Quick Overview of Parent As Coach Summer Camp

Hi there, it's 11 o'clock. And I'm Lynn Davison, your adulting. Coach. Today, I want to give you a quick overview of Parent As Coach Summer Camp and answer any of the questions that you might have. Plus, I address the questions that I've already heard from others.

So I can't wait to tell you about this camp and because I really do believe that these what I'm going to teach you at camp are the five most important, most important tools, skills that we need to know as parents to help coach our autistic high school graduates to practice confident adulting. That's what we're after. It's confident, adult, autistic adulting so that when they're on their own, they can self advocate for what they need and for what they want. So this is what we're after. So let's just break it down really quickly.

Confidence is an emotion. It is created by our thoughts.

No one or nothing outside of us affects our confidence. It's inside of us. It's created by the thoughts that our brain offers us.

That is the best news because we can manage our thoughts. We can become aware of them, figure out which ones aren't working for us, and then decide if they need to be changed.

Maybe they don't. In fact, you know, more than 99% of our 70,000 thoughts every day don't need to be changed. But some of them do because they're not producing the results that we want.

So we figure out how to live up to them so that we can and when we practice that over and over again, it helps us become more confident.

It's really acknowledging that life is 50/50 that are parts of us that we are proud of. And there are parts of us that are the dark side of us. And we can work with all of it.

That yin yang suit symbol has been around for centuries, because this is the human condition. And that 50/50 tells us that there are going to be things that we're going to interpret as not so great, or we're gonna interpret as wonderful and we need to have the entire human experience because that's what helps us grow.

Being autistic however, means that we come with a different brain, in most cases, we have a very active amygdala. In fact, some of the research that they're now just recently publishing shows exactly the size and shape of an autistic brain's amygdala and how it differs from someone who doesn't have autism. So there's some biological evidence. This is true, but we didn't need that biological evidence means seeing it our whole lives. While we've been parenting our autistic young adults.

They tend to be more fearful than others. Their confidence gets rocked easier than others more easily than others does, because their thoughts can be influenced so much by that middle brain that is just trying to keep them alive. Just trying to keep them safe. Just trying to reserve to reserve all of their resources and just trying to keep them in the immediate gratification instead of the long term gratification.

And that's why it's hard or harder for autistic people to learn because they're in that fearful state a lot more. And that makes sense. Fearful people have a harder time learning because they can't access that prefrontal cortex, where they do.

And what about adulting what is it that we're going after?

We're going after helping them practice the set of mental tools that help them manage their thoughts, their emotions and their actions, so they can achieve goals set by them for them. That's what we're after. Is that kind of adulting is that's what they're gonna need when they are on their own.

So how are we going to do that in Parents As Coach Summer Camp? First, we're going to talk about connection because, after all, a segment it's our connection with our young adults that we value the most and that will help us them influence them the most and when we do, we're influenced most by someone that we know like and trust and that connection is critical.

We also need to connect with ourselves because I've got, you know, in my opinion, this is the Ivy League school of parenting that we've been in. It takes more thought, it takes more strategy than parenting a child who just goes with the flow who fits nicely into that bell shaped curve where everybody you know, where the schools are oriented to where the doctors understand where everyone is aiming for.

But our kids tend to be more on the tail end of the bell shaped curve and enough characteristics and enough human characteristics that we notice. And then it does make life more difficult for them. So how do we connect with them?

Then we'll talk about identity. In other words, what are our expectations for ourselves? What are their expectations for them?

I read recently on a post by an autistic young adult, that authenticity seems to be one of the characteristics that she identified, I believe that was her pronoun, that she identified as so important to her. I have when I thought about that I in all the autistic people that I know and love.

You know, authenticity really is a key identifier.

They you know, autistic people just can't stand being anything other than themselves. And I get it totally. I get it. It makes perfect sense to me. We do not want to put that round peg into that square hole anymore.

Finally, I'm sorry, next, the thoughts. Really it is about managing our thoughts, because they inform our emotions and our actions. And we're going to talk about the motivational triad, the intentional motivational triad, and the STEAR Mapping tools. Then we'll go into action. And finally people so let me just go through exactly what we'll talk about in the art of adulting.

In I'm sorry, in Parent As Coach Summer Camp, and of course when you're in parent of coach summer camp, you also get an entire month in the art of adulting course. So that enables me to give you the kind of personalized coaching that you need. That is going to be so valuable to you because who else knows this other than another parent who's gone through this before?

So again, back to the connection, we talk about the default motivational triad and why that makes it so difficult for our autistic young adults to learn. And then the skill reflective listening, this is how we get connected in a firm way. Because reflective listening helps them feel seen, safe, and secure, so that they can go out and do some of those scary steps that are going to create the life that they love.

We move into identity where we create our essence acronym. This is how we set expectations of ourselves, and how we quickly recenter on those things that are most important to us. And that's what matters, that authenticity, because we want to be the person that we were meant to be.

Then our thoughts, we're going to notice them. A lot of times they're on default anyway. They're just so automatic. We don't even think about and what then we're going to also once we've noticed them, we're gonna question do they create what we want?

And, okay, we have to feel the feeling anyway. We really do have to know that our thoughts are creating those feelings and by feeling them in our bodies, we can process through them, get to the other side, where we can then turn on our brain, our prefrontal cortex and solve whatever problem is in front of us. That how we manage through our feelings.

And how we can avoid those meltdowns. I mean, we've all had them, our kids aren't the only ones.

Then, in the action, part of the past two confident autistic adults. We want to do everything we can to maximize motivation. So we understand where our default, we talked about where the default motivational triad is. And now we're talking about the intentional motivational triad.

How we have to do something totally counterintuitive. In order to get what we want. 

We move to the motivation equation that tells us the four parts of motivation, and hmm, they are all based on how we think. So that's the best news because we can change how we think. All of our thoughts are optional. So we can change how we think to maximize the importance, our confidence that we can get what we want, and minimize how difficult we think it's going to be and the distance between us and the prize.

That's when we break things down into smaller steps. Because incrementality is the attitude we have to take. Every step matters. We don't have to take giant leaps toward adulting in order to be successful.

In fact, if we really want to make it stick, doing small steps and practicing them over and over again, is what really cements a learning in our brain.

Finally, we know that our kids are going to be interacting with other people, not family members, especially in the workplace. So we want to encourage their flexible mindsets, by helping them recognize how other people think. That the situation that stimulated the thought in their mind is not probably not, very much likely not the thought that the other person has in their head. And so we want to make them aware of the STEAR Maps the situation, thoughts, emotions, actions, and results that the other person has, so that they can take that perspective on and we use the same tool that we use to recognize our own our own thinking.

And then by creating collaborative solutions together, we both are facing the same problem. We have our STEAR Map, they have theirs. Now let's do an experiment. Let's use the scientific method that we all learned in school, to experiment, gather data, do the experiment, gather the data and figure out what worked well for them and what didn't work well and what we want to repeat.

That's how we collaborate and if they can do that at home with us, over and over and over again, if they can practice that with us, then we know that they can also take these skills into other environments, especially the work environment where you know, they're going to face some challenges.

So those are the five parts of Parent As Coach Summer Camp. I really hope that you'll join me there. Just click on the link and sign up.

Only $47 which is $50 off my monthly fee for not only five days of live training, but also an entire month in the Art of Adulting where we give you personalized help every step of the way. It's a done with you solution, not a "just go take a course and figure it out." We'll help you every step of the way.

Speaking of here's the here's the question that because every step does matter.

So here's a question that I get is what if I can't attend at one o'clock Monday through Friday Eastern Time?

The answer is I've got you. No worries. We're going to record every session and post it inside the parent as coach summer camp course. You'll be able to access it, look at it and submit your homework each night.

We will send you you will have the link to a personalized video by me and with help from my coach Carol going over all of the things that we would like to offer to you to consider in your situation.

Please take the time to do this work with us. We know it will make a huge difference in your life and in your family's lives. We've seen it happen in the current members of the Art of Adulting I can't wait to see you there.

Bye for now.