If You Don’t Break it, You Don’t Have to Fix it!

I will never forget bumping into my children’s former pediatrician who told me that she had left the practice of medicine to become a life coach. When I asked her if she worked with children (she was a pediatrician after all), her response was something like, “Oh, no. Kids haven’t lived long enough to need a life coach. They’re not broken yet so they don’t need to be fixed.”  

When I heard her say that, I was dumbfounded. All I kept thinking was, maybe if kids had a life coach when they were young (or learned certain life-coaching skills) then they wouldn't need a life coach when they got older, when they were “broken.”

If I asked you to write down all the thoughts you had about yourself right now, what would you write? 

You may have some good ones in there but I bet you would have a number of negative thoughts about yourself …

I am disorganized

I am not good with numbers

I am always running late

I am overweight/underweight

I am not as smart as other people

 You may even believe that you are “broken” in some way or another. 

Where do you think these thoughts came from? You were not born with them. 

They developed over time. They came from the things you heard your parents, teachers, and friends say about you. They may even come from other influences such as your environment, something you saw on TV, or something you read or overheard. 

All of these influences created the thoughts you have about yourself. And the older you are, the longer these thoughts have been ruminating in your mind. 

When you think a thought for a long enough time, that thought becomes a belief. 

More often than not, these beliefs are not true. But try and change these thoughts now and it may take a while, as they have undergone the compound effect. You have spent years thinking these thoughts and collecting evidence that they are seemingly true, like a snowball rolling down a hill collecting snow and growing bigger with each roll. 

What happens when negative thoughts take root during a child’s early years? The negative thoughts become patterns which then become habits. 

These habits can be hidden in our subconscious. We may not even know that they exist. Then all of a sudden, the child has habitual negative thoughts that get carried over into their adult life. We all know what happens then… 

Time to call the life coach, or better yet, the therapist.  

What if we could teach children to live their lives in such a way that this never happens to them? What if children learned how to create themselves rather than having to “fix” themselves when they get older? 

This is the mission of the Junior Mind Masters - to teach children that they have the power of their mind, that thoughts are optional and that they have the choice and ability to think anything they want. They can choose how they see themselves. They can create the person they want to be.

I never want to see a child, or an adult for that matter, think of themselves as broken, something that needs to be fixed. Each person is unique and should be celebrated. But to accomplish this, we need to get to the root of the problem. We need to start at the beginning when the seeds get planted.

Let's help children plant positive, productive and healthy thoughts that will grow into positive, productive and healthy beliefs and habits. Here at the Junior Mind Masters, we dive deep into these issues in our monthly blog posts. Please subscribe!