Making the Moment Matter for Kids® is a fun and effective path for the development of emotional intelligence. It offers age-appropriate training in mindfulness and self inquiry, enabling young people to discover, deepen, and passionately use their resources. Through individual sessions children learn how to maintain a self awareness that enables them to be consciously and creatively responsive in living life to the fullest and treating all of life with the highest of respect.
The program teaches children communication skills, from tuning in more intimately with themselves, to communicating more effectively with others; from managing conflicts they're involved in, to leading others into agreement and peace.
This is a full developmental program starting at the fundamental level of teaching young people how to notice more of what goes on inside themselves and not get lost in their experience. This enables them to get out from under any negative self talk that seems to have a life of its own, and to get unstuck from strong emotions that also seem to have power of monstrous proportion.
These are practical applications of basic mindfulness -- developing an "inner witness" and knowing what to do with this witness. The training facilitates being able to use this inner witness to notice and study not only thoughts and feeling states but "identity states" as well -- the experience we have of ourselves when we lose ourselves in some role or identity such as "dumb kid" or "not good enough" or "troublemaker" or "can't do anything right" or "better than anyone in my class".
Being able to separate from these identity states can turn a lot around for a young person. They can start to notice the beliefs that are fused with their various identities and can start to make more conscious choices about things that they may have thought were out of their control.
The program embodies "self inquiry" which teaches kids how to deal with fundamental questions about meaning in life and how to have a conscious relationship with these questions throughout their lives. Along with this are foundational skills which nurture an exploration of values and purpose, and help participants navigate the balance between what matters to oneself and what matters in relation to others. And, most dramatically, kids integrate a practical understanding of the way they create their experience of reality. When children learn at an early age that they are the creators of their experience, and learn just how this is true, they stand to become very empowered and creative people.
Goals and Benefits
Making the Moment Matter for Kids® is a path towards having a conscious relationship with your experience, beliefs, the world around you, and what matters to you. It increases your ability to respond more effectively, free from automatic responses, and from the emotional charge of projections and fantasies.
Resources and qualities which typically increase include:
| awareness | sense of self |
| sense of confidence | peace |
| gratitude | openness |
| responsibility | compassion |
| purposefulness | passion |
Contact Jim for information about groups for 9 to 12 year olds, 13 to 15 year olds, and 16 to 18 year olds, and for individual sessions for anyone above the age of four.
310 741-7783 . jim@jimlehrman.com . http://jimlehrman.com
About Jim Lehrman
In 2005, Jim Lehrman left his 30 years of practicing psychotherapy to supervise his daughter and her budding acting career in Hollywood. He is now resuming his life purpose: training people to be smiling samurai - more present in the moment, taking responsibility for their experience, and getting the internal and external results they want. He stopped doing "therapy" long ago as he focused on educating people in the emotional intelligence skills that encompass the mechanics of how they put their experience together. In addition to his clinical background, he has been the director of Omega Institute, a holistic eduction center for adults in upstate New York which serves 6000 students per year, an instructor in Character Theory to post-graduate psychotherapists, and a leader in alternative education.
Jim is available to work both in person in Los Angeles and on the phone. Over the past decade he has worked with clients in 4 continents. He also mentors and does intensive work with children and teens, as well as with groups and organizations. He has a separate practice in conflict management for creative collaborators.
