How can a book about teaching teen leadership not be about teens?
Because, frankly, lack of understanding about teens is really not the biggest problem in teaching them leadership skills. After all, you were a teen, and probably remember something about what it was like. And yes, the world has changed, but if you work with teens you probably have picked up on many of the changes. They may think that you don’t understand their world, but the truth of the matter is that most of you actually understand it reasonably well.
This is not a book about teens. It is a book about how we as adults relate to teens. Because the only tool we have to teach leadership skills (or anything) to teens is the control we have over our own actions. You can spend hours worrying about what the teens are doing or their attitude, but we can only control the things we do and our own attitude.
The only tool we have to influence or teach them is through our own conduct.
This is, of course, true of leadership in general – a leader cannot control a group, other than through their own actions and choices.
You communicate with the teens you work with in everything you do and say. So what you do and say, and how you do it and say it, matters.
So instead of analyzing teens or trying to understand them, the focus of this book is on our choices as adults, the things we say, the way we say them, and how those things are interpreted. You will find that even the smallest changes in your approach can have far reaching results.
