Teen Life Coach in Mill Valley, CA

Evolution Mentoring and Coaching is a teen life coaching and mentoring practice based in Mill Valley, California, serving families throughout Marin County. Jeffrey Leiken, MA has mentored bright, sensitive teens and young adults ages 13 to 31 for more than 25 years. In-person meetings are available across Marin. This is mentoring and life coaching, not therapy.

Marin Is Home. This Is Where the Work Started.

Evolution Mentoring and Coaching has been based in Mill Valley for more than two decades. Families in Tiburon, Ross, Larkspur, Kentfield, Greenbrae, San Anselmo, Sausalito and San Rafael have been sending their kids to Jeff Leiken for a generation, and Marin is the one place where in-person meetings are readily available.

Marin looks like an easy place to grow up. Good schools, beautiful hills, engaged parents, every opportunity available. That is exactly what makes it hard for a certain kind of kid. When a teen has been given everything and still feels lost, there is no acceptable way to say so. So they don’t. They go quiet, they stop trying, they disappear into a screen, and everyone assumes they are fine.

The Teens Jeff Works With

They are bright, thoughtful, sensitive and intense. They are often talented in music, sport, art, or a subject nobody else in the family understands. On the outside they look capable and accomplished. Underneath, they are wrestling with self-doubt, direction and identity, and they overthink until they become their own worst enemy.

Parents come to Jeff about teens who are anxious, socially anxious, unmotivated, retreating into video games, no longer going outside, flattened by a breakup, hard on themselves to the point of cruelty, or simply stuck, wanting something badly and unable to find the first step toward it.

Why a Mentor and Not Another Appointment

Jeff Leiken is a life coach and mentor. He is not a therapist and does not provide therapy. Many Marin families arrive having already tried the clinical route and found their child stayed exactly where they were. Evolution Mentoring and Coaching offers something different: growth and learning instead of treatment, taught by a trusted adult in plain language.

The mechanism is simple and most parents already sense it. Your teenager will not take this guidance from you. That is developmentally normal and it is not a failure of parenting. The same words, from a trusted adult who is not their parent, land completely differently.

Regular Meetings, and Access In Between

Jeff meets with your teen in person in Marin County or remotely, on a regular schedule. At the comprehensive level he also stays reachable between meetings by text, email and phone, joins family conversations, and can attend a school meeting or an event when it matters. The moment a young person is ready to open up almost never coincides with a calendar slot.

Because Marin is home, families here can also meet Jeff face to face rather than only on a screen, which many teenagers prefer in the early months before trust has been built.

Schedule a Free Consultation

Evolution Mentoring and Coaching takes a small number of families at a time. That is deliberate. It is what makes this level of attention possible, and it is why Jeff would rather tell you honestly whether he has room than sign you up and stretch himself thin.

Jeff also works with families across Silicon Valley and the Peninsula. Schedule a free consultation, tell him about your child, and hear how he would approach the work.

Frequently Asked Questions