It's so simple, yet so powerful. It's the one conversational tool I use every single day, with every single client I work with and I use it at home with my kids too. It'll take you from misunderstandings and frustration to real dialogue quicker than anything else. Find out now! …
Tag: teen engagement
On the importance of not getting all caught up in our expertise, superior knowledge or experience and forgetting to do the most important thing of all with our troubled teens- listening.
Teens can blow up in our faces because they think we are being unfair. Part 2 of this mini-series looks at: 1. What can we do to get them to express themselves better, to stop treating us like a verbal and/or physical punchbags; 2. How we can get them to respond more appropriately to their perceived sense of injustice. With practical examples and scripts.
You think you know. You think you know what’s going on in my head, in my life, in my everything. Why I blow up in anger, or why I’m withdrawn, why I use coke, why I skip school, why I’m silent when you essentially ask me WTF? God you probably think you know why I put jam on my toast. You think you know. Well you don’t. Whether you have studied for five years, whether you have worked with troubled kids for ten, whether you have lived with me for fifteen, I have to tell you that you do not know. Why? Because when you over-rely on what you know, you do not rely on what I know. What I know of my existence, what I have experienced, the thoughts and emotions that whirl around inside me. You might see outward manifestations of all of that, you might see my dysfunction, but you do not know my inner world. The biggest tell-tale for me that you do not know is when you do not ask. It is when you tell me what I feel. It is when you tell me why I am doing what I’m doing and punish me…
They're my friends. They're my friends 'cos they get me. And yet you think I shouldn't hang around with them. They're a bad influence. But you will never get me to stop being their friends until you understand why they are my friends in the first place and I understand this too. We need to work this out together before anything else. The role of familiarity magnetism, of low self-esteem, of a need for high emotional volume. You need to get this, before anything else.
What happens when we stop thinking we are an expert when we meet with our teens? What happens when we stop thinking we know it all? What happens when we open our hearts, minds and start really listening?