Better Outcomes Through Coaching (Teens)

American novelist and poet Nancy Willard wrote, “Answers are closed rooms; and questions are open doors that invite us in.” One of the greatest challenges in a culture that seems to always move at speeds that surpass that of our internet connections, is that we have lost the art of exploration. We don’t (have, take, use, make, create, access) the time necessary to really understand the events and people around us, nor the person we are in those events and among those people.

The information age has spoiled us to having instant access to facts (Why do hedgehogs kneel to eat? What’s the best recipe for an apple pie? How do you change the brake pads on a 2002 Ford Fusion?), but Siri, Alexa, Google, Jeeves, DuckDuckGo, Bing or Yahoo do not help us know how to live in terms of meaning, developing as people, or finding better paths on which to move forward. All those informational answers lead us to closed rooms. The deeper side of our lives is found at the end of a question.

Coaching approaches are designed to help you become a better asker so that the young people you are committed to help can recover the art of exploration and climb their way to new summits of social-emotional development, realization of goals, improved life skills, and enriched interpersonal relationships.

Beyond Mentoring

Some of you mentor teenagers, perhaps at the request of a single mother who is looking for someone to fill a role as a father figure or big brother or sister to her shut-down child. This is called naturally occurring mentoring, evolving out of mutual connections in extended families, friend of friend circles, or common participation in a social group, church or synagogue. As important as these naturally occurring mentor relationships are, they often fall short of their expected aims because you felt the need to be a safe person for the teenager and the pressure to be a surrogate advisor for the parent who believes they had lost their voice in the life of their son or daughter. In many of those situations, the teenager reads it that way too.

I’d encourage you to intervene in the lives of teenagers through the role of a mentor coach; someone who is just disconnected enough from their parents to remove the surrogate advisor suspicion and someone who is skilled in the art of asking rather than advising. Coaching behavior and tools allow you to open doors in the lives of teenagers and be invited into the exploration process with them.

I believe that helpful domains of critical thought, intuitions, hunches, gut instincts, insights and unconscious reasoning go on in the lives of all humans but are typically unexplored and concealed under the surface layers of reactive emotions, mood altering chemicals, and the distractions of non-stop external stimulus (i.e. your smartphone). By intervening as a skilled mentor-coach you can help mute this external white noise and create the space necessary for these deeper domains of thought and reasoning to come into the student’s view and grasp of understanding.

Coaching and Core Life Skills

Multiple studies have been conducted around the world to answer the problem of poor or missing life-skills competencies among middle and late adolescent youth. These life skills are universally recognized to include communication, problem-solving, grit and resilience, emotional regulation, and conflict resolution among a few others. Some studies group these into thinking skills, social skills and emotional skills. We are regularly seeing the impact of poor or missing life skills reading out in disruptive and antisocial behavior in educational classrooms, the workplace, in hostile social media interactions and at the shopping mall.

These deficiencies are more than just inconvenient. Poor life skills add to the day-to-day chaos and emotional turmoil in a teen’s life. Additionally, these missing life skills leave many youths without the psychological defenses which are necessary to keep them from making harmful decisions. Researchers are finding a clear and direct correlation between higher life and social skills and the strength of a teenager’s “psychological pushbacks for high-risk behavior” including drug use and risky sexual activities.

The goal of mentor-coaching is to use high engagement and foundational critical thinking skills realized through questions-based communication to guide students into the social and emotional skills they will need for building and maintaining a fulfilling, satisfied and successful life. Scenario and role-play exploration of thinking skills, social skills, and emotional skills are highly ineffective because the problems are usually clearly spelled out, involve a limited number of variables, and allow for one desirable outcome. They present the student with a set of criteria that, if missing from authentic experiences, cannot be compared, recalled, and applied. Scenario and role play create idealistic plans that tend to be forgotten in the moment of emotional arousal. Life skills have the best possibility of being understood, adopted, and then adapted into life of a teenager when these skills are self-discovered as a part of real-time, real-life situations.

Is Coaching the only answer?

Some people have an objection to a coaching approach because they believe individuals (especially youth) still need to be instructed, advised, and given wise counsel. I believe that too! In no way am I suggesting that a coaching approach is the independent solution for teenagers. What I do suggest is that unwanted instruction and unsolicited advice are the hidden problems in the old expression, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.” Too often we make teaching and counsel available to people who do not perceive any need or possess any desire for what is being offered… they are not thirsty.

What coaching does more effectively than anything else is create thirst. You don’t know what you don’t know until you face the need to solve a problem. Coaching asks students to identify where they want to go and leaves the responsibility for figuring out how to get there squarely on their plate. This functions as an effective process requiring them to think through what they are going through. Along the way they will discover the “how, what, when, where, why” gaps in their understanding and be more inclined to seek out the instruction, advice and wisdom they need.

Get started coaching!

Being a part of the solution to bring truly life-transforming resources directly into the lives of teenagers is a great objective. Coaching behaviors and methods, however, are not a part of how most of us have learned to interact and communicate. Please take the time to explore and receive training on the concepts, theories and best practices of questions-based communication. I’m sure you want to just jump in and get going, but you will be a better mentor-coach by investing the time and focus to let coaching methodology filter through your mind and into your soul. The degree to which you have immersed yourself in coaching concepts and practices will determine how naturally and effectively you can use them in one-to-one and group processes with teens.

Resources 

Assessment of life-skills of adolescents in relation to selected variables Rajni Dhingraa, Kirti Singh Chauhanb International Journal of Scientific and Research Publications, Volume 7, Issue 8, August 2017

A narrative systematic review of life skills education: effectiveness, research gaps and priorities Aishath Nasheeda, Haslinda Binti Abdullah, Steven Eric Krauss & Nobaya Binti Ahmed International Journal of Adolescence and Youth © 2018 by Informa UK Limited, https://doi.org/10.1080/02673843.2018.14792 78

The Mentoring Effect – 2014 https://www.mentoring.org/program-resources/ mentor-resources-and-publications/the-mentoring-effect/