Pillar #1: Help him become more of who he is. 

Start here if your teenager is under age 14.

Or if your teenager is older than 14 but still wrestling with one or more of these problems:

• A lack of motivation to get started on something meaningful
• Or a lack of being able to stick with one thing

This track in Parent-Their-Passion will show you how to trigger a deep inner motivation and a passion for developing something he can be proud of.

Here’s what doesn’t work: 

Sighing and telling your child to “find something to do” every five minutes doesn’t work. The reality: your child truly doesn’t know how to get started! 

He’s depending on you to guide him out of his rut. This is where a method to guide him comes into play.

This method will show you how to use your child’s identity as the primary energy source for finding his deep inner motivation and passion.

Your child will feel whole, powerful, and capable.

Start here: 

Can you genuinely say that your child has a deep, inner motivation that will give him that sense of joy and accomplishment to carry him up and into his adult years? 

If so, then your child is in a good spot, and you should continue doing what you are doing. Check out the other tracks of Parent-Their-Passion on how to accelerate his trajectory.

If your son or daughter is bored, unfocused, and wasting their potential, keep reading. 

Or, if they are so squirrely-minded that they can’t stay with one interest long enough to develop some meaningful knowledge or skill, then this article is also for you. 

I will show you how to generate a sustained focus that your child will truly enjoy.

I will show you how to bring about on-demand in your child a deep motivation and passion within just a few months of starting!

Why you should start building talent when your child is young… but not too young

This secret? Do it while your teenager is still young enough to activate and amplify what he already has within him and around him. 

This is what I call  “becoming more of who he is.” 

External identities and external motivations far removed from his current life work best when your child is an older teenager with experiences of what works and doesn’t work. When he is younger (ages 12 to 14), I have found that this track is the most effective and fun for everyone to watch him change in real-time.

Let’s finally get to the nuts and bolts of how this works.

Having your child become more of who he is involves lining up three elements that already exist within your family: Personal Interest, Tools & Assets, and Value to Others. We’ll get into those in just a minute.

Here’s what you don’t have to do:

• You don’t have to move your family into another environment.
• You don’t have to spend money you don’t have.
• You don’t have to depend on the crapshoot of some celebrity to discover your child. 
• You don’t have to wait for luck to kick in (no more comparing your kid to other kids!)

Instead, you’ll get:   

• A deep inner motivation that brings him joy and passion in his life NOW.
• An interest that could turn into a skill set that will carry them into adulthood with a drive to achieve real success.
• Access to a series of calibrations of what you already control and already own.

“Becoming more of who he is” means he will start from the stable position of his current abilities and of his current understanding of the world.

Your child’s identity extends to include all his parent’s abilities, his family’s assets and the tools it controls, not forgetting the input of his family’s social connections and mindsets.

His father’s car is his car, in the sense that he can go as far as his father is willing to drive him to the activities they choose. Her mother’s easy math abilities are the daughter’s abilities, as far as her mom is willing to patiently teach her inside tricks at becoming so proficient. This principle can extend all the way into the physical and social world around them.

So how do you tap into that full identity that belongs to your child?

By stacking these three key elements:

• Personal Interest
• Tools & Assets
• Value to Others

Those three key elements are probably not stacked up right now. 

In the worst case, those three elements might be competing against each other! They are co-existing at best. 

The end result of a lack of alignment of those three elements is a teenager that is unmotivated, passion-less, and disconnected.

Stack up the three key elements properly and your teen’s motivation problems disappear. 

Here’s what you do:

1. First, identify and focus on a small existing personal interest in your teen’s life.
2. Second, have your teen use your family’s tools and strengths that already belong to your family to create something tangible with his interest.
3. Third, have your child create something that is actually useful and valuable to others besides himself.

If you stack those three elements, in that order, you will have success. 

This is the secret formula for creating passion-on-demand:

Interest + Tools + Value = Passion

“Becoming More of Who He Is” takes your child from passive curiosity and ho-hum interest to a higher level of passion and motivation.

Now that you know the formula, let’s look closely at each of the three elements and how you stack them on top of each other.