IT'S OK NOT TO BE OK!

Working with young people and the pitfalls!

We all know dealing with young people can be inspiring yet crucifying! They give us joy, yet stress! But I’ve often found that many adults working in a professional environment (whether it be as a teacher or coach) struggle to deal with their own emotions and thus cannot empathise with the young people in front of them! But I will state that the best of the best educators manage to listen, adjust and have a structured cognitive rationale to help young people.

Now I would be lying if I said I hadn’t evolved myself and matured with 20 years of life and teaching experience. Both of the previous mentioned, what I mean is by naturally reflecting alone you become better at dealing with the various situations that occur with young people. Now working with elite and aspiring professional football players I have seen first-hand the stress that some of these young people are under. Football pressures, school and exam pressures and also family and adolescent pressures are the main ones of course. But in addition what about dealing with bereavement at a young age, illness, mainly injury or loss of form. Also many other life variables that come our way.

Anyway what is my point?                    

“Remember young people are often stressed, worried or fearful”

So my advice for all young people, parents and educators that serve them. GET THEM to understand that’s it’s,

“OK NOT TO BE OK”

We’ve all seen the success picture above where there is a squiggly line to what success looks like and a straight line to what people think success looks like! Often in my experience young people simply think success is easy and based on ability alone. As experts we all know ability and talent simply isn’t enough, so building in resilience programmes, and as an example a framework where young people have a repertoire of language which could include questions and not always answers. This could include:

“What are the possible solutions to this problem I have?”

Basically young people simply struggle to understand this PART OF LIFE and therefore we as educators,

“need to understand that young people sometimes don’t understand”

…if that makes sense

So in summary dealing with emotions is hard for adults let alone young people. They may have peer pressure eating away at them and find it hard to express themselves.. But always say that sometimes…

“its ok not to be ok”