How to Empower Your Child - The Growth Cycle

Driving from Lakewood to Monsey is a relatively straight drive down the Garden State Parkway. Imagine, though, that you're following a broken GPS, which is taking you in circles. After a while, you begin to get frustrated. Then after a few more hours, you start doubting your ability to ever drive the distance.

Wouldn't that be unfortunate?

Yet we seem to do this in so many areas of our lives.

We get frustrated and doubt our ability to achieve and succeed because we haven't ever reached those goals that we set out to accomplish. 

But our failure to reach our goals is often not rooted in lack of ability. We are often merely using a broken GPS. Our maps and directions are skewed.  

And if only we had the correct map and focused on taking the right turns and exits, we would, with G-d's help, reach our destination. 

This idea applies to so many different situations. We so often put effort into the wrong parts.

But maybe there is no area that this better applies to more than personal growth.

When it comes to personal growth, the common belief is that growth is all about trying, and if we didn't achieve what we set out to do, then we invariably didn't work hard enough.

But like everything else, personal growth follows a process. Merely pushing and trying isn't enough. We need to push and exercise the correct components.

Sure, effort is essential, but often the problem isn't a lack of effort. Instead, what holds us back is that we are pushing and putting in effort doing the wrong things.

In the last article, we touched on a concept which I refer to as "The Growth Cycle."

Personal growth doesn't work in a vacuum. There is a process that occurs which spurs and facilitates growth.

On a basic level, the process is made up of four parts:

1.  Something motivates us to move out of our comfort zone and do something that we now believe we can accomplish.
2.  We push ourselves and do something difficult.
3.  We find meaning in and feel good about the difficult work that we did.
4.  This feeling inspires us to take the next challenging step, and we start the cycle anew.

This sounds overly simple, so let me give some examples to bring out the idea and how it pertains to us as parents. Breaking down a problematic situation and checking whether one of these steps is missing can go a long way in improving the situation.

Tzvi* had struggled with concentrating and focusing in the classroom since he started in Pre-K. Friends didn't come easy either, and school was always a struggle. Somehow he made it through the school system relatively unscathed and had started ninth grade in a school that was better geared towards his needs. His parents, Mr. and Mrs. Licht*, excitedly sent him off at the beginning of the school year, hoping—and even expecting—Tzvi to finally find his place.

But it never happened. 

Although Tzvi's teachers were phenomenally giving, Tzvi showed little interest. 

And then the calls started coming in. Tzvi was disturbing the class. He was talking back to his teachers. 

A frantic Mrs. Licht called me, ready to give up. She felt panicked, wondering why Tzvi couldn't put in the effort needed to succeed when everything was there available for him. Would Tzvi ever get out of this mess? Was there any hope?

What went wrong?

When I met Tzvi, I met a teen who lacked any belief in his ability to thrive and shine. He had gone through too many years of stress and failure to simply walk into a new school and believe that this time, the situation would be different.

In essence, he was missing step one of The Growth Cycle. Because he didn't believe that he could succeed, he lacked the motivation to move out of his comfort zone and try to succeed.

So although his environment had changed, Tzvi lacked the drive to push himself to focus and learn.

I understood that explaining to Tzvi how his new environment was different wouldn't be enough to get him to put in the effort. His struggles had been going on for far too long for him to believe mere words. 

Instead, I had a tutor work with him using a unique approach that focuses on helping a child understand the material through their own unique strengths. Tzvi started feeling that he had it in him and then went to class, ready with his own questions on the material they would be studying. Impressed, his teacher responded in kind, and Tzvi finally tasted some success. He couldn't help but glow.

When I met Tzvi next, I told him that I had spoken to his teacher and how his teacher was tremendously impressed with his questions. With this vital component in place, he was now ready to start believing that this time things could be different. 

And this led to step one of The Growth Cycle. 

Tzvi now had the impetus to push himself to step out of his comfort zone and try.

And when he tried and subsequently succeeded, the cycle of success truly began.

Here is another example of a story where focusing on The Growth Cycle helped another struggling teen. 

Unlike Tzvi from our earlier story, Reuvein* did shine academically. Although he didn't always put in the effort expected of him, Reuvein was still from the top few boys in his class up until ninth grade, where the trouble began. In this new environment, Reuvein began sleeping in and missing mornings. From there, it went to missing the first few classes, and after a few months, he was attending school fewer days then he was out. The school tried using rewards and then threats, but nothing helped. Finally, the school had enough, and Reuvein was told to either pull himself together or find himself a new school.

Reuven's parents and teachers struggled to understand how a teen with such strengths seemed to lack a will to succeed. He appeared to be a successful, but for some reason, he didn't seem to even try.

Meeting Reuvein in my office revealed a teenager who was extremely self-critical. Although others saw him as a success, in his own mind, he was a failure. (Reasons and solutions for toxic self-criticism is a discussion best left for another article.)

So although Reuvein did at times push himself to try to take steps out of his comfort zone (step number one) and even seemed to succeed in doing so (step number two), he never found meaning in his efforts (step number three) because of his self-criticism. Because of this, Reuvein lacked the drive to repeat his successes.

My work with Reuvein had to begin with helping him feel pride in his efforts and accomplishments. Working through this helped ignite the fire within him and helped him start accomplishing and shining. From there we were able to work with other struggles which held him back.

Our emotional struggles can be rooted in innumerable causes. Working on those causes is often vital, but until we have all the components of The Growth Cycle, working on the root causes may simply not be enough.

This article originally appeared in my bi-weekly column in The Lakewood Shopper