Mental images can also motivate children to set and achieve new goals. The “Lighthouse” exercise helps children to visualize their goals by defining appropriate intermediate steps and supports them in implementing their goals. Instead of focusing on a problem, it is sometimes rewarding to focus more on a target state. At the beginning of the exercise, children have to imagine that they’ve already achieved their goal. In a second step, they have to observe what would change inside themselves (physical feeling, posture, thoughts, voice, feelings, etc.). A child who, for example is afraid to walk the route to school all alone, may observe in its imagination, that it feels worriless, liberated and courageous in the target state. Perhaps its posture will also be more open and relaxed. It may also be that the child approaches its classmates more quickly and interacts with them more.
Visualizing and feeling the desired state is usually very motivating for children. Once the main goal has been identified and described, realistic subgoals can be defined. After that the discrepancy between the actual and desired state is not too big and the child can quickly experience that it can successfully change something. The child with fear of walking to school would perhaps choose to walk the path from the school building to the classroom on its own as a subgoal.
For having enough courage to practice a new behavior, children can choose a good feeling from the “Wheel of feelings”. Therefore, they activate it, while they are practicing the intermediate goal in imagination. It is best to try out, how to achieve an intermediate goal in imagination first, before you put it into practice in reality. Depending on the difficulty of the goal, you can include different numbers of intermediate goals until the final goal is achieved. The child mentioned above would perhaps determine, that the parents accompany it only as far as the school grounds as the next goal. Then only up to half of the way to school and finally the child will be able to walk the whole way to school by itself.
Here you can download for free the pdf of the workbook Lighthouse
