Create Unshakeable Confidence In A Nutshell

Once you listen to this video, you'll want to watch the 7 Practices Videos here.

Hi! It’s Lynn, your adulting coach.

You’ve all been given a link to the seven practices videos. However, not all of you have watched them. So I thought I'd give them to you in a nutshell, so that you really understood what is in them. And why they're important.

We're trying to create unshakable confidence with our autistic young adults, because that's the first part of the motivation equation. How likely do we think we're going to achieve what we set our goal to?

We multiply that times how important it is to us and then it's divided by how difficult we perceive it's going to be and how far out the goal is.

And that's why we need to start with that first element of Creating Unshakable Confidence. So here it is in three parts.

We need to start first by understanding where we are, both of us, the autistic graduate, and us, the parents or the grandparents or anyone else who loves them all the way down to their toenails.

We want to make sure that they achieve their potential, and they're okay when they're on their own someday.

So we first have to understand what's going on with both them and with us, accept where we are, accept the gifts of autism, the beauty of autism and the challenges that it brings to both parties.

We need to believe that a future is possible, that we can grow into this challenge. We've run into a lot of challenges before why not this one?

We need to connect with each other. We need to really understand the thinking that is creating the confidence, the value, how difficult and how far away our goal is. We need to understand and connect with each other so that we can get a real clear picture of where we are now.

Then we need to anchor in our future. That means to have a clear idea of what we want in each of the 10 domains of our life, and how we want to show up while we're getting them.

And that means we know what our most important virtues are. What are the things that really ring true to us? And that's so that we can show up acting in those virtues. Because the real secret is that the more virtuous we act, the closer to the most important things that matter to us that we act, the less likely we are going to ever get depressed, the more likely we're going to take the actions that we need to take in order to create that future. The clearer we are on it, the more we can actually, you know, describe to someone else what it is that we're trying to create, the more likely we are to create it. Makes sense.

And we need to recognize the emotions that come up whenever we are talking about doing something new. I love the serenity poem. And you know it’s, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change (those are the situation, the facts), the things that I can change (my thoughts and I can change my emotions, and I can change my actions), and the wisdom to know the difference.

So we can't change the fact that we were born with the brains that we were born with and that we are where we are. We certainly can decide to feel those scary emotions that come up when whenever we're trying to do something new and do it anyway.

Then we need to practice. We need to understand that our brain is going to offer us thoughts to keep us safe, to guard our resources and to make sure we don't miss out on any pleasures. That's just the way our brains have worked for these 1000s of years. And that's what's kept us at the top of the food chain.

But we also know that because we're safe 99.99% of the time that we need to do stuff that's scary, spend a lot of our resources and defer pleasure for the long term gain that we're really looking for. So we have to turn our brain upside down and agree with it. Okay, thank you for offering me that thought. But this thought is going to help me get to the next action that I need to take in practice. And that's what we look for.

We're looking for how do we manage our thoughts? How do we get our the things done that we have to get done? And then how do we partner effectively with each other to outsmart the inevitable struggles that are gonna come up that have always come up?

And yet this now we're not dictating what the other person does? We're not saying you have to meet my expectations. Neither one of us are saying that. We're saying we have to meet our own expectations.

And let's set them out here. And let's figure out what the next steps are that we're going to take. Let's create the experiment that we know will give us the data that we know as to whether or not it's working for us or not. We have to do that partnering step together because then we know that we're so much more powerful.

And yeah, we'll probably have to bring in some professionals, a coach, a psychologist, and all the people that can help us navigate this complex goal that we have of making sure that we get what we want, that we create what we want out of our life.

So please go and watch those seven practices videos that give you a lot more information than I'm describing to you now.

But know that I've been on this path. We have six adult kids. All of them are alternative learners, several are autistic and we had to figure this out. And I'm still figuring it we are still figuring this out.

And you know, let's do it together because we're really not meant to do it alone. Bye for now.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai