Parenting Children's Talents

Reichlen Performance Lesson 3: Be calm on the outside to stay calm on the inside

While onstage, Teresa Reichlen, a ballerina with the New York City Ballet appears calm and serene.  On the inside, however, she has a different experience.  “It’s funny because people tell me I look calm,” she said to the NY Times. “But I don’t always feel calm. When I’m the most stressed or angry I become really quiet. Maybe it’s my way of dealing. I don’t know if I hold it all in, but it’s just the way I am — in life and on the stage.”

Reichlen is explaining one aspect of the creative tension many performers experience.  It is the tension between remaining calm on the outside while working hard on the inside.  Some performers feel uncomfortable doing this and want to express their inner intensity openly.  However, remaining physically calm on the outside can help your body relax and send messages to your mind that everything is going OK.  Your outward calm can keep your inner drive and intensity in check and focused.

Performers in school, sports and the arts should practice this technique while studying, during practices and training.  By doing so, you will find that your inner intensity remains more centered and relaxed, and your actions more precise and expressive.

While Reichlen is only 23 years old, she has lived a lifetime in ballet starting at age 3 in a ballet school behind a grocery store in Clifton, Va.  Because of her love and dedication to dance, she has naturally developed mental techniques that helped her rise to the top of the ballet world and grow as a person.  With her techniques in hand, as explained in this week's posts, you can also grow as a student, athlete and artist.

Reichlen Performance Lesson 2: Have a point of view when you perform

Beginning last summer Teresa Reichlen  performed with Christopher Wheeldon’s company, Morphoses. “I got a lot from that experience,” she said. “He is very passionate about his ballets and getting the best out of his dancers, so he was pushing me a lot.”   

Wheeldon explained that she needed to have a point of view when she danced. “Honestly, that was a very hard correction for me to take,” she said to the NY Times. “It’s not something you can just fix. Some dancers appear to have a whole story behind a ballet — it’s just the way they dance — and I’m not like that.”  But she realized that having a point of view when she dances can move her beyond executing flawless movements to embodying her character and the story.

Every performer in school, sports and the arts needs to have a point of view about their performance.  A point of view is an opinion and understanding about why you are performing, studying, and training, and how you want to express yourself to others as an artist, athlete or student.

To get started, you need to first select an upcoming performance, project, test, or game for which you must prepare.  Then, answer a series of questions to get outside yourself and imagine the type of idealized, fictional character you must portray during that performance: “What type of character do I need to play during the performance?  What is most important to that character and motivates him or her to be successful?  What is important to people around the character?  How do I act to portray the character and give a masterful performance?” 

These questions will help you journey into a fictionalized, ideal world to give yourself a different perspective about the role you must play to be successful during a key performance in school, sports or the arts.

Ballerina Teresa Reichlen's Performance Lessons

Teresa Reichlen of the New York City Ballet is a premier dancer in the competitive and demanding world of ballet but, as a person, she remains centered and inspired by her art.  Her poised, serene face, long legs and elegant jumps have made her a soloist at age 23 in one of the world’s greatest ballet companies.

Her journey from the Russell School of Ballet in Chantilly, Va to the School of American Ballet at age 15 and onto the City Ballet has taught her lessons about expressing herself as an artist and person.   This weeks blog posts are about three important lessons Reichlen has learned to help her grow as a ballerina and person.  These same lessons can help all performers in school, sports and the arts advance their talents and more fully express themselves in their field.  Let's take a look at the first performance lesson.

Reichlen Performance Lesson 1: Don’t Over Try On Stage

As the NY Times explains, “Since being named a soloist in 2005, Reichlen has preserved her poise and attained a new rigor in her technique. ‘It took me a long time to realize that you can try too hard onstage,’ she said after a company class one day last month at the New York State Theater. ‘Sometimes you just have to settle down.  I would always have good shows when I was really tired, and I think it’s because I just did what I had to do.’”

Focusing her thoughts and actions only on what is most essential during performances has helped Reichlen stay focused and relaxed in executing the precision needed in ballet. 

This same technique can be used by other performers in school, sports and the arts.  Before any project, practice, game, performance, or test, you need to ask yourself “What are the most basic things I need to do very well to be successful?  What things will I see myself doing if I try too hard and over-react?  How can I assure that I stay focused only on the things in my performance that are the most essential for success and not over try?”

Sports Psychology: Visualizing athlete’s ideal performance

When competing, some athletes feel unprepared, as if they are experiencing a situation for the first time.  While they know how to execute basic skills, they have difficulty reading situations in competition which can make them feel stressed and worried.  One solution is to make sure everything about a competition feels familiar.  One technique athletes can use to totally prepare their mind and body for competition is called previewing or visualizing. 

Visualizing can be a powerful method to prepare for games by imagining the ideal performance you want to create as an athlete.  You can also imagine yourself in a game situation you fear and visualize yourself successfully responding to that situation.  In short, you need to imagine all of the details of the performance you want to create so, when you are in competition, everything seems familiar.  The following provides you with the steps to preview your performance successfully before you are in competition or practice:

First, get your body into a relaxed position in a quiet surrounding, with soft music playing if needed

Second, start focusing on your breathing

Third, breathe slowly in through your nose and out through your mouth

Fourth, breathe deeply a few times to fill up your lungs, and fully exhale

Fifth, start visualizing the performance you want to create for a game or match.  Visualize the full game experience from the time you are getting dressed for competition to the time you arrive back home.

Sixth, use all of your senses when you visualize the performance: What do you see, hear, touch, smell and taste?  By visualizing with all of your senses, you totally immerse yourself into every aspect of the performance you want to create.

Seventh, you can visualize the perfect performance on one occasion during a week, and visualize yourself successfully responding to an error or difficult situation during another session that same week.  You should always visualize yourself being successful.  Visualize before games and practices.  Visualize your ideal performance at least three times a week and on the day of a competition

When you mentally visualize the ideal performance you want to create, your body also responds in small, unnoticeable ways so you are preparing both your mind and body.  As an athlete, the more you preview your performance, the better you will become at using this technique to prepare yourself for competition.  If you are a parent or coach, you can teach your athletes how to preview practices and competition so you train their minds while training their bodies.

To learn additional mental skills for athletes, visit A Talented Mind library.

Transitioning To the Adult World: Essential skills for young adults

Throughout childhood, children are taught to measure success by how well they comply to other people’s demands, expectations, and the next level of achievement expected.  Students are prepared for the next of everything: the next academic skill, subject, and grade level.  In high school, they are told to prepare for college.  In college, they are told to prepare for a “well paying job.”

There is, however, a void between what is taught in school and what is essential to learn to live a fulfilled life as an adult.   There is a tendency for people to overemphasize a host of skills during childhood that will have little or no use in the workplace or adult world. 

According to the acclaimed pediatrician, Dr. Mel Levine, young adults may enter adulthood unskilled in areas that are essential for success in the adult world such as the ability to think critically, to brainstorm, to monitor and refine their own performance, to communicate convincingly, to manage their reputation, and to plan and preview work.  These are “make or break” skills in the world of adults and need to be developed and refined throughout life so children avoid being unprepared for each stage of adulthood.

Based on Dr. Levine’s research covered in his book, Ready or Not, Here Life Comes, a successful launch into the adult world with its added responsibilities and specialization requires children to develop four important processes.  These processes are:

• Inner Direction: They have insight into themselves as people which can include a good understanding of their strengths, weaknesses, personal values, and aspirations for the future.  They also have the ability to motivate themselves to focus on achieving their most valued goals.
• Interpretation: They are able to interpret and understand the outside world around them which enables them to make good judgments and decisions, along with evaluating critical opportunities, issues, products and people.
• Instrumentation: They are able to develop the skills needed for high quality thinking and productivity which can include organization skills, use of effective mental energy, brainstorming ability, and creative and sound decision making.
• Interaction: They are able to establish and conduct effective interpersonal relationships through good communications, developing strong alliances, and managing the politics around them.

Within these four areas, there are twelve growth processes that children must develop to eventually launch themselves into the adult world and create a fulfilled life that's in line with their talents and values.  These processes can be an important guide to parents, teachers, and coaches as they help children and young adults develop the skills needed to transition from family and school to the world of adults.

Coping With Stress: Resources To Help Reduce Children’s Stress

Everyone has resources personally and in their environment that help them cope with stress.  Children are no exception, but the maturity of their personal coping skills depend on their age, mental and physical abilities, and experience. 

At a personal level, children cope with stress by using abilities such as relationship building, communicating clearly, organizing themselves, getting appropriate exercise, nutrition and sleep.  In children’s broader environment, they get support to cope with stress by having positive relationships with their family, teachers, coaches, friends and pets; having religious faith; and having a drug and alcohol free environment.  These personal abilities and support in the environment are all resources your children can use to cope with stress.

As a parent, you can teach your children coping methods by first leveraging their strongest personal and environmental resources available.  Then, you need to identify their weakest resources that should be strengthened or eliminated.

For instance, if your son is a good communicator and has a strong religious faith, you can teach him to use these qualities to resolve conflicts, interpret situations in constructive ways, and have faith that good will prevail.

If your daughter is dealing with her parents’ difficult divorce and has trouble sleeping, you need to determine how to keep her out of the divorce’s drama and improve her ability to sleep and renew energy.  Her family environment and sleep are resources that can add stress and drain her energy to cope.  If strengthened or eliminated, they can support her growth and ability to cope with stress.

By understanding your children’s strongest and weakest resources to cope with stress, you can help them develop coping skills and eliminate issues that add to their stress and weaken their ability to cope.

Stressful Moments: Knowing when your child becomes stressed

As your children age, their minds and bodies develop automatic patterns of reacting to different stressful situations throughout the day.  For instance, when children have to go to practice in the afternoon, some of them will feel excited and physically energized while others feel nervous and overwhelmed.  These reactions can be automatic ways of reacting to situations that are perceived to be stressful.

While it is important to know how children automatically react to stress, it is essential to first know when and in what situations they automatically feel the most stress throughout the day.  There are usually specific situations, times of a day or week, or people that cause your children higher stress.  By knowing these situations, you can help them learn important coping methods.

To discover the moments and/or people that typically cause your children stress, you need to conduct a little survey:

Step 1: At the end of each day, ask your children when they felt the most relaxed and positive in the morning.  Then, have them describe the same happy moments that occurred in afternoon and evening.  For younger children, you may ask, “When did you have the most fun in the morning...in the afternoon...in the evening?”  Find out the general time of day, who or what triggered the event, and the level of enjoyment (using a rating of “big or little fun,” or “high, medium, low”).

Step 2: After you discuss the fun, relaxing things your children experienced, you should ask “Did you feel angry, sad, or confused in the morning?  If so, when?”  Then ask about the afternoon and evening separately.  Find out the general time of day, who or what triggered the event, and the level of stress they felt (use a rating method).

Step 3: After your conversation, you should record what your children told you on a piece of paper for each day with separate sections for morning, afternoon and evening.

Step 4: If you track the results for two weeks or more, you will see the pattern of when your children are relaxed and stressed throughout the day and week.  You can use this information to determine ways to teach your children coping methods and provide the necessary family support.

While you may have to alter these steps to fit the personality and age of your children, you will find that it leads to open communications and builds support for the stress your children experience.

Children Coping With Stress: Tip For Parents

As children develop their talents in school, sports and the arts, they explore new areas about themselves and the world.  While children have the ability to master the demands of certain situations they encounter when developing their talents, they may struggle to cope with certain types of stress.

For all of us, stress is our natural mental and physical reaction to changes and events to prepare us to address them directly or avoid them.  Some children have the personality and relationships needed to cope with stress so it motivates instead of deflates them.  Other children, however, do not have the coping skills and support needed to put stress into perspective and use methods to manage it well.

Parents are children’s first line of support for helping them cope with stress.  Parents can either help children learn coping skills or add to children’s stress by not providing the support needed.  The blog posts this week provide tips parents can use to help children learn how to cope with the stress they experience in school, sports, and the arts.  Let's take a look at the first tip for parents.

Parent’s Stress: What your behavior teaches your children about coping with stress

Children learn about themselves and the world by watching their parents react to different situations.  If parents are anxious about something in their lives, they can transfer that same anxiety to their children through their words and actions.  In order for parents to help their children learn how to cope with stress, they should first answer the following questions about themselves: What stresses me the most each day and how do I handle those situations?  What example am I setting for my children about how stressed I become and how I handle it?

For instance, if your daughter comes home from school complaining about how a classmate mistreated her, do you get angry and start personally criticizing the student and the student’s family?  As a parent, you feel the stress of your child being mistreated and may over-respond by attacking the student, teacher, parents, or family as a way of coping with the stress you feel.  You go into attack mode while your child watches, listens, and learns from your example. 

If you, on the other hand, calmly ask your child questions about what happened, condemned the other student’s poor behavior without making personal attacks, and teach your child methods to handle the situation, you are instructing her about how to stay centered and understanding during stressful times.

In order to help your children learn how to cope with stress, you need to look at how you experience and handle stress in your life as a parent, and consider what lessons you teach your children by your example.  This self-reflection will help you better model the behaviors your children need to manage stress in healthy ways.

Teen Brain Development: Good judgment is still a work in progress

A group of neuroscientists, the people who study the brain, at Harvard’s Children’s Hospital developed a Teen Brain 101 short course for teens, parents and teachers because they wanted to explain the link between teens' brain development and their periodic poor judgment.  The following excerpt from the Dana Foundation explains the course and provides guidance to parents and teens about focusing on strengths.  It also gives parents a mantra they can say to keep themselves sane during the adolescent years.

After you read this excerpt, you can learn more about how the teen brain develops and its impact on judgment by reading the article Teen Brain’s Ability to Learn Can Have a Flip Side.

Teen Brain 101

As neuroscientists develop a clearer picture of the neural dynamics playing out during adolescence, the findings are helping to explain some of the risky, impulsive, “what were you thinking?” kinds of behaviors for which teens are notorious. But teens, their parents and their teachers may not know about it.

“It’s amazing how little of this information is out there,” said neurologist Frances Jensen of Harvard’s Children’s Hospital.  Fundamental insights that neuroscientists figured out years ago are “just not translating,” she said.

Recently, Jensen teamed up with Harvard neurologist David Urion and a linguistics psychologist from Tufts, Maryanne Wolf, on a community service project to try to remedy this knowledge gap one high school at a time. The idea was simple: talk to kids directly about the dynamic, dramatic changes their brains are undergoing and how that could impact day-to-day choices.

They put together a kind of “Teen Brain 101” short course for teens, their parents and teachers. Parents are invited to evening lectures, and the program is repeated at their children’s school the next morning. This way, “everybody in the community hears the same thing,” Jensen said.

So how do you tell a teenager that the “good judgment” part of his brain isn’t fully developed yet?

“We really try to stress the positive,” Jensen said. “We tell them: ‘This is an age when you’re most likely going to determine where your skill sets will be, so capitalize on what you understand to be your strengths and compensate for your weaknesses. Take hold of this massive power at this point in time, because it isn’t going to get any better.’ ”

As a mother of two teenage boys, Jensen has first-hand knowledge of the sometimes inexplicable behavior of which the “teen species” is capable. And as a neuroscientist, she knows that brain science can help explain at least some aspects of this behavior.

“This has actually helped me to be a more laid-back parent,” she said. “My mantra to myself is, ‘This too shall pass.’ ”

Memory Training Enhances Brainpower

Did you ever wonder if children's brains can be trained to be more intelligent? The New York Times published the following article on April 29, 2008 about a study that explored if memory training can enhance intelligence.  The study highlighted in this article can be helpful for parents as they try to improve children's mental performance and better manage learning disabilities.  The article was written by Nicholas Bakalar.

Memory Training Shown to Turn Up Brainpower

A new study has found that it may be possible to train people to be more intelligent, increasing the brainpower they had at birth.

Until now, it had been widely assumed that the kind of mental ability that allows us to solve new problems without having any relevant previous experience,€” what psychologists call fluid intelligence, is innate and cannot be taught (though people can raise their grades on tests of it by practicing).

But in the new study, researchers describe a method for improving this skill, along with experiments to prove it works.

The key, researchers found, was carefully structured training in working memory,€” the kind that allows memorization of a telephone number just long enough to dial it. This type of memory is closely related to fluid intelligence, according to background information in the article, and appears to rely on the same brain circuitry. So the researchers reasoned that improving it might lead to improvements in fluid intelligence.

The results, published Monday in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, were striking. Although the control groups also made gains, presumably because they had practice with the fluid intelligence tests, improvement in the trained groups was substantially greater. Moreover, the longer they trained, the higher their scores were. All performers, from the weakest to the strongest, showed significant improvement.

"Intelligence has always been considered principally an immutable inherited trait,"€ said Susanne M. Jaeggi, a postdoctoral fellow in psychology at the University of Michigan and a co-author of the paper. "Our results show you can increase your intelligence with appropriate training."

Why did the training work? The authors suggest several aspects of the exercise relevant to solving new problems: ignoring irrelevant items, monitoring ongoing performance, managing two tasks simultaneously and connecting related items to one another in space and time.

No one knows how long the gains will last after training stops, Dr. Jaeggi said, and the experiment's design did not allow the researchers to determine whether more training would continue to produce further gains.