#83 | How Parenting as a Life Coach and Encouraging Self-Coaching Helps Autistic High School Graduates Accelerate Adulting Actions
Jun 21, 2022Watch the webclass, "4-Part Roadmap to Encourage Adulting Actions."
Download, "The Quick Start Guide to STEAR Mapping"
RESOURCES
- LivesInTheBalance.org by Dr. Ross Greene
- William Stixrud and Ned Johnson, THE SELF-DRIVEN CHILD
Here's how parenting as a life coach, and encouraging self coaching helps autistic high school graduates accelerate adulting actions. I'm Lynn Davison, your adulting coach.
This video was inspired by a mom at Parents of Adults with Aspergers on Facebook. She says that her son has failed the behind the wheel driver's test. He's angry about it. He's tried it three times. The examiner noticed her son's anxiety. Now he's angry about it and he resists getting a job until he has passed his driver's license exam. So he's gaming a lot. He's lashing out at family members. He sanitizes everything. And he argues with anyone who makes any suggestions or advice or criticizes anything that he's doing.
Now what? We've been there. We're all there actually. Probably. Right now. I have a solution for you that has four parts. And it involves creating a unique life GPS for your autistic young adult. It's customizing the approach to life so that we can help them find solutions that work for them. All those traditional educational processes had to be accommodated for our autistic young adults. And I argue that we have to have them self advocate for the accommodations that they need in their adult life. And that's what I help do at The Art of Adulting and here's how.
We look at four paths and decide what we want to do in each of the four paths.
The first one is the identity path. This is where we clarify who we are at our best to find peace and make progress in pieces. That's when both parents who are now parenting as a life coach and the autistic young adult creates an essence image of who they are at their best.
That essence image is compiled of the virtues that matter most to both of them. And it's put together in an acronym that will help them center themselves whenever there's a triggering event in their life. And that's what we can all use because I've been triggered recently and I've watched my autistic young adults get triggered as well. And I know that having that essence image helps me center myself back and learn from whatever adversity I just experienced, so that I can go forward with a better solution.
So let me just go over the next part, which is that we need to use our mind to train our brain to work better for us. So let's do that. That's when we actually become much more aware of our thoughts and how they're creating our life and how they all pour into a unique life GPS that we create together.
Then we self assess our actions on a weekly basis or as frequently as we can get to it. It helps our brain realize that we're making progress in little steps. And there's always improvement opportunities in our lives for the way that we coach our young adults, and for the way our young adults take adulting actions. That's just the way of life.
So let's start first with the identity piece, because as William Stixrud and Ned Johnson said in THE SELF-DRIVEN CHILD, "Our role as adults is not to force them to follow the track we've laid out for them. (We tried that in school and it didn't work.) It's to help them develop the skills to figure out the track that's right for them." So well said.
So how do we do that? Well, we take on the role of the life coach, we encourage our young adults, we warn them of the risks that are out there because we've had many more miles on our tires than they have. So we have some wisdom that it would behoove them to to take advantage of.
I mean, we really do want to give them our best thoughts because we have their best in mind, always. In fact, we're probably the only people on the planet who can say that 100%, that we know that we have their best interests in mind.
And then third, we want them to consult us when they struggle. To do that we have to maintain a strong connection.
So those are our three goals: to encourage, to warn and to be consulted. It's interesting that they are the same roles that the Queen of England has for the United Kingdom. I can tell you more about that at another time. But I really believe that those three roles are the roles of the parent, the parent coach, the life coach, who's the parent who's going to help our autistic young adults accelerate their adulting actions.
What's their role? Their role is to become an adult and practice adulting actions. That is practicing this set of mental tools that help them manage their thoughts, emotions and actions, so that they can achieve goals set by them for them.
So that's their role they need to take on the adulting role. And when they do that they take responsibility for their thoughts, emotions and actions. That's how we move from emotional childhood to emotional adulthood. It's when we take responsibility for what our thoughts are creating in our lives.
Okay, so now that we know what we want to do, and we have a method for doing that, setting that essence image, putting it in place, knowing that that's what's going to guide us and it's customized to each of us to the adult and to the autistic young adult.
Then what we really want is to nurture the mindset that's going to help us grow. We want to notice when our brain is spinning in negative thinking, and we want to stop and just notice that but don't push back on it.
We're in a spin cycle like we have when we're doing our wash and we can't distinguish one thought from another until we slow things down.
And then we give ourselves compassion. We say, "Things are going a bit rough for you today." And just notice that that's what's happening.
When we acknowledge the feelings that we have, that's when we can move from that flight or freeze midbrain to our frontal lobe or our prefrontal cortex where we can solve problems.
That’s the tool we want them to use, because that's all well and good, but how? Here's how.
We slow things down enough to notice the situation, which is always outside of our control, the neutral facts, the things that we cannot change and our thoughts, emotions and actions.
Our T E A (our thoughts, emotions and actions) are our choice, and they are what create the results in our lives. So there's a gap between the situation and our thinking, and in that gap lies our power to choose.
When Viktor Frankl was in a concentration camp in Germany and lost his pregnant wife and nearly all, if not all of his family members, he was forced to use the experience to learn this very key concept. That gap between our situation and our thoughts about it, is the one place that we are in control and that no one else can manage for us. And that's both wonderful good news and a huge responsibility.
So let's slow things down and use the STEAR map to help our autistic young adults coach themselves on what's going on. While we of course are using it to coach ourselves on what's going on so that together, we can struggle, share and connect on what it's like to be an adult in the 21st century.
Then we move into the action path, and that's when we take our lives and we look at each of 10 domains. We say okay, what do we want in each of those 10 domains?
So in the energy domain, we're looking at how much do we want to have in our bank account? And what kinds of financial tools do we want to have?
What's going on with food? How are we fueling our brain and our mind?
And how are we strengthening our mental health and our physical health? We want to look at those domains because if we don't have the energy for our life, many of the other things can't be accomplished. So we want to really maximize the amount of energy that we have so we can create the life that we love that works for us.
Then we move into the work domains, what's going on in our space at home, and how are we offering that to others? What kind of jobs are we doing to create what we want to put out in the world. Not just to fund what's going on but also so that the many hours that we spend at work are spent doing something that we really find value doing.
Keeping is just keeping track of all the things that there are and like there are so many of them (computers, cell phones, cars and clothing) and trying to get all that organized and trying to be as efficient as possible with all those things, while minimizing our footprint is what I think we are all trying to do these days. That's the keeping part.
Then the love aspects of learning. Learning fuels us if we love what we're learning. That also includes lots of the gaming that they're doing because they're learning a lot about how to play those games, and learning from podcasts or YouTubes, or whatever shows that we like, those are all the chosen inputs that we allow into our life.
Relationships because no one succeeds alone. We need to encourage the skills building in that area so that there's more reciprocity and more perspective taking happening.
And then the last domain is the virtues. How do we want to show up so we're more consistent as the person that we want to be.
That sounds kind of fluffy. But actually, the research suggests that if we are acting in a way that isn't consistent with the virtues that we value, and we're evaluating ourselves negatively, that can put us into a depression dip. So we want to pay attention to the virtues in our life.
So let's put together a plan that looks at what we've already created and what we want next. And then what are we willing to do to get it?
Also in the action steps, this is when we want our moms and dads and grandmas and grandpas and aunts and uncles and other interested family members, even if they're unofficial family members. We want them to help create proactive solutions with our autistic young adults. We want them to learn how to do this as well, because this is what they're going to need to do for the rest of their adult life, with the people at work and with the people that support them, and with the people that they care about. So creating proactive solutions is outlined beautifully at Ross Greene's livesinthebalance.org.
It's when we start with just the facts, then we figure out what their STEAR map is first, then we share ours and we make sure that we're short and clear. And then we agree on what are the next steps that we're willing to experiment.
So this is the next tool in the actions category because we really need to agree on what we're going to do to help them and what they're going to do to create the life that they love. And then we need to move on to the people part of the four paths, which includes reflective listening. This tool makes all the difference in the kind of life coach you will be for your autistic young adults. And if you can get them to practice it, it will be an awesome tool that they can use to develop a perspective of where the other person is coming from.
This is when we say back in a declarative statement, for example, "It seems like you're upset because you didn't pass your test." or "It seems like you're upset because you're worried about getting sick." That's when we observe that hand washing and sanitizing. They might be concerned about getting COVID.
We need them to know that we see them. We need them to know that they're safe sharing what's going on with them. We need them to feel soothed in our presence so that they can then develop the security to ask us for help.
And then as they develop that skill of asking and advocating for themselves of what it is that they need, both in terms of accommodations and other forms of support, then they can take that out into the work world and into the relationship making world and use those skills to create income and create connections that will create that adult life that they're looking for.
And one way to make sure that we connect is by using more declarative language. Declarative language is a game changer. It suggests that when we make statements where we comment or describe what's going on inside us or something that we're observing, when we give praise, when we think aloud and show them how we're trying to struggle with our own problems, that helps trigger the kinds of thoughts, the thinking process. It encourages that thinking using that prefrontal cortex and encourages practicing executive skills, planning and organizing. It's the key people skill that we need to practice. And we need to encourage our young adults to practice so that we form connections with the people who are going to help us with exactly the right help at exactly the right time that we need it.
So that's a brief overview of what we do in The Art of Adulting with those four paths, and I hope that this would be helpful to our mom who's struggling to figure out okay, now that we have a lot of these issues going on, let's go back to her thoughts. You know, he's failed the driver's test. So that's a situation. How's he thinking? Feeling? What is the thoughts, emotions and actions associated with that event that are causing the results that he's getting? It sounds like he's angry, and it must be because he feels like he really wanted to pass that test and didn't. His actions are refusing to do anything and he's doing quite a bit of escaping and buffering away from feeling the failure feelings. I'm sure that he has the shame and the blame, that it sounds like might be going on. And then how can we shift that thinking? How could he think that we would still be true to him? He shifts his thinking so it could produce a better result. And, you know, the concerns that he has about getting ill and we all have those concerns. The people skills that he needs in terms of arguing with everybody.
I'm hopeful. This is an approach that we've used in my family. This is what my clients have used, and they say is successful for them. And I'm really hoping that this approach will help our mom who is just ready for a plan for all of this. Because I'm sure she's tried a bunch of other things like therapists and classes and social skills.
What we found in our family was that, sure we're going to access professionals who do have specialties in this area. We had a wonderful Driver's Education one on one teacher who helped them develop the confidence that they could pass the exam over a full year of one-on-one drivers training. So we're going to access those people and we're going to also be the life coach that can help follow up and reinforce and encourage the practice of those skills that are taught.
That's when we're driving around with them practicing (that sounds like a life coach type of thing to do) encouraging, making declarative sentences, sentences and statements, so that they can really trigger what's going on in the thinking part of the brain and see if we can come up with proactive collaborative solutions to any struggle that we face together.
I really believe that this process will help because I know that it has helped my clients and it's helped my family as well.
So if you're interested, please come to www.lynncdavison.com/blog for a transcript of this video. And while you're there, have a look around and I'd love to see you on that side.
Bye for now.
