Raising Resilient Teens with Sarah Morgan: Beliefs, Failure, and Emotional Strength

Parents, is your teen college ready? Are you feeling overwhelmed, stressed out, or excited about your teen applying to college? Do you know what colleges are looking for? And if your kid gets in, do you know what you'll pay for it? College admission has never been so competitive or expensive. Shellee Howard will take you on a journey to help you and your teen get college ready. Now here's your host, Shellee.

Well, hello parents, this is Shellee Howard, the founder and CEO of College Ready. And today on Parents, Is Your Teen College Ready? I have a great guest, Miss Sarah Morgan. Welcome to the show.

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

So Sarah comes with a wealth of knowledge, but I'm not going to steal her thunder. Sarah, can you tell our listeners who you are and maybe why they might want to listen.

So I come from a background of corporate training. I used to teach leadership, feedback, all that kind of workplace conflict stuff for people climbing the career ladder. And then a few years ago, I decided to make an intentional switch to the next generation. So now I am a, uh, school assembly speaker, and I travel all over the country teaching kids about their emotions, their belief systems, and how to be successful in life. Wow.

So you chose the arena of going into schools and where they're really squirrely. How do you even begin to keep their attention? What is the secret? I just gotta know.

It might be something I was born with. I always had that performer thing, and I'm just like, it energizes me so much to see all the people and the lights and lights, camera, action, the whole thing. I love it.

So I too love public speaking, and so most people are terrified of it. So I thought it would be interesting to hear your perspective. For our listeners who are wondering, well, what is she telling my child when she goes into their school? What would you be sharing? What are your topics on? What do you enjoy talking about? And what can parents What can we expect?

Well, it's all under the umbrella of resilience and recovery, but it can be social resilience, dealing with— the old term was bullies— when people aren't being kind, they're not being nice. But it's not just about when we're dealing with social crises. Life has plenty of crises on its own. You have natural disasters and news from the doctor and all, all kinds of things that just when you think you have everything under control, life throws you a curveball. And so I talk about that. I talk about my story of breaking my neck and dealing with the crisis in the moment of realizing I might be quadriplegic for the rest of, of my life when I got in that accident horseback riding and how we can deal with those things and be prepared to, to deal with those things. When life goes wrong, in other words.

I know the listeners are thinking what I'm thinking. Tell me about the accident. How old were you? How did it change your life? How do you use that story for the better so somebody else can learn from what you went through?

So I was 30, so I was an adult. I'd been riding pretty much my whole life, not crazy jumper going to states, not like 100% horse person, but it had always been a passion and a hobby, and I had maintained that in my adulthood. And, uh, I was, uh, on someone's private property and just met them, but they asked me if I was a rider and I said yes. And they said, you wanna go riding with us? And so many things happened that set my situation up for me having the complete recovery that I had. I was offered a helmet and I took it. As an adult, I'd never been offered a helmet before. I'd been riding for over 10 years and I'm so thankful I was offered that helmet. If it hadn't been for that helmet, I would've had a very different story. But in my school assembly, I, I talk about how it would've been very easy for me to focus on my feelings and my feelings in the hospital were, I'm terrified. I know what this, how bad this could mean. Really getting sucked into that negativity would've been very easy. And one thing I teach the, the students is don't focus on your feelings. Feelings are real and there's nothing wrong with feelings, but they really don't serve— it doesn't serve you to focus on them. It serves you to focus on what you can control and that can change the— now in my situation, it was me having— I'm not gonna say that I recovered the way I did because I had a good attitude, but there were decisions that I made. I made the decision not to take risks. I didn't get up off the ground. I waited for people to come and find me. And part of that is my first aid knowledge. Knowledge is power, but it was also my state of mind. I, my belief was they will come and find me. I don't need, I can just sit back and let other people look for me in this moment. I don't need to go looking for them. And that belief saved me. The doctor said, if you had even tried to sit up, you would've been irrevocably quadriplegic.

Wow. That one decision was massive. So I'm listening. I'm enthralled. These teenagers. Are listening, they're like, wow. So now you've got them listening and they're all in. So now how do you address the emotions, the bullying, the, the, the things people don't even want to talk about?

Sure. Well, one of the things I like to try to cover in every school assembly is the ABC theory of emotions. This is, uh, from Dr. Albert Ellis. Uh, A stands for the activating event. B stands for your belief system. C is the emotional consequence. And often someone disrespects us, bumps us, we have an emotional reaction. We think that A causes C. And, uh, Albert Ellis teaches that it's not the activating event. The activating event comes through your belief system. So for example, I suppose you could use my horseback riding as an example, incident, situation. So I'm in the hospital, I have not gone through surgery yet, so it's still a big question mark what the future holds, but they're making decision about whether to do the, the surgical approach from the front of my neck or from the back of my neck, and they're explaining the pros and cons to me. And it seemed to me their medical speak was clearly indicating that it was a smarter choice to go from the front. So I was kind of surprised they were even talking to me about this. And I said, why are we— am I missing something here? What am I missing? And he was like, well, some women don't want to go through the front because of the scar. So if I had a belief system that I needed to avoid a scar on the front of my neck, at all costs, then apparently some people make the decision to have a different surgical approach because of that belief system. But my belief system was, I don't care about a scar on the front of my neck. So I went with the choice of that surgical approach. That's an example of how your belief system can impact the emotional consequence that, or it is like I teach that it is your belief system. So it happens so quickly. We're aware of the activating event, we're aware of the emotional consequences, and we ignore the fact that that went through our belief system. Other people don't have to bother us. The things that happen in life that are less than ideal, they don't have to ruin our life, ruin our day. We can change our belief system, and that will change the emotional consequence.

It's so interesting. So I've raised 4 children myself, and I used to tell them, don't allow people to rent space in your head. And listening to you, I'm like, wow, I didn't even know what I was talking about, other than all of that negative chatter, that stuff that was going on, and that was distracting them, not anything positive is exactly what you're talking about. I was helping their belief system be a choice. They didn't have to allow it to ruin their day. So I love this. So the question I have is, do you work one-to-one with students or only one-to-many? So do you have a practice that you meet with families or is it mainly you just do uh, big events.

So I'm not a psychologist and I'm not a therapist, but I talk to everybody. So, but my income is from school assemblies.

I love that. So as you're going from school assembly, you meet all kinds of families, there's no doubt about it. I have a program through College Ready called EmpowerEducation.World, and it's student-led. So middle school and high school students lead others to be the change they wish to see in the world. In 2 years, we built it into a nonprofit. And the reason I'm bringing this up is because emotional awareness is huge with this group. And so there are 850 children now that attend our school. They walk 3 hours to— it's in Uganda— 3 hours to school, 3 hours home. And every week we meet And I have this group of students who are trying to help them have a better mindset, be able to talk about their feelings, emotional awareness, so on and so forth. And I remember asking them this question, and now I'm going to ask it to you. Since we're all unique, every one of us, and we come with our own belief system and our own values, and we don't know what those are from without talking to somebody. How can you be careful in what you say and how it's going to be affected, how somebody's going to receive it? That's the word I wanted. Because what you're saying makes so much sense, but I don't know the person receiving it and what they've gone through. So how do you address that?

So I, I don't, I focus on the person on the receiving end that are caught up in their, I was triggered. You're not allowed to bother me. You're not allowed to hurt my feelings. So one of Dr. Albert Ellis's quotes is, there are three musts that ruin our life. I must be perfect. Other people must treat me well, and life must be easy and comfortable.

Wow. And so as a teenager, they're going, yes, what's wrong with that belief? Right? And they're like, wait a minute, did I miss something? Because that's how I believe. So then you take them from here and how do you get them somewhere over here?

So if they are aware enough that life is going to throw curveballs at them, You know, whether it's, again, weather, to take people out of the equation, weather, natural disasters. So maybe 90% of your life is ideal, perfect, but sometimes, maybe once a year, something isn't going to go your way and no fault of yours or anybody else. Let's talk about when that happens. I love Dr. Henry Cloud. And all of the books he's written. And one of the things he gets asked a lot by parents is, what's the one thing that young people should learn? And he says, I would make sure that my child knows how to fail. And then everybody was like, no, no, no, I don't want them to fail. I want them to succeed. And he's like, well, they will in many different ways. They will succeed. But it's impossible to avoid failure entirely. Over the course of a lifetime. And so when that— it's like the Princess and the Pea— and when the one little thing gets in your shoe, what are you gonna do then? Are you gonna be able to handle that, or is it going to derail you because this little grain of salt sand got in my shoe? So, or that you can endure, the more foolproof. He doesn't— I can get— it makes me think of those beautiful examples in sports where somebody trips and falls and has to recover in the middle of the race from way behind everybody else, and they've totally been written off, and then they still manage to win or get second place. Or even— it's not even about winning— even just being able to get back up and get back in the race. That is so Powerful. That's a true athletic champion. And that's what I want to be in my life. And that's what I want for the children that I'm speaking to and raising.

So I'm sure this has been brought up before, but I know I'm curious, how has social media and AI played a part in the emotional whole awareness, whatever you want to call it, of this generation?

So I'm not a researcher, so I'm not quoting my own research, but I think everyone is like me that has lived before social media is aware that the expect— so what I talk about is rigid expectations. This must be this way, my wedding must look like this, and my postage stamp must match the color of my envelope, and that level of expectation is higher than ever before because of so much more constant exposure to each other's lives. So, you know, comparison through the roof. And what I teach is getting away from the, the rigidity. And rigidity shows up as anger. It shows up as anxiety. Think of those two things as being opposite of each other, but Both are examples of, it must go this way or else, or I'm so worried that it's not gonna be this. Backing off from that and letting yourself go into the next phase, which is gonna be more a desperate feeling, a weak, a vulnerable feeling, a fearful feeling. Like, what if that doesn't, like, oh, I don't have control over that. I don't have control over that other person. Instead of, "I must get into this school," it becomes, "What's gonna happen to me if I don't get into this school?" And then get to a place where you can be indifferent. If I don't get into this school, I'll try again next year, or I'll go to another school, or maybe something else will come up that I haven't even thought about yet. And on the total other end of the spectrum is where you're actually bring it. I, if this school, there's a big country music singer that just pulled his song from a Golden Globe competition. I think he's in that category. He's like, I don't even wanna win your award. I'm pulling, I'm, I want you to fail me. I want you to reject me because I just know that there's something out there that's so much better and I haven't even thought about it yet. So I'm not wanting everyone to go from one extreme to the other. We shoot for more lightly held desires. It's okay to want something. It's okay to have a favorite school, school you want to choose you. But what if that doesn't happen? It's not gonna be the end of the world and things can even work out for the better. Wow.

So as a parent, mom or dad, and What advice or recommendations can you offer them to help navigate? Obviously, you can't be at every school across the globe. So if we don't get our kids in front of you, what can we do as parents to help navigate this a little bit easier for them?

So learning about Dr. Albert Ellis and his research, his books, He's very well known with school counselors. So tapping into your school counselor, a lot of school counselors have a very important job. They're spread thin, all this, but they have a lot to offer that parents don't take advantage of because parents are struggling with this as well. Parents are in their own place of rigid expectations. My child must earn this grade. My child must perform this way in sports. I must be this kind of parent for my child. And so I would say your first resource is your school counselor.

Okay.

And then there are books out there. Dr. Brooks Gibbs, friend of mine, Chris Shuf, he wrote a book called The Big Bad B Word, and I'm forgetting the title of the other book that he recently wrote, but there are resources out there. Uh, I do feel like we're still the minority. It's easier to want to focus on self-esteem and self-help. Dr. Albert Ellis said that self-esteem is the worst disease because it's conditional.

Interesting. So for our listeners, I just want you to know that I care about your child's emotional awareness. And Miss Sarah, thank you so much for coming on the show and just letting us know that you have a heart to touch others' lives. And if you feel, parents, that your child is struggling, or that maybe they're on the other side and they want to help people that are struggling, sometimes they don't know how to put it into words. And maybe doing a little bit of reading or talking to the high school counselor sounds like a really great place to start. I, I love your ideas, your examples. So thank you so much for being on the show. It has been a wonderful opportunity to get to know you, and I can't wait for, uh, the opportunity to see you on stage. I bet you're amazing.

Oh, thank you. Follow— I encourage your listeners to follow me on YouTube. My handle is Resilience Recovery, uh, just the two words, but, uh, but Resilience and Recovery is, is my brand.

Outstanding. All right, until next time, parents, please make sure you're having these discussions with your children because that way they will be ready for college and beyond. Well, hello parents! This is Shellee Howard, the founder and CEO of College Ready, and today on Parents, Is Your Teen College Ready? I have a great guest, Miss Sarah Morgan. Welcome to the show!

Thank you, thanks for having me.

So Sarah comes with a wealth of knowledge, but I'm not going to steal her thunder. Sarah, can you tell our listeners who you are and maybe why they might want to listen?

So I come from a background of corporate training. I used to teach leadership, feedback, all that kind of workplace conflict stuff for people climbing the career ladder. And then a few years ago, I decided to make an intentional switch to the next generation. So now I am a, uh, school assembly speaker, and I travel all over the country, uh, teaching kids about their emotions, their belief systems and how to be successful in life. Wow.

So you chose the arena of going into schools and where they're really squirrely. How do you even begin to keep their attention? What is the secret? I just gotta know.

It might be something I was born with. I always had that performer thing, and I'm just like, it energizes me so much to see see all the people and the lights and lights, camera, action, the whole thing.

I love it. So I too love public speaking, and so most people are terrified of it. So I thought it would be interesting to hear your perspective for our listeners who are wondering, well, what is she telling my child when she goes into their school? What would you be sharing? What are your topics on? What do you enjoy talking about? And what parents expect?

Well, it's all under the umbrella of resilience and recovery, but it can be social resilience, dealing with— old term was bullies— when people aren't being kind, they're not being nice. But it's not just about when we're dealing with social crises. Life has plenty of crises on its own. You have natural disasters and news from the doctor and all, all kinds of things that just when you think you have everything under control, life throws you a curveball. And so I talk about that. I talk about my story of breaking my neck and dealing with the crisis in the moment of realizing I might be quadriplegic for the rest of, of my life when I got in that accident horseback riding and how we can deal with those things and be prepared to, to deal with those things. When life goes wrong, in other words.

I know the listeners are thinking what I'm thinking. Tell me about the accident. How old were you? How did it change your life? How do you use that story for the better so somebody else can learn from what you went through?

So I was 30, so I was an adult. I'd been riding pretty much my whole life, not crazy jumper going to states, but not like 100% horse person, but it had always been a passion and a hobby, and I had maintained that in my adulthood. And, uh, I was, uh, on someone's private property and just met them, but they asked me if I was a rider and I said yes. And they said, you wanna go riding with us? And so many things happened that set my situation up for me having the complete recovery that I had. Uh, I was offered a helmet and I took it. Um, as an adult, I'd never been offered a helmet before. Uh, I'd been riding for over 10 years and I'm so thankful I was offered that helmet. If it hadn't been for that helmet, I would have had a very different story. But in my school assembly, I talk about how it would have been very easy for me to focus on my feelings. And my feelings in the hospital were, I'm terrified. I know what this, how bad this could mean. Really getting sucked into that negativity would've been very easy. And one thing I teach the students is don't focus on your feelings. Feelings are real and there's nothing wrong with feelings, but they really don't serve, it doesn't serve you to focus on them. It serves you to focus on what you can control, and that can change. My situation, it would—

it—

me having— I'm not going to say that I recovered the way I did because I had a good attitude, but there were decisions that I made. I made the decision not to take risks. I didn't get up off the ground. I waited for people to come and find me. And part of that is my first aid knowledge. Knowledge is power, but it was also my state of mind. My belief was they will come and find me. I don't need— I can just sit back and let other people look for me in this moment. I don't need to go looking for them. And that belief saved me. The doctor said, if you had even tried to sit up, you would've been irrevocably quadriplegic.

Wow, that one decision was massive. So I'm listening, I'm enthralled, these teenagers are listening, they're like, wow. So now you've got them listening and they're all in. So now how do you address the emotions, the bullying, the things people don't even want to talk about?

Sure, well, one of the things I like to try to cover in every school assembly is the ABC theory of emotions. This is, uh, from Dr. Albert Ellis. A stands for the activating event. B stands for your belief system. C is the emotional consequence. And often someone disrespects us, bumps us, we have an emotional reaction. We think that A causes C. And, uh, Albert Ellis teaches that it's not the activating event. The activating event comes through your belief system. So for example, I suppose you could use my, uh, horseback riding as an example incident situation. So I'm in the hospital, I have not gone through surgery yet, so it's still a big question mark what the future holds, but they're making decision about whether to do the, the surgical approach from the front of my neck. Or from the back of my neck. And they're explaining the pros and cons to me. And it seemed to me their medical speak was clearly indicating that it was a smarter choice to go from the front. So I was kind of surprised they were even talking to me about this. And I said, why are we— what am I missing something here? What am I missing? And he was like, well, some women don't want to go through the front because of the scar. So if I had a belief system that I needed to avoid a scar on the front of my neck at all costs, then apparently some people make the decision to have a different surgical approach because of that belief system. But my belief system was, I don't care about a scar on the front of my neck. So I went with the choice of that surgical approach. That's an example of how your belief system can impact the emotional consequence that— or it is like I teach that it is your belief system. So it happens so quickly. We're aware of the activating event, we're aware of the emotional consequences, and we ignore the fact that that went through our belief system. Other people don't have to bother us. The things that happen in life that are less than ideal They don't have to ruin our life, ruin our day. We can change our belief system, and that will change the emotional consequence.

It's so interesting. So I've raised 4 children now myself, and I used to tell them, don't allow people to rent space in your head. And listening to you, I'm like, wow, I didn't even know what I was talking about other than all of that negative chatter, that stuff that was going on and that was distracting them, not anything positive, is exactly what you're talking about. I was helping their belief system be a choice. They didn't have to allow it to ruin their day. So I love this. So the question I have is, do you work one-to-one with students or only one-to-many? So do you have a practice that you meet with families, or is it mainly you just do big events?

So I'm not a psychologist and I'm not a therapist, but I talk to everybody. So, but my income is from school assemblies.

I love that. So as you're going from school assembly, you meet all kinds of families. There's no doubt about it. I have a program through College Ready called EmpowerEducation.World, and it's student-led. So middle school and high school students lead others to be the change they wish to see in the world. In 2 years, we built it into a nonprofit. And the reason I'm bringing this up is because emotional awareness is huge with this group. And so there are 850 children now that attend our school. They walk 3 hours to— it's in Uganda— 3 hours to school, 3 hours home. And every week we meet, and I have this group of students who are trying to help them have a better mindset, be able to talk about their feelings, emotional awareness, so on and so forth. And I remember asking them this question, and now I'm going to ask it to you. Since we're all unique, every one of us, and we come with our own belief system and our own values, and we don't know what those are from without talking to somebody, how can you be careful in what you say and how it's going to be affect— how somebody's going to receive it? That's the word I wanted. Because what you're saying makes so much sense, but I don't know the person receiving it and what they've gone through. So how do you address that?

So I focus on the person on the receiving end that are caught up in their, I was triggered. You're not allowed to bother me. You're not allowed to hurt my feelings. So one of Dr. Albert Ellis's quotes is, there are three musts that ruin our life. I must. Be perfect, other people must treat me well, and life must be easy and comfortable.

Wow. And so as a teenager, they're going, yes, what's wrong with that belief? Right? And they're like, wait a minute, did I miss something? Because that's how I believe. So then you take them from here, and how do you get them somewhere over here?

So if they are aware enough that life is going to throw curveballs at them, you know, whether it's, again, weather— you take people out of the equation— weather, natural disasters. So maybe 90% of your life is ideal, perfect, but sometimes, maybe once a year, something isn't going to go your way, and no fault of yours or anybody else. Let's talk about when that happens. I love Dr. Henry Cloud and all the books he's written. And one of the things he gets asked a lot by parents is, what's the one thing that, that young people should learn? And he says, I would make sure that my child knows how to fail. And then everybody was like, no, no, no, I don't want them to fail. I want them to succeed. And he's like, well, they will in many different ways. They will succeed. Succeed, but it's impossible to avoid failure entirely over the course of a lifetime. And so when that— it's like the princess and the pea. And when the one little thing gets in your shoe, what are you gonna do then? Are you gonna be able to handle that, or is it going to derail you because this little grain of salt— sand got in my shoe? So the more that you can endure, the more foolproof. It doesn't— I can get— it makes me think of those beautiful examples in sports where somebody trips and falls and has to recover in the middle of the race from way behind everybody else, and they've totally been written off, and then they still manage to win or get second place. Or even, it's not even about winning, even just being able to get back up and get back in the race. That is so powerful. That's a true athletic champion. And that's what I want to be in my life. And that's what I want for the children that I'm speaking to and raising.

So I'm sure this has been brought up before, but I know I'm curious, how has social media and AI played a part in the emotional whole awareness, whatever you want to call it, of this generation?

So I'm not a researcher, so I'm not quoting my own research, but I think everyone is like me that has lived before social media is aware that The expect— so what I talk about is rigid expectations. This must be this way. My wedding must look like this, and my postage stamp must match the color of my envelope. And that level of expectation is higher than ever before because of so much more constant exposure to, to each other's lives. So, you know, comparison through the roof. And what I teach is getting away from the, the rigidity. And rigidity shows up as anger. It shows up as anxiety. Think of those two things as being opposite of each other, but both are examples of, it must go this way or else, or I'm so worried that it's not gonna be this. Backing off from that and letting yourself go into the next phase, which is gonna be more a desperate feeling, a weak, a vulnerable feeling, a fearful feeling. Like, what if that doesn't— like, oh, I don't have control over that. I don't have control over that other person. Instead of, I must get into this school, it becomes, what's going to happen to me if I don't get into this school? And then get to a place where you can be indifferent. If I don't get into this school, I'll try again next year, or I'll go to another school, or maybe something else will come up that I haven't even thought about yet. And on the total other end of the spectrum is where you're actually bring it. If this school, uh, there's a big country music singer that just pulled his, uh, song from a Golden Globe competition. I think he's in that category. He's like, I don't even wanna win your award. I'm pulling, I'm, I want you to fail me. I want you to reject me because I just know that there's something out there that's so much better and I haven't even thought about it yet. So I'm not wanting everyone to go from one extreme to the other. We shoot for more lightly held desires. It's okay to want something. It's okay to have a favorite school, school you want to choose you. But what if that doesn't happen? It's not gonna be the end of the world and things can even work out for the better.

Wow. So as a parent, mom or dad, and what advice or recommendations can you offer them to help navigate? Obviously, you can't be at every school across the globe. So if we don't get our kids in front of you, what can we do as parents to help navigate this a little bit easier for them?

So learning about Dr. Albert Ellis and his research, his books— he's very well known with school counselors. So tapping into your school counselor— a lot of school counselors have a very important job, they're spread thin, all this, but they have a lot to offer that parents don't take advantage of because parents are struggling with this as well. Parents are in their own place of rigid expectations. My child must earn this grade. My child must perform this way in sports. I must be this kind of parent for my child. And so I would say your first resource is your school counselor.

Okay.

And then there are books out there. Dr. Brooks Gibbs, friend of mine, Chris Shuf, he wrote a book called The Big Bad B Word, and Forgetting the title of the other book that he recently wrote, but there, there are resources out there. I do feel like we're still the minority. It's easier to want to focus on self-esteem and self-help. Dr. Albert Ellis said that self-esteem is the worst disease because it's conditional.

Interesting. So for our listeners, I just want you to know that I care about your child's emotional awareness and Miss Sarah, thank you so much for coming on the show and just letting us know that you have a heart to touch others' lives. And if you feel, parents, that your child is struggling, or that maybe they, they're on the other side and they want to help people that are struggling, sometimes they don't know how to put it into words. And maybe doing a little bit of reading or talking to the high school counselor Sounds like a really great place to start. I, I love your ideas, your examples. So thank you so much for being on the show. It has been a wonderful opportunity to get to know you, and I can't wait for, uh, the opportunity to see you on stage. I bet you're amazing.

Oh, thank you. Follow— I encourage your listeners to follow me on YouTube. Uh, my handle is Resilience Recovery. Uh, just the two words, but resilience and recovery is my brand.

Outstanding. All right, until next time, parents, please make sure you're having these discussions with your children because that way they will be ready for college and beyond.