All new offering:

Jeff will work exclusively  with a select adolescent friend group, influencing them to aspire to a more mature, healthy life, and teaching them to support one another on their individual journeys..

Why:

Adolescents are heavily influenced by their core peer group.

When a peer group is either keeping them stuck in place, or worse, dragging them down, they are left with few options:

1: Leave the group and have little to no social life 

OR 

2: Try and find new friends and a new friend group.

The challenges with those options:

 1: Few teens want to be isolated and have no companionship.

 2: It is very hard – particularly at a school like Tam where the social groups are so established and separate from one another, to break their way into a new group.

These truths make it more appealing to stick with the status quo.

 

There is a 3rd option – an unexplored one:

Instead of leaving the group to go off alone or trying to break into a new group, we work WITH the current group and inspire them to elevate their aspiration and instill in them or deepen their conviction to pursue a healthier, more mature and ambitious life.

If this proves effective, THEN instead of asking anyone to leave their friends behind (which is an enormous ask of a teen), their peer group instead becomes a source of support and encouragement, helping them elevate their lives, taking legitimate steps towards adulthood.

Outcomes:

I can never know what the next step in a client’s evolution is until I get to know them. Here are some of the recent ones my clients have chosen:

• Raising their GPA up to a higher level.
• Quitting nicotine and/or marrjuana and starting to exercise regularly. 
• Talking to girls, or, actually having a real relationship. 
• Getting a job. 
• Speaking up in class 
• Stopping being a jerk to their family.

The evidence of progress is going to be individual, idiosyncratic and possibly incrimental… but progress in the right direction is valuable progress.

 

Reason for Hope:

My “gift” has long been my ability to engage adolescents in thinking that engages their desire to be more powerful, more adult and more moral… To take some things in life more seriously and to be taken more seriously.

Will this work with a group of 10th grade boys, sitting on the wavering cusp between “I just want to be a kid” and “I am ready to be a man”? 

I don’t know. But I am willing to try, and to try with every resource I can reasonably bring.

 

Next steps:

Join me for a meeting with all interested parents – either a zoom meeting or we coordinate  a time to meet collectively in person. We can discuss this in more detail and align our expectations.

 

Commitment:

I am also under no illusion that this will be a “once a month group meeting” process. This is going to require I do work with the group collectively (probably meeting a couple times a month) and with individuals in more private conversations as needed. It will be time consuming on my end, and I am willing to put the time in.

It is an experiment and one that I think is worth trying. I look forward to going on this journey with you.