TED* Is Not Just for Grown-Ups
Earlier this week, David was on a Zoom session with a group of individuals who have read The Power of TED*. During introductions, several participants shared that they want to take the TED* (*The Empowerment Dynamic)® work to youth and into schools.
At the same time, many, many parents are faced with the reality of home-schooling their children during the COVID pandemic. We were recently inspired to learn that one of our teammates is teaching TED* to her 7 and 9-year-old children and that they are “totally getting it.”
This past summer, prior to the start of school, we received an email from a mother (Roselyn) about her experience of encouraging, Gabby, her 10-year-old daughter, to read TED*.
Here is Roselyn’s message to us:
I recall us being in our small home library when Gabby began reading TED* (after acquiescing to mommy’s week-long cajoling to take up the book), and how pleasantly surprised she was after just the first few pages. Like me, she LOVES to read, and she instantly loved that it’s told in a narrative style.
With each page turn, she got more inquisitive—interjecting her reading with musing aloud about the main character’s fate, sympathizing with the man. She instinctively began to see herself in those roles and cited to me examples of how she, and others, show up in those roles; she quickly discovered the juxtaposition of the roles: “Oh! can’t have one without the other Mommy!” she quipped, “victim–rescuer; victim-persecutor…”
David, it was such a precious gift to see her, at 10, unfolding this rich model and begin to internalize it introspectively. At one point I said to her, “Sweetheart, blessed are you for learning this now. Many people live their entire lives oblivious to these ideas. And how tragic that is!”
A little while later, Roselyn wrote:
Gabby finally finished reading TED yesterday and she’s ecstatic; she’s mulling it over as she often does when she’s completed a work… stopping to check in with new insights.
Moved by hearing about their mother-daughter experience, we asked if we could record an interview with them—to which they readily agreed!
This is the first in a two-part series from that interview about how The Power of TED* can be used by a family to initiate a conversion that will impact the lifetime of a young person. It also illustrates that TED* is not just for grown-ups!
In this video, 10-year-old Gabby shares with David her experience with the book: