#080 Steps to Crush Teen Stress and Bring Relief with Dr. Ben Bernstein

Flourish Coaching

Jul 25, 2023

In this episode, Lisa and Ben discuss:

The biggest challenge for teens and the best predictor of student success.
Understanding the true definition of your teen’s stress.
How your teen (and you!) can learn to be calm, confident, and focused in the face of stress.
Helping your student when they say they are not stressed, but you think they are.
How to foster agency in your student.

Key Takeaways:

Self-definition is one of the most difficult things for teenagers (and everyone). The current education systems do not teach individuality and society does not give people the experience early enough to be able to define who they are.
Ideal stress is a bell curve. Too much or too little and performance decreases, but some stress is required for your student to perform at their best.
Life is going to happen and it will be filled with challenges. Stress comes with how people react to those situations.
Parents can help their teens get through stressful situations by reminding them of other situations where they have overcome something challenging.

“When you approach life’s challenges, whether it’s the ACT, a college interview, or somebody getting sick, you can approach it in a calm and confident and focused way. You’re not struggling with it, you’re not wishing it were different, you are just dealing with it as it is.” – Dr. Ben Bernstein

About Dr. Ben Bernstein:

Ben Bernstein is a senior psychologist and educator specializing in top performance. Known as the “Stress Doctor,” he is the author of four books on how stress affects performance: Test Success (2009), A Teen’s Guide to Success (2014); Stressed Out! for Parents (2015); and Crush Your Test Anxiety (2018). His forthcoming book, The Threefold Path to Optimal Living, will be released in 2024. His monthly blog posts on the Psychology Today website regularly receive thousands of hits.

‘Dr. B’ is a performance coach for Academy Award, Tony Award, and Pulitzer Prize winners. His client list includes dentists and dental specialists, CEOs, business owners, athletes, attorneys, physicians, parents, opera singers, and actors. He lectures worldwide, live and online, to audiences of business executives, professors, parents, and healthcare professionals.

Paralleling his career in education and psychology, Bernstein has extensive involvement in the performing arts. He created and publicly produced original films and plays with psychiatric patients in Australia and the US. As a result of this work, he was invited to be a resource artist at Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute to collaborate with writers to realize their creative ideas. He has directed theater at the Juilliard School (New York) and the National Academy for Dramatic Art (Sydney). An award-winning composer and Master Coach at the San Francisco Opera, Bernstein is the Founder and Artistic Director of The Singer’s Gym, a non-profit training workshop for professional singers to have more vitality, spontaneity, and connection in their work.

Episode References:

Episode #040 Building Motivation & Stress Tolerance for Happy Teens with Ned Johnson

Get Lisa’s Free on-demand video: How-to guide for your teen to choose the right major, college, & career…(without painting themselves into a corner, missing crucial deadlines, or risking choices you both regret).

https://courses.flourishcoachingco.com/howtoguideyourteen-free-training