EXTRAORDINARY TEENS

EXTRAORDINARY TEENS (A SPECIAL STORY BY SEAN CONVEY)

 Many of my challenges began at birth. My dad said, “Sean, when you were born your cheeks were so fat the doctor don’t know which end to spank!” He wasn’t kidding. You should see my baby pictures! My cheeks hung off my face like balloons, so you imagine how often I was teased.

   Once I was with all neighborhood kids jumping on the trampoline when Susan, my neighbor, couldn’t resist saying what everyone was thinking, “Man, look at Sean’s bouncing cheeks. They’re so fat.” David, my younger brother , in an effort to defend me said, “They’re not fat. They’re muscle.” His valiant effort backfired, and everyone got kick out of my new nickname, “Muscle cheeks.”

   My problems continued into junior high school. I hate seventh grade and have chosen to forget most of it. I do remember that I still had fat cheeks and an eight-grader named Scott kept trying to pick a fight with me. I don’t know why he picked on me. I’d never even met the guy. Maybe it was because he was confident he could pound me. He’d wait in the hallway with a couple of his friends and challenge me to a fight every day after my algebra class. One day he cornered me. “Hey, Covey. You big fat sissy. Why don’t you fight me?”

“I don’t know.”

  He then slugged me in the stomach real hard, knocking my breath out. I was too scared to fight back. He left me alone after that, but I was humiliated and felt like a loser.

   As I began high school, to pleasant surprise, my face grew into my cheeks, but as you can guess, I still struggled with my self-esteem. To make matter worse, my dad was a super successful author and speaker which made me feel like I would never measure up. You might be familiar with my dad’s book, The 7 Habit of Highly Effective People, which became one successful leadership books ever written.

  Well, my dad owes a lot of credit for its success to me and my brothers and sisters. You see,we were his guinea pigs. My dad always wanted us to take responsibility for everything in life. Whenever I said something like “Dad my girlfriend makes me so mad,” without a doubt my dad would come back with “Now Sean, no one can make you mad unless you let them. It’s your choice. You choose to be mad.” He never let me off the hook. He always challenging me, making sure that I never blamed someone else for the way I acted. I often screamed back “You are wrong, Dad! I didn’t choose to be mad. She MADE me mad. Just get off my back and leave me alone.

   My dad tried all of his psycho experiments on us, and that’s why my brothers and sisters have major emotional problems (just kidding). Luckily, I did manage to escape rather unscathed.

   You might think because of my dad’s success that giving speeches would come naturally, right? Wrong. In fact, I was so afraid that I dropped out of the campaign to run for office in high school because I discovered that I had to give a speech to the student body. I was very shy I was scared to death to speak (even in front my classroom).

   Nevertheless, I still had a passion for helping other young people. In college, my confidence finally began to grow. I joined the football team at BYU and as a sophomore I was starting the quarterback, something I couldn’t imagine even imagine in high school. So with the help of football experiences and coaching from friends and family, I finally got over my fear of public speaking and ended up speaking at over two hundred assemblies in just two years! This is was an enormous turnaround for me. The way I looked at myself and my life changed dramatically.

   At age seventeen, my dad’s book, The7 Habits of Highly Effective People, became a real source of inspiration for me. I started to absorb the ideas and concepts in his book and I realized that the same seven habits literally applied everywhere in one’s life, especially in school setting.

   After some thought, I asked my dad that I could write a teen version of the book. He said, “You’re a great writer, son. Go for it. I trust you and your judgment.” Sure enough, I began writing The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens.

   So what is habit? Well, try folding your arms. Then try folding them in opposite way. It feels awkward at first, but if you did that, over and over again, for many days, you would develop a new arm folding habit and soon it would feel comfortable and natural. Just like folding our arms differently each day, we can create a new habits in other areas of our life. So, I would like to say that we create our habits and habits create us.

I also want to share this sentence:

Sometimes competition can be healthy, but the one area that we should not compete in our relationships

The fastest way you change your life is to change how you think.

                                                                                             

NURUL SYUHADA BINTI AMALLUDIN

17672

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