Help For Young Adults: Communication

Help for Young Adults

The goal of these articles is to change your life for the better:

To find lasting help for young adults, you have know how you perceive your children. How they interact with you and how you learn to be your best in the world in the very place where it is most difficult… amongst the people you love. All of that will change for the better!

When parents contact me to help them help their teen or young adult find their way, the whole family often seems lost and without hope. Dealing with depression, anxiety, School failures, pot addiction. Once they hear how this system works they often say something like: “this is the first time in a long time when I have felt some hope”. This is true help for young adults.

Help for Young Adults in a Book

The system I work from is based on my first book “The Slacker’s Guide to Success – 13 steps to Personal Success in the New Millennium”. It works for almost anyone. Most young people really do want to succeed and do good work while gaining a sense of self-worth (this may sometimes be hard to believe for those who know these young people but not by me). Given the proper tools these teens and young adults find their way to success.

Something very interesting happens as they progress and the parents see the impossible occur. It becomes very clear that the old ways of communication between parents and their children also need a new way to evolve to a richer and healthier way.

How Does This Book Create Help for Young Adults?

This book shall give you the tools to discover your child as the new person they are becoming and they are a new person. Not because of their Mentor. Not because of surmounting their challenges (although both of those things help). They are a new person because that is the evolutionary truth of people. The baby you held in your arms is not the same person that the toddler became. The toddler is not the same person the teen became. The young adult is again completely different again. In fact, look at your own life. Investigate the things you have done at different ages and think about how you would have felt being judged at these different stages by the things that challenged you as a child.

Here is the greatest part of the new skills you will gain: You will meet a whole, happy, healthy person who has been the object of your life since you first laid eyes on them. This new person will bring to your new relationship, new thoughts, new things to share and their own wisdom to enhance both your lives.

Isn’t that worth the price of changing your own habits of being heard and listening in a new way? Yes. That’s right. The title of this book is “How to Be Heard” but (and you can quote me): “If you want to get something… give it”!

To get help for young adults: The best way to be heard is to learn a new way to listen.

That’s what this book will help you do. Give you a great way to be heard by you taking the time to learn to listen. This is the work I do with the parents willing to try something new as they see how well their child and I communicate and how I am able to get their children to do things that they have been hounding those kids to do for what seems like an eternity.

Actually, I never get anyone to do anything. I show people things what “others” want them to do. We investigate. We analyze and I listen to the client’s (the young person’s) thoughts and we go from there. To the parents, it seems like I “got” their kids to do what they had always known their child should do but never would do.

In fact, I simply laid out options and let the client choose. The difference might seem arbitrary to some but I hope that when you have finished practicing what this book preaches, you will know the difference and it is a country mile apart.

First, I shall share with you the secrets of what your child really means when they say things. Are you ready?

To Find Help for Young Adults: Learn to Speak Gen Z

“Fine”.

The ultimate passive-aggressive diss.
Fine stands for f***ed up, insecure, neurotic and emotional.
When a child gives up to your repeated requests and says “fine” what they are really saying is “it is so not worth arguing with you. I shall give you this agreement, which is not really an agreement but my disdain for you, your clothes and the high horse you rode in on”. (Caution: Gen Z’s don’t actually speak that way. This is my translation of them in a way that you can relate to ☺

“I’ve already done it”!

(Translation) “I know and you know I haven’t done it and we both know that if I say I haven’t done it you will yell at me and then I will yell back so, in effect, I have vowed to get this done after I play endless amount of video games… unless I forget… which doesn’t count because I intended to…”

“Yes I will”!!

“My friends are waiting for me online to keep playing the game. You are merely an annoyance and so whatever I tell you now is my nice way of not telling you to f*** off because I want to play. You should appreciate that. Promises void where prohibited by my doing you a favor”.

“I promise”!!!

“Oh my G-d!! Did you not understand what I meant when I said “Yes I will”?!? Read the above translation. Trust me. I am doing you a favor. YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH!”

The real promise:

“I really intend to do whatever it is you have asked of me if I happen to remember it (which is not likely based on past experience) and I do believe that my intention should be all that is truly required of me. The resentment I feel from you reminding me over and over that I NEVER do these things just makes me want to do these things even less. That is all”.

I’m sure you know what we call the act of doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome:.. Parenting.

Here is my promise to you; learn the steps in this book and work on them with your child and others and you will not need those conversations ever again. They will be replaced by communication; cooperation and mutual respect.

How to Use This Book and Get Help for Young Adults

This book has a companion book written for your child. Please, for the love of Crisco, don’t read theirs’. There’s nothing secret in it but it says soooo much about you if you do read it and so much more about you if you don’t.

The best way to use this book is to do a quick read of it once all the way through and highlight the parts that are most meaningful to you. Then take each chapter and work on your parts on your own, and with your child when it calls for it, for a month. The whole book will take one full year to go through. (Hello? Hello? Still there?)

Yes. In this world of “three easy things to make your child do whatever you want” (good luck with that), I am saying that the true meaningful way to communicate with your child will take time, patience and determination. Only constant, steady work in small regular doses on your part and letting them work on their part will bear the fruit you seek: To truly be heard.

The Three Stages to Create Help for Young Adults

The three stages you will experience are:
1) Unlearning
2) Reframing and
3) A new beginning.
There are explanations for each of these at the beginning of each stage.

Every stage is a complete separate entity with four steps to guide you towards completion. The 13th step is about taking what you have learned into all future chapters of your life. Acknowledging and honoring yourself for the journey you have taken in being heard. More importantly; learning a new way to listen.

Sometimes we do great things but don’t take the time to acknowledge what we have accomplished. To climb that mountain and not take the time to take in the view from the summit is not have taken the journey in our hearts. Our hearts needs the time to reach whatever physical summits we achieve in life. Always take the moment to let all of you; your physical, mental and spiritual/emotional sides witness the great things in life.

May your journey be filled with challenges. May you overcome each challenge with inner-faith, kind self-speak, grace and humor and may the creative force of life guide your path with a sense of adventure and wonder.

Enjoy!

Ken Rabow

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Author: Ken_Rabow

Ken Rabow is the Mentor's Mentor for Troubled Teens, Young Adults and their Families