Your attitude and emotions and especially your attitude are influence by every component of your life. Love is an attitude and mindset, as is faith and faithfulness. Your family influences your attitude and your attitude influences your relationship with your family. Ditto with your friendships. Your attitude influences your ability to learn and grow and your very thinking influences your attitude. It also has a significant impact on your health, fitness, and well-being. Of course, it becomes your spirit. Thus, to become a champion, you need a champions mindset – you need to develop the attitude, knowledge, and skills in each of those areas. Then for a bonus, train the attitude – mindset of a millionaire.

Teen Mindset Training: The complete curriculum
Training One: A mindset of love

Training a mindset of love will make you a better person and more desirable on many levels. Your love will lead to patience, hopefulness, perseverance which are three incredibly important characteristics of a member of any team and a leader. A loving mindset will build other vitally important character traits. Kindness, being slow to anger, not being envious, not being boastful or proud, not being self-seeking, being protective, and being trusting and trustworthy are all characteristics of a champion and characteristics of someone who others want to associate with. Wouldn’t you want to have an employee who is genuinely kind. Someone who doesn’t quickly or easily lose their temper. A person who genuinely wants you to succeed. Being sincerely humble, a loving person endears themselves to others. Having the genuine interest in others welfare before their own is the hallmark of a great leader. A friend, colleague, or leader who has your back and is protective of you as a person is someone you would definitely want around. Finally, you have to be able trust people and be trustworthy yourself. Those are character traits of a love mindset and will get you far in life. Why would you leave that training to happenstance?

Teen Mindset Training: The Complete Curriculum
Training Two: A mindset of faith

Teen mindset training should include training faith. Faith is a complex concept. Certainly faith in your own abilities, in your family and friends, in your education, in your training is of significance if you are to become a champion in life. Undoubtedly, that level of faith is just part of what a faith mindset entails. It really is much deeper than that.

At the deepest levels faith deals with how we understand the world. It is our worldview, which answer four fundamental questions. There is much more on faith on those pages in this site. The important thing to recognize here is the need to be sure you are congruent with what you think you believe and what you do believe. When you are incongruent, you can at the worst case lead a hypocritical life. You say one thing and do another in part because you don’t really believe that what you believe is really real. That in-congruency is often, though not always, quite unconscious. I am finding in the western world and America specifically there are increasing numbers of people who have in-congruencies because of the deeply cultural conflicts between the Christian heritage and a much more secularized modern culture. Many people are experiencing internal worldview conflicts that impact their behaviors in subtle but important ways. Making sure you find and address any of these conflicts can be quite powerful and have a surprising impact on your ability trust. It is hard to trust when on the unconscious level you don’t trust your own beliefs.

Teen Mindset Training: The Complete Curriculum
Training Three: A mindset of faithfulness 

Faithfulness is a little more straight forward. Again, there is much more information on faithfulness on our page on that component of the mindset of a champion arch. Suffice it to say that being trustworthy is one of the important components of faithfulness. You really want your family, friends, and colleagues to have faith in you. Faith and trust are two sides of the same coin and indispensable for valuable relationships. You can probably see the overlap here with the characteristics of love already discussed. In its essence, faithfulness is about how others perceive you and your desire and ability to put your own self-interests aside for the good of others.

The other aspect of faithfulness is the idea of being faithful to a creed, idea, or organizational mission. That means whatever the organization's ideals and goals are you have bought into them. Being faithful or showing faithfulness is buying into doing it the way the organization wants things done. In that context then, having faithfulness is being true to your own and or organizational creed. If there is not a match between your own values and creed and that of the organization, you will need to make some choices and that too is part of good mindset training – the ability to make difficult decisions.  

Teen Mindset Training: The Complete Curriculum
Training Four: Training For A Family Mindset

Families have a significant impact on one's mindset. It is important to first identify those influences and then learn how they are impacting you. Using the tools already introduced during the breakthrough training you will be learning about the attitude toward family you already have and about the mindset you need to be part of a functioning, loving, stable family. There are no perfect families. Every family has its challenges. As a teen, learning to understand what goes into make a family run well will prepare them for that time in their life when they decide to have their own family. In the meantime, they will develop the mindset and the knowledge to understand their proper role in their family.

Teen Mindset Training: The Complete Curriculum
Training Five: Training For a Mindset of Friendship

Human relationships are the magic that makes life special. They can also be the explosives that cause an implosion in your life. If you don’t train your mindset, manage your emotions, and learn essential skills for winning friends and building life-long relationships you are playing with explosives. The teenage years can be very turbulent for relationships as teens try to figure out what it takes to build those all important human relationships. We do not provide them much knowledge or training in this area. We let them figure it out for themselves. Why not provide the training so they can truly figure it out for themselves while doing so in a much healthier manner?

Teen Mindset Training: The Complete Curriculum
Training 6: Training A Mindset of Life-Long Learning

This training is obviously very important. Learning is something you cannot not do. Unfortunately, many teens really don’t know what goes into learning. Of course, there are habits, emotions, and attitude that go into becoming a life-long learner. Training a mindset of learning will not only maximize a teenager's success in their high school and college years, it will maximize their ability to continue to learn and grow as a person. This domain of the mind is about seeking knowledge, truth, and wisdom. Unfortunately, teens are not fully taught how to develop this all important component of a mindset of a champion.

Teen Mindset Training: The complete Curriculum
Training Seven: Training A Mindset of Well-being

Mind, body, spirit, humans need to develop all three. All three influence each other. Your mindset is the force that connects the three. Your well-being requires an understanding of how nutrition, exercise, thinking, and emotions come together to maintain your health – physical, mental, and emotional. It is more than just knowledge and wisdom. It involves of course building healthy habits and beliefs. Your health is essential for your success in life.

Teen Mindset Training: The Complete Curriculum
Training Eight: Training The Spirit of a Champion.

Developing the spirit of a champion is the keystone to the mindset of a champion arch. It is that final piece to training the mindset of a champion. There are many components that go into this part of your mindset training. More components get built into your daily habits. These components will have specific applications for students but are convertible to life outside of school. Of course these components are about further building the habits, emotions, and attitude needed to win at the game of life.

The entire design of Growth Mindset Training Academies curriculum is to build the initial habits that you use in every subsequent training to build more and more pieces to your new mindset. The final portion is enhancing your self-discovery, emotional management, and attitude formation. During this training your focus is training your ability to control your thinking, push your limits, control your emotions, and use the powerful tools taught earlier to further push you to become the best person you can become. This final training should be about building your life-long habit of self-discovery and self-improvement. Obviously, this goes far beyond being a student, but these teen to young adult years offers the ideal opportunity to invest your precious time in training to acquire the skills and get them fine-tuned before using them in other contexts.

Teen Mindset Training: The Complete Curriculum
Training Nine: Training the Mindset of a Millionaire

We as a society do a very poor job training the mindset necessary for the accumulation of wealth. Wealth creation we do well, but how to handle that wealth is not done well. Understanding the nature of wealth is not taught nor typically understood. There are fundamental truths that need to be trained. There is a pattern of thinking that is necessary. Building the knowledge, habits, and attitude toward wealth must be trained. Money problems cause so many issues in families and in society at large why wouldn’t we make it a concerted effort to train this all essential element?

So many parents say to me they are trying to find something… anything to help their child develop the self-confidence and inner fortitude that is necessary to succeed in school and life, but they are still stuck with the old, school based solutions like guidance groups, special education classes, or “alternative” education classes that don’t address the core problem.

I know this sounds crazy, but go with me

The parents we work with go from seeing their child struggle with any one of the following: high stress, low self-confidence, poor peer relations, academic pressures, or fear to watching their child thrive in and out of the classroom without having to rely on ineffective and stigmatizing school based or community based classes or programs.

Sure, someone could try guidance groups, social work groups, or whatever else public schools might offer them, but only if they want their child to address their problems slowly and with more of a struggle.

But, the simple fact is our parents watch their teen train the habits, emotional management, and attitude that will prepare them for success in and out of school without having to worry about their child feeling insecure, or stigmatized by being placed in “special” programs and classes.

Ready to see how it’s done? Then hit the link below to get your name down for my 100% free presentation.

It’s a must watch for any parent who is serious about helping their child become happy, well rounded and confident adults.