
July 29, 2024
APPLETON – Tantrums; anxiety; lack of confidence, motivation and focus; screen-based entertainment addictions – if contemporary society’s childhood challenges aren’t altogether new, their magnitude, Jen Philibeck and Mandy Rinne said, is.
By launching Empowered Minds Kids Studio (5765 West Grande Market Drive), Co-owners Rinne and Philibeck said they’re coaching kids – and their parents – to overcome obstacles both modern and timeless.
As certified kids life coaches, Philibeck and Rinne said their approach is to get kids to play their way to positive mindsets and healthy lifestyle habits.
“We know that’s how they learn best – when they have a good relationship and they’re having fun,” Rinne said. “In here, I think we give them back a little bit of that childhood. They get that opportunity to play, to share, to grow and to learn things in a natural, cool way.”
The co-owners said this strategy builds upon the more traditional educational background, as they expand upon their decades of experience as elementary school teachers to “teach the whole child.”
“Through the course of our teaching, we saw there was this need,” Philibeck said, “for social-emotional development, learning and skills we couldn’t reach enough of in the classroom.”
Rinne said they are also passionate about teaching healthy eating habits, sleeping habits and exercise “because we know that ‘healthy’ doesn’t just mean mentally but also physically – it’s a whole experience.”
During their time as teachers, Philibeck said they enjoyed the relationship and classroom community they developed.
“(We loved) creating this beautiful classroom community that supports and lifts each other up,” she said. “We get to take the best of what we loved about teaching and incorporate it here.”
It takes a village
Empowered Minds, Philibeck said, offers four-week group coaching sessions and seven-month individual coaching sessions throughout the year.
The studio, she said, is also offering two single-day “summer camp” events in August to build up kids’ skills ahead of the forthcoming school year.
While the new year can bring about a combination of nerves and excitement for students, Rinne and Philibeck said they’ll also experience mixed emotions come September.

“We thought we’d be teachers for life,” Philibeck said.
She said it was hard to walk away from the profession when she resigned from teaching in 2020 to focus on raising her children.
After nearly three years as a full-time mom, Philibeck said she started exploring part-time, remote work and happened across a job posting for a kids life coach.
“That got my juices flowing thinking about this (career), and I did a lot of research,” she said. “What an amazing concept and idea – this speaks so much to my heart. From there, there was no going back. I knew this is what I needed to be.”
Her ensuing research, Philibeck said, led to her discovery of Kids Life Studio – a global network of play-based life coaches with “fun, interactive, resilience-building programs,” which offered children “tools and tips for handling the ups and downs of life so they can make good choices and live the life of their dreams.”
As she recognized the potential of what kids life coaching could do for the Northeast Wisconsin region, Philibeck said what she envisioned quickly expanded beyond a part-time, personal endeavor – leading her to reach out to Rinne – a like-minded teacher she’d taught with at North Greenville Elementary.
“We knew our visions aligned from knowing each other through school,” Philibeck said. “I immediately called (Rinne), and I said, ‘you need to know about this. This is totally up your alley – it’s everything you are.’”
Rinne said she wholeheartedly agreed, and while appreciating the social-emotional support school systems are able to provide, she said she recognized the opportunity to offer services for kids to build these life skills even more with coaching.
Rinne and Philibeck said they earned certifications in kids life coaching through Kids Life Studio and officially opened Empowered Minds Kids Studio in February 2024.
Philibeck kicked things off herself, while Rinne finished the remainder of the school year before fully joining forces with Philibeck.
“I knew this was the right move,” Rinne said. “It’s hard to leave something you love, but I also know we can help so many more kids – and families.”
The coaching duo said with Empowered Minds, they can complement and reinforce the positive growth parents and teachers provide, embracing the proverb “it takes a village to raise a child.”
“We both believe if that social-emotional piece and those relationships are in place, any kid can learn well,” Rinne said.
The power of play
Empowered Minds programs, Rinne and Philibeck said, introduce and exemplify topics, such as positive collaboration, productive communication, healthy appraisal of personal strengths and simplified concepts of neuroscience – not with explicit lesson plans or rote memorization, rather by livening up the studio with playful activities, games and exercises.
“We’re play-based coaches,” Rinne said. “We are constantly moving. Because we have this large space, sometimes we’ll set up a baseball diamond, and we’ll have different cards, and I ask them what their goals or intentions are. We make it fun and active so they’re getting that movement piece in there as well.”
Tag, basketball and science experiments, Philibeck and Rinne said, are other examples of the type of “Trojan Horse” approach they take to introduce sophisticated life skills to coaches.
The pair said they’ve found the typical age range for aptitude is from five to 13.
“We will work with any kiddos,” Rinne said. “We want to focus on their strengths and take those strengths and those positive aspects and build into the challenging areas.”
Rinne and Philibeck said Empowering Minds gives kids the tools to overcome negative self-talk, improve emotional regulation and sharpen executive function skills – meaning the ability to take and hold multiple directions without becoming distracted.
Though they recommend coaching for all children, Rinne and Philibeck said for some struggles – including trauma, eating disorders or severe depression – play-based life coaching sometimes works best as a supplement in conjunction with other forms of treatment and counseling.
The inclusive range of children who benefit from kids life coaching is a big part of what Philibeck said appealed to her about the approach.
The co-owners said resources are often devoted to gifted and talented students and to children with severe and urgent challenges, whereas coaching can be ideal, foundational and preventative for the often-quiet “gray-area kiddos floating below the radar.”
Philibeck said Kids Life Studio provides resources, suggestions and a sounding board for certified coaches, but Empowering Minds’ independence allows her and Rinne to embrace their own coaching styles and curate unique curricula for all kids.
“The beautiful part of Kids Life Studio is they give you the theory behind kids life coaching – the science behind it,” Philibeck said. “They give you the structures, but then they say, ‘make it what you want.’”
Determining the most impactful type of play, she said, is based off of an initial, 250-question lifestyle assessment completed by parents.
“We take that assessment – that data – and create every child’s coaching program specific to what they need,” Philibeck said. “No two children will have the same program. Then we get to hear the kid’s side of their story, related to certain questions. We play a game, and we ask them different questions about themselves based on what we saw from the lifestyle assessment, that maybe we want a little more information on. They get to fill in the gaps and (help us) put together the whole picture of that child, that family and what they specifically will need through coaching.”
Parental support
After a parent has initiated a consultation with Empowered Minds, Rinne and Philibeck said sessions only go forth if the child is interested and willing.
Though the coaching is kid-centric, they said the success relies upon the continued efforts of the rest of the family, as well as teachers or therapists.
“If we’re teaching a little kiddo a strategy, we want every adult who’s working with them to know that strategy – so we can all be on the same page,” Philibeck said. “It’s for the best interest of the child, so everybody is using the same language and examples and tools.”
Rinne said parents are regularly notified of each week’s progress, goals and how they can help at home.
Philibeck and Rinne said the primary focus of the coaching is the child, but both have been surprised at the impact and buy-in from the broader, incidental family coaching.
“We know how important it is when the kids are learning these skills that the parents know them, too – because you don’t know what you don’t know,” Rinne said. “‘We can use a timer and checklist to help with screen time?’ These are things (Philibeck and I) think about, but (parents) are working their own jobs, and they’re trying to keep their households afloat. You can’t think of everything on your own.”

Philibeck said the pace of life today has changed substantially.
“Schedules are full, and if adults are feeling overwhelmed and stressed, obviously kids are feeling that way, too,” she said.
Rinne said she and Philibeck always say, “we are not perfect – we are moms.”
“We’re not here to ‘fix’ your kids,” she said.
Empowered Minds, Philibeck said, is also a judge-free zone.
“We are on this journey right along with you,” she said. “We’re fighting the good fight, too, and trying to figure it out one day at a time.”
A house plant for the family to water and maintain together; a household gratitude jar for jotting notes of appreciation; a reflective journal for parents with prompts like “what’s something your child taught you today?” and nightly meditation sessions called “mind vacations” are a few of the tools Rinne and Philibeck said they provide parents.
“The feedback we have received from parents has been heartwarming and astounding,” Rinne said. “It has driven us to think, ‘how else can we support these parents?’”
Some of that help, Philibeck said, is merely a matter of normalizing parents’ struggles.
“As a society, we’ve gotten into this (idea that), ‘I have to be able to do it all by myself – I can’t ask for help,’” she said. “I don’t know where that shift happened. Or to admit you can’t do it all is a weakness. It’s not a weakness. You’re not supposed to be the mom who can throw the best birthday party with the best theme and do all the things. Standards have been unrealistically set.”
The pair said they can personally attest to the semi-maddening value of wisdom transmitted from a non-parent source.
“(Kids listen to and absorb information differently) when an outside party tells them,” Philibeck said.
Rinne said one of her children sees Philibeck for coaching.
“I can say something the exact same way – and (my daughter) will say, ‘Coach Jen said…’ and I’ll say, ‘gosh, isn’t she smart and amazing?’”
Philibeck said kiddos absorb the information in a different way “because it’s not Mom and Dad saying it.”
“It’s great because we can support Mom and Dad by saying the same things they want to get across to their child,” she said.
Breaking through
As they near six months of Empowered Minds, Philibeck and Rinne said they’re thoroughly encouraged by the word-of-mouth endorsement and positive feedback they’ve gotten.
The pair said their goals for the studio range from increased collaboration with schools, to the broader ideal of parents considering life coaching for their kids before necessarily opting to having their kids prescribed medication.
“If you’re looking for support for your child, if you’re looking for support for yourself as a parent or if you know your family in general is missing some key pieces and you’re looking for some ideas, tools – we give a tool kit for life they’re going to use in all situations,” Philibeck said. “(Kids life coaching) is worth checking out and learning more about, just to see if it would be helpful for your family.”
Rinne said all kids can benefit from coaching in some way.
“None of us is the best at everything, so there’s always something we can grow in,” she said.
Visit empoweredmindskidsstudio.com for more information.