Teenagers and young adults in their early twenties can extract a great deal from and get exceptional value from the life coaching process. They can take control of their lives much earlier and avoid the many errors and mistakes in life choices that are normally made during the growing up process. They can shape their careers and lives early to personally suit them on their terms. They can pursue the best education and experience programs to suit their long-range goals, and they can avoid paying for education or wasting time and effort in experiences that do not help, or even harm their best-suited life, by experiencing the wonders of being coached.

The reasons these statements are true are because teenagers and young adults will be able to discover their inner selves so much earlier in their lives through life coaching. Through life coaching, they will become the world’s leading experts on themselves. When they do, they can then work with their life coach to take control of the personal, family, and work lives early on and create the conditions that will assure them success, enjoyment and fulfillment on their own terms. Think of the many lost soles, false starts, pitfalls, mistakes and other less than helpful actions these teenagers and young adults can avoid by just hiring a life coach.

Then why doesn’t every teenager or young adult seek and find his or her own life coach? And why is it so difficult for parents to convince their teenager or young adult children to hire a life coach, when the results and rewards are so valuable, and so much fun?

Teenagers and young adults have many other pressing motivations and priorities. Undoubtedly, they are either still in school or have recently finished school of some kind. As full time students, they are required to learn the EXTERNAL facts, information, and theories forced upon them by their teachers, whether they want to learn this information or not. Students are then required to pass tests to prove to the teachers that they have learned, digested, and understood the required external information better than the other students taking the same tests. The teachers and schools grade the tests to determine what percentage of the questions the students answered correctly to prove their knowledge of the required recently learned external information. Then their accuracy percentage of answering the required test questions is compared with the accuracy percentages of the other students taking the same tests, and those students that score the highest accuracy percentages on answering the required tests are given higher grades for these required learning experiences, called classes.

The students are given exceptional rewards in many forms for achieving the highest accuracy percentages in more classes than other students. They are designated smarter, looked up to as more intelligent, placed in higher status, are recruited to attend more prestigious advanced schools, given monetary rewards in the forms of payment for school costs, and also in the forms of higher initial salaries in the jobs they are recruited for. Personal pride, parental pride, school pride and other emotions are tied to the success rate at which these students are able to attain higher accuracy percentages in answering the required tests for the required classes where they are forced to learn the required information. In essence, the students are trained, motivated, and rewarded for being able to score better grades on required examinations for learning the required external information forced upon them better than other students. Students are in this external information learning stage for a long time. They are told what to do by their parents, teachers, school administrators, sports coaches and even many adults they come in contact with.

Teenagers and young adults need to rebel and spread their own wings and fly on their own. They are normally so ready to escape the forced learning and testing phase of their lives and the constraints that come with them that they take any activities that help them escape and feel independent to be fun, desirable, and a release. They have friends, new love interests, potential employment, new jobs, new accommodations, new cars, and other new things in life to consider.

Most teenagers and young adults are probably more interested in getting full paying jobs actually doing something after experiencing years of absorbing information and testing in schools. They are probably far more anxious to earn income and are less interested in worrying about work enjoyment, fulfillment, or personal achievement. They are also more apt to be influenced by their parents, teachers, peers, loved ones, tradition, and employment recruiters, when they select their jobs or careers. This is only natural.

However, the teenagers and young adults frequently make choices and do things that are not in their best interest, and are frequently damaging, just to escape from the previous student forced learning phases, and to seek the independence they think is so important to them at the time. They struggle. They lose interest in themselves and their life. They have no purpose or direction, other than doing something different.

Parents who see their teenager, young adult children struggle through inaction, false activities, damaging pathways normally feel a strong sense of frustration because they want to help and redirect their children to more enjoyable, more rewarding, more lucrative and more understood pathways. Many times these parents seek life coaches for their children. The propaganda out there and simple logic motivates parents to think that life coaching will be the answer.

For the teenager young adults to switch gears 180 degrees to seek, understand, accept, and enjoy the possibility that a life coach will only focus on what they might want, like, enjoy, and/or reveal about themselves is an exceptionally difficult thing to recognize, let alone accomplish with any degree of success. The concept that the real answers are within them is almost too much to believe. They have been told everything for so long and by so many different people that to consider looking within is hard to visualize, let alone accept. Teenagers and young adults normally have to experience some life lessons to realize that there might be a better way to approach life. They will need to come to the place where they want to discover who and what they really are to finally take advantage of the wonders of life coaching. Unfortunately, this frequently requires them to suffer and feel some serious pain, before they seek these answers. Parents see and understand this, and frequently want to protect their children from these inevitable negative consequences, before they happen. That is when they call for life coaches as one of many possible solutions. But the parents are frequently a major part of the problem, because they are frequently the main inspiration that the teenagers and young adults have for doing what they do or many times do not do to escape, rebel, and seek independence. Taking further advice, direction or even help from the very parents they are trying to rebel from becomes a real contradiction.

What can parents do? We feel that teenager young adults must recognize that their life coach will be totally in their corner, and will NOT express or represent and opinions or influence from others, including their parents. They will be able to rebel, become independent, and escape even more so through working with their own life coach. Yet, this way they will do so on a far more positive, rewarding, enjoyable and exciting manner than what they had been doing on their own. We have found that the teenagers and young adults who have been able to engage a life coach without any parental control or influence and they all knew it, were able to discover their true selves and the wonders within them, and do some very remarkable things because they did. We have also found that the most difficult thing that needs to be accomplished is for the parents to truly let go, and actually allow their children to discover and become themselves on their own terms. Then the parents can and will enjoy the remarkable children they raised to be who they really are.

Thus, one of the most difficult messages we at The Coach Connection have to relate to the many parents who contact TCC to find the right life coach for their teenager or young adult children is that the parent will NOT be in control NOR will the parent have any influence over the life coaching process. Unfortunately, too many parents refuse to let go, and they do not let their teenager or young adult children even talk to a life coach, for fear of loosing the control they think they have but really don’t and the control they need to let go of for their children to grow up and return to the family. They find other solutions to imposed on their children that allow them to influence what is done.

For you teenagers and young adults, you will experience degrees of freedom, rebelling, and independence that you will want and enjoy through life coaching.

For you parents, who REALLY want your teenager young adult children to grow up and find themselves and become happy with their own life directions, we hope your children become ready for a life coach soon. Teenagers and young adults will become ready and motivated to seek and use a life coach on their own time. There is very little we and the parents can do to hasten this process.

I know. I have four children from the ages of 16 through 35. One used life coaching to great success. One could greatly benefit from engaging a life coach, but is very unlikely to do so. And my other two are doing fine, without the use of a life coach. They are still deep in the student learning stages, and are not ready. Yet.