5 Tips on Building Entrepreneurship Skills in Teens

1 - Build Resilience

Becoming a young entrepreneur by its nature requires a great deal of resilience. To have the courage to try out something new and manage setbacks and failures in the process requires the strength of character.

Building resilience in children starts from an early age, with children learning how to delay gratification around the preschool years. This ability to understand and feel comfortable with situations in which rewards take time and effort is one of the first building blocks for resilience in our children.

While resilience skills typically develop with age and social interactions, resilience can be fostered and directly taught. Some helpful ways of promoting resilience amongst our adolescents include:

• helping them develop problem-solving skills,
• ensuring they feel socially connected with peers and their community and embracing their differences.

With adolescence comes a desire to be independent, and providing age-appropriate independence with clear and consistent limits helps adolescents develop resilience. Eric Greitens (2015), author and Rhodes Scholar, wrote:

“Entrepreneurs jump on the wild roller coaster ride of life where the tracks haven’t yet been fully built. They’d have it no other way. They’re happy that way -- with the wind in their hair.”

and being resilient is a necessary quality to develop and manage the ride ahead.

2 - Harness Creativity and Personal Experiences

All too often, we as parents and carers can focus on developing compliant children. It comes with the territory of helping our children conform to rules in school, manage their time and activities and be part of a happily functioning family system. Sometimes we can lose sight of just being a kid and the creative and unique ways our children often see the world.

Entrepreneurs need to be creative, see opportunity where others have not, and take risks where others don’t dare. Bearing in mind your child’s interests, passions, and creative outlets can really help foster their positioning to become entrepreneurs. Take the time to be interested in your child and schedule plenty of time to fill with their own interests. Utilising and reframing personal experiences can also be valuable.

Take Bridgette Veneris, the 10-year old Melbourne girl who won the littleBIGidea competition for her invention of an easy-to-use adhesive bandage dispenser (Charpentier-Andre, 2016). Bridgette utilised her experiences while in a hospital recovering from leukaemia to develop a sticky bandage that was quicker and easier to peel off. Ideas and inventions can come from unexpected places, even negative experiences, with the right support and interest.

3 - Develop a Growth Mindset

Children are becoming increasingly exposed to the concept that our abilities and capabilities are not fixed but rather malleable and changeable.

This growth mindset is becoming part of our children’s language in the educational setting. Children learn to swap their “I can’t do it” attitude for the “I can’t do it yet, but with effort and support, I can!” mindset. Recent advances in neuroscience indicate that our brain has an amazing ability to change in response to situations, attitudes and support.

Parents and carers are positioned to support children’s development of this growth mindset. Entrepreneurs succeed with a growth mindset - they need to be flexible on the start-up roller coaster ride, learn from experiences and attribute failures to things that they can change. Parents can foster a growth mindset in their adolescents by encouraging them to problem solve issues that arise, take a flexible approach with failures, embrace the learning process involved, encourage taking a leap of faith with ideas and praising effort, persistence, and self-reflection. Companies such as Google, Apple, Disney and Amazon are known for fostering a culture of curiosity, innovation and risk-taking and valuing the growth mindset of their employees.

4 - Call in the Community

Helping your child connect with those around them that have similar interests as well as complementary skills will help position them for success in making their ideas not only a reality but a sustainable one. Entrepreneurs not only need great ideas, but they also need to be able to bring ideas to fruition and ensure the scalability and longevity of their enterprises, and having a team around them to provide backing, guidance, and reflection is important.

Building a team and support network around your adolescent is an essential ingredient for the making of an entrepreneur. Some ways parents can help is by providing their adolescent with guidance, particularly on their experiences with running a business and managing success and failure, helping their adolescent link in with an appropriate mentor and fostering a network of like-minded adolescents. Adolescents need to know their parents have their backs, even in times of challenge and failure.  

5 - Provide Guidance around the Practicalities

Becoming an entrepreneur requires knowledge around the logistics of how a business works, from understanding how to set up a bank account all the way to the knowledge about the commercial guidelines and laws surrounding your business idea and model.

Parents and carers can share their business experiences and facilitate the growth of financial literacy by stepping their adolescent through the processes of setting up bank accounts and navigating business structures. It can be helpful to call on mentors or link your child into courses that may be helpful for their business, e.g., Commercial law or coding courses. Of course, parents and carers are also positioned well to help their adolescent understand and learn about self-care and balancing the demands of becoming an entrepreneur with those of being a child.

Our youth are growing up in an environment that is thriving on connectivity, creativity, and innovation, which for many adolescents, provides a perfect base from which to encourage their strengths and foster their entrepreneurial skills.

Do you want to help your child excel in their field?

Here at Quirky Kid, we run a program to do just this, and it's called Power Up! Run both at clinics and as a unique online program, Power Up! takes all the essential psychological techniques used by elite performers and makes them accessible to children through the teaching of Performance Psychology.