These messages abound through media such as music, ads, magazines, billboards and the Internet. Suggestions that drug use and sex are activities youth can and should participate in are ubiquitous—presented as sure-fire ways for youth to answer those questions that haunt their changing minds throughout adolescence: Who am I? What is life about? How should I relate to other people and the world we live in?

As adults our burning question ought to be: How can we best help teens sort through these messages and not fall victim to lies? Unfortunately, a common response is to simply be dismissive of the media. Many of us are inclined to deride it for its perverse presentation of reality; its seductive antics, propaganda and lies. “That’s ridiculous!” we may say in response to a music video that has captured the interest of a teen in our life. My concern is that such derision makes the object of our wrath forbidden fruit. That which we adults label ridiculous or stupid becomes enticing to youth precisely because we disparage it.

Perhaps I’m being too generous in thinking the majority of adults are attuned to the reality that the media are feeding feverishly on our youth. I suspect many adults, paralyzed by what they recognize on some level as an inevitable swell of propaganda beneath their feet, acquiesce to the surge of the media’s force. Such folks are inclined to underestimate not only the power of the media and its role in shaping young minds, but also the calculated, premeditated nature of these manipulations.

I want to offer a more helpful option to either dismissing the media as ridiculous, or denying its power. To begin I’d like to introduce the concept of “live ideas.” Live ideas exist within us as viable possibilities for how things really are. Since these ideas are alive and active, they help inform what we believe and do.

Imagine a teen coming to a crossroads at which he will need to make a decision. How does he go about doing this? What factors influence the decision he will make, and how might the media influence his decision? The media will guide a teen’s decision-making process insomuch as the media can introduce and sustain live ideas in teens. A music video, for example, may deliver the not-so-subtle message that if I have sex often and with many different women, I bolster my manhood and become a more substantive person. If I’m a teen I may believe sex will improve my social standing. Imagine these beliefs entering, living, growing, and thriving within the mind of a teen, like their own little Oz hiding behind the curtain calling the shots. The idea is now alive and will influence that teen’s decisions, worldview and self-perception.

Teens absorb dozens, even hundreds of these ideas. Live ideas produce live options. If a teen crafts his identity as a jock, the options put forth to him through the media may include: be arrogant, dismissive, cruel, and humiliating. He may not experience as a live option ballet, opera, chess, or volunteering at his local convalescent home. These are dead options because he has no live ideas that might furnish these options. Ideas are the seed. Options are the plant with all its branches.

So long as unhealthy, deceptive live ideas remain hidden they will grow. When we dismiss or deride the ideas they grow even more. To kill these ideas and cultivate true ideas that bear good fruit we need to bring the false ideas into the open. Live, lying ideas fully exposed will die. What happens when these ideas die? Teens enter the marketplace for new, better ideas to replace the old.

Crisis and conflict are central to this process. Where there is no crisis there is no conflict and no change. I believe our task is to bring teens into relationship with live ideas that are eating their soul. This creates the kind of conflict we’re looking for. If the teen is willing to let the idea die, and work through the ensuing crisis, a new idea will inevitably ripen and give true sustenance.

I hope you enjoy this episode, and would love to know how you do with the action item I present here. Just send me a note at andrew@peoplechangepeople.com

Cheers!

One need not be a 19th century Russian peasant to relate to Tolstoy’s story. Our families, relationships, and vocations are demanding, often monotonous hard work. We are inclined to forget that such routine holds gobs of good stuff. Like the peasant, we possess the means of creating beauty in the midst of the mundane. We can commit ourselves fully to this work and recognize the art that emerges through our diligence and good faith. We can line our plow with candles, set out in the night, and note each star as it appears.

Like master artists we do well to immerse ourselves in the unfolding progression of work within our relationships. Pieces of art are at this moment evolving between us and everyone we know. But in relationships, unlike in art-making, the work is never done. We never create a final product from which we can step back and say, “it is complete.” The best, richest relationships are also inconvenient and challenging. But the fact that relationships are inconvenient and challenging is a gift to us. I would be half the person I am today if my relationships were a breeze.

My relationship with my wife is the most valuable and rewarding I will ever know. That we enjoy what I would call a “good marriage” is more indicative of the process than a place we’ve arrived. Hard work in relationships, rather than connoting a negative reality, is indicative that something good is afoot. This is true in personal as well as professional relationships. Like the farmer and his plow, relationships offer an unparallelled opportunity to create something beautiful.

Nonetheless, I am a big fan of the glaring, wonderful exceptions to drudgery: the birth of a child, a stroll through an art museum, camping with other families, and the blooming of fruit trees. I love that life orchestrates these kinds of “mundanity busters.” I feel within me the wish that all of life be a break from the familiar and mundane. I suppose similar desires birthed Las Vegas. But what I know to be true is that, while these blessed interruptions are welcomed refreshments, they do not and should not characterize the balance of our lives. Accepting this reality is freeing. I no longer want to just get through the day; I want to bob along in its current and take in the scenery. Though today may be familiar, a near carbon copy of yesterday, it is a gift. It is where real life happens.

Last week I spoke with the director of a youth organization I’ve been working with for several years. Her group is transitioning from a standardized education model to a more personalized one. The director described the initial training for the original program implementation. “We were basically trained to deliver a script,” she told me. Her observation succinctly captured a core tenet of the standardized approach. Hatched in the industrial revolution to promote a “consistent product” (I grieve to think that we would deign to refer to humans and their ideas as “product”), this relic prevails today. We have come to value standards and fidelity to such an extreme that we have marginalized the very elements that can promote behavior change. Standardized educational methods, while they may be earnest in their desire for bringing about positive change, consume precious resources and limit educational effectiveness and efficiency. To recoup these losses and to bring greater benefit to the youth we serve, I believe we must transition from standardized education to a more personalized model. Personalized education does not mean that we deliver a different program to every student. It means we retool our methods to provide every student with the requisite freedom, trust, and safety to make the education his or her own.

Consider the following: You deliver a “Stop Smoking” message to a group of teens and survey them afterward. You’re encouraged by the test results. In each of the key areas students demonstrate positive responses. Nearly all of the students, for example, agree smoking is not in their best interest. You then sit down with the class and pose one final question, “Can you tell me what this message of not smoking means to you?” Thirty students equals 30 unique meanings—and it is at the level of meaning that we must operate if we are to make a positive difference. It’s all too feasible that we could find consistency among student recall that would make the industrialist proud. The questions on the survey only help you measure how well you do in standardized terms. But accurate recall does not make for better decisions, for the simple reason that a student’s ability to recall data has little to do with whether the data has any meaning—and therefore any power. Behavior change is preceded by a process wherein meaningless content becomes meaningful. Personalized education encourages students to partake in this process.

One simple step you can take toward helping students make your message their own is to pose these questions that pertain to meaning during your presentation:

What do you think about this message? How do you relate to this message? How might this message affect your life? If this message seems irrelevant, please, by all means tell me in detail how this seems irrelevant.

Note the freedom and multiple points of entry these questions offer students.

Please don’t misunderstand me: Prevention education should have standards for content. Standards help provide consistency and program fidelity, components that are essential at a number of levels, not the least of which are assessment and evaluation. So while content is something we should define in clear terms, the process of learning–in order to be meaning-filled and potent–should encourage exploration and student process. The message has to progress from being ours to being owned by the students; from being pertinent from our perspective, to becoming a transformative element in how students see themselves and the world. Only when students personalize our message can we have any confidence that our work is effective. To ensure the most promising outcomes possible we must retool our training and implementation.

I was presenting on this topic a couple weeks ago in Florida when one participant noted what I believe is the primary reason we shy away from personalizing education, no matter how much good we think this will bring to students: “It feels really vulnerable,” she said. She got it. More than our fear of getting in trouble for not fulfilling standards, there is a deeper fear, multifaceted, that sabotages our efforts. I suspect, based on my own experience, it’s one of the most powerful fears–fear of the unknown. We wonder, “If I give students freedom, what might they say or do?” This is one reason we’re drawn to standardized education. In it we discover safety and control. It provides a Trojan horse within which we can house our fears. We do well to recognize this, enter classrooms anyway, and open the horse. An honest assessment of our fears is a bold first step that will help us be more effective.

Each of us hopes that our work in prevention education will help youth surmount substantial obstacles. We address this goal in prevention education best not by telling students about something, but instead helping them come to know our message in a personal way. Only then can the power and richness of this message help create the positive change we all seek.

The door opened and a girl entered who had not been present for any of the other four days. By looking at her I wondered if she was a proponent for some kind of minimalist clothing movement, for the distance from the hem of her skirt to the top of her tube-top couldn’t have been much more than 12 inches. She strutted passed me and sat at her desk.

A few moments later I posed to the class the question, “What are some reasons teens choose to have sex?” Without hesitation, though she hadn’t been present for any of the other discussions, the aforementioned girl raised her hand.

“Because it’s natural,” she said. Her tone was unmistakable. She wanted to skirmish. I recognized this and responded with a good deal of enthusiasm, “You’re absolutely right! Sex is as natural as breathing.” I went on to amplify the truth embedded in her statement: sex is natural. She wasn’t expecting this. She expected a fight. I think part of her hoped I would launch into a monologue about the risks of sex at an early age. Stunned, she sat quietly.

After this we discussed other reasons teens choose to have sex. We then explored the potential drawbacks to this decision. I just asked questions and facilitated discussion among the students.

Then I switched gears. “We’ve discussed the reasons why some teens have sex, and some of the potential drawbacks to that decision. But why would someone choose to wait for sex?”

The same girl raised her hand. I would be lying if I said I didn’t fasten a mental seat belt before calling on her.

In place of the venom that laced her previous statement there was stone-cold sobriety. “I think I would have more respect for myself,” she said. That was it. The room was quiet. I was stunned. I think a good number of her classmates were, as well.

I may never know whether this interaction created any lasting positive change in the life of this teen. But by honoring her statement, oppositional though it was, we didn’t get bogged down in resistance. This freed her to consider alternatives to her position. Had I increased the resistance she would have been stuck.

I’ve heard stories about hunters who discover the carcasses of two deer, their antlers locked together. Unable to separate themselves, the creatures eventually died a tragic, prolonged death. You and I do well not to lock horns with teens. Teens, like the girl in the class, will square up to us and invite us to resist them. Doing so would have devastating implications for our ability to create change.

Teens need to process their ideas. They need us to listen without reacting. Whenever possible, find the truth in a teen’s statement that you can support. You don’t have to agree with him or her in entirety. But by doing so in part you keep alive the conversation and make possible a deeper connection. What can happen in time is that we earn the right to share our valuable thoughts and opinions–and teens just might listen to what we say.

But when we say someone “has an agenda,” we tend to mean that he or she has an idea of how he or she wants things to proceed to the exclusion of input from others. Though others are in the room, the person driving the agenda does not welcome or allow the opinions of these people to mold ideas or alter the course of the conversation. Questions in this setting are a sham, not an earnest solicitation for ideas.

We all cross over from knowing how we want things to go to insisting things go a particular way. When we begin to ramrod our agenda we begin to view others as obstacles. Their questions, suggestions, and comments are of little worth to us at best, gadflies at worst.

I took my four-year-old to the beach last summer for her birthday. My goal was to let my daughter lead our time. The following was my agenda:

1. We’re going to the beach.

2. We’re staying at the hotel where I made a reservation.

3. We’re returning the following afternoon.

I knew somewhere in there we would eat, sleep, play, and read. But I didn’t know when, where, or in what order. If these were business meeting agenda items, I would have succeeded in completing each one.

So on the way to the beach I asked her, “Do you want to check in to the hotel, or go to the beach?” At lunch I asked her what she felt like eating. After dinner I asked her what she wanted to do before it was time for bed. I didn’t have to ask very often. She was more than happy to voice her wishes. If ever she seemed at a loss for what to do, I offered some options. I can’t say I succeeded in reaching my goal with perfection. There were many times I so wanted to do something other than what she wanted. I could feel the heat of my own volition rising to the surface. I was mostly successful in curbing these desires. My hope was that, over the course of a couple days dedicated exclusively to daughter-dad time, my child would sense the profound respect I have for her and her abilities. She is not “in my way,” and therefore not an obstacle to my agenda.

I grieve to think of the times I’ve treated my children and others as barriers to my objectives. We cross the line when we say, “my agenda ought to also be your agenda.” We take a figurative stapler and attach the agenda to another person’s chest. “There,” we say, “this is what you’ll be doing.” We are saying without equivocation, “I know what you want to do, but if I honor that it will detract from what I have planned.”

But we learn best when we can ask questions, raise associations no matter how oblique, and know there will be another there to help us make sense of it all. Many raise the concern that where boundaries are too vague, people wander. This is true. Boundaries are important. But keep in mind that where purpose drives direction there is no need for establishing rigid boundaries. Everyone knows where we’re going. Straying to the right or left isn’t an option. But what we want is the freedom to sort out what we view through the window.

Try this in a conversation, a meeting, or while teaching. Determine the entry point for the topic, have a sense of where you’d like to finish, but leave the process open for others to enter with their own ideas. I’ve conducted weekend retreats in this manner. This is still how I form agendas, or what I prefer to call “items for our conversation.” Everyone knows what we we’re doing and what we hope to accomplish. I intentionally leave the content open-ended so that everyone can contribute toward driving the time. Leaving agendas open creates a vacuum into which human creativity and brilliance can enter. This will make for much more meaningful, enjoyable and fruitful interactions.

Being like the youth we serve cannot be our priority, not if we want to make a significant impact. Teens need and want us to be adults. They have lots of buddies. They want us to relate with them in a way that’s in keeping with our authentic humanhood. When we seek to be buddies with teens, they lose the best thing we have to offer: our selves.

We are a medium for youth, a living message. This message will translate to teens when we model for them what it looks like to be a responsible, compassionate, kind adult. If we fall victim to our insecurities and seek to prioritize being hip over being heroic, teens lose.

I knew a family that spoke to their children in “baby talk” to the exclusion of normal diction. Not surprising, each of their children had difficulty speaking in their early years. One could hardly understand them. They had only known baby talk and hadn’t learned to speak with clarity. Teens gain clarity about life best by being around caring adults who behave as adults.

To connect with youth in a meaningful way be yourself. Dress, talk, and act the way you normally do. This is an attractive quality to teens. Come to think of it, this kind of authenticity is attractive to everyone.

We don’t need to be a platinum-selling artist to recognize this kind of brilliance. A sprig of green emerges in your garden. A child demonstrates she is beginning to understand long-division. A friend finally receives the kudos from his employer that he’s always deserved.

The Edge said the only reason U2 ever arrives at brilliant musical moments is because of one thing: commitment. As a whole they are committed to showing up and working hard. Over the span of three decades the world-renown band has learned to trust this process. If they show up, work hard, and engage with and trust each other and the process, something beautiful can and will happen.

Early in our process with others, consciously or unconsciously, we identify what we would consider brilliant. You want your son to learn to play Moonlight Sonata, for example. This is a good and worthy goal. But committing to the creative process is difficult. Showing up is not sufficient. You need to be engaged. Then you can know you’ll be around to behold the brilliance that finally shines through. He strings together a few bars. It’s not the whole song, but it sure doesn’t sound like Yanni. So you stay with it. He strings a few more bars together and eventually he can play the entire Sonata, and with feeling.

Most aspects of the creative process encourage us to bail out. Exit doors flank us each step of the way. Committing to stay with and trust the process can seem to border on the absurd. Why commit to something so frustrating? Because some part of us knows better. We know something shot through with goodness awaits us. This is why we commit, show up, and engage with the people and pastimes we care about. What makes U2’s creative process meaningful and productive are the same elements that make for rewarding artful endeavors and rich, enduring relationships. We may not make music. But whatever our interests and calling, through commitment, engagement, patience and trust something extraordinary will stumble out of the fog to greet us.

1. Applying weed killer

2. Enhancing the soil and planting more grass

Carrying this analogy to the realm of prevention programs and policies, my observation is that most efforts have concentrated on “killing the weeds” by setting up funding streams that target specific risk behaviors among youth. Risk behaviors such as alcohol and tobacco use, sex, and suicide, all have their own funding streams. The idea behind these streams is to create programs that focus on reducing the prevalence of a particular behavior. Having worked in prevention for some time now, I’ve developed two main concerns with this approach:

1) “Prevention” as a term doesn’t seem helpful. There are times we certainly want to prevent things. I prevent my two-year-old from running into the road, for example. I’ve counseled youth and tried to prevent them from taking their own life. But prevention should describe only a portion of my efforts. Instead of trying to keep youth from doing certain things, we should inspire youth toward something better. When I think of the term “prevention” I picture standing in a doorway. Above the door is a plaque with the name of the behavior I’m trying to prevent. I don’t need to say a thing. My position says it all: Don’t go into this room. But what do we know about human nature, especially youth? They are intrigued most by what we forbid. By trying to block the behavior we may be drawing attention to it. I believe that if we can inspire youth toward something better, we have hope of succeeding in guiding them away from poor choices.

2) Risk behaviors travel in clusters. Anyone in the field of prevention will agree. Teens who smoke pot are more likely to drink alcohol, have sex, and so on. But our government addresses each of these behaviors not as facets of a whole, but as separate isolated behaviors. There are excellent programs that have long known this and attempt to address the interconnected nature of the behaviors. But this should be the norm, not the exception. Federal resources that fund such programs would do well to allocate their funding in ways that mirror the reality in which these risk behaviors occur.

There are groups and some funding that address the relational and environmental landscape–the soil–in which youth grow, some of which is downright uninhabitable. I hope this holistic approach will become the standard, for it’s at the level of the soil that we infuse youth with the nutrients to grow. Rather than restricting our view of youth to a single, undesirable behavior, we should target deeper elements that give rise to behavior, healthy and unhealthy.

Another tragic side-effect of these splintered funding streams is that the process encourages cronyism and adverse competition. Each prevention field has within it strong, vocal camps that fiercely defend their territory. They believe they are right, others are wrong. They believe they deserve the money more than others. They really believe this. In some cases, they are right. There are many organizations whose efforts deserve recognition and accolades. These groups should inspire others to serve youth in profound ways. But what happens all too often is that organizations within a field square off against each other and against other fields–forgetting that we are here to serve youth, not ourselves.

Prevention groups can encourage work that changes the lives of youth, no matter what funding source paid for it. We can work to develop and refine programs that appreciate the complexity of risk behaviors. Programs can address not merely behaviors, but the deeper causes of behaviors–like one’s sense of self-efficacy, worth, and personal beliefs and values. The behaviors are most conspicuous, but we should not identify them as the primary problem.

Being authentic means you answer to a different call. It’s like hearing and responding to a note only you can detect. Strive for authenticity and you will give a gift to others around you, and to yourself. This takes work, but yields immeasurable riches in the realm of human connection and self-understanding.

Enjoy! If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, send me an email at andrew@peoplechangepeople.com