Today Dr. Thayne addresses one of the most universal issues families are dealing with today . . . anxiety. He shares three principles for building confidence in our teens and in ourselves as parents. He also recommends you watch this classic family movie that will illustrate these tips beautifully.
Today Dr. Thayne addresses one of the most universal issues families are dealing with today . . . anxiety. He shares three principles for building confidence in our teens and in ourselves as parents. He also recommends you watch this classic family movie that will illustrate these tips beautifully.
Welcome to not by chance the podcast. I'm Talmage, Dr. Thayne son, and podcast manager. Today, Dr. Thayne talks about confidence, one of the most important things that young people can learn nowadays, and something that a lot of young people don't have any of his speaks of some of the key principles that you can use to help your team build that confidence and self worth.
Dr. Tim Thayne:Everybody, thank you for joining me today on this not by chance podcast. This is Tim Thayne, I am excited about today I'm excited about the topic I'm gonna share. The title I'm giving it is dust off your dancing shoes, three ways to build confidence. And you're probably going what? What's that mean? I've got a couple of stories I'm going to share with you. Some of the topics we're going to hit very soon here is going to be the epidemic that we see with teens and young adults who right now are frozen with fear, or in a real dearth of, of confidence in themselves. I want to go back in time a little bit and share a movie with you that that you can watch as a family that illustrates this, this confidence. And then I'll give you three ways to build confidence in yourself or your son or daughter. But before I get into that, let me share with you just a little bit of what's kind of happened to me over the last little while. This last year, I talked to a mother yesterday. And she said the last 18 months. So this all her her issues and challenges really started before COVID hit. But she says the last 18 months have been hell. And she said that three or four times during our call, you can tell it's just been a rough, rough time. And I think we can all relate to that. But this last year, including COVID, I actually had surgery during that time was a rough one for me as well. And I noticed that confidence, you know, that's a topic for today, he really can ebb and flow in our life, you know, our health can really affect our confidence. And, and also, we might have some false confidence and find out maybe we aren't as good as we thought we were. But I think that that when I when I just kind of give the background for what I think about confidence is that the best kind of confidence that we can have comes from feeling of sense a sense of self worth. The reality is that each person is special. And they need to know that inside. They need to know that they are special. No matter what it is they they do. There's something innately innately amazing about that each and every person and that includes each of us, even ourselves when we can't find that. But for me back to kind of the story. I've aged over the last little while and I think with my health issues, I started getting some neck problems, some shoulder problems, I messed up my knee. I don't know if I mentioned in a previous podcast but we adopted a couple Mustangs and those Mustangs have been a lot of fun to work with, but they they aggravated a knee injury pretty seriously and and so I'm tentative on that and so it's just the way I walk looks like I don't have confidence the way all of that is affecting my my sense of confidence. One thing I do have though, I do know that you know I'm of worth and so I have that I have that basis, but my confidence has has been shaken. So what I decided to do, and it really helps when you have a doctor that says Tim you need to exercise like your life depends on it. And when that kind of hits you you go, I need to change I can't just work all the time or you know, neglect my my body and all of that I need to pay attention to this. And so I began to acquire some gym equipment. I turned turn part of our barn into a gym so that that I couldn't have that excuse that I had in place to exercise. Another thing that happened is I I went and got a jump rope and not just a flimsy little one. I started out with that but I actually ended up with a really really nice jump rope one that has some weight to it so exercises you more and and I started to try and do this jump rope and I'm just going to share with you kind of my experience with that. I used to jump rope when I was young. I used to like that. I don't know if some of the older listeners out there. Remember the when the betta jump rope came out it was plastic kind of pieces like an inch long around the rope. And that came out when I was a kid. And I remember really thinking I was pretty good at that. And, and that was maybe the building block of a little bit of my confidence way back then. But I tried this jump rope, you know, recently, and I made it like 30 seconds max and I was exhausted. By the way, it's amazing exercise, if you're looking for something to do that, it's very inexpensive to get the equipment for. But because of this, I guess, feeling that I had to do something for my health, I didn't like the feeling I had at the end of that 30 seconds being totally exhausted. But But I knew I needed to keep with it. And so I have, and it's just one more little teeny evidence that that that we whatever it is we persist in becomes easier. And I'm trying to remember who said this, it's not that the nature of the thing changed at all, it's just that our capacity to do it improved or increased. And so our, our ability to actually perform that it gets easier. Yesterday, I did two and a half minutes, stopped and rested for a minute, two and a half minutes, rested for a minute, and then two minutes and 50 seconds. So over the course of 10 minutes, I rested for two minutes and jump rope the rest. I was pretty proud of myself. Now. That's a well earned set of you know, little little boost in confidence around my physical abilities that maybe I'm not over the hill, maybe I can get better at this. Now let's get to, to some of the, you know, think about the the epidemic of anxiety in our world today. And why is that it's almost you know, it's a phenomenon that's happening in in just great numbers right now, where people are struggling with self confidence. I think you could also say they're struggling with courage, because they're not maybe putting themselves in difficult situations where they think they might fail. Because it's scary to fail. I think it's it's hard to push ourselves not just, you know, physically into some of these things, but emotionally and mentally to do that. And so the natural thing to do, unless we have this kind of thirst for self improvement or feeling better about ourselves is maybe to withdraw from those things that would stretch us like that. The other phenomenon going on right now that I think is contributing to this, this kind of spiraling down, and then spiraling down again, and then down again, instead of recovering, I mean life is kind of built out of experiences of maybe having some dips, and but usually a recovery. And when people are losing self confidence because they spiral down. And instead of recovering, they spiral down again. And again, maybe because they don't have the tools. Maybe they don't have the support, or the strategies or the the willpower the know how whatever it might be. But instead of recovering, they spiral. I think some of the contributing factors to that, for young people today are lots of mechanisms to numb out instead of, you know, realize, Hey, I've spiraled down, I don't feel good. And he do something different in my life in order to feel better. So instead of doing that different thing, there's lots of ways to kind of forget the fact we feel crappy, we feel bad. And that could be it could be a gaming addiction. Could be a pornography addiction could be substance use. It could be you know, just a lot of a lot of things that keep us from thinking about maybe where our life is, whatever that might be. And unless we have other people in our life kind of helping us not go down that path, either by helping us get inspired about something else, and move forward and do something that's going to grow us and build us. Or in some cases parents have to put restrictions on some of these things so that they don't become the go to numbing agent in their life. And that they can be uncomfortable in that situation and go you know what, I don't like the way I feel. I need to turn it around. The fun movie I want to share with you. Have you ever watched the movie Napoleon Dynamite? I don't know the year This came out. But you I didn't realize how profound and amazing that movie was. Because it's, it's silly, it's incredibly silly. And if you're in the right mood, you will laugh your head off. If you haven't watched it for a while, go back and watch it. This is one of those movies, you could watch multiple times. And it never really gets old. Unless you just don't like that kind of humor. But I'd say if you don't like the humor, maybe you weren't born in the 80s or something, because that shows all about the 80s. And some funny stuff around that. But so this is about a kid who is what others would call a nerd. Okay. He likes to draw, he has no friends. He has this kind of crazy home life. He's not athletic, he gets picked on all of these kinds of things. Mark his life. And that's kind of what what you see in the first part of this movie, actually, all the way through it. But he makes friends with a guy named Pedro. And Pedro is new to the school. But he has this confidence to ask out the pretty girl to the dance and to run for student council. I think he wanted to be president or the student body president. And this another thing about, about Napoleon. So these two are quite opposites, in a lot of ways. Napoleon, he couldn't ride his bike off jumps, he failed at karate in the movie. He couldn't catch the football his uncle would throw at him. But he did find an old videotape. pneus is kind of an interesting thing. Because this is a shift that happened in his life. He found an old videotape at a thrift store and started to learn some dance moves at home. He do this just in front of the mirror in his bedroom, all by himself, because that's probably the only place he really dared do it. But in the final scene, Pedro learns that to run for class president he needs to have a talent to perform in front of the whole school. Problem is he doesn't have a talent. So Napoleon decides that he will step in at that immediate moment and does the talent for him. And what he does is he dances he walks out on stage in his Vote for Pedro t shirt, and he has moon boots on. At first everyone is hesitant, but then they start to clap, then cheer then give a standing ovation. Pedro smiles for the first time in the whole movie. And and the Polian goes from this guy that you you really don't know if he has a single talent, to rhythm, and movement and energy and topics that is just amazing. And it came as he was playing the music, and he had rehearsed this many, many times. So if you haven't seen this, please go look it up on YouTube under Napoleon Dynamite dance. Look for the some of the views. I mean, a lot of people try to replicate his dance, but nothing's like the real thing. So look for the one with millions of views. Most kids today struggle with their self worth and confidence. Not even what others think about me, but they lack confidence in themselves. They definitely worry about what other people think about them, but they lack confidence in themselves. There is an ever shrinking of their world as they do this. They start to pull inward, they start to withdrawal from friends, they start to spend more time in the room than outside of the home. They start to avoid things that scare them. And like I mentioned in the beginning there's a lack of bravery. You might see some kids out there that act cocky and they're out there for sure. But I think there's there's more kids these days that that maybe are on the other side of this continuum where they have no confidence. Now I think we can remember why we might feel that way if we just think back how hard it was to do something when we're new at it. So it's easy to have empathy of whole remember, you know, instead of just thinking come on just to have confidence son or daughter, you know, remember what it was like to try and do something for the first time and how scary that was. Especially things like dancing where we feel so vulnerable. And, you know, how are we going to how are we going to be perceived by other people and it really important thing so as you're helping have people around you develop confidence, remember, empathy. That's step number one. Another one is then to another tip is to stick with it long enough. So do what you can to stick with something yourself long enough, and help other people do the same, that they start to be able to measure progress, they get to see that while I'm getting better and better and better, like my jump roping, at this point, I think I'm pretty good at it. And I want to just improve on myself and not competing against anybody else, but on myself. And that's the third tip, you know, look at as you measure progress, compete with the with yourself, keep getting better and better and better at it. And you'll start to connect the dots with with pushing myself in uncomfortable ways, leads to improvement in those areas. And actual, it becomes easier and easier and easier for me to do. We need to help our kids take on some hard things, maybe in small dose doses at first, like Napoleon dancing in his own bedroom, until they can build that confidence too. Would you please let me know what you're doing to help build confidence in your kid. And and in what area of life you're helping them build it in? Email me at Tim at homeward bound.com I'd love to hear from you on what it is you're doing. So that I can share that with other people. One of the things I'm going to be doing soon I work with in my church, I work with some of the young men in our area, our neighborhood. And I'm noticing this lack of social because of the pandemic and everything else. I'm going to invite my dance partner from my BYU ballroom days, and ask her to come here to the barn and work with the young men. And she's got this incredible ability to help people feel comfortable, she's enthusiastic, she, you know, whatever, she, she's extremely good. She's a professional at dancing. And what I want to do is just help them feel comfortable moving their body to the music a little bit. And I'm going to do my best to help them forget about what other people think. And just start doing a few things like that. Ultimately, I hope this leads to a an experience at a dance in the near future. There's a girls choice dance coming up, there's prom coming up. And I want them to be able to go and have some fun and not be so worried about. I don't know what I'm doing out here. But that's the goal. Share with me if you will, some of your ideas what you're doing. And let's see if we can help some of the youth young people in our lives, our children, the other people around us to build this all important. First, self worth and then confidence