In this episode of the Teenage Guide Podcast, host Ashley Chandler addresses the common parental wish for their teens to be confident and self‑compassionate. She introduces a framework of four "keys" that parents can intentionally weave into daily interactions to help tweens and teens develop authentic confidence: (1) seeing themselves with non‑judgment, (2) feeling significance through the ripple effect of everyday actions, (3) clarifying and respecting personal and family values, and (4) cultivating a sense of purpose that grounds them amid life’s ups and downs. Chandler contrasts authentic confidence with superficial bravado, outlines the negative behaviors that signal a lack of self‑compassion, and explains why adolescence is a critical identity‑formation stage. She shares a detailed coaching anecdote about a mother struggling with her son’s self‑critical sports mindset, illustrating how applying the four keys led to noticeable improvements in his resilience and mood. Throughout, she offers concrete conversational prompts, metaphors (the grapefruit analogy), and practical suggestions for parents to model and reinforce these principles. The episode concludes with a testimonial from the mother and an invitation to join Chandler’s live "Do Listen Trust" class for deeper support.
Chapters
I just want my kid to feel confident. I just want them to feel good about themselves. These are the 2 statements that I hear the most often from parents about their teenagers. So if you're interested in understanding the 4 keys and how to get your tween or your teen feeling good about themselves Liking who they see in the mirror, knowing themselves. I like to say knowing themselves, liking themselves, and trusting themselves when they're by themselves. If you're interested in that, and who isn't, I would say, then you're definitely going to want to listen to this episode all the way to the end. All right, welcome to the Teenage Guide Podcast. I love this topic and I love helping parents, tweens, and teens have more confidence, feel good about themselves. And so this is extremely packed full experience, wisdom, tips. And encouragement and prompts for you to take this one step further. So I love the late, great Wayne Dyer, and I'll never forget, I was doing laundry, endless piles of laundry on a Sunday one time years ago. This must have been like 9 years ago. And I was listening to him while I was doing laundry, and he gave the best Analogy and metaphor for this concept. So I want you to imagine that you are holding a grapefruit and you are squeezing it as hard as you can. You are squeezing that grapefruit as hard as you can. Now, what's coming out of the grapefruit? Because it's already cut open a little bit, so something's coming out, right? It's lemon juice, right? Wait, no. Apple juice. No. Oh yeah, it's grapefruit juice, right? Because what comes out when we're squeezed is what's inside. How we show up to the exterior world is a reflection of what's inside us already. And so we know inherently that it's so important to help ourselves, help our teenagers feel confident. We already know that. We just may not know how, because they are constantly getting messages of how to be, what to look like, how to fit in, how to be accepted, how to feel successful, how to be successful, right? And those are all external things. And so we already inherently know as parents That it's way more important for them to feel good on the inside than it is for them to achieve something on the outside or have someone else's approval. So I was coaching a mom who was so fed up with her teenage son's behavior. And if her son— her son was pretty hard on himself. He played sports and He was really hard on himself if he wouldn't win, if he would lose, or if he didn't do well on something in school. And it was really hard on Mom because she was trying everything that she knew how to do to just get him to feel better about himself, right? To get him to not be so focused on being perfect or looking a certain way, but to actually just feel good no matter what, to embrace failure. And so Mom didn't know how to get out of this cycle, and she just felt stuck. And she felt really sad deep down, but also frustrated because it felt like her son was always playing victim, like he was always— he was never winning in any way. She felt stressed about it. She also felt like she would walk on eggshells a lot with him because she just felt like she needed to kind of shift around his moods. So I worked with her on this. I worked with her on how to be a guide for him to feeling good about himself. And I made a list for you today and just a quick way to think about feeling good about themselves. And so I walked her through what I'm going to walk you through today because I want you to understand what it can look like. If they don't have what I call authentic confidence. Someone can appear confident and have a lot of bravado and kind of ego and be like, oh, I'm the best. We know people like that, right? That's not authentic confidence because the— sometimes the most— almost oftentimes the most confident person in the room is not the person who needs to tell everyone how confident and great they are, right? So here's what it can look like if they don't have that, if they don't have authentic confidence and self-compassion. In other words, if they don't actually feel that good about themselves, it can look like them being hard on themselves. It can look like them being overly just kind of dismissive or distant. It can look like them shutting down and saying, I'm always bad. I'm sorry. I'm always wrong. It can be them being self-critical, not wanting to try new things they don't know how to do, or being hard on maybe you or other people in the family or friends. So here's why it's so important to start to shift this. If you notice some of these behaviors are happening, here's why it's really important to shift the dialogue, the perception around these, and the action that you're going to take in order to to guide them to feel good about themselves. Again, you cannot control the way they feel about themselves, but you can guide them through this work and how you approach them and work with them. So I want you to understand that adolescence is identity formation stage. What they believe about themselves and their capabilities and why they matter really takes shape during this stage as they separate from you. And the key here is to be intentional in the ways you show up with them, in the conversations you have, in the activities you share, in the experiences that you seek out that accentuate these 4 keys to them feeling good about themselves. These are the areas that you actually have control— is in your relationship, how you approach them, the conversations you have. These are the areas that you have control in them feeling good about themselves. So the first one is seeing themselves with non-judgment. So helping them focus on strengths and just clearly talking about areas to grow, areas they want to grow, areas you want to grow. And also highlighting and being able to be aware of qualities that are personal to them, right? The, the personal qualities that we have. For example, Thinking of ourselves as athletic or a quick thinker or observant or the funny one or whatever. Really calling these out, calling out these personal qualities and seeing themselves through the lens of non-judgment. It's not better than, worse than. They're very good at black and white thinking. We want them to start to see the gray area in a human being. And so we want to Practice non-judgment, we wanna practice neutrality, just calling them out, you know, calling out these personal qualities. The next area to focus on is a feeling of significance, not, again, not better than someone else. And I think one of the biggest keys to the mental health crisis in our adolescents is that them feeling significant is wrapped up in things that don't matter. Right? It's in likes, it's in shares, being an influencer, being the popular one, knowing a certain dance on TikTok, having access to certain trends, et cetera, et cetera. None of that stuff matters. None of it matters really. And it actually doesn't contribute. It can be fun, it can be entertaining, but it also can be really detrimental. We do not wanna associate our self-worth or our significance To that superficial stuff. I like to say that everyone is a leader, everyone has impact. Every single human on this planet is a teacher and a student. Everyone creates significance in life, in their own life, if they're paying attention. If you're paying attention, you create a ripple effect, right? I want you to consider like a line of dominoes. That first domino is you. And you create a ripple effect. You make the dominoes go in a cool pattern, a cool shape. That's what you do. You are that first rock that skips and creates like a little ripple effect in the water. And that ripple effect is real. The impact that you have on others in small day-to-day actions, it adds up. And this is what builds true significance, feeling like you matter because you have tangible experiences where you are mattering to other people. You are mattering. You can see or feel or experience energetically the impact that you have on the world around you. This is what builds significance. The next area that helps your tween or teen feel good about themselves is really being aware of your values, right? You've got your family values. Maybe they're try— we in this family, we try our best, we're not afraid of challenges, we keep an open mind, we fail forward. These are examples of family values which you want to get clear on. But also remember that it's natural for them to separate from you in their values and beliefs, and these values and beliefs might differ from yours right now. That's okay. The goal isn't that you're 100% aligned all the time. You know, when it comes to being a good person, that's a value you wanna double down on. But they might have other values or interests or things that they find valuable that you just could care less about or you don't understand. That's okay. The goal here is that you respect each other for exactly who you are. You don't judge each other. This is how they learn to do that out in the world, Think about the polarity and the divisiveness in our country, in the United States today. And I think it's really important because you and your teenager aren't going to agree on everything, that you respect each other, that you practice mutual respect. And the final key to your tween or your teen feeling good about themselves is having an idea of their purpose. Now, I'm not talking about My purpose is to be an attorney when I grow up. You know, I love litigation. No, that is unrealistic. We're talking about deeper purpose around life, and this can infuse into spirituality, but it doesn't have to to be effective, right? To me, everything is spiritual for real. Everything. If I look around and I think about my purpose, and I think about why I'm here. It's to grow in my awareness and my consciousness. It's to fully experience life in this human body and in this personality and to grow through it and to make the world a better place. This is the purpose, and that is deeply connected to my spiritual experience. It doesn't have to be in order to be meaningful. So it could be to make the world a better place. Or to help people, or to live fully, or to love people, or whatever it is. But you want to talk about it. You want to talk about it. You want to ask them questions about it. And it helps ground them at a time that can feel like a roller coaster for them. It helps ground them in the magic of life, the mystery of life, the— you know, life is full of ups and downs. It just is. Right? There's no such thing as totally smooth sailing your whole life. That would be— that's not possible. And so you want to just have dialogue around it and express that and get curious around theirs. And this helps them feel better about themselves when there are bumps. It helps them learn to celebrate themselves when there is good stuff. It helps them learn to be Self-accepting when they are imperfect, which they always are going to be. It helps them look at themselves as their own individual being versus having to be like someone else, right? You know, they think the spotlight is on them oftentimes, and the last thing they want to do is stand out. And at the same time, they want to feel like they matter. And this is how you— Can guide them to feeling good about themselves. So what's— what comes out is what's inside, right? And you want to help them see themselves with non-judgment. You want to help them feel significant through the ripple effect that they create in their day-to-day actions. You want to help see and respect each other's values, get clear on those, and really start to kind of tap into like the purpose of being alive. And just maybe you don't even know, but you lead with with curiosity. You have enthusiasm for life. You allow yourself to feel however you're feeling and grow through it. This helps them feel better about themselves. All 4 of these help them feel better about themselves when the world is telling them otherwise. I have, uh, you know, to close out the story of coaching the mom, and after her applying these principles, she noticed that after a few months' time where she started to be intentional about weaving these conversations in, weaving these kinds of experiences in, she noticed a tangible difference in the way that her son interacted with her after sports practice and the way that he saw things and saw challenges, the way he was showing up as more resilient for himself and less moody. This isn't to say all of a sudden he was this Giantly different person, but the way he saw life and himself was drastically shifting, and it worked. And she actually wrote this, and I wanted to share it with you. When I came to Ashley, I felt stuck in how to help my son feel better about himself. He was extremely hard on himself and me, and so many of our interactions ended in a fight. Or complete emotional shutdown. And when I learned about these 4 qualities, these 4 things about how to get him to feel better about himself, and I practiced building them into our daily life, whether at the dinner table or homework was mounting or there was drama at school, I would have that conversation and I could feel a shift in him. In just a few months, he's seeing himself in a new light and it makes everything better. Now, I love sharing stories of real-life scenarios of people that I've, I've worked with, and I want you to remember that the number one way that you have influence in your tween or your teen feeling good about themselves is in your approach and inside your relationship. So if you'd love even more support Don't miss my next Do Listen Trust class. It's happening live each week through this back-to-school season. It's back to school here in the United States, but maybe where you are it's not. No matter where it is or what timing it is for you and you're hearing this, I am hosting this Do Listen Trust class live each week through this season. So the link to register is in the show notes, and you can also head to theteenageguide.com/class. Or just head to my website, theteenageguide.com. Never underestimate the power you have. You were made for each other.
