A Coaching Case Study By Carla Trejo De León, Life Coach, MEXICO
Helping an Adolescent Conquer Happiness by Letting Go of His Fears
I love having a conversation with a teenager. In my opinion, adolescence is the best stage to dream big. I enjoy hearing about their life plans and the great ideas they have to create a good future.
On the other hand, adolescents face challenges, pressures, stress, or temptations that prevent them from making clear and safe decisions. It is not that adolescents have not had the time or the experience to acquire a broad sense of the world; simply, their brains have not yet matured physically, and they need a guide or an accompaniment to fulfill their goals and do what truly makes them happy.
Stages of Adolescent Development Case Study “Social-Emotional Development”
The decision to coach adolescents was made after a session in which I supported an 18-year-old boy to decide what to study at university.
It all started because the young man needed a guide to let go of his insecurities and dare to study what he felt made him happy. At the beginning of the session, I noticed that he had many prejudices about money and very superficial life expectancies.
I started by asking “What was important in choosing the right career for him?” He answered that he felt that choosing the career of his dreams would change his life completely and that his happiness depended on it. Without a doubt, I realized that in that answer, there was something much deeper than discovering what career to study at university.
Through different questions and sessions, the client managed to get to the point where he realized that society and what he has been taught what success means was stopping him from doing what he really likes, which is music. This is because he feared not being successful through his music and was hesitant to lean into studying finances.
Something that certainly helped a lot in the session was the Trust vs. Doubt power tool. The client needed to trust himself to obtain that security that he needed to be happy and study music. It was a session that I thoroughly enjoyed because it was beautiful to see the shift in his energy as he began to recognize his virtues, his strengths, his beliefs, but most importantly he embraced them.
Some questions to help shift into Trust were:
- “What can you trust about this situation that is making you stronger/wiser/more open?”
- “What judgment are you making that might be creating doubt about yourself?”
- “What would it feel like to completely trust yourself right now?”
- “If we can suspend our disbelief for a second, what is it, right now, that is absolutely perfect?”