Confidence, Connection, and the One Decision That Changes Everything

Can you hear my dog whining in the background?

No?

Okay. Just me. Rescue with high anxiety. She is top tier whining. It's like she can, she just wants to be right by me. Anyway. All right. Welcome back to The Teenage Guide Podcast. This week is gonna be a little bit different, and I'm really excited to share what I've got in store for you.

Hi, I'm Ashley Chandler, here to guide you to the soul-to-system support you both need to thrive from the inside out.

This is The Teenage Guide Podcast. Over the years, I've done a ton of surveys and asking parents and just noticing patterns with the questions that parents ask me. And even educators ask me about how can I help my kid? Not even so much questions as like, these are the top things that come up again and again and again for what they wanna know how to do or desires. Like at the end of the day, head meets the pillow, what do parents want with their teens? So there's a few things. Number one, you want them to listen to you, do what they need to do, and build trust between you. And I summarize this in essentially confidence as a parent and for your teen to be confident in connection. These 2 topics, confidence and connection, are deeply tied to the facets of parenting, of being a human being in midlife and being a teenager and all the layers of what it means to be alive, right? We want confidence for ourselves. We are still our own people. We are individuals. And being a parent's just one part of the human experience for us, right? We want to feel confident in midlife. We want to feel confident just being our real selves in our personal lives, in our professional lives. And then how does that show up in confidence in parenting is one piece to this. And we want our teens to be confident because we know that When teens are confident and it's authentic confidence, it's not coming from an egoic, I'm better than you place. It's coming from a place of true self-awareness and self-advocacy and having competence around certain skills and in relationships, socially, emotionally, and all the layers that we know how much confidence impacts them. And that's what we want for them too. And we also know that the number one way that we have influence in our teenager's life Is through the quality of our relationship with them. So we want them to listen to us, focus on the relationship. We want them to do what they need to do, focus on the relationship. There's another piece to this that's really important to focus on, and that is skill building. So needless to say, I could talk about confidence and connection all day long for the next 3 months and not run out of things to say about it. And So because of that, I can't put it all into an episode, so I've put it into a class. So this episode is really kind of a mini micro episode giving you a preview to invite you into my Confident and Connected class, which is free. It's about 30 minutes, and it is so value-packed with not only just information, but nudges to get you moving and acting in the way that's really important when it comes to building confidence within yourself as a parent, confidence in your teen, and connection between you. So you've definitely heard me say this before if you've been tuning into all my content for a while, which is The Teenage Guide is a play on words, okay? It has multiple different meanings. I am not a guru at the top of the mountain, and this is not a cult where you need to do everything I say. And I know better than you. Quite the opposite. I am here as a mirror so that you can access your own intuition and wisdom as a parent, what your soul knows to be true, that part of you, that intangible, infinitely valuable part of you that knows what is right and what is real and what speaks to you.

Right.

what you really want. Oftentimes there are a lot of layers that cover that up through conditioning and life. And so I am here as a mirror to remind you and to guide you to become the teenage guide inside your own home. And how you do that is through identity work. You have to shift your perceptions, you have to shift your beliefs and your understanding, and this leads to behavior change. This leads to a different experience. And so inside my Confident and Connected class, I share how to do that. I walk you through some really key pieces of what it means to be the teenage guide. In fact, I focus actually on 3 common mistakes that even the most well-intentioned, most loving parents on the planet And how to shift those into starting to become the teenage guide inside your own home. This goes back to the way that we actually create behavior change or experience change. So in my frameworks and in my work with parents and teens, I infuse a lot of different research and expertise and work that focuses on strengthening relationships and skill building, building confidence and building connection. And one expert who I highly recommend his work is James Clear. He wrote Atomic Habits, and he talks about in Atomic Habits that behavior change is identity change. If you wanna change an experience with your teen or within yourself in any capacity, it starts with how you see yourself. If you want your teenager to be more confident, it starts with how they see themselves. Okay? The way that we feel about ourselves, our perceptions, our beliefs, the way that we feel significant in the world, our values, what all of this is for. What's the purpose of life? What's the purpose of getting good grades? What's the purpose of getting into college, right? We want to get really clear on those answers for ourselves, And we wanna understand our teenagers more. And my Confident and Connected class is a great preview to get you thinking and acting according to how you wanna show up and the kind of experience that you wanna have with them. So again, what does this actually mean? Well, identity is the lens. If your eyes are a camera, right? Your identity is the lens that you're looking through and it changes the filter. It changes what you're able to see, changes what you're able to perceive about yourself, about your role as a parent, about your teenager and what's even possible for you. It's the story that's running in the background. I'm a bad mom. My teen hates me. This is just how teenagers are. We've lost our connection forever. There's no hope. Identity work is about examining those stories, questioning them, and deliberately choosing who you want to be as a person, as a parent, and as a teenager. And when your identity shifts, everything around you starts to shift too. So this episode is a preview of the deeper dive inside my Confident and Connected class. So you can go to theteenageguide.com/confidentandconnected. I've also linked it in the show notes so that you can have the formula, my framework to engineer more confidence and connection for yourself, for your teen, and inside your home immediately. Here's a really important point that a lot of parents miss, which is summer. Now I'm in the United States, and so our summer is beginning. And most parents— summer's like this 3-phase process. In the beginning of summer, kids are burnt out. Kids, young adults, parents, you know, it's like we've been on the hamster wheel of May and we start getting really just burnt out by the end. And so when summer hits, we may have planned a few things, which is great, But a lot of parents skip over the summer months and outsource a lot of entertainment or connection, or, you know, they don't use that downtime intentionally. Downtime is very important in the summer. I'm not saying you need to be go, go, go. What I am saying is that investing in your relationship and in the skills that you're building individually and together is so important, and summer is a prime time to make it real in your own life. It's a real opportunity to invest in yourself, invest in your teen, and it's gonna pay off for life. Oh, I just saw a hawk. That was so cool. That's my mom's spirit animal. Okay, coming back. So, If you were to pause right now and look at your life, you would see that where you are right now is the result of decision-making and the power that a single decision can have over the trajectory of your life. And if you were to examine times when you needed to make a change, what happened right before? Because you have that power right here, right now. So if you're one of those people who consumes a lot of information, I've been guilty of this in the past, podcast binging. I have a lot of podcasts I listen to. I consume a lot of information. On the one hand, this is a beautiful thing. It's beautiful. Love to learn. There gets to be a point when it becomes an excuse and a distraction from taking action and making decisions that will actually move the needle in your life, that will create the change that you genuinely want to be experiencing, right? So this episode today is almost like it's a more, dare I say, aggressive— I don't think aggressive is the right word, but it is a more— in-your-face nudge to say that you have the power to create change by taking what's inside this episode and watching that class. And once you listen and watch that class, don't just do it while you're doing a million other things. Really absorb it, take notes, sit with it, and let it nudge you to create the change that you are dreaming of. Let it go from simply information to changing the dynamic and the experience for you and your teen. Again, theteenageguide.com/class is where you can find it, and I'm linking it here in the show notes. I am so grateful to be here with you. Thank you so much for tuning in, and I'll see you next week.

I know you have limited time and energy, so thank you for being here and kudos to you for investing This time in yourself and your teen. If you enjoyed this episode, please continue the ripple effect and like, subscribe, review, and/or share with a fellow parent who could benefit so more people can find my content. Remember, the number one way that you have influence in your teen or your young adult's life is in your relationships with yourself and them.

So Never doubt how much power you have, because you are the teenage guide too.