Welcome to Connections Your weekly pānui for tips, tricks, and strategies to deepen your connection with your tween, teen, or adolescent. Kia ora Reader March was quite the month, thank you for taking the time to try out the reflective starters I shared. I loved hearing your stories and celebrating with you. There's a summary of March's emails in this blog post, 'Unlocking Understanding: The Power of Reflective Questions in Parent-Adolescent Conversations' Who hasn’t been here - the...
10 days ago • 1 min read
Welcome to Connections Your weekly pānui for tips, tricks, and strategies to deepen your connection with your tween, teen, or adolescent. Kia ora Reader Time and attention are our most precious commodities, so how can we fit it all in? One way is to listen while we’re doing something else. And to a point, this works beautifully. We can listen while we drive, while we walk, while we eat and while we wipe down the kitchen bench. So yes, some of our listening can be done while we’re paying...
10 days ago • 1 min read
Welcome to Connections Your weekly pānui for tips, tricks, and strategies to deepen your connection with your tween, teen, or adolescent. Kia ora Reader This month we’ve been getting into detail on the art of reflective listening. We’ve tried out a three different sentence starters all useable for changing the way we communicate with our rangatahi on the daily. The recurring piece that follows every single one of these opening lines is the pause. It's powerful! When we pause, we’re waiting...
17 days ago • 1 min read
Welcome to Connections Your weekly pānui for tips, tricks, and strategies to deepen your connection with your tween, teen, or adolescent. Kia ora Reader We’ve had a week of practising, “It sounds like …” and a week of practising, “It looks like …” How are you getting on, Reader? Remember to be compassionate with yourself so far, and curious. We’re giving grace to ourselves as we try this out and create a new habit. I especially love this quote, attributed to Buddha, “First I create my habits,...
24 days ago • 2 min read
Welcome to Connections Your weekly pānui for tips, tricks, and strategies to deepen your connection with your tween, teen, or adolescent. Kia ora Reader How’s the reflective dialogue going? If you had a chance, and remembered …, I’d love to know how it went with the sentence starter, “It sounds like …” And if you haven’t gotten there yet, congratulate yourself for noticing and be compassionate with yourself. Maybe the opportunity didn’t arise, or maybe it came and went and you forgot … either...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Welcome to Connections Your weekly pānui for tips, tricks, and strategies to deepen your connection with your tween, teen, or adolescent. Kia ora Reader The ability to be reflective makes an enormous difference to a conversation. It moves a simple conversation that relates an event to a conversation that has the potential for connection. Follow this conversation between a mum and a rangatahi after the rangatahi had been at a party at a remote location and stayed the night … The dialogue in...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Welcome to Connections Your weekly pānui for tips, tricks, and strategies to deepen your connection with your tween, teen, or adolescent. Kia ora Reader With complete honesty and truthfulness - even though I teach this for a living, I still catch myself slipping up from time to time! Luckily I’m much quicker to notice now and I will pull myself back from the beginnings of a complete whitewash. How do I know when I’ve slipped out of active listening mode? I ask questions that don’t need to be...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Welcome to Connections Your weekly pānui for tips, tricks, and strategies to deepen your connection with your tween, teen, or adolescent. Kia ora Reader When you’re listening to understand, you get to ask questions. You get to be a bit nosey (just enough to keep them talking). There are two sets of questions you can run through. The first set is more of a short answer question - you’re looking for a “yes” or a “no.” This set of questions are called reflective questions and they use the...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Welcome to Connections Your weekly pānui for tips, tricks, and strategies to deepen your connection with your tween, teen, or adolescent. Kia ora Reader The idea of ‘grace’ seems to have rapidly disappeared from our culture. It’s quietly bowed itself out as we’ve favoured busyness, productivity and discipline as our steps to success. So, for those of us who are overworked, tired or just plain EXHAUSTED, I want to offer you a different way of living. A way of living that gets rid of the trash...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read