Our children need to know that disappointments, problems, failures are bound to happen, they are inevitable, and that is part of life.

The box problems come in, the way we think about problems is, “there is something wrong with me” or “this shouldn’t have happened, I’m dumb.”

Let your adolescent know: Feelings are not facts and self-critical thoughts are not facts. Problems and failures don’t mean anything negative about us or that there is something wrong with us of that failure shouldn’t have happened.  Tiger Woods is the best golfer in history and his golf ball will sometimes go into a sand trap.  Sometimes he might have aimed it there because his stance was off or his concentration; sometimes he didn’t aim it there but the wind took it there.  Either way, he expects he will sometimes end up in a sand trap or his ball will land in the pond.  He knows disappointments are bound to happen.  What he also knows is how to get out of the sand trap. And to know how to do that he had to practice being in the sand trap and then practice getting out of the sand trap.  There are 4 questions he asks himself:  Where am I now?  How did I get here?  Where do I want to be? How do I get there?

Break it down into small doable steps.  Just like there are many different kinds of golf clubs needed for the course, there are many different kinds of strategies and possibilities to get us to our goal.