Renaye Thornborrow’s Movement to Bring Life Coaching to Kids

When Renaye Thornborrow discovered the power of personal development, she vowed to empower children with Mindset Skills - but the journey of launching her own life coaching certification program and inspiring hundreds of coaches in 30 countries to use her work with kids has been a roller-coaster of challenges and resilience. Show Notes | Transcript "When faced with challenges and disappointments, most kids don't have the skills to handle them. So as a result of that, they get down on themselves. This crushes their self confidence or their self esteem. So what Mindset Skills is all about is supporting children and proactively developing Mindset Skills for self esteem, for confidence, resilience, self leadership, and learning how to set and achieve goals – the missing link in children's education." - Renaye Thornborrow Renaye Thornborrow is a leading personal development expert and the founder of a worldwide movement to bring life coaching to kids. She has certified hundreds of coaches in over 30 countries, helping them create a business they love as a life coach for kids, while empowering children around the world. Along the way, Renaye faced her own obstacles, but her unwavering vision to empower kids kept her going. She now teaches a "bounce back formula" with five Rs for building resilience, to help anyone get back up after a setback. In this episode, you will learn the following: How Renaye Thornborrow's work using Mindset Skills support children in navigating challenges and developing self-esteem, confidence, and resilience What is the "Bounce Back Formula" for building resilience and how can it be used to support entrepreneurs How can a Vision Board help entrepreneurs stay connected to their "why" and remain motivated Related Live. Love. Engage. episodes you may enjoy: Re-imagining Education with Dr. Shauli Mukherjee In this episode, Dr. Mukherjee explains why schools should be helping children develop emotional intelligence Co-Parent Strategies that Work with Fiona Kong In this episode, Fiona shares tips for navigating a difficult co-parenting relationship. Bullies and Confidence Building with Marty L. Ward Marty Ward explains why it’s important to remember we can only control ourselves. Resources: Connect with Renaye here Join the Soulful Women's Network here Send me a message here ☕ Support the podcast here ❤ Love this episode? Leave us a review and rating here Connect with Gloria: LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter TRANSCRIPT Gloria Grace Rand: Namaste and welcome to another edition of Live. Love. Engage. And I am as always so happy to have a guest with us and today’s guest I’m really looking forward to. I met her recently and was intrigued by what she does. So let me tell you what she does. Her name is Renaye Thornborrow and she is leading a worldwide movement to bring life coaching to kids. . Since 2013, her company has certified hundreds of coaches in over 30 countries, helping them create a business they love as a life coach for kids, while empowering children around the world. She is also a personal development expert, member of the ICF, International coaching Federation, I believe that’s what that stands for. And a former 3-year board member for the Association of Coach Training Organizations. Hopefully my tongue will work a little bit better today. I seem to be tripping over myself a little bit. But anyway I’m just so delighted to welcome you Renaye to Live Love Engage. Renaye Thornborrow: Thanks for having me Gloria. It’s a thrill to be here. Gloria Grace Rand: I always love to start off the podcast asking our guests about what brought them to the work that they’re doing today and as I mentioned a moment ago, we met on a publicity summit and I was just totally intrigued by life coaching for kids. So because we hear about, especially for entrepreneurs, I’m sure many of you listening may actually be a life coach, so it’s not as unusual as maybe it might have been thirty years ago. But doing it for kids, that struck me as a bit unusual. So what got you into deciding to offer that type of service and then train other coaches as well? Renaye Thornborrow: Yeah, Gloria, I’m going to answer this question and be happy to share that. It’s amazing, I’ve been doing this for almost twelve years now and still have people all the time saying, “Life coaching for kids? I didn’t know there was such a thing.” And it all kind of came about by accident. But the seed was planted many years ago, decades ago actually when I graduated from college. And Gloria, I discovered the world of personal development. And I remember thinking to myself, why didn’t I learn this when I was a kid? It made no sense to me that the personal development world and the way the life coaching world focuses on grownups. And those core thoughts and beliefs that shape who we are and what we think is possible for our lives are formed when we’re really young and I knew that I wanted my kids to one day know this, these powerful mindset skills. And through the years I became an expert in personal development. I used my skills to create a very successful corporate career, happy fulfilling marriage. And when I had children, a little over twenty years ago, my kids are 20 now, I couldn’t find anything out there to help them develop these mindset skills. There was plenty on how to get my kids to behave, a few things on character development, but nothing about mindset skills. So I started working with my kids myself and they were pretty young, four years old or so, five. And sometimes it seemed a little lectury or boring so I started kind of writing stories, just informally, over the next couple of years, more stories. And from there a vision just grew, Gloria and at the time I was vice president of marketing for a company, loved my job, fabulous career, loved my team, but I just had this pull to do, to bring this work to the world. And to bring this to children. And when I first launched my company, I retired from the corporate job, I was fortunate enough to be able to take a year off and wrote a full curriculum to teach 27 mindset skills to children using a story-based coaching curriculum. But what happened was, I launched it as a home-study program for parents to use with their kids, but then I had people coming to me, like life coaches, educators, and counselors and therapists, wanting to use my work in their businesses. I thought, well that’s a great idea because I knew they could reach children I could never be able to reach. And here we are, ten years later, have a certification program, and I’m just so honored – we have hundreds of coaches in over 30 countries who are using this work with kids. So it kind of came out by accident. But I’m just so glad it is. And it’s amazing, I’m so proud of our coaches and the impact that they’re having with children. That’s the journey. Gloria Grace Rand: There’s so many questions that are going through my head right now. I’m trying to figure out which one to go first. So let’s start off with simply the benefits because you talk about mindset work with kids. So actually before even benefits, maybe just give me an example of something that you think kids aren’t getting that life coaching in regards to mindset helps them? Renaye Thornborrow: Yeah, well you know, when faced with challenges and disappointments, most kids don’t have the skills to handle them. So as a result of that, they get down on themselves. This crushes their self-confidence or their self-esteem. They give up on themselves. That crushes their self-confidence. And they just, it, they’re left almost paralyzed and not feeling empowered in life. And so what mindset skills is all about is supporting children in proactively developing mindset skills for self-esteem, for confidence, resilience, and boy have we had things for children, all of us have gone through in the last few years, are coming out of the pandemic. Self-leadership, learning how to set and achieve goals, and these are just. It’s the missing link in children’s education. It’s the missing link in children's mental health. It’s really supporting them in developing these skills. And just as an example, one skill that they’re missing, one of the favorite things I love to teach is about the skill of developing positive self-talk. In fact, there’s a story we give away for free on our website because we think it’s so important for everybody, children and grownups, to learn that skill of positive self-talk. So we invite people to go to our website, get that free story and start developing that skill because self-talk affects everything from our confidence, our self-esteem, our resilience and even what we believe we can achieve as well. Gloria Grace Rand: Yeah. That’s for sure because I know I still occasionally catch myself with a little bit of negative self-talk and it’s, would have been nice to have learned that really consciously, being able to learn that at a younger age to be able to have that foundation. Which brings me to my next question. So how young do you recommend kids to be able to start doing this type of work? Renaye Thornborrow: Well, our curriculum is really geared towards children between the ages of six through twelve. We want to get them in elementary school, middle school before they get into the really rough stuff in high school, college and on to the adult years as well. We want to support them in developing these mindset skills that they will be able to use for the rest of their lives. With our coaches, we have coaches that come from a variety of backgrounds. Some have experience working with a little bit younger kids and even teens and some of them will adapt the curriculum in order to support the expanded age groups on either end. But we’re really, we’re focused on ages six through twelve because once kids go to elementary school,...