Motivate Your Teen With This Job Interview Trick
When parents tell their teens to do something, they want to, well, not do it. You know this if you have a teenager or have ever been a teenager. Moms and dads can keep pushing, grunting, and threatening to shutdown Fortnite forever, but that only leads to a short-term deal at best.
For adolescents to develop strong habits (instead of rolling their eyes and saying, “GREAT, I’ll do it this time because these people are lying on my back “), they must believe that they are making the best decision for themselves . But how can you, the person in charge of supporting their journey to adulthood, push them? This takes some psychological trickery. Bestselling author and Wharton professor Adam Grant recommends trying a technique called motivational interviewing.
He explains in Today : “You think about a life skill you want to teach and you say,“ Look, on a scale of zero to 10, where zero is the most painful experience you can imagine and 10 is nirvana, how much motivated. ” you will do it? And your teenager might say two or three, and you might say, Really? Why not below? and then they come up with their own reasons why it’s not so bad. “
Perhaps your teen will come to his own conclusions as to why getting a summer job might not be the highest form of torture, or find some advantage in doing his own laundry. Teenagers are not lazy – they are selective. They like to act on their own terms and want to know what depends on them . Now and throughout their lives, they will need to find an intrinsic motivation that does not come from the words “Because I said so.”