Dave Mortensen

And outside of this podcast, I'm also the leader for a division of our company, Southwestern Consulting, and our division is the Southwestern Student Coaching Program.

And that division, we started back in 2020 because the desire we had was to take all these skills that we've equipped executives with for

Over a decade, I've coached executives and managers and sales professionals on the skills, the habits, the motivation, and the systems to be successful in their job and in life.

And what we realized from working with 30, 40, 50 year olds was if we could have gotten to them when they were in ninth grade, in middle school, in high school, and equipped them with the same things we're teaching them now, the ripple effects would be huge.

And so back in 2020, we decided to formulate a coaching program for youth

equipping youth with the same types of skill development that we typically work on with adults.

We just apply it to their world.

And what that looks like is teaching them the study skills, the communication skills that they can use every day in the classroom and outside the classroom, coaching them on the mindset and the motivation of someone who's a top performer

And what does that mean?

It means helping a young teenager create and craft a vision for themselves.

Because without a vision, we perish.

But with a vision, we can be equipped with the motivation to dig into our study habits.

We can see the connection between our future and the excellence that we have to form our habits now to be successful in the long run.

And we also work on the emotional intelligence.

It's how we balance our emotions and manage those emotions when they come up in a way that allows us to communicate effectively with others and to communicate with ourselves.

It's about equipping young people with self-talk.

That means equipping them with the language that they can use to better direct their thoughts and their mind to accomplish their goals and their aims.

And lastly, we equip them with the systems.

That means for us, the tools, the time management, and the organization strategies

to not just work hard in life but to work smart and when we combine all these different areas that we work with our teens on what we find is that they form the habits early in life that allows them to achieve their goals later in life and even right now and so our passion is to equip as many young people across this world as we can and we're doing pretty good so far we've got teens in seven different countries who have been through our coaching program to date