3 qualities that confident employees and confident kids have in common (and how to teach them)

SALT LAKE CITY — As parents, we're all trying to play the long game. We're helping with homework and driving to practice, but we're also raising future coworkers, leaders, teammates, spouses and friends.

Many of the qualities that help people thrive in the workplace start developing at home long before that first job interview. Spencer Horn is an executive performance coach and the author of the upcoming book "The Divinity Principle," available at altiumleadership.com. He shared three observations that connect what confident kids and confident employees have in common and what that can teach us as parents.

"One thing that they have in common is that they've been challenged early on in their life," he said.

It can be hard to let kids face challenges because as parents, we naturally want to protect them. But we need to let kids face difficulties and help them learn how to handle them. Growth happens when kids encounter obstacles instead of having every obstacle removed.

Being rescued v. being coached

Horn said that in his own family, his wife didn't always rescue their kids; she coached them.

"When they had a problem with maybe a bully, it was, 'How do you handle this?' And we would role-play and talk it through with them so that they were prepared when they went back," he said.

His oldest daughter had a challenging high school teacher and spent months trying to navigate the relationship.

"My wife was every day for the semester coaching her about how to approach this teacher," Horn said. "They role-played. It was trial and error."

He explained that his daughter was nervous going into exchanges with an authority figure in her life, but at the end of the semester, the teacher said she was one of her best students.

"For her it was a huge win," Horn said. "She learned how to talk to people with authority, and also people that are difficult to connect with. But it took that steady coaching."

Becoming something

"You need to look at them as who they're going to be 10, 20 years down the road, not who they are right now," Horn explained.

He said not to just look at our kids through the lens of today's behavior. Look at the larger vision of who that child is becoming. That perspective shift changes how we respond to mistakes, immaturity and struggles. Confidence from a parent often becomes confidence within the child.

Learning to plan

Our kids come to us with problems, and our first instinct is to respond with answers. Horn said to respond differently.

He said to instead say, "That's a great question. Tell me what you've thought about so far."

You're not avoiding helping them; you're encouraging them to think and problem-solve for themselves. Kids learn to problem solve even better when they have opportunities to practice it. Horn said to give children real responsibilities that require planning and preparation.

"Giving them opportunities to do new things, to maybe plan the meal for the family," Horn suggested. "If there's something they're excited about making, well, what do you need for that?"

This story originally aired on KSL TV and has been reformatted for a digital audience using artificial intelligence.

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