Challenge to Excellence: A Survival Guide for Teenagers and Parents

By Kathleen Shea

This book a primer, which just means this is an introduction, a basic book to help you see how valuable you are and to assist you in becoming the best you can be. It's written for a middle school and high school audience and parents. 

You have value. It's not value you earn. Your worth is intrinsic. It's in you, and no one can take it

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kathleen Shea
• Release date: Feb 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9798218142971

Kathleen Shea

Kathleen Shea is a retired credentialed educator. She wrote and taught a motivational course called Challenge to Excellence to thousands of junior high and high school students, parents, teachers, student teachers, and administrators. She did this through workshops, weeklong seminars, retreats, and leadership conferences.She is also a certified teacher of the Enneagram, which she taught in the Come Alive Program at St. Mary's College in Moraga, California.Her last teaching assignment was teaching seventh grade at Chipman Middle School in Alameda, California. This provided her with the tremendous opportunity to really get to know and love her students and convey the principles of Challenge to Excellence daily.After forty years of making a difference in the lives of others, she now enjoys life with her husband of fifty-five years and loves being the best Gramma she can be to her five grandchildren.

Book preview

Title Page

Copyright © 2022 Kathleen Shea.

All rights reserved. This book is protected by copyright. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including as photocopies or scanned-in or other electronic copies, or utilized by any information storage and retrieval system without written permission from the copyright owner.

Printed in the United States of America.

Cover and Interior design by FormattedBooks

Review from a dad:

The message is awesome. What a gift!

CONTENTS

Introduction: Written for Teens and Parents

Chapter 1 Why I Wrote This Book and Who I Am

Chapter 2 Who Are You? A Priceless, Precious Angel

Chapter 3 Double Winners

Chapter 4 Goal Setting

Chapter 5 Visualizations and Affirmations—See It First!

Chapter 6 Negative Criticism

Chapter 7 Heart Talks and Heart Listening

Chapter 8 Adolescence and Review of Big Ideas

Letter from the Author

Biography of Kathleen Shea

Dedication

Testimonials

For handouts and extra worksheets please go to my website.

INTRODUCTION:

WRITTEN FOR TEENS AND PARENTS

TO TEENS

You have value. It’s not value you earn. Your worth is intrinsic. It’s in you, and no one can take it away from you. You are born with this innate characteristic. You are unique and rare. Because of this, you have great value. If you be the best you can be, then you can achieve your dreams, and the world will be a bette r place!

There will always be challenges, people who do bad things, adversity, betrayal, and suffering. But you, as a strong individual, have the power within you to overcome these adversities.

I call this book a primer, which just means this is an introduction, a basic book to help you see how valuable you are and to assist you in becoming the best you can be. It is written for a middle school and high school audience. Teens, I am writing to you in chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 8. Chapters 6 and 7 are written to you and your parents.

Young teens entering middle school especially need to hear this message. You are facing seven of the most challenging years of your life.

Luckily, this book provides a toolbox with some reliable tools to build a strong and resilient self-image. I call it The Family Survival Toolbox. I know from experience that your parents and high schoolers will need just as much help as you do. The tools I shared for twenty-five years and that I am recommending here have been tried and tested by thousands of students and families.

TO PARENTS

Parents, your greatest gifts to the planet are your children. My firm hope is that at the end of your seven-year journey, the information in these pages will build strong family bonds and enhance and enrich this precious time.

When I look back over my sons’ middle school and high school years, as busy and challenging as they were, they remain the happiest years of my life. I look back on that time fondly. I know my sons do too.

I don’t want to gloss over how challenging those seven years were. When our sons were teenagers, I was too busy to think about being happy. I was just trying to survive being the mother to three boys all born within three and a half years of each other! My family called them Irish triplets. I certainly did not have all the answers.

When I gave parent talks, I would be introduced as having three teenage sons and being happily married. I would always respond, Happily married with three teenage sons is a contradiction in terms!

When I was a teenager, if my father even looked at me as if he was disappointed, I was devastated. I was a Goody Two-shoes and attended Holy Names Academy in Seattle, an all-girls high school. In my senior year, I was the student body president.

One evening, my husband and I went out to dinner. We arrived home to find that our high school boys had somehow gotten our van stuck in a ditch next to a steep grassy hill in our neighborhood. After we called AAA, we rescued our car, and the boys were asleep, my husband grabbed the car keys.

I’ll be right back, he said.

A few minutes later he walked into our house and put two cases of beer on the island in our kitchen.

Because I was such a Goody Two-shoes, I was astounded.

I asked, Where did you find that? How did you know you would find beer?

He looked at me and smiled. Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

I can assure you that this Goody Two-shoes would never have known there was beer hidden on that steep grassy hill.

When the boys walked into the kitchen for breakfast and saw their two cases of beer on the island, they knew they were in trouble.

My husband just pointed to each one of them.

You mow the lawn.

You clean the pool.

You, get rid of the beer.

Oh, and you’ll all spend a few Friday nights at home.

I am not kidding when I say that these teenage years were some of the most demanding and trying years of my life.

As for my sons, the lessons they had to learn were never easy. Now, thirty years later, our sons are excellent husbands, amazing fathers, and incredible sons.

I can also tell you that I had no idea whether any of these tools would work. Today, I know that the tools you will learn to use in the book not only work but are also invaluable!

There aren’t many books written for both teenagers and parents. But I wanted to speak to both groups. A friend who read an earlier version of this book said it was really a family communication workbook.

If you want to, you can read this book from cover to cover in less than two hours. I recommend that you do read the whole book first before doing the worksheets. It is less than one hundred pages. And at the end of each chapter are worksheets to be completed by the family. This homework is essential because it is in the doing and experiencing where the change will take place. I also tell and share stories throughout because examples also help with recalling important concepts.

WHY I WROTE THIS BOOK AND WHO I AM

LIVING MY STORY

Like many of my students, you may think you’ll never succeed, but like me, who came from a very humble background, you can overcome difficult circumstances and make your dreams come true. We all have stories, and they need to be shared.

My father’s mother died before I was born, and my maternal grandmother died when I was seven. I know hardly anything about either of them. I am the last of my family. There is no one to tell me stories about them. This is true for many of us my age. By the time we are interested in our family history, the people who could recount the stories have all passed away.

When I was four years old, I was visiting my grandparents who lived in Wallville, WA, when someone came to the door and told Grandma that my grandfather, a logger, had been crushed and killed by a falling tree. My first childhood memory is that after hearing the news about my grandpa, my grandma put me behind her kitchen wood stove with a basket of baby chicks and told me to wait there for my aunt.

Grandma came to live with us for a while, and my next memory of her is of the day she died, when I was seven. Recent research has found that the earliest memories tend to be ones filled with emotion, either positive or negative. And both of those negative memories are etched into my brain.

Even if you come from humble beginnings, you can become successful and thrive and flourish. I recently read an excellent book, Hillbilly Elegy, in which author J.D. Vance describes his childhood growing up in Ohio and Kentucky. My mother’s family were hillbillies, but whereas Vance’s mother chose drugs and alcohol and made life miserable and unbearable for J.D., I was more fortunate.

Although my mother grew up poor and often felt inadequate and unsure of herself, she and my dad loved each other, my sister, and me unconditionally. They did this even though life was not always easy, and they always wanted the best for me and my sister.

My parents moved us to Seattle to give us the advantage of growing up in a city and getting an education, one of the keys to achieving the American Dream. I am in awe about this admirable decision to leave everything they knew—their family, their loved ones, their small towns—just to provide us with better education. But despite their courage, I still noticed echoes of my hillbilly past.

When I entered high school at