How Teen Life Coaching can help students through Depression and Social Anxiety?

Teenagers often face problems that only a few adults understand. Be it social anxiety, depression or shyness; students nowadays suffer from a variety of issues that parents, teachers and even peers are unable to understand at first. This is where teen life coaching comes into the picture. Teen life coaching not only helps students get over such issues in a very constructive manner, but it also helps them create a positive self-image and develop confidence to take on the fierce competition that awaits them. In this interview, Teen Life Coach Rajat Soni shares why teen life coaching is an important aspect for young students and how it can help them improve their overall life.

Extracts from the Interview

Aspects Covered Under Teen Life Coaching

According to Rajat Soni, Teen-age life coaching covers all the aspects of a young student’s life i.e. their family, relationship within the family, their school, their personal growth and other similar areas. Broadly speaking, Teen Life Coaching covers social anxiety among the children, shyness, learning difficulties, especially among kids with special needs such as Aspergers or Autism or ADHD. Life coaching gives a unique opportunity to the students to come out of their shell and unleash their true potential that plays a pivotal role in achieving success in every area of their life.

Academics vs. Personal Growth – How can Life-Coaching help students?

The advent of examinations and marking schemes was done to help young students understand and gauge their own potential. The purpose of marks is to measure how the child is developing and improving in comparison to him/herself. But, slowly that digressed into negative connotations and became a competition against others.  

Rajat notes that not being good in academic or not getting good marks is a symptom rather than a disease. There might be several other factors that are bothering the child that s/he is unable to perform well on the academic front. It may be the shyness, or lack or friends or his general unhappiness with what he is doing. So, life coaching helps students and parents look beyond the superficial level of marks and go deep into the psyche of the student to understand the real problem.

Life-Coaching to beat the Competition

On the topic of how life coaching can help teenagers beat the fierce competition, Rajat Soni notes that the general tendency among Indian students and parents is to look at the outside world while ignoring the much significant that are directly related to them. The only competition that anyone should worry about is themselves. Students should try to be a better individual every single day and be a better version of themselves then what they were a day before. Life coaching helps students understand this at a deeper level thereby helping them understand their true passion and develop the focus that is required to achieve their dreams. Life-coaching helps students identify their strengths and helps them harness and channel it into constructive and meaningful actions-oriented goals.

Changing Societal Perception about Social Anxiety, Depression and other issues

Issues like Social Anxiety, Depression and such other problems can snowball into a major one for anyone at any stage of their life. For instance, even today, some of the most successful people in the world, including CEOs of top companies, admit suffering from these problems. However, if we were able to inculcate the ability and skills to handle these problems from the formative years i.e. during teen-age, students will be able to handle them much better then they encounter them later-on in their lives. So, building the base, the strong foundation of these teenagers will really help them do that.                          

Rajat has also featured in a series of videos on life skills, especially for school and college students. To watch these, stay tuned to jagranjosh.com.

About the Expert

Rajat Soni is a Teen Life Coach, a motivational speaker and the founder of RajatSoni International, an organization catering to the overall personal development of teenagers. He helps teens and pre-teens overcome shyness, social anxiety, learning difficulties and any other factors that may be stopping them from achieving their full potential.