Ask a child which animal they’d want as their own, and watch them light up thinking it through. The Power Spirit Technique lets a child borrow the strength of an animal they admire, giving shape to confidence and coping skills that are otherwise hard for a child to put into words.
Why this matters
Children often struggle to name what inner strengths they’d like to have, or what might help them cope better with a hard moment, it’s a genuinely abstract question for a young mind. Choosing and building an animal they admire sidesteps that difficulty entirely: a child can usually describe exactly why a lion, an eagle, or a dolphin is strong, even if they couldn’t easily describe wanting to feel braver or calmer themselves.
What you need
Pictures of a variety of animals. Modelling clay, or drawing materials.
How to play
Show your child pictures of several different animals and ask them to choose one that genuinely appeals to them. Then help them build that animal out of clay, or draw it, or make a simple mask with its face.
Once the animal is made, ask your child to imagine what it might do in a situation they find difficult, a tough moment at school, a disagreement with a friend, a time they felt scared. Let them describe how their animal would handle it, confidently, calmly, cleverly, whatever qualities they imagine it bringing.
Returning to the animal over time
The real value builds with repetition. Bring the animal back into conversation regularly, especially around moments that are genuinely hard for your child, and ask what their animal would do. Over time, many children start drawing on the animal’s imagined qualities more naturally, eventually needing the prop less and less as the underlying confidence becomes more their own.
Variations
Some children prefer inventing an entirely imaginary creature, a tiny messenger or companion that only they (and you) can “see,” who stays with them and reminds them of good ways to handle a problem. Others enjoy imagining themselves as a superhero instead, describing the exact qualities they’d want their hero self to have, then drawing it and imagining it solving a problem alongside them.
Why this works
A direct question like “what makes you feel brave?” often draws a blank from a child. An animal, a messenger, or an imagined hero gives the same idea somewhere concrete to live, and children tend to find it much easier to describe someone else’s courage, cleverness, or calm than to claim those qualities directly for themselves, at least at first.
A chosen animal, built in clay or drawn on paper, becomes something a child can return to again and again, a small, personal symbol of strength that’s entirely their own design.
