Will Expert Communication Skills Make You a Better Parent?

If you want to have a positive impact on teenagers, you need to connect with them. But teens aren't always so easy to talk to. They're on a journey that ultimately leads to flying away from the nest, and they're experimenting with independence and exploring their individuality. And emotions can flare at any time.

It helps to have strong communication skills. Or does it?

Meredith Bell

I recently spoke with Meredith Bell, who has been consulting, speaking, writing and developing products in the area of people skills for 25 years. I wanted to know if her expertise in interpersonal communication helped her raise her teen daughter.

It was an interesting conversation...



The books she referred to are available at Amazon.com...

Conversations with the Wise Aunt

Conversations with the Wise Uncle

Teen-Proofing

Just Listen

Post by Dennis E. Coates, Ph.D., Copyright 2012. Building Personal Strength .

The Top 5 Personal Strengths that Support Effective Listening

I've affirmed many times that listening is probably the #1 people skill. When two people get together, the ability to listen well is the key to a beneficial encounter more often than any other skill. Listening is also a component of several other interaction skills.

While some people are good listeners, most aren't. And very few indeed are great listeners. Probably everyone alive on Earth today could benefit from improving their listening skills.

In this space I've written a lot about listening and other people skills. And I've written a lot about personal strengths. But I've never related the two, except to say that these two very different areas of ability are at the core of everything we do.

In this post, I relate the ability to listen well to these Top 5 of the forty personal strengths. Engaging these strengths make it easier to listen well, and the failure to engage them make doing so very difficult.

Here they are, in no particular order...

Compassion. There's a lot more to effective listening than payiung attention. In order to really understand what someone is saying, you have to show you care about what the person is trying to tell you, stick with the conversation to hear the whole message, and verify your understanding. If the other person's feelings aren't important to you, you won't make the effort.

Focus. Listening effectively requires attending to both what is said and how a person feels about what is said - the verbal and the nonverbal messages. To absorb all these elements, you have to pay attention to them. You have to shift your focus away from other activities, unrelated thoughts, and external distractions.

Awareness. It isn't easy to pick up on nonverbal messages. You have to notice the little details - tone of voice, posture, facial expressions, and hand gestures. You can't check these out and relate them to what is said if you aren't aware of them.

Self-discipline. You may have the presence of mind to focus your attention and make an effort to be aware of the whole message, but the trick is to sustain this during the entire interchange. Your mind may want to wander. There may be distractions going on around you. And you have to resist talking when you should be listening. All this takes quite a bit of self-control.

Patience. Not everyone communicates the same way. A person who has something to say may not say it the way you prefer to hear it. You may hear a lot of detail before someone gets to the point. Or someone may hit you with the bottom line with no explanation. Or you may have to endure repetitiousness. Meanwhile, you may feel anxious because the other person isn't telling you what you feel you need to hear. It takes patience not to express your anxiety, to let the speaker communicate in his or her say own way.

Not all of us are blessed with an abundance of compassion, focus, awareness, self-discipline or patience. But we all have the ability to stretch. We can reach for more of one of these strengths when needed, especially when we know we have to. If you do, your interactions will go your way a lot more often.

Post by Dennis E. Coates, Ph.D., Copyright 2012. Building Personal Strength . (Permission to use photo purchased from istockphoto.com)

Reading - It Can Help Your Teen Build a Fine Mind

I have a friend whose dad had a personal library of several thousand books. When my friend was about ten years old, his dad enrolled him in a speed-reading course. Soon afterward, he began reading the classics of world literature.

One great book at a time, he became a passionate reader. As a consequence, he began to ponder the meaning of life. The more he read, the more thoughtful and independent his mind became. At age 15 he left home to pursue a life as a painter. And he continued to read, roughly a book every day for the rest of his life.

At age 70, he is now a world-famous artist. And his personal library contains over 18,000 volumes, almost exclusively nonfiction. And he has one of the most interesting minds I've ever encountered.

Of course, his mind isn't the product of a formal education. He didn't graduate from high school, and he didn't attend an esteemed university. He is a self-made man who reads every day and continues to pursue his passion with intensity. The last time I visited him I saw a copy of William H. Gass's latest collection of literary criticism, Life Sentences, lying on his coffee table, bookmarked at chapter four.

If you are raising children and want the best for them, a college education is not the ultimate answer. Don't get me wrong. A college education can have major benefits. It can expose kids to ideas, give them learning skills and punch their ticket for that first job out of college. But you need to know that very few professors consciously try to teach kids how to think. As they see it, that's not what they're getting paid the big bucks for. Their job is to pass along the latest information, to give them the answers.

The problem is, even the best knowledge, information and answers can't guarantee success. In the world of action, it comes down to what you do with what you've learned - action - exercising good judgment and decision-making.

If your child ever does acquire good judgment, it will have to be because you stimulated your child's mind in youth. Or maybe they got lucky and other adults, such as teachers, coaches, counselors, relatives, or other adults who cared about your child encouraged her to think for herself.

When I was in high school, I had a friend who had a fine mind. He knew things I didn't know. He understood things I didn't understand. He had learned to do things I could not do. I admired him and wanted to be like him. I discovered that he read a lot. So I began to read the books he recommended. It was quite an awakening. And it happened at the right time, while my brain's prefrontal cortex, which handles comprehension, analysis, judgment, decision making, planning and organization, was in the sensitive period of development that begins and ends during adolescence.

I was lucky to have a few influences like that. I didn't start reading voraciously until I was 16, but after that I read obsessively.

I earned my Ph.D. from Duke University in 1977, but I like to tell young people that as glorious as that experience was, 99% of what I know today I've learned since then - on my own, from reading.

Reading benefits a young person two important ways. First, it helps build his vocabulary. Having words for things is essential to creating and organizing concepts in the mind. No language, no knowledge.

Second, the content of books can reveal insights which make the child reflect on important issues, to help the child use his or her mind to connect the dots - while programming the prefrontal cortex for critical thinking.

Language. High-level thinking. These are the two mental abilities that separate us from all other species on Earth. And you can get these life-changing powers from reading the best books.

Encourage your kid to read.

Post by Dennis E. Coates, Ph.D., Copyright 2012. Building Personal Strength .

Benini and the Sculpture Ranch - Glorious Art Treasures Hidden in the Texas Hill Country

Texas is a big place. And within its vast plains and mountain ranges and Hill Country ranches are countless hidden surprises.

For example, when my wife Kathleen and I visited Glen Rose, a tiny town of west of Fort Worth, we not only discovered the Fossil Rim Wildlife Center with 30-million-year-old fossils exposed on the ground and giraffes, zebras and other large animals who ate from our hands, in the town itself was Barnard's Mill and Art Museum, a 150-year old restored mill that houses what may be the most important collection of American western art in the world.

Texas is like that. Hidden treasures. To find them you must seek them.

Recently we discovered another hidden treasure. Accompanying my wife as she researched an article about what she calls the "Texas Hill Country Open-Air Sculpture Trail," we discovered the Benini Galleries and Sculpture Ranch, a 140-acre property that used to be part of Lyndon Johnson's ranch.

Entrance - Benini Galleries and Sculpture Ranch

For more than ten years, the ranch has been home for over 110 large outdoor sculptures. The works of over 40 artists, they include a diversity of styles that will satisfy practically anyone's tastes.

At the center of this remarkable arts destination is Benini (known only by that name), who has been painting for more than 60 years and whose works have been shown in over 160 one-man exhibitions world-wide.

When Kathleen and I showed up one morning to see the sculptures, Benini was there to greet us. He and I began to talk, and I found him so interesting that I opted to continue the conversation rather than tour the outdoor gallery.

As a painter, he has put in his 10,000 hours many times over. He was born in Italy and by the age of seven he began painting in watercolors and has continued painting ever since. A fiercely independent spirit, as a teenager he left the Catholic church and his home to travel around Italy, subsisting on works he painted in public places. In the winter he worked menial jobs and continued his development by copying the masters in museums. In his twenties he found work with the Alpine ski patrol and a cruise ship. When the ship reached the Bahamas, he decided to take up residence, where he painted nudes and island life. In his thirties, he moved to central Florida and became a sensation by painting symbolic roses in an ultra-realistic style on very large canvases.

He became a focus for an art in Florida, but then he sought a more compatible environment in which to work, and he and his new wife Lorraine moved to Hot Springs, Arkansas. During the 1990s, Benini's love of the arts and his desire to encourage it stimulated new interest in art in Arkansas. For Benini, art always trumps the business of art, which is why he exhibits only in one-man shows and public institutions - never private galleries. Even today he doesn't expect artists to remit a percentage from the works sold at his ranch.

When he once again felt the need to escape the distractions of attention, they moved to an isolated spot in the Texas Hill Country, which reminded him of the terrain of Italy. Once again, his fame and willingness to promote the careers of his colleagues have created a center of activity, which today is beginning to encroach on his ability to focus on his art.

This history of moving to new venues reveals a spirit that requires the freedom to focus on his work. And not just freedom from distractions - freedom from people who try to define him and guide him to produce certain kinds of work. Neither follower nor leader, for four decades he has refused to be a part of the mainstream art scene, with its art movements, dealers, agents, critics and others who would try to pigeonhole him. Twenty years ago, when he sensed that people were calling him "the rose artist," he stopped painting roses altogether.

Benini - "Forbidden Love"

Indeed, his style of painting defies categorization. It doesn't fit any of the so-called schools or trends discussed by art critics. For decades now, Benini has been using a unique style he invented to satisfy his personal need for expression. It involves laying down over 20 layers of acrylic paint to create the illusion of dimensionality. The objects he represents on his large canvases - some recognizable, like stars and ribbons, and some more abstract - seem to pop out from their two-dimensional canvases and float in space. This effect, combined with his perfect control of color and provocative choice of subject matter, draw in the viewer's eye and make it hard to look away. What the viewer sees sparks emotional connections so basic they are hard to articulate.

I was taken off-guard by the impact of his paintings, partially because I usually prefer more representational art. I love art that offers up images from a recognizable world and helps me understand a new perspective of it. But as I said, Benini is impossible to pigeonhole. Today he paints highly subjective nonrepresentational subjects he calls "Courting Kaos."

Benini - "Face of God"

As Benini walked me through the substantial gallery of his own work, I was dumbfounded by this latest series. To me, they unmistakably expressed the elemental force of the universe - the way star systems form from gaseous nebulae, eventually igniting from the energy created by unimaginable gravity. Similar forces are at work at the subatomic level.

Since his father introduced him to speed-reading at the age of ten, Benini has been a voracious reader and lifelong learner. He showed me his personal library, which exceeds 18,000 volumes. He claims to read a book every day of his life. Since painting in acrylics requires temperatures in the 50s, he paints at night, sleeping only four hours a day.

As I said, he's a remarkable man who has produced a remarkable body of work, and this treasure is hidden in a remote part of the Texas Hill Country. He's invited us to visit again soon, so maybe this time I'll get a chance to walk around the property and see the other sculptures. Or maybe not, if Benini and I get caught up in another stimulating conversation.

Post by Dennis E. Coates, Ph.D., Copyright 2012. Building Personal Strength .

Facebook Parenting for the Troubled Teen - Commentary

"It's not so much what you say, it's how you say it." Wise words from a friend of mine.

Tommy Jordan - "tough love" dad

Another shocking YouTube video has gone viral. Apparently a man's daughter posted an emotional rant about her parents on Facebook, using obscene language. The angry father then video recorded himself reading the rant and then shooting his daughter's laptop nine times with a .45 pistol.

On the one hand, he's drawing the line with someone he depicts as his emotional, spoiled 15-year-old daughter. And he should.

On the other hand, it appears he has burned the parent-child bridge of communication - perhaps permanently. Instead of using basic communication skills to address the issue, he reacted in a violently emotional "you don't know who you're messing with" way.

See for yourself...



Can you picture yourself owning a .45 caliber pistol? And going down to the gun store to buy a box of hollow-point ammunition? No? Then firing nine rounds into the kid's laptop in front of a video camera and posting it on YouTube for the world to see?

Well, this is the guy we're looking at. It seems to me that it's no wonder the kid has reacted emotionally to this style of parenting. I wonder where her father's daughter learned that it's okay to react the way she did?

If there ever was a case for learning and using a handful of basic communication skills, this video certainly makes it.

Post by Dennis E. Coates, Ph.D., Copyright 2012. Building Personal Strength .

Why 15-year-old Alyssa Bustamante Murdered 9-year-old Elizabeth Olten

Bustamante - sheriff's photo

You may have seen the news report about the sentencing of 18-year-old Alyssa Bustamante to life in prison (with the possibility of parole). Originally charged with first-degree murder, she later pleaded guilty to the lesser charge to avoid a trial and a harsher punishment.

What did this teenager do to warrant a life sentence? Well, when she was 15, she lured 9-year-old Elizabeth Olten outside her home near Jefferson City, Missouri, then strangled her, stabbed her repeatedly in the chest, slashed her throat and wrists, and then buried her.

Why did she do this? One of the arresting officers said that the girl told him that she did it because she wanted to know what it felt like to kill someone.

Well, she found out. As she wrote in her diary, "It was ahmazing. As soon as you get over the 'ohmygawd I can't do this' feeling, it's pretty enjoyable. I'm kinda nervous and shaky though right now."

Her tone was different at the sentencing hearing. According to the report, she told the judge, "I know words can never be enough and they can never adequately describe how horribly I feel for all of this....If I could give my life to get her back I would. I'm sorry."

Bustamante - Facebook photo

Actions have consequences, and with her act of cold-blooded murder, Alyssa went from sassy teen with a goth bad-girl image to spending the rest of her life in prison, a hellish, unimaginable experience.

The traditional question adults ask teens when they do "crazy" things: "What were you thinking?"

The classic answer: "I don't know."

It turns out that this is an honest answer, not an evasive one. Not many people know that during adolescence, the part of the brain that handles judgment and decision-making is "under construction." In a real sense, it's a perilous time for teens. The brain's prefrontal cortex, which handles reasoning, judgment and decision-making, has just begun the process of development. To grow into adults who exercise good judgment, teens have to exercise the skills of good judgment - even though doing so is hard because the wiring isn't in place yet. It's very much like toddlers learning to walk, even though their brains don't yet have the neural pathways for walking. But with each faltering attempt, the toddler's brain cells are establishing the permanent connections for walking.

During her teen years, Alyssa seemingly wasn't making much progress in the reasoning department. She was born to a teenage mother who committed a series of petty crimes involving drug possession. At one point, her mother was arrested for driving while intoxicated. She had abandoned her children several times. Her father was in jail, serving a 10-year sentence for assault. An at-risk child, Alyssa's grandmother became her guardian. She was an above-average student, but after puberty, she expressed her feelings of hurt, anger and depression by harming herself. She even attempted suicide. This led to her wanting to harm her younger brothers. She was a highly emotional teen girl who had few adults in her life who encouraged rational thinking. Instead of ingraining the patterns of rational thought, she ingrained the patterns of reacting emotionally. Very likely she didn't think about the consequences of killing Elizabeth Olten at all. All she was concerned with was how murdering someone would feel.

Once in custody, she continued to react emotionally. When she started to experience the consequences, she panicked and tried to harm herself.

In the short term, Alyssa is on her way to prison, where bad things happen. In the long-term, there's little chance that she'll mature into an adult who is adept at exercising good judgment. The foundation for critical thinking is established during adolescence. After that, the window of opportunity closes; and while an adult can continue learning, intellectual growth will be limited by this foundation. The first six years of Alyssa's adolescence mostly reinforced patterns of emotional thinking. In prison, there's not much hope that her final six years of adolescence will change that.

Teens often do crazy things, and what Alyssa did certainly fits that description. But teens aren't crazy, and neither was Alyssa. She was a typical but unfortunate kid who, instead of working on learning to think, worked on acting out the goth culture. It's a tragic story of a teen journey gone bad. She failed to make the most of the cards she was dealt. Kids who grow up with the advantages of unconditional love, mentoring and character-building activities have a far better chance of surviving the teen years, programming a robust prefrontal cortex, and becoming the kind of mature adults who build happy, successful lives.

But a version of Alyssa's journey into hell could happen to any teenager. It's a cautionary tale for parents.

Post by Dennis E. Coates, Ph.D., Copyright 2012. Building Personal Strength .

Breaking a Bad Habit - A Trick to Make the Process Easier

Have you ever tried to break a really bad habit - and failed? You can't succeed without motivation and commitment; but even with these in place, the process is always hard. There are more failures than successes.

But I've got good news for you. There's a way to make the process easier. But before I explain it to you, let's review what we're talking about here...

Routines, habits, skills, and behavior patterns. To your brain, all these are the same thing - ways of doing something that are so well ingrained that you do them automatically without having to think about them.

Routines, habits, skills, and behavior patterns get established in your brain through consistent repetition of an action over time. Each time you perform the behaviors, the brain cells involved in the action try to grow dendrites that will connect the brain cells involved into a circuit. As brain scientists like to say, "Brain cells that fire together wire together." Yes, but only after many repetitions. As all the connections are being made, the brain cells are insulating themselves with myelin. So the thought processes involved are not only automatic, they're fast.

And oh yeah. They're permanent. So "wiring" isn't a figure of speech. The connections are physical. There's no delete key. There's no quick and easy way to make them go away.

And one more thing. The behavior patterns that get wired could be good habits or bad habits. The brain doesn't know the difference. All your brain knows is that you're repeating a behavior, which stimulates the brain cells to begin wiring together to make it easier for you to repeat the behavior.

Why am I telling you this?

Because so many people would like to "break" a bad habit or learn to do something better. The problem is, you don't really break a habit or make it go away. As I said, there's no delete key.

What you do is ingrain a new pattern or habit that's so much more fulfilling that you stop using the old one. So you end up with two habits wired in your brain. The old, "bad" habit and the new, improved habit. After many years of not being used, the brain cell connections of the old habit will wither away and be absorbed by the body.

The bottom line - breaking a habit is hard work. While constructing a new neural pathway, you have to ignore what the old neural pathway makes it so easy to do. Initially, there are more successes than failures. Also, the rewiring process takes time - a minimum of weeks or months of consistent repetition, depending on how complex the new pattern is.

You might view everything I've said so far as "bad news." You want this to be easy, and it's not. You want your good intentions to be rewarded with quick success, and that ain't gonna happen.

But I do have some good news about breaking habits. Some really good news.

It's this: the more habits you break, the easier it gets to break the next habit. You see, breaking a habit is a process, which can become habit itself. Put another way, you can establish the brain wiring for breaking habits. This means that if you do the work to break enough habits, breaking a habit eventually could become relatively easy for you.

So here's a trick for you. Create the wiring for breaking habits by breaking a bunch of easy habits. Save that big bad habit until much later, after you have several successes under your belt.

An example of a relatively easy positive change of habit - If you usually write with a pen, start writing with a pencil, or the other way around. If you start your day by checking email, check it the night before.

After a few successes, you can move on to changing things that are slightly harder, such as - Get up an hour earlier each morning to go walking or jogging before your morning shower. If you go to bed an hour earlier, getting up an hour earlier won't be so hard. Or replace sugar-based desserts with fruit. Or start flossing your teeth twice a day.

Any change will seem difficult initially, but compared to stopping abuse of sex, alcohol or nicotine, these are easy changes. And if you persist, the rewiring will happen rather quickly.

Successfully change enough "easy" patterns, and eventually you'll have the habit-breaking habits you need to tackle something big.

Post by Dennis E. Coates, Ph.D., Copyright 2012. Building Personal Strength .

I'm Being Held Accountable to Improve the Way I Work

In my company, we "eat our own dog food." Meaning, we actually use the products and services we create. We do this to get insights about how to make our stuff better. Plus, we benefit personally from doing so!

The product is ProStar Coach, an online virtual coaching service for improving people skills and personal strengths. One of my favorite exercises is called the "Reflection Exercise." A part of the Focus-Action-Reflection behavior change cycle, the Reflection Exercise uses five "magic" questions to help someone learn from experience. The idea is to complete the exercise after taking action to improve an area of ability. Do so can accelerate the ingraining of a new behavior pattern.

The area I'm trying to improve is the personal strength called INITIATIVE. What I'm trying to do is ingrain the work habit of starting my day by working on my top priority first, before I do anything else. I'm making this effort because most of the other things I could be doing are fun and interesting time-wasters. I'm not always successful. But today I was, and I decided to do a Reflection Exercise about it...

1. What happened...

I've been trying to establish a pattern of "hitting the ground running" each morning by attacking my top priority first, before doing anything else. I did this today and by noon I had drafted two more chapters on my book.

2. Why it happened that way...

I think the content is already in my head, and getting my fingers moving on the keyboard causes it to spill out. Plus, I've already written some good draft content about these chapters.

3. The consequences...

I made huge progress right away. I felt wonderful about it. My self-esteem and self-confidence were boosted, I could feel it.

4. How I would handle a similar situation in the future...

Keep on doing it! Plus, maybe I should try kicking off the afternoon after lunch this way, too!

5. PLANNED ACTION - My next steps...

I will try attacking a new chapter right after lunch.

After answering the questions I clicked the "Save to Learning Archive" button, then the "Request Input" button to share the exercise with my accountability coach. She usually responds with ideas or encouragement.

My accountability coach is Paula, one of my business partners. I selected her because I knew she would always call me at the appointed time and ask me if I did what I said I was going to do. It's amazing how motivating these calls are. It's like getting on the scales once a week in front of my peers at Weight Watchers.

Today was a big success, but I've stumbled in the past. The trick is to not give up, to gradually build up more successes than failures. I know that if I persist, eventually "hitting the ground running" each morning will become an unconscious habit.

And how cool that will be!

Post by Dennis E. Coates, Ph.D., Copyright 2012. Building Personal Strength .

Life-Changing Insights for Teenage Girls

I found the following in the editorial page of our local paper. A fellow saved the quote from a preacher's sermon and was passing it along. Now I'm passing it along to you...

We need to teach our daughters and granddaughters to distinguish between a man who flatters her and a man who compliments her, a man who spends money on her and a man who invests in her, a man who views her as property and a man who views her properly, a man who lusts after her and a man who loves her, a man who believes he is God's gift to women and a man who remembers that a woman was God's gift to man.

Amen.

Here's a good exercise...take one of the above discriminators and ask the young girl, "What would that look like?" And let her answer be the start point for a conversation.

For example, "When a man views a woman as property, what would that look like?"

And, "When a man views a woman properly, what would that look like?"

That ought to exercise her pre-frontal cortex!


More life-changing advice for teen girls...

And for teen boys...


Post by Dennis E. Coates, Ph.D., Copyright 2012. Building Personal Strength .