It is certainly not unusual for children and teens to struggle both to make friends and to keep them and this can start as soon as they start school with many experiencing great sadness when a friend breaks away and befriends someone else in the class, leaving your child feeling alone and confused. Of course, it can also work the other way. Navigating friendships can be fraught with problems and it’s hard to know how to help. Here are a few ideas of discussions that may be appropriate , hopefully something here will hit the spot.
F – Feel the fear and manage the failure
R – Rapport – matching patterns
I – Intuition – watch the body language
E – Empathy – care about them
N – Knowledge – get to know them
D – Drama Triangle – keep out!
S – Stuff happens – you can only control your response
H – Hold onto your values and be prepared to shifts some beliefs
I – No ifs or buts – just do it!
P – Playful – laugh, life doesn’t have to be dull
Feel the fear and manage the failure
If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.
If you want a different result you (yes – you) have to do something different.
There’s no failure, only feedback – how can you get the learning – look for the positive intent.
Rapport
Choose a topic they are interested in, hobbies, things you have in common.
VAK – match their visual language, auditory or kinaesthetic
Match their body posture, gestures
Match volume, tone,
Intuition
Step into their shoes (not literally) and try to figure out what they want and how they feel.
Empathy
Care about them. This will show in your body and voice tone.
Knowledge
Be curious, find out about them, take an interest.
Drama Triangle
Are you playing the victim, persecutor or Rescuer, step away and take responsibility for your own outcomes.
Stuff happens
Everyone has grumpy days, sad days, silly days. Just shrug it off and let them deal with their own stuff. It isn’t all about you.
Hold on to your values
Your values are what makes you you. They run through you like a thread holding you together. Beliefs change with new knowledge and experiences, be flexible about them, they are not facts.
No ifs or buts
Set your goal and go for it. Excuses simply get in the way.
Playful
Laughter really is the best way to build rapport, it is contagious, people want to be around you when you share playfulness.
In my therapy room I have a tin of Moshi Monsters. I use these to help children and teens talk about what happened with their friends. Because they do not look like real people, they can choose characters to represent them and their friends and I use them to set them up as if they are narrating a movie so I can see what happened just before things went ‘pear-shaped’. We can then discuss what other options were available.
One of the NLP beliefs of excellence is ‘The person with the most flexibility controls the system’ and this is so true in relationships I find.
Another exercise to try is to use Lego to ask them to build a model of friendship.
And you discuss this by using ‘clean language’ asking about what the colours mean to them and what they are expressing in the model.
Then ask them to build a ‘block to friendship’ , what gets in the way of a good friendship. Use EFT Tapping to tap on each element of the ‘block’ model to clear it.
You’ll find detailed instructions on how to do this in my book ‘Empower your kids’