Tony Robbins says, “The quality of your life depends on the quality of your relationships.”
These are 10 principles I practise daily to connect with my students and children.
For 10 years as an educator and 14 years as a mother, I’ve learned a great deal about building positive relationships and meaningful, deep connections with the people around me. These are what I’ve learned, and they have helped me immensely in creating a safe, loving, and continuously supportive learning environment at Lilydale Tuition Centre and at home.
- Make them feel accepted by actually accepting who they are, with all their strengths and weaknesses, differences, and faults.
- Believe in them, in their abilities and especially their potential. Fundamentally, I believe that is the reason we, as educators and parents, are here: to create change, support improvement, and be a guide for who they want to become.
- Celebrate even the smallest changes and improvements, because progress is the key to a lifelong learning journey.
- Praise their kindness and effort, and do not focus too heavily on end results because learning is a journey and if they’re kind enough to themselves and to people around them, they will put their effort to learn what they’re curious about.
- Be hopeful and optimistic about their strengths, and focus on the positive among the chaos, the good within the challenges.
- For every negative action or comment, aim to create four positive moments to reconnect.
- At times, allow their resistance and return to acceptance.
- Let go of what you want or desire for them; it is not about you, and they are not a reflection of you.
- Be comfortable saying, “I don’t know,” and “Let’s learn and find out together.”
- Lastly and most importantly, show your interest in their life by asking lots of ‘WH- questions’ and listening to them without interruption.