Calm Parenting Podcast - Podcast for Kids: 3 Ways to Help Overcome Anxiety

Episode Date: February 23, 2020

Podcast for Kids: 3 Ways to Help Overcome Anxiety Kirk's son, Casey, wrestles the microphone away from his father to share how he learned to deal with his anxiety. "Anxiety is normal and there's nothing wrong with you," Casey reassures your kids. He then provides three concrete ways to help kids enjoy new experiences and social situations. Questions for Casey? Email [e-mail]  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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my dad as much as he makes fun of me. Just kidding. I actually wanted to do a podcast for your kids, so I would recommend kind of listening to this first, and then if you like the content, then send it to your kids or listen with your kids. You can check out more podcasts at CelebrateCalm.com, Simplecast, Spotify, iTunes, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, we're pretty much everywhere. So one of the biggest drivers of my defiant behavior as a kid was actually my anxiety over social situations, new places, and new activities. And many of you have kids who struggle with transitions, new activities, and going new places. And something I've realized over the last few years when doing assemblies

is that I often ask, how many of you are anxious about trying new activities? How many of you are nervous talking in front of large groups of people or meeting new people? And almost all the kids raise their hands every single time. And so first, I want you to know that anxiety is perfectly normal. There's nothing wrong with you. And everyone has anxiety. It's to a different extent and people have it over different things. So you don't need to be fixed. You just need some different tools to help you deal with situations that cause you to be anxious. So today I'd kind of like to look at three different tools to help counter anxiety. Kind of a three-step kind of process. So the first thing is I want you to identify which situations give you anxiety. And so you're going to have to start paying attention.

When do I get that nervous feeling in my stomach? Is it before tests? Is it before going new places? Is it before you have a difficult conversation with a friend or a parent or a teacher? So identify what normally causes your anxiety. And once you identify your anxiety, then you can start working on the second part of this, which is be creative and come up with different tools to counter the anxiety. So talk to your friends, talk to your parents, talk to a school counselor. And I'm going to give you a couple examples as well. So as I mentioned, when I'm conducting student assemblies at schools, I always ask the kids, how many of you are nervous about

these situations? And for those of you who are nervous about interacting with large groups of people, how many of you are really, really good one-on-one with other kids or in small group situations. And again, most everyone's hands go up. So what exactly is the difference? Well, when you walk into a room full of strangers, what you see is not a room of individual people who may be nice to you or you could be friends with. What you see is a room full of people who are either going to judge you, make fun of you, laugh at you, or who you might do something embarrassing in front of and make kind of a fool out of yourself. So yeah, no wonder you have anxiety over that. I have anxiety over it still. And I speak in front of large groups of people all the time. So what's

the tool? Well, when you're already good with small groups of people and you're good friends, but you're terrified out of your skull when it's a large group. So what if in every room you entered, instead of looking at the mass of people staring at you, you knew that it was your mission to find one, two, or three people to ask questions to and the questions you could plan in advance and talk to. Then instead of seeing this large group of people who can judge you, you see a few individuals. You ask them questions. And what you do is you create your own small group out of the big group. And that tends to help a little bit with the anxiety over large groups.

Another thing that I struggled with a lot when I was younger was I played ice hockey. And one of the most terrifying things for me was tryout time, because all of the questions kind of ran through my mind in the days leading up to the tryouts. And I was completely on edge and grumpy and rude to my parents and you know how that is. And so all these questions were like, well, what if the coach doesn't like me? Adults don't always like me as much as they like the other kids. And what if I'm not as good as the other kids? And what if I fall and make a fool of myself in front of everyone? What if they laugh at me? And what if I don't make any friends on the team? And what if I don't even make the team? So we always try to do a couple things in those kinds of situations.

The first thing would be, I would recommend going early. So we would go early to hockey tryouts. And sometimes if we went a day or two ahead of time, and I got to familiarize myself with the environment, that made me feel a little bit more calm about it. The second thing was we tried to meet the coach ahead of time, which takes away another unknown. Because now instead of going to this new place where I have to meet a new coach and meet new kids and also perform well, now I've been to the place already. I've met the coach already. And then the third thing that we would do is we would ask the coach

to give me a job to do. And so this really all kind of ties it together. So my responsibility was to make sure all the water bottles were filled and the nets were set up properly. So now instead of me wondering, oh my gosh, what's going to happen at tryouts? Am I to make the team? Are the people going to like me? I was really focused on accomplishing my jobs. I already knew the environment, I knew the coach, and I knew what my jobs were. And so instead of worrying about all the other things, I was really focused on what I had to do. And so as much as you can, try to plan things, go ahead of time, be early, meet people ahead of time, and always have a focus, always have a job to do.

Wherever you go, have a job to do and something to focus on. The third big thing is get out there and confront it. Confront your anxiety voluntarily. Try things that scare you and do it on purpose. And what you'll quickly realize is that you're way stronger than you think you are. There's way more to you than you think. And you start to develop courage because this is the thing with anxiety. You'll still be nervous. I'm nervous. I'm scared of heights, I'm scared of speaking in front of people, yet I do those things all the time.

But what happened is I confronted them voluntarily and I grew to realize, okay, I've done this before and I can do it again. So you still have the nervous feeling beforehand, but what you realize is you're strong enough to deal with it and you're strong enough to deal with it, and you're strong enough to overcome that. And that's absolutely huge. So what I want you to do this week is one, focus on identifying what makes you the most anxious. Two, I want you to come up with some different tools and ideas to deal with it. And then three, I want you to go do something that terrifies you. Do something that scares you this week. Confront the anxiety. And then three, I want you to go do something that terrifies you. Do something that

scares you this week. Confront the anxiety. And you're going to realize that you're a lot stronger than you thought you were. So I'd encourage you, if you don't have the Straight Talk for Kids program, which is me talking directly to kids, I'd recommend getting that. And I'll help you kind of learn how to deal with your emotions, control your impulses, deal with things like anxiety, difficult discussions with parents. Parents, you can email me directly at Casey at CelebrateCalm.com and I'll help you get this program or I can help you create a custom package to meet your specific needs based on the ages of your kids, biggest issues in the home and all of that. So my email address is Casey at CelebrateCalm.com.

It's C-A-S-E-Y at CelebrateCalm.com. You're also welcome to call me at 888-506-1871, and I will be happy to help out. And I hope you all have a wonderful week, and I hope you also enjoyed having a little break from Kirk this week. So thanks for listening to the Calm Parenting Podcast. Please share it with your friends, family, share it on social media. We'd love to get this out to as many people as possible. So thanks again, and I hope you have an awesome week. Bye.