Chris Mance II - Mental Skills Coach

What can a parent do when they clearly have a talented child who doesn’t want to use their talent? Well, there is no easy answer to this complex problem, but I do have a few suggestions.

First, parents must take a step back and remove their emotions from the situation. When a child knows you want something for them more than they want it for themselves, they tend to be more stubborn. Come to terms with the fact that it’s okay if your child chooses not to use their talent. Subsequently, this first step will allow the use of what I informally call “choice” psychology instead of reverse psychology.

Using Choice Psychology

As the name suggest, choice psychology is getting your child to choose what’s good for them over what feels good to them. This implies that the parenting goal is to help your child mature, so they know how to choose the right thing without you explicitly telling them what’s right.

With that in mind, good choice psychology starts by suggesting to your child that you are indifferent about the “choice” they make, even when you do care. Be mindful that this more subtle approach only works when your child is in a situation to make a good choice.  This means they understand both the long term and short-term pros and cons of their choice.  If you rush through this process and give them a choice with no context, more likely than not they will choose the feel good option. 

Therefore, before you attempt choice psychology:

• Start with a conversation about choices and decision making. 
• Discuss how short-term pleasure can impact long-term goals. 
• Use a hypothetical situation to ask them to choose what they would do and explain the potential impacts of their choice. 

Once you establish this context, your child will be in a position to choose between what’s good for them and what feels good to them.

Obviously, this could be time consuming, and your child will eventually catch on if you do it too much.  So, it’s best to use this technique only in meaningful moments.  If done right, however, these teachable exercises in choice will lead to you raising a smart decision maker who makes choices based on facts instead of emotions.

Mentorship / Mindset Coaching

From here, I would get an outside mentor or mindset coach such as myself involved. My process leans on using the Strengths Based Parenting approach. This approach puts the child’s personality, motivations, and strengths ahead of the goals. To put it differently, the process becomes the goal, and the goal of getting the child to use their talent becomes the compass.

In my experience, talented kids who don’t want to use their talent are in this predicament because too much focus is put on fixing their weaknesses instead of strengthening their strengths. When you can change the focus to using a child’s unique personality, motivations, and strengths as the backbone of their process, magic happens. I won’t claim this magic happens overnight, but the process of a young person developing self-awareness of what makes them tick nearly always jump starts their motivation.

If you are raising a child who is not using their talent to the best of their ability, I suggest you give these ideas a try. Now is as good a time as any to find out how you can give them a jump start. Contact me here to find out how I can help you with this.