A journey of awareness for young people and those who support them.
Young people today are growing up in a world filled with competing influences. Social media, peer groups, culture, family expectations, and the natural desire to belong can all affect how they see themselves and the choices they make.
If you are a teen or young adult, you may be trying to discover who you are while surrounded by messages about who you should be. If you are a parent, grandparent, teacher, counsellor, coach, mentor, or caregiver, you may be watching a young person you care about navigate these same pressures and wondering how best to help.
I believe my first two books are especially relevant to this stage of life, particularly Book Two. They are not intended to tell young people what to think, but to help them better understand how and why they think, feel, and behave as they do, and develop the awareness to think more consciously for themselves.
The Powerful Influences Shaping Who We Become
During our teens and young adulthood, identity, beliefs, habits, and our sense of self are still developing. The desire to belong and be accepted can be particularly powerful. As a result, young people may sometimes adopt attitudes, behaviours, beliefs, or values that are not truly aligned with who they are and may even be harmful to themselves or others.
At the same time, they are still developing the ability to critically evaluate the many ideas and influences they encounter and consider how those influences may affect their relationships, self-worth, choices, and future direction.
Although young people learn many academic and technical skills in school, they may receive far less guidance in emotional awareness, identity formation, relationships, peer influence, critical self-reflection, or understanding how culture and conditioning shape perception and behaviour.
Some believe these lessons belong primarily in the home rather than the classroom. Ideally, parents and families play an important role. But not every parent has had the opportunity to develop these skills themselves, and many adults are dealing with some of the same conditioning, relationship difficulties, and questions of identity.
Rather than debating whether this responsibility belongs to parents or schools, perhaps the more important question is whether young people are receiving this guidance at all.
Parents, educators, mentors, coaches, counsellors, community organizations, and other trusted adults can all contribute. Their role need not be to provide all the answers or tell young people what to think. Perhaps one of the greatest gifts we can give a young person is to help them learn how to think more consciously for themselves.
Discovering Who You Are and Learning to Think Independently
As young people move toward adulthood, they naturally seek greater independence and want to make their own decisions. This is an important part of growing up.
But independence does not mean rejecting the experience, perspective, or advice of others. True independence involves learning to listen, question, evaluate different perspectives, consider the consequences of our choices, and then take responsibility for the decisions we make.
This creates an interesting dilemma. At the very time young people may most benefit from guidance, they may be least inclined to accept it from parents or other authority figures. That makes developing their own inner guidance increasingly important: clarifying their values, questioning assumptions, recognizing outside influences, considering how their choices affect others, and distinguishing between simply doing what they want and making a thoughtful, responsible decision.
For the adults in their lives, this can also require a change of approach. Guidance does not always mean giving advice or providing answers. Sometimes it means listening, asking questions, sharing experience, and creating an environment in which a young person can arrive at their own understanding.
Looking Beneath the Image
An important part of self-discovery is recognizing that we are infinitely more than the image, role, or identity we have learned to present to the world.
For young people especially, appearance, possessions, achievements, popularity, social status, grades, and approval from others can easily become measures of personal worth. But none of these determines the value of a human being.
When we become overly identified with these external measures and conditioned identities, we may begin to see ourselves and others through a distorted lens. Greater awareness allows us to begin looking beneath those layers and asking a much deeper question:
Who am I beneath everything I have learned I am supposed to be?
Turning Awareness Into Something Practical
This is where Book Two moves beyond simply discussing self-awareness. It provides practical tools and a process for exploring these questions more deeply.
The exercises and worksheets help readers identify and prioritize their values, consider where those values came from, recognize the needs and expectations that arise from them, examine how well those needs are being met, and better understand the relationships that influence their lives.
These exercises can be valuable for a young person working independently, but they can also become a powerful way for a young person and a parent, grandparent, caregiver, mentor, or other trusted adult to understand one another better.
Both can complete appropriate worksheets separately and then compare what they discover. Which values are most important to each of them? Where are they similar? Where do they differ? What expectations arise from those values? Are there needs or priorities that one person has never fully understood about the other?
The purpose is not for the adult to persuade the young person to adopt their values, or for the young person to reject the adult’s experience and guidance. It is to create greater awareness, communication, and understanding on both sides.
And this is very much a two-way process. Adults have been conditioned too. Parents and caregivers bring their own upbringing, beliefs, expectations, fears, values, and life experiences into their relationships with young people. Completing and comparing the exercises may therefore help both people discover things about themselves, and each other, that they had never previously recognized.
Greater understanding does not mean they will always agree. But understanding why another person thinks and feels differently can itself strengthen a relationship.
A Journey We Never Outgrow
Through this process, young people can begin making choices based less on fear, comparison, the need for approval, or social pressure, and more on awareness, authenticity, compassion, and inner understanding.
This is not always easy. Growth requires courage, honesty, reflection, and practice. Nor is it a journey that ends when we become adults. Parents and young people alike may discover that they are examining some of the same questions at different stages of their lives.
The goal is not to tell anyone what to think. It is to encourage all of us to understand why we think as we do, question the influences that have shaped us, and become more conscious of the choices we make.
We cannot change the patterns we do not see. Awareness is where the journey begins.