The theme for this week for CB is confidence and trusting himself. There have been several situations where he responded to the posed questions with confidence and with the correct answers. However, when another child joined in and started responding, CB would wait to respond till the other child responded. CB would then second guess his answers and much of the time respond with the other child’s answers, even if the answer was wrong. Olem and I have talked in detail about how much we want to help him gain confidence and to be able to trust that he can accomplish whatever is set forth. Yes, it may take a longer time for CB and it may take more work, but he can do it! I want him to stop second guessing himself.
This got me thinking about how I talk about this topic like it is such an easy thing to do – trust yourself, trust your gut. This is something I have struggled with and continue to struggle with. On certain topics, I can come across as quite assertive and maybe even arrogant. I am argumentative by nature and have to work on toning my assertiveness down. On some topics though, I feel I struggle to get my head around all the options and which one seems to be the best one. I have told myself over and over not to second guess myself so much in those scenarios, but I feel that my ability to really make the best decision was limited. I just didn’t feel like I was able to really see the bigger picture. I would get lost in all the minutia of the data presented and couldn’t really step back, take in all the data, and make that really high level decision. Now, I am mainly looking back at a very specific time in my life, but I feel I learned a lot about myself during those trials and somewhat tough times. So how does this really relate to CB and his confidence struggles?
I wonder if that is how CB feels but on a daily basis. Maybe he can only process so many variables and on a regular basis, there are just too many variables presented. So he either shuts down, focuses on some other distraction, or choose the only option he can process, which in the scenario I presented above may be to choose the other person’s answer. Who knows if by focusing on the other person’s answer whether he has even forgotten what the original question was and therefore really doesn’t know the answer. CB does need things broken down step by step. He can follow multi-step requests but only certain ones. Many times, we have to speak slowly and repeat them. If the issue is that he is having to process too much, then the obvious answer is to provide an environment with the least distractions and to not test CB’s capabilities in this type of fashion. It is educational and beneficial to interact in the group setting and I think he can still learn in those scenarios; however, it may not be fair to access his knowledge acquisition in that same setting. So, in some scenarios, maybe it is not an issue of trusting his gut. Maybe, he is losing sight of what his gut is telling him before his gut has a chance to speak. And for many others, there is the issue of CB learning how to listen to his gut and to trust it. We will continue to provide more options for CB to be independent and feel success in his capabilities. And we will continue to try to understand where CB is coming from and to try to meet him at his level and to find new and different ways to help CB learn and grow.