In his best-selling book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell introduces a study by the social psychologist Howard Leventhal at Yale University, who produced two kinds of booklets detailing the risks of tetanus. Some of the booklets were what he called “high fear” versions and included explicit text and color images about the horrors of tetanus. The other “low fear” versions minimized the risks of tetanus and did not include the images.

The results of this study were notable. Students who received the high-fear booklets were more persuaded of the risks of tetanus and the need for shots, and more inclined to report that they intended to visit the campus health clinic for a vaccine. But all the differences between the two groups vanished when Leventhal looked at how many students actually went to the clinic to receive a vaccination–a scant 3 percent. Leventhal tried the study again with one simple change: the addition of a campus map to the booklet. This raised the vaccination rate equally in both the high-fear and low-fear groups to 28 percent.

Adding the map, Gladwell points out, moved the information from something abstract to something more personal. “And once the advice became practical and personal, it became memorable,” he writes.

This study highlights a reality we can easily forget: When things become personal they become powerful. Until a concept becomes personal it has little power to influence the decisions we make. We can help people make healthier choices by aiding them in the process of translating the abstract and impersonal into the concrete and personal.

In college I volunteered for Project Open Hand, a nonprofit organization devoted to meeting the nutritional needs of people living with HIV and AIDS, as well as the homebound, critically ill, and seniors. Our job was to prepare and deliver hot meals to people infected with AIDS in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District. Most of these people were so ill they could not leave home. Handing a hot meal to another human being living in the shadow of death forever altered my understanding of the disease and its victims. The concept of AIDS became powerful to me because it became personal.

This is the task of education: to make something abstract more personal. This translation must take place for us to say in truth that we and the people we serve have learned anything at all. Whether we experience something firsthand or not, process is what morphs a concept into something more meaningful and personal. Think of process like digestion: We derive sustenance from what we eat by breaking it down and making it part of our bodies.

Are you up for a challenge? The following is an exercise I introduce during my Epic workshops with youth development and prevention organizations. I will give a copy of my new book, The Teen Age, to the first three people who do the following:

1. Commit to trying the following steps.

2. Let me know how it goes.

I’ll coach you through the process ahead of time if you’d like. Send me an email or give me a call. If you are an administrator or director, see if one of your staff will try it.

To increase student process and learning:

1. Begin with the message you bring with you to those you serve. Take, for example, a message about the risks of underage drinking: Being under the influence of drugs will likely damage your health, relationships, and your future.

2. Introduce process to help students break down and personalize the message. A great way to do this is to ask students what questions they have about this truism. They may ask, for example, “What does it mean to be ‘under the influence?’” or, “How can alcohol damage my relationships if I don’t hurt anyone while I’m drunk?” Collect as many questions as you can from students. This helps pique student curiosity–an essential key to process.

3. Trust the process. Ask good questions. Listen. Facilitate dialogue among students. The clarity and meaning that emerge from this will stun you. Keep in mind that the value of process lies in students arriving at their own personal conclusions, not mimicking yours. We short-circuit process if we jump in with our answers before students have had time to process their ideas.

4. Summarize the discussion. Work with students to coalesce the dialogue into a succinct synopsis.

5. Motorize the summary. A more personal understanding led more students at Yale to the campus health clinic. How will a more personal, meaningful understanding of your message influence students’ decisions? Work with your students to arrive at clear, measurable objectives.

Download the three free tools from the Epic website to strengthen this process even more.

I look forward to hearing how your individual processes unfold.

It’s great to be working with you to promote positive change in the lives of others!

Best,

Andrew

There is much talk today about the negative, destructive messages that target youth. A recent study revealed that one out of every three rap songs references drug and alcohol use. The study did not say, but I wonder if the other two songs are about sex.

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.