How to Help a Teen Recover from Self-Sabotage

There seems to be an epidemic of teens failing at school, teens failing at success and teens failing at life. Clearly, the big question on so many parent’s mind is how to help a teen recover from self-sabotage.

As teen life coaches, our job at World Wide Youth Mentoring is to empower teens to help them recover from self-sabotage.

Here are four tips on how to help a teen recover from self sabotage.

Just-in-timers to Good Enough-ers

One of the big challenges teens and young adults have today is that they are too smart for early school years. Clearly, there are some who can get good grades or “get along” in the early school years without much effort. Effectively,  they have untrained themselves to have good study habits.

This ends when they hit a grade level where their grades drop precipitously and they are “no longer magic”. Now come the coping mechanisms. Many end up saying to themselves “if I choose to fail and I do, then I’ve won”. Subsequently, you have the beginnings of self-sabotage.

Step One in how to help a teen recover from self-sabotage

Find a teen life coach. A person who deals with the different ways teens self-sabotage. Who knows how to redirect self-sabotaging teens towards focusing on goals, challenges and sign-posts of success. Interestingly, that is the recipe to change a teen’s mindset from fear and anxiety to problem solving

teen-self-sabotage
Finding ways to help teens who self sabotage succeed

. They learn to search for ways that work.

Step Two in how to help a teen recover from self-sabotage

Separate yourself. Allow your teen mentor to do their work. Make sure they invite you to have input through email communications. You get a vacation from being judge, jury and executions and get to be a supportive parent again. Send emails to the teen life coach on issues ranging from school failures, hygiene issues, communication issues etc. Let the mentor and your child work on those issues and then share with you when your child is ready.

Step Three in how to help a teen recover from self-sabotage

Discovery: A life coach for teen’s most powerful tools are establishing goals, determining sign-posts of success, creating a daily routine and learning with the client in a judgment-free environment. First of all, this needs to be a time where the teen life coach and the teen find what works and what doesn’t work. As Wayne Dyer would say: “Either I’m getting it right, or I’m learning”.

Step Four in how to help a teen recover from self-sabotage

Teamwork: As your child begins to succeed, it is time to reacquaint yourself with this new successful person. Find a teen life coach who specializes in helping families work together. This work should be done only after the successes begin for your child.

Know a teen who could use help to recover from self-sabotage? Find out more here

Know someone who would like to mentor teens recovering from self-sabotage?  Click here

Young Adult Self-Sabotage

Why are so many young people willing to self-sabotage every aspect of their potential future?
Young adult self-sabotage is everywhere. Not participating in class, not doing the required studying, staying up late, sleeping most of the day away and missing more and more school. For quite a few, video gaming and/or pot addiction is another big factor.

The most frustrating part of this is that these same people are very often gifted in some way and yet here they are ….. off the tracks.

Many young people today are able to thrive or at least get by in a nuclear or single parent family, learning from their caregivers and finding other elders to learn from at school, sports, dance, music, etc. These young people grow through the ritual of daily tasks of homework, tests and projects. Graduation becomes their rite of passage. But what if your child does not connect to such a system? This creates young adult self-sabotage.

You’ve tried it all — traditional therapy, behavioral therapy, conditioned response, pharmaceuticals, begging, pleading, tough love — and some of it worked for a while and some didn’t work at all.

Young adults sabotage can leave all concerned feeling hopeless sometimes.
Feeling that your child will never grow up and take responsibility, but it has been my experience that some alternative approaches can make a world of difference. Once your troubled teen or young adult goes beyond their regular world filled with all the trappings that keep him/her where they are and finds a support system with a mentor / life- coach who is non-judgmental, on their side and open to thinking “outside the box”, that child will become motivated to start the process of getting back on track.

Four ways to create success for a troubled teen or young adult.

  1. 1. Find a mentor to work with your child.
    Someone not from the immediate family, preferably through Skype. Skype sessions allow the client to learn positive new habits at the place where they usually get in trouble: their computers.

Have the mentor ask the student these pertinent questions:
a) Name three goals you would like to work on.
b) What are the challenges to those goals?
c) What would be the first sign-posts of success?

2. The mentor and the student can put together a daily routine based on the student’s goals and interests
(e.g. meditation, yoga, tai chi, weight lifting, biking, jogging, playing an instrument, singing and reading). Basically all the things we were told that have no real financial benefit. Start with two 5 – 15 minute routines to be attempted five to six days a week. Then slowly build up to as many routines that the client feels they can comfortably handle. (Five is a good final number.) Make a weekly worksheet that divides the tasks into columns. Make room for the student to write the duration of each daily exercise (0-20). The goal of these exercises is to empower the student. These exercises are self-motivated without help from the family.

3. Hold bi-weekly meetings discussing progress.
Looking at existing obstacles and exploring solutions to these obstacles in a non-judgmental way. Therapy works well in once-a-week sessions. Mentoring / life coaching young adults requires two times a week. We are building whole new structures to succeed. This requires six to nine months of twice-a-week support until the client has internalized the habits.

4. During these sessions the mentor asks: 
“If you could do anything at all with your life, without concern of how you would make it happen, what would you choose?”
With this answered, the mentor and the student can go about finding ways to put their toes into the pond of these life purpose quests. Whittling away at young adult self-sabotage. It could be a 12-week workshop, a college class, a volunteer position or starting a small business. This time is used to help the student bring his “daily work” training into these new situations. To enhance his successful patterns accordingly. For so many young people, their home has been their box of safety and joy. Something they find wonderful and yet limiting . . . not a good long-term strategy.

Mentoring young adults is an important goal is to help these newly empowered youth create the tools they need. Allowing them  to feel safe going out into the world successfully. To eradicate young adult self-sabotage, you need to create mini-boxes of safety for them to thrive in. Places where they can learn to be self-empowered. Without exception, students who go through the entire process choose self-empowerment over self-sabotage. They not only succeed but most often become examples of leadership in their chosen vocation.

Help your child find their inspiration and get on track for a successful life!

Know a teen or young adult in need of mentoring? Check out www.MentoringYoungAdults.com

Interested in Mentoring Millennials? Check out www.MentorsProfessionalWorkshop.com

Young Adult Depression and Life Coaching

How can we transform young adult depression? One of the things I hear more often than anything else as a mentor for young adults is parents asking for help with their child’s school failures, depression, low self-esteem video game (and/or pot) addiction.

Often the depression seems most prevalent on both the parent’s and the potential Mentee’s (the young adult in question) mind. What I often say to this is: “Most of us tend to remember things in reverse order”.

Reverse Memory Syndrome with Young Adult Depression:
When a Mentee has a “discussion” with his or her parent for the bazillionth time about why they stay up so late, the parents tell the young person why they are doing it and why it’s wrong. Their child tries to explain what is really going on. Neither side listens. Voices raise and finally the Mentee tells the parents to do something that is anatomically impossible. That’s when the parents say: “We just tell you how you need to be more responsible about going to sleep at a good time and all you do is shout and scream and curse at us”. That is reverse memory syndrome. The escalation and the accusing gets lost as a factor in the final result.

Reverse memory syndrome is often the reason why the depression is foremost on the minds of the people who contact me with the issues stated above. Let’s deconstruct the actual order of events for these clients and parents contacting me.

When Millennials were magic.
This generation is the first one that was told that actually everything they did was perfect. They were the best crayoners; the best howlers; the best poopers; and everybody got a medal when they “competed”… (you wonder why they think they’re magic).

For this particular group, they were able to pull off acceptable or really good marks out of their butts at the last minute at school and of course, Mumzy and Dadzy told them “they were magic”!!

Until they weren’t magic anymore.
Fast forward to the time when pulling marks out your butt (beside being non-hygienic) no longer works for our magic client. What comes next? False epiphanies.

Most of the people I meet have at some time come up to “issues” that blocked them in their lives. When natural talent wasn’t enough anymore. At that point, if they come up with “gee, I better learn some new study habits and work harder” I never get to see them. However, if they go for the false epiphanies: “My magic is gone”, “I am stupid”, “The world is not safe” or “If I choose to fail and I do… then I’ve won”, that’s when they are getting into choosing bad coping mechanisms.

What are those coping mechanisms? Self-medication (Video games or pot), anxiety, negative self-speak (low self-esteem) or depression.

Being careful with issues such as young adult depression.
There are thee kinds of depression that one comes across as a mentor for young adults.

1) Situation-based depression where the client’s constant failures and inability to find a way out lead to depression.

2) Negative self-speak depression. Where the mind has stopped being a motivational force and has become the worst in-your-head parent constantly leading to you towards self-defeat. This requires learning to retrain the mind through mindfulness-based exercises (meditation, visualization or things like yoga).

3) True clinical depression; a chemical imbalance requiring mental health professionals to do what they do best and help find the best way to get back that proper balance.

When it comes to clinical young adult depression, a Mentor’s job is make sure that a good mental health specialist is onboard, chosen by the family and that we help make sure that this label is not all that the client becomes but is a new starting point to help that client find their personal powers.

For situation-based and negative self-speak based depression, we begin with choosing goals, the challenges to those goals and the first indicators of success, creating micro-successes through daily routines chosen by the Mentee and with the Mentee in charge. The Mentor’s job is to let the client walk every step of that journey and simply help them out of dead ends in a way that speaks to the client.

We teach the Mentee organization skills that makes sense to them in incremental stages. How to pick the best times to succeed in adding studying into their lives when it seemed impossible before. They learn how to advocate for themselves with teachers, school staff and parents (seeing both sides of the equation). This can really change things in young adult depression.

We work on finding the mindfulness-bases system that best works for them
Deep Breathing, Visualization, Meditation or, for some, Prayer. The client starts in five or ten minute increments. Beginning by doing the work first with their mentors and slowly being able to do it on their own over time. This is the beginning of self-motivated empowerment.

The big take away.
Everyone tends to see things in reverse. Become a detective, free of judgment and go back and look for false epiphanies, coping mechanisms and most importantly, seek out people outside the family to help Mentor the child and the family to find that person’s true magic. It is there, waiting to be found.

How Life Coaching Young Adults can make profound change.

Life Coaching Young Adults is an alternative way to help young adults with depression find a new way forward. Instead of focusing on what is not working, we help the Mentee create practical goals in their lives.

Once they begin working on these goals, the challenges to these goals and the first sign-posts of success, they are training themselves to look for  solutions (with the help of our Mentors) and make consistent micro-successes. These micro-successes help build up an earned self-worth the reduces depression and, in fact, builds up positive self-speak to believe that with work and trial and error, they can succeed in life.

Ask for a free 15 minute consultation.

Check out the payment options and see if one is right for you.

Interested in mentoring young adults? Check out www.MentorsProfessionalWorkshop.com

Know a young adult in need of mentoring? Check out www.MentoringYoungAdults.com

Life Coaching Young Adults: Creating Communication

As someone who trains Boomers and Gen X’ers in the art of life coaching young adults,

I often find that the best examples to explain my work to those wanting to know the secrets of working with young adults, comes from my own personal practice life coaching young adults. Today’s topic is: Mentoring Young Adults: Helping Parents and Teens Communicate or How to I Learned to Stop Screaming.

Although most people seeking help in life coaching for young adults are usually dealing with school failures, social anxiety, depression, pot or video game addiction (or both), it doesn’t take long until the other shoe drops. Parents and young adults with an equal and well earned disdain for each other. Its not that they don’t love each other, there are just too many war wounds to be ignored. What do we end up with? Each side shouting their “truths” across the room while neither side truly hears the other. How do we get to truly life coaching young adults from that place?

Want to get your child to not do something? 

Tell them you think it’s important!

Want to get a parent to nix an idea?

Have their child tell them that they think it’s a great idea!

How did it come to this?
How do we change it?
(You know what I am going to say… don’t you?)

Change comes from outside the family unit… through a professional Mentor/Life Coach.

Here are the tried and true steps I use on a regular basis and that the Mentors I train find immensely helpful (as do the families).

The 7 Steps to Transforming Miscommunication into Co-creation using life coaching for young adults.

Step 1: Parent identifies issues:

school issues, home issues, personal mental health issues (anxiety included). This is our first consultation either by phone or Skype.

Step 2: Mentor meets with mentee:

(the client is the young adult) and establishes goals, the challenges to those goals and the first sign-posts of success. This usually occurs in the first one hour Zoom session, the only time it doesn’t is when clients come to me as the sky is falling (read that as massive school failures that can no longer be ignored). We deal with putting out fires first and the on to the Goals; Challenges and Sign-Posts of Success. Zoom is the best way to reach young adults (vs in person therapy) as you are doing positive, healthy work with them in the place they tend to get messed up the most; their internet portal. This is how we show the mentee how life coaching young  adults can be of help to them.

Step 3: Parents are freed from having to play “cop”.

You get to let go of the head-butting, enjoy each other and email your Mentor the “issues” that keep coming up. Mentor and mentee look at each issue, and learn how to put them in perspective, how to communicate and advocate for themselves and how to understand the “other’s” perspective.

Step 4: Poop hits the fan.

So, you have all agreed to try life coaching for young adults. Both sides knew the calm would be short-lived. Something happens. The parents blame their child. The mentee isn’t responding to what they are saying but just yells back at the same decibel level: “Call Ken! Call Ken!” That p**ses off the parent even more (really not how I suggested to use the Mentor-in-the-middle get-out-of-jail-free card at all). The Mentor gets the client to hear the parents. The parents get to not want everything that has never been done to be done RIGHT NOW!!!! We all agree on a reasonable incremental way forward that makes sure everyone is heard. Fan de-pooped.

Step 5: The parent confession:

This is where I usually get a call or email from one parent thanking me and then calling themselves an awful parent. This is where I tell them the real truth: “You are a great parent! An awful parent gives up, doesn’t care or doesn’t notice. You are a parent who needs support from a Mentor to help you with a child who doesn’t respond to whatever worked when you were parented by your parent. That to me is not only a good parent but a wise parent.

Step 6: The mentee confession:

The Mentors that are now working with mentees through us are always amazed that our clients often share their truths about their short-comings and their frustrations in now knowing how to get out of those problems. That is why the system is based on empowering young people and not focusing on the failures. Next.. Mentee and Mentor go back to work. Parents send emails and the Mentee/Mentor team incorporate their home issues with the goals the client wanted to focus on. It works. Things get better. The mentee starts to succeed at school, at their personal issues, and at communicating.

Step 7: A new way of communication

The goal of life coaching young adults is create new ways of communication  for mentees and parents. “Open Listening”. First the Mentor trains the client in the system. We practice on friends or family members willing to try new things. Finally we show the family how to use it during confrontations. Would you like to know how open listening works?

What is co-creation?

It’s where both sides share their concerns, each side listens with an open heart to the other and together the create a new way forward. As missteps happen, both sides communicate, evaluate and recalibrate.

Interested in life coaching young adults professionally   Check out www.MentorsProfessionalWorkshop.com

Know a young adult in need of life coaching? Check out www.MentoringYoungAdults.com

The Slacker’s Guide to Success – Introduction

The Slacker’s Guide to Success is Ken Rabow’s method based on his work Life Coaching Troubled Teens, Young Adults and their Families over the past 13 years. Here is an excerpt. Enjoy!

An Introduction to The Slackers Guide to Success By Ken Rabow
So, you know you’re brilliant. Your parents know you’re brilliant. Your dog thinks you’re amazing, then why are so many things not working out in your life?

Hi, My name is Ken Rabow and I work with young adults struggling to find their place in the world. The ones I take on as clients are those who really want to make changes in their lives. Many of the clients I work with come to me when they have…
a) Been stuck in part-time jobs without a future
b) Become addicted to video games; or pot; or magic cards or something else.
c) Failed a course, a term or a whole school year
d) Major sleep or anger “issues”
e) All of the above.
Don’t you just love multiple choice?!?

As one of my clients once said to me:
“I really like staying at home, playing video games all day in my bathrobe…..
but I’m beginning to think that it’s not a great long-term plan”.
Let us call that client Skeeter. At the writing of this blog Skeeter is back in school working on a science degree. In his first semester, he caught the attention of an amazing professor doing ground-breaking research who has hired Skeeter in the lab.
So how did Skeeter go from being a stay-in-his room slacker to an up-and-coming science guy? And why should you care if you are into something else or don’t even want to go to school but have dreams of starting your own business or killer app?
Because! 🙂

Okay, that’s a parent-y answer. The real answer is that what worked for Skeeter can work for you in any field, in any format, in any situation. Your success will come from:
• finding your power
• learning to believe in yourself
• determining how to build habits that guarantee success and
• discovering the secret to success through messing up.

Yes, I’m here to tell you that you can’t really be great at anything until you can get past…. perfectionism.
That’s what this system is all about and it works! Each time. Every time.
I’ve seen so many young people change their lives around. There are a lot of people out there who deserve to learn how to be their very best and do great things in their lives.
I’ve written these articles so you can benefit from this “out of the box” approach that I have refined in my private practice over the years. This process that will enable you to succeed on your own terms. If you follow this method, you will find yourself growing in character and soon enough you will discover yourself achieving successes you didn’t dare dream of. You will find that it’s great to get out of bed every morning, feeling good about
An Introduction to The Slackers Guide to Success By Ken Rabow
doing things that earns people’s respect. More importantly, you will feel good about yourself for your personal achievements
.
You will need to do these exercises with a coach/mentor, preferably someone who is not a close relative or who sees you on a day-to-day basis. You need someone you can talk to, someone who will keep your secrets, someone who will respect you and let you grow at your own pace.
There are three sections in these articles and each section is one full stage of development. The first stage is personal development, the second stage, professional develpment is bringing your personal development out into the world with your new strengths and the third stage, inner development is giving back to the world and growing as a person.
Here is a brief outline of the 13 steps in three stages. Enjoy!
Stage One – Personal Development
1) Investigation: Looking at our strengths; challenges, past patterns; coping strategies and choosing role models and events or ideas as inspirations.
2) Opportunity: Searching for a mentor. Choosing three goals, defining the challenges to those goals and indicators of success
3) Mindsets: Abundance, Poverty Mentality and False Epiphanies.
4) Generativity: Creating your daily routine of a personal meaningful practice.
Finding the blocks that stop you from succeeding and creating remedies.
5) Out Into The World (and back again) Bringing your new skills in to practice in the outside world in a safe and limited way.
6) Setting limits: Learning to set limits gracefully on the time-stealers in your life.
7) Direction. (Following your bliss) Creating the groundwork for a successful, enjoyable life.
Stage Two – Professional Development
8) Out into the world: Putting into practice stage one in a more extended fashion and transforming all you have learned into new situations.
9) Forming new boxes of safety: Using mindfulness and success consciousness out there and seeing how they work in new situations while learning to feel safe.
10) Creating new generative structures. Schedules, coping and new friends.
11) Making your addictions work for you. Using your urges to indulge your addictions as a reward for doing the work you need to get done.
Stage Three – Inner Development
12) A complete life. Learning a sustainable daily practice of being mindful in
learning, work, relationships and even play.
13) Pay it forward: Once you’ve reached this point, your life is richer, you are happier and you will truly want to help others grow in their own way. This step will teach you how to do that.

Get the book; paperback or Kindle! Click here

Communication, Gen Z and The Curse of Social Media

So, my iPhone 5 went on the fritz. 🙁
I called AppleCare and got a really professional, organized, thoughtful Cyberdonian who helped me. We did a diagnostic on the phone and it was clear it was fried 🙁 🙁 🙁

He was so helpful that towards end I told him about what I do for living. It was clear from the way he responded that something was bothering him. Considering the stellar service he had just given me, I said he could ask me any one question and that I would try to answer it for him.

He said: “I really wonder about my overuse and my friends overuse of social media. I feel like we don’t communicate anymore except through Facebook, texting, Etc.. Friendships have been ruined. I find it’s hard to keep friends and if I wanted to approach someone, Truthfully, I locked the confidence to do so.

I’m really not sure how we should approach one another. Especially if you want to go on a date. I’m not sure how I should ask her out. Text her? Facebook? (I notice he didn’t consider phoning her). I really believe that relationships are being ruined by social media and I’m not sure what to do about it. What should I do?”

So many people these days are commenting on the fact that teens and young adults really are losing the ability to know how to communicate in person with each other. What is more alarming is that when you going to a restaurant people of every age are sharing a meal while spending most of the time communicating with people that are not in the room.

I paused for a moment… and then I said to this vexed young man from AppleCare:
“you represent a great quality in Gen Z’s these days. You were searching and not accepting the status quo. I think social media is a great tool. But as with everything, things must be in moderation.

Before I talk about some things you could do to deal with the communication, I would suggest we talk about how to deal with the overuse of social media. I would recommend “micro-Sabbaths”, “mini-Sabbaths” and “major-Sabbaths” as a great starting point.

In my definition of “sabbath”, I am referring to the idea of break from everything electronic. No phones, no computers, no means electronic communications or electronic games.
A “micro-Sabbath” would be A 30 minute up to two hours a day of electronics free time.
A “mini-Sabbath” would be a 2 to 4 hour time period on a given day free of electronics.
A “major-Sabbath” would be A full day from waking up to sleep of electronic free time.

The next question is what to do with this time.

You could use it to read (I think they still make books).
You could use it to go for walks.
Paint. Play music. Sing. Dance.

… or you could practice an ancient ritual called…
communication.

Communicating with family, friends, business people and loved ones.
Communication is an art. The goal is to learn about someone’s passions, someone’s pleasures and someone’s peccadilloes. In short, Great communication should be about sharing one’s heart.

How do we do that?
Ask them a question about something that is important and meaningful to yourself.
Really listen to their answer. Try to understand their response from their perspective and share how that makes you feel.”

The gentleman from AppleCare and I were expected to converse on the simple and rudimentary level but upon seeing A fellow human being who cares and is searching I took the opportunity to communicate.

Here is my challenge to you.

Take one of these Micro sabbaths and tweet me how you used that time and I will share it with everyone I know and ask them to do the same.

Let’s see what happens.

Click Here to Book a Free 15 Minute Consultation 

Teen Pot Addiction

65% of the young clients I treat are dealing with teen pot addiction.
Teen pot addiction is a huge problem for many clients when I meet with them. There may be others out there who do fine with marijuana but they don’t come to see me. The ones that I see have some or all of these factors playing on them at once:

When you put these together with a daily use of marijuana, you have a recipe for failure; drama; and a cycle of hopelessness.

So how do you get them to see “the light”?It begins by having faith in these individuals, that by letting them discover the roadblocks, free of judgment, that they are putting in front of themselves and offering them a simple, effective way to start succeeding at things that they enjoy in their lives, they will seek creative and original ways to self-limit their addictions in a way that make sense to them.

Secondly, we offer these young adults dealing with teen pot addiction the opportunity to choose what they want to create in their lives. To figure out the challenges and the first sign-posts of success. We then create a daily routine. When they start to see the challenges that teen pot addiction plays in their lives, they ask to find ways to begin limiting their smoking. It works best when it comes from the client.

The problem with teen pot addiction is all the mainstream ways that people have imposed on them have not worked.
so they may have given up on thinking that there is a solution. But once they are inspired to look for a new solution, and to realize through simple concrete examples that they can succeed, they choose to succeed.

I have seen this system work over and over again.

Find out more about teen addictions by clicking here.

Interested in becoming a professional mentor for young adults? Click here

Know a young adult with mental health issues? click here

Video Game Addiction in Young Adults

Video game addiction;
Help! My kids eyes are glued to the screen! Well, if they really are glued to the screen, their sibling probably got crazy glue for the holidays. But, more than likely, they just disappeared into their rooms, coming out only occasionally, bleary-eyed, to grab some food and then return back to their cave. Welcome to the wonderful world of video game addiction.

How bad is incessant video game addiction?
I think it’s all about duration and intensity. When combined with multi-tasking (texting, BBMing, Facebooking, or watching a movie at the same time), I believe your child’s noggin is being trained to be three miles wide and one inch deep.

What do we do about video game addiction in young adults?
One of my clients calls it the cereal factor. He has noticed that during school time, his brain is crispy like new cereal that is ready to eat (mmmm, cereal). But when break time comes, the brain ends up looking and acting like cereal that has been in the milk or soy-based substitute way too long. We get mushy brain.

The holidays are one thing, now it’s school time!
In a previous article, I did make some suggestions on how to get your kids through the holidays mush-free (click here to see it), but now they are back in school and every moment that they are not at school, they are at their video games.

How do you approach this?
Find a mentor for young adults!
It could be a music teacher, it could be a neighbour, it could be a professional life coach for young adults (that’s what I do most of the week), but it should not be the child’s parent. Insight rarely comes easily from someone too close.

Seven steps for coming unglued from video game addiction.

1) Have the mentor help your teen look at their weekly schedule of classes.
2) Break it down with a scheduler (iCal or Google Calendar are good) and write out their whole week, including start and stop times for classes, transportation time, outside commitments (hockey, music lessons, etc.) and social time.
3) Include the amount of time (including start and stop times) presently spent doing homework.
4) Ask your teen to estimate the amount of time required for home study on each subject. Then ask what the teacher’s recommendation is and take both and meet them halfway.
5) Look at sleep prep time, sleep time (approximate) and waking time and include this as part of the schedule.
6) Take a look at the free time available for gaming. (It’s never enough, is it?)

The tricky part:
help determine how much increased time will be spent on school work and have the teen commit to it. This can be done one of three ways:

a) A weekly report in a chart where the student writes the daily work and the duration of practice.
b) A daily email to the mentor giving the same details
c) Texts after each section in a day is completed. E.g.: jst did 40 min math — my brain hurts ☹

The Result:
If your young adult really wants to do well, this should be enough to help them start to take control of the scheduling and get back on track. If not, when the first tests come in, go over the whole system and ask the young adult to figure out where they could have done more work or study more efficiently. Then implement step seven in reverse; going from c to b to a when appropriate.

The allure:
Video games have a magical quality to them. There is some good in them, no matter what you read about them and it probably will become a big part of most people’s future. We do want to live in the real world, however. Having gentle limits that are guided, but ultimately come from the teen, are the ones that will help them when they are out on their own.

A recent study found that older men were actually playing more video games then their younger counterparts.
Moderation and self-limits, these are the keys.

Now where’s my Angry Birds app?

Interested in mentoring young adults? Click here.

If your child is in serious mental health crisis, please look into it immediately. This link is a good staring place. Click here. When things are more settled, life coaching can be a great addition to a complete program.

Mentoring Young Adults Can Help Your Child

To know why mentoring young adults may be the proper way out of the challenges many parents face these days, we must look at where so many families find themselves. There are so many parents of troubled teens and young adults who are at their wits end, not knowing how to deal with their children. Communication is an issue. Hygiene is an issue. Sleep is an issue. Video gaming and overuse of the Internet is an issue. Let’s face it, there’s a lot more of issues than anything else! Let’s look at why mentoring young adults may be the solution for your child.

Finding Success through Life Coaching Young Adults
People seek a life coach for teens and young adults when they come to a certain realization. It’s okay to have an outside party be there to create something more than medication or talk therapy may achieve. That something is a slow and steady concrete process. One that will bring hope back to your child. One of earning their own belief in themselves. To be successful and rise above challenges and failures. To learn that failures and mistakes are the route to their greatness. Most importantly, to learn the value in day-to-day simple disciplines. Disciplines based on things that they would enjoy doing, bringing a rightly earned self-confidence to them.

The Proven Method
My book “The Slacker’s Guide To Success” chronicles the entire 13 step process, but to put it in a nutshell: a young person needs to seek out a life coach that they are willing to trust and be open to trying new things with. They must then be willing to look at their goals and their challenges to succeeding and finally to start a daily chart of the small successes that will instill in them a sense of the possibility of succeeding in the real world.

How Some People Limit Struggling Teens and Young Adults
I meet so many young people that so many have said of them that they will never be able to succeed. Often, all the family and relatives were hoping for was for things to not get worse and yet these young people have soared and have found their greatness.

The ones who did not succeed, did not succeed because the expectations from their family and friends were for an immediate fix. The kind of profound inner changes I am speaking about in this article are slow and steady. But if all those concerned take the time, have the patience, determination and certitude to see this through, the rewards will be immeasurable.

Remember This:
Do not give up hope. Do not think that you are alone. Reach out for someone to help you and the changes will come. They may be slow but they will be astounding…  Ken Rabow

Update by Ken Rabow – Dec 2017
Here it is four years later and I find that in life coaching young adults, I am still finding so many teens and young adults with anxiety, sleep issues, communication challenges and more. The good news is that working with this system, mentoring young adults really does help these young people AND their families have successful lives where they can hope again for a great future.

What does it take? Find the right mentor to mentor young adults. Taking the time to let them learn the system, to create positive daily routines and grow as a young adult. To fall on their butts, dust themselves off and try again.

Mentoring young adults is not a fast solution but if it works for your child, it is a long lasting solution. Mentoring young adults can help them throughout their lives. It requires the same work to un-mess up someone as to help them find their greatness. Most parents come to us bereft of hope. They want to help their child not fail. As people mentoring young adults, we seek how to help them not only not fail but to soar to greatness. Each person has greatness in them. Sometimes a mentor is the best way forward.

To learn how to become a professional mentor for young adults, click here