Self-Confidence: Your Teen’s Superpower

Leslie Randolph is a Certified Life Coach and the Chief Wisdom Officer at The Coach Chronicles. With a focus on building self-confidence and intentionality, Leslie specializes in guiding teenage girls and adult women to set life-enhancing goals. Her coaching approach is designed to assist clients in crafting narratives that foster growth, self-improvement, and overall betterment of their lives. After overcoming challenges in self-perception and self-esteem through diligent work and coaching, Leslie made a commitment to share her insights and tools with others.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

Leslie Randolph shares the source of her passion for helping teenage girls
How Leslie teaches teenage girls to change their belief systems
The concept of emotional forecasting
How Leslie markets to her clients — and the recurring issues they face
The impact of social media on teenage girls’ self confidence
What are the strategies and tools Leslie uses when working with teenage girls?
The pros and cons of individual and group coaching
How parents can support their child’s progress at home
Leslie’s favorite resources on confidence for parents and teens

In this episode…

Confidence is not just a recommended trait for teenagers — it’s a superpower! A teenager armed with self-confidence navigates the tumultuous years of adolescence with resilience, clear thinking, and a stronger sense of identity. But how can parents help their teens develop this crucial quality?

According to Leslie Randolph, a confidence coach for girls and young women, nurturing self-confidence involves empowering young people to believe in their inherent worthiness and gifts. Leslie believes with the right resources and mindset, self-confidence can be taught, fostered, and nurtured like any other skill. By helping teens identify negative thoughts and feelings through coaching therapy, they can alter their personal belief systems.

In this episode of The Coping Podcast, host Dr. Leigh Weisz converses with Leslie Randolph about the pivotal role of self-confidence in a teen’s development. They discuss the interplay between self-confidence and mental health, the impact of parents and peers on a teen’s confidence, and strategies to foster self-belief in teens. Leslie also shares her favorite resources for parents and teenagers.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by Coping Partners.

Coping Partners is a mental health practice dedicated to helping children, adolescents, and adults manage various challenges including anxiety, divorce, behavioral issues, relationship problems and much more in the Chicago suburbs.

Our practitioners are devoted to building on our clients’ strengths and bolstering weaknesses.

To gain insight and tools for getting unstuck check out our website at CopingPartners.com, email us at support@copingpartners.com.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:01

Welcome to The Coping Podcast where we share strategies for coping with the stressors of life, especially the difficulties of parenting. And here is your host, Dr. Leigh Weisz.

Dr. Leigh Weisz 0:15

This is Dr. Leigh Weisz. I am the host of The Coping Podcast where I feature top experts on topics like raising healthy children, parenting, and so much more. Past guests include therapists, Dr. Froum, Dr. Cira, Ben Kessler, neuropsychologist Lisa Novak, dietitian Lara Field, and many more. Just a quick disclaimer, the information provided is for educational and informational purposes only. This is not intended to provide mental health treatment and does not constitute a client therapist relationship. The information provided is not a replacement for being assessed and evaluated by a licensed professional and is not intended to replace mental health or medical advice. Before we get into today’s topic, I wanted to introduce our guest. Leslie Randolph is a life coach who specializes in helping teenage girls and adult women build more self confidence and get more intentional about what they want. She helps girls and women set goals to get more of what they want out of their lives and write new narratives that will serve them better. Please check out her website, confidencecoachforgirls.com. So thank you so much, Leslie, for being here today. You and I’ve had great conversations in the past about your work. And I love that you have a passion for helping teenage girls cultivate self confidence in today’s world of social media, and all that we know about how these apps can lead to more anxiety and depression in teens, it’s so important to have people like you focusing on how to bolster self confidence. So I would ask you if you can start by telling us how you got into this area or this niche of focusing on teenage girls, where did this passion come from?

Leslie Randolph 2:00

Absolutely, Leigh, thank you so much for having me. I’m really excited to be here. Anytime I have an opportunity to talk about self confidence. I’m, I’m just thrilled. So appreciate the opportunity. You know, my journey was a long one, I always knew that I wanted to help people. I always knew I wanted to change the world. It just took me many decades to get there. So I won’t tell the story that starts in second grade with this desire to change the world. It was actually in in the wake of COVID, when you know the world had changed. And it was that realization of life is short. And you should pursue your dreams and pursue your passions. And becoming a life coach was one that I quietly held for many years, I say quietly because the voice inside my head always said, Oh, that that’s not a real career. That’s not what is the life coach do know you, you stay where you are. And I learned to quiet that voice and to stand up for myself and a dream that I had had. So I had pursued an intensive certification to become a life coach. And when I did, I kind of put on my open for business sign and coached it is I coached everyone in their mother, including my mother, which I don’t recommend without consent. In that time, I coached humans, ages 11 to 75. And the universal pain point that I found for just about everybody was a lack of self confidence. And they might not vocalize it as a lack of self confidence. But it was, you know, anxiety that stood in the way of going after goals or chasing dreams, doubt in their ability or capability or worthiness of achieving and having what they desired, very similar to me on this journey to becoming a coach. And so I thought, Well, why why not build a practice completely upon self confidence. And obviously, you know, in my coaching practice, we coach on those goals and how self confidence can be the fuel to help you achieve them. But we really look a lot at self confidence. Now, as I coached these older adults, I realized it was really a reprogramming of beliefs that they had held for so many years, that we now had to do like a rewiring of their brain. And as my business grew, I thought How I wish I could get in on the ground level of the belief system. So rather than doing a reprogramming that you are worthy of love, including your own, that you can choose to believe in yourself and learn to trust yourself. What if that was just at the foundation, and in those teen years, those formative teen years? That is where we can get in? I often think what my teen year As, and then my 20s. And then my 30s would have looked like, if I knew then what I know now. So my intention, and my hope is that every teenager has a cheerleader like me in their corner. Or even better yet, they fire me and become their own cheerleader in their own corner, and go after their goals and chase their dreams.

Dr. Leigh Weisz 5:22

It’s so interesting, I feel very similarly, in terms of why I gravitated toward working with children. That again, it’s so it’s so much easier in a way to be able to help them avoid some of those bad habits, you know, if you’re able to kind of re-, like you said, rewire the brain at such an early age, and reprogram beliefs. So I love that you just voice what I felt for a very, very long time. So changing people’s voices, their self talk, their belief systems, tell me a little bit about how you teach this to your teenage girls.

Leslie Randolph 5:59

Sure. So if we look at research, and obviously research will, will vary. But you can find many studies that say we think about 60,000 thoughts a day, that is a lot of chatter going on in that beautiful brain of ours, right. And I don’t think we are often taught, I know, I wasn’t, that our thoughts are not facts. Our thoughts are not truths. Our thoughts, and this is what I offer to my clients is are just optional sentences in your brain, love that you can choose to believe them, and then suddenly, they become true to you. But if we don’t have that awareness that what’s going on in that beautiful brain of yours is not, you know, set in stone is not a fact, then it makes it very hard to challenge your thinking. So that is one of the first things that I teach my clients of becoming an observer of what’s happening up there, you know, tuning into our thoughts, a lot of times we’re not tuning into our thoughts, we are very well versed in the feelings, run out anxiety, we feel that tightness in our chest, that doubt we feel that pit in our stomach embarrassment, we feel the hot in our cheeks, but we don’t take a moment to then go up here and say, what is it that’s going on in my brain? That has me feeling this way? Because our thoughts are what ultimately cause our feeling. Now we might feel the feeling first, right? We can slow down enough, right? So they come up here and say what’s going on here? Then we can check in with it.

Dr. Leigh Weisz 7:41

So you’re able to provide it sounds like some very basic psychoeducation or teaching of how do we first identify what our thoughts are? Right? And there’s thoughts that are perfectly fine that you wouldn’t want to reprogram. Right? But like you said, there’s there’s some of these thoughts that are causing pain, or stuckness, as I like to say, and maybe leading to a negative feeling. So your first kind of helping, it sounds like the teens just identify what those feelings are, what those thoughts rather are. Okay, absolutely.

Leslie Randolph 8:12

Awareness is the first step here, right. Awareness is the first step of just checking in with what goes on in that brain. And I sometimes with my team, clients talk about it, we have a bestie brain and a bully brain. Yes, the bully brain is the one that’s telling you, you can’t do that. What do you think you are? What’s wrong with you? And I call it the bestie brain because you would never say those things to your best friend. But we reserved that self talk for ourselves, right? And then the best the brain is like, you can do it. And if that seems like too much a leap. It’s, you can try, right? I believe in you. There’s nothing wrong with you, right? And so we have this spectrum of thoughts. But if we don’t, first become aware of what it is that we’re thinking, and don’t lean into this possibility that our thoughts are not facts, then we can’t change them. And if we follow the breadcrumbs of our thoughts, cause our feelings, our feelings are also what then drive our actions. So if we think about a teenager in class of I don’t know the right answer, and I’m going to die of embarrassment. If I say it wrong. Chances are you’re not gonna raise your hand. Right. But if you think I’m willing to try, I believe in myself, in the worst case scenario, ain’t that bad. The best case scenario is I’m going to learn something, then probably you’ll raise your hand. Right? But so it’s really important that we look at our thoughts. Yes, because it makes us feel better. We have the opportunity to change how we’re feeling, but it also then drives our actions what we do and don’t do in our lives.

Dr. Leigh Weisz 9:54

It’s interesting. I had a guest on the podcast who is an expert and OCD recently, and she was saying how she calls some of these thoughts specific to OCD junk thoughts, right, like they really are spam, they should be, you know, thrown out in the recycle or the trash. Yeah, delete and and, and they’re more obvious I would think to someone without OCD, you know that those thoughts are, you know, we think of them as kind of like ridiculous even sometimes the people themselves identify them as ridiculous, but they still pay attention to them, you know, but they’re a little bit more obvious. Whereas I think for someone who doesn’t have OCD, you know, they still have these thoughts that are getting in their way. But it’s not so obvious that it’s like a dysfunctional automatic thought, the way it might be of something that’s irrational. Does that make sense? It’s the same concept of like you said, you have thousands of thoughts, you know, going through your brain, which ones do I want to to pay attention to? Yeah.

Leslie Randolph 10:57

And you can, like you said, there are some that are just kind of benign, right, they’re neutral. And we don’t need to pay attention to every single one. But if we think of someone who has a goal of doing well academically, going out for the team, or going after another sort of goal, whether it’s a social goal, or academic or extracurricular, if your action is not taking you towards what it is you want, we got to check in here, what’s going on up here, that has you feeling doubt, anxiety, fear, which is then or overwhelm stopping you from going after what it is you want, right?

Dr. Leigh Weisz 11:38

I’m wondering if you can give us an example of a teen, a teen girl who had identified with you? What was a struggle, you know, they weren’t getting what they wanted, and what the thought was that was getting in the way, just kind of even when they first presented for you.

Leslie Randolph 11:56

Yeah, so I’ll give you an example. Personally of myself, because as I always say, I am every client that I hope to help. And as I thought of this, what would my life had looked like, if I had known then what I know now, Leigh, you know, this, one of the dreams that I had had was to be an actress when I was younger, I loved being on a stage, I love being in theater. I never once went on a professional audition. I went to college for theater, and psychology and sociology, and never did anything with this degree. And as I, you know, looked at what it was that was stopping me. It was really this, I can’t do it. I’m too, you know, I’m gonna get rejected. And so the thought was, you know, it’s not possible. It’s not worth it. Like, the barrier actually was the feeling of rejection, so I would avoid it. And so I never went after that goal. But if I had been able to tap into some of these tools, and now, you know, I find myself on a microphone, often through this work. I could have said, you know, I’m willing to try, right? Failure is not, you know, the worst failure, it’s the worst case scenario. And that’s okay, failure won’t kill me. Failure doesn’t physically hurt me, right? Failure is an opportunity to learn. It’s the reframing of also the negative emotion and the thinking.

Dr. Leigh Weisz 13:26

We talk a lot in our practice about feelings as being uncomfortable, sometimes, but not dangerous. And that reminds me of like, I was just had a little girl who’s leaving for overnight camp, and as you know, is scared to be homesick. And so we talked about, you know, imagine that you have that feeling I want you to imagine, and she closed her eyes, and she really was able to imagine the feeling so much that she started tearing up. And I said, you know, tell me what it feels like. And she was able to identify, she said, she misses her parents, you know, but it wasn’t going to hurt her, you know, and I said to Now imagine you’re walking to your next activity at camp, you’re going to swim in the lake, and you’re going to have fun with your friends. And she was able to say, Yeah, I’ll be able to get past that feeling and move on to the next activity. It doesn’t last forever. But sometimes the fear of having that feeling of rejection of sadness of, of, you know, failure, whatever it is, is overwhelming to people.

Leslie Randolph 14:22

Yeah, I call that I call it emotional forecasting, of like, we we anticipate this awful experience, you know, and that’s just our brain doing our brains job, right. Our brain is like, a negative emotion is really the similar to, you know, danger. A negative emotion is danger. But it’s so important that we have, you know, practitioners like you that remind us of a feeling is just a vibration in your body. That doesn’t mean it feels good. If I could have told my teenage self like, yes, failure and rejection won’t feel good. but you will be okay. Right? And what, like the little girl walking to her activity? What’s on the other side of that? What’s the other possibility? You know, if we believe the fact our brains are facts, we’re kind of only looking here. But we’re willing to believe that their actual senses our brain, we can see so much so many other possibilities and perspectives. The other perspective is me on a stage living my dream. Right? Right. And so you have to be willing to challenge the thinking. And this is one of the things that I always say is like a spoiler alert of self confidence. Self Confidence requires you to be willing to feel all those feelings and knowing you can handle them. So self confident, teenage lastly, I’m you know, this would have been in my 20s What is that? I might get rejected. And that’s okay. Right might fail. And that’s okay. I also then get to decide what all of that means about me. We’d follow the breadcrumbs with those thoughts. I think ultimately, what it comes back down to for a lot of us is, I’m not good enough. Right, right. Even if I’m rejected, or from an audition for, you know, I don’t get the part, I still get to believe I’m good enough. I can instead then believe it wasn’t the right part. For me. There are other opportunities. I’m gonna keep going.

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