Competence Brings Confidence
When we begin treatment with a new patient, or we begin working on a new skill at home as a parent, we often become so excited about the goal, or the end game, that we forget about all the small steps we should take to get there. Over the past 20 years working with children and families as an SLP and raising my own children I have learned that we need to celebrate the small steps in life and for therapy progress.
At some point I started telling parents of preschoolers and early elementary students, “Competence brings confidence!”
Your child might learn a very small step toward their goal in a therapy session. This small step should bring a lot of excitement, praise, and chances to “show it off” at home. These chances are growing your child’s confidence in their abilities. Those chances are giving neural connections a chance to form. Those chances are reinforcing new motor patterns. Being competent in a new skill, no matter how small, brings confidence! Confidence gives us the drive and the will to keep working hard and keep going. It keeps us excited in our pursuit to learn something new or difficult and optimizes therapy progress.
Focus on the Small Steps for Big Victories
Often parents and practitioners focus too much on the end goal. Young children do not even know what the end goal is. We need to celebrate each very small step along the way.
With the confidence your child has from practicing a seemingly small skill at home, they come to therapy ready to move on and add more new skills. They will have the skill they have become so good at in their tool belt, and add to it! They might have started making a speech sound with confidence in isolation. When they are confident with that skill because they have shown it off many times, they will be ready to move on to making that sound in words.
In the opposite scenario we might spend time working on the small skills, try to speed along, and forget to give praise and practice at each step. We are focused on the end goal, for example, clear speech. All along your child or patient might practice and never realize all the small gains because we forget to praise them with small steps or have them show off their small steps. In this scenario, opportunities to practice important building blocks are missed. Opportunities to build confidence are missed, and ultimately the pace of progress is slower.
In the end, learning the “end goal” should have felt like many moments of satisfaction and praise to finally reach where we wanted the child to be. It should not feel like many moments of trying and not {quite} getting there and being corrected over and over until we {finally} get good enough.
Incidentally, this works for grown ups too! If you are trying to learn something new, give yourself some grace. Focus on a small step you have mastered and practice it or show it off many times, and then move on. In the long run, you will be smarter and stronger for building competence in the small steps all along, and you will be more confident with your goal when you get there!
Optimizing Therapy Progress at Carolina Therapy Connection
The key to success is realizing that our large or end goals aren’t going to happen overnight, in the next week or maybe even the next year, but this is okay. We tend to take the present moment for granted – it seems insignificant, and we believe the little things we do in the moment are not changing us. At Carolina Therapy Connection, we believe in a culture that embraces the small victories for your family! Each time your child has milestone achievement, we will find a way to celebrate. We believe it is critical to make therapy as fun and motivating as possible by celebrating the small victories as well as major achievements. After all, when children enjoy what they are doing, who they are with and the environment they are in, anything is possible! If your family has concerns regarding your child’s development or goals you would like to achieve, call us at 252-341-9944. We would love to help you and make you a part of our CTC family and culture.
Written by: Susan Hill, MS, CCC-SLP
