Category: Mentoring Advice

Let me set a scene for you.

You are standing in a room full of teenagers. Maybe it’s a youth group. Maybe it’s a camp dining hall. Maybe it’s a school hallway or a church lobby or the parking lot after practice. You are doing what you think is a perfectly fine job of being a present, engaged, responsible adult. You smiled at the right moments. You made a joke. You said encouraging things. You feel pretty good about the whole interaction.

And across the room, a sixteen-year-old is watching you the way a wildlife researcher watches a species they do not fully trust yet. She clocked that you smiled differently at the popular kids. She noticed you checked your phone when Marcus was mid-sentence. She remembered that you said last month you would follow up about that thing, and you didn’t. She filed it. She didn’t say anything. She just filed it.

You had no idea.

This is not a post about teenagers being sneaky or adversarial. It is not a post about how adults are failing or how the youth of today are too perceptive for their own good. It is a post about something that anyone who has ever worked with young people for more than five minutes knows in their gut but rarely says out loud:

Teenagers are watching us with a level of attention and precision that most of us are completely unprepared for.

And if we actually want to be trustworthy to them, not just technically present in the same room as them, we need to understand what they’re seeing.

The Consistency Test (That We Did Not Know We Were Taking)

Here is something I have noticed over years of being around young people in mentoring and camp and youth spaces: teenagers run a constant, low-key, almost unconscious consistency test on the adults in their lives. They are not doing it to be difficult. They are doing it because they have been burned before. Lots of them have. And even the ones who haven’t been burned in any dramatic way are still hardwired by developmental biology to be figuring out who in their world is actually safe and reliable.

So they watch.

They watch whether you say the same thing on a bad day that you said on a good day. They watch whether the rules apply the same way to the kid who’s easy to like as they do to the kid who’s harder to like. They watch whether your values are a vibe you perform when it’s convenient or whether they actually hold up under pressure. They are not doing a formal audit. It’s more like sonar. Ping. Ping. Ping. Is this person who they say they are?

Inconsistency doesn’t always register to a teenager as “this adult made a mistake.” Sometimes it registers as “this adult cannot be trusted.” That is a very different conclusion to recover from. Mistakes are human. Inconsistency feels like evidence.

And here is the part that really gets me: most of the time, the adults who are failing the consistency test do not even realize they are inconsistent. They think they’re treating everyone the same. They think they’re applying the rules fairly. They genuinely believe they are doing fine. The gap between what we think we’re broadcasting and what teenagers are actually receiving can be genuinely enormous.

Favouritism: The One They Can Spot Across A Parking Lot

Favouritism is one of those things adults think they are hiding. We are not hiding it. We are not even close to hiding it.

I want to be careful here, because not all preferential treatment is favouritism in the harmful sense. Adults naturally have better rapport with some young people than others. Some kids are easier to connect with. Some personalities click better. That is not a moral failing, that is just being human. The problem is when that natural difference in comfort level starts translating into visible differences in treatment, in opportunity, in grace extended when someone makes a mistake.

Teenagers see that. Instantly.

They see who gets the benefit of the doubt when something goes sideways and who gets the consequence with no grace attached. They see who gets the encouraging comment in front of the group and who gets ignored. They see who you remember things about and who you clearly haven’t thought about between sessions. The kids who are on the receiving end of favouritism sometimes feel awkward about it, actually. They know it isn’t fully fair. And the kids who are not on the receiving end? Some of them will never say a word and will just quietly conclude that they do not belong in your space.

The fix is not to pretend you don’t like some kids more naturally than others. The fix is to be intentional about equity even when it doesn’t feel natural. To ask yourself who you haven’t checked in on lately. To notice whose name you haven’t said out loud in a while. To extend the same conversational investment to the quiet kid in the corner that you gave to the three charismatic ones who were easy.

It takes effort. It should.

Tone of Voice: The Thing They Remember Long After They’ve Forgotten The Words

Adults sometimes think communication is mostly about content. What you say. The actual words. Teenagers know better.

They have grown up in a world where they were often talked at rather than to, where adult communication frequently came packaged with undertones of impatience or dismissiveness or condescension, even when the words themselves were technically fine. So they learned early to listen to the tone underneath the words. That is where the real message lives.

You can say “that’s a great question” in a tone that actually means I do not have time for this right now and I would like you to stop talking. Teenagers hear that. They hear the slight edge in your voice when you’ve had a hard day and you’re barely holding it together. They hear when your encouragement sounds rote, like you’re running a script. They hear the difference between “I’m proud of you” said because you mean it and “I’m proud of you” said because it was the right moment to perform pride.

I am not saying you need to be emotionally perfect every second. Adults are allowed to have hard days. But one of the most valuable things we can do is just be honest about it. “I’m running low today, sorry if I seem distracted” lands so much better than pretending everything is fine while your tone says something completely different. Young people can handle honesty. What they struggle with is the cognitive dissonance of being told one thing while receiving another.

The teenagers I’ve watched thrive in mentoring relationships are almost universally the ones who had adults around them who spoke in tones that matched their words. That alignment is not a small thing. It is the foundation of trust.

Broken Promises: Even The Small Ones

This one is short because it doesn’t need a lot of explaining.

If you say you will do something, do it. If you cannot do it, say so. If you forgot, own it.

That is the whole lesson. But let me give it some texture because the subtle version of broken promises is where most of us actually fail.

It’s rarely the dramatic promise that gets broken. It’s the small ones. “I’ll grab that information for you.” “I’ll check in with you next week.” “I’ll look into that.” “Let’s make sure we connect before you leave.” The adult forgets. The teenager does not. And when it happens enough times, the teenager stops sharing things that matter because they have learned, quietly and privately, that sharing things does not lead to anything.

I have seen young people close down in real time over a pattern of small unkept words. Not in any visible dramatic way. They just stop bringing things to that adult. They reroute. They find someone else or they find no one. And the adult often doesn’t even notice the door closed, because the kid never made a scene about it.

Write it down. Set a reminder. Do the thing. And when you drop the ball, which will happen because you’re human, don’t minimize it. “Hey, I said I’d get back to you about that and I dropped it. I’m sorry. Can we revisit it?” That kind of accountability is actually wildly powerful to a teenager who is used to adults either not noticing or not caring that they dropped the ball.

Following through is not optional infrastructure. It is the whole building.

Performative Kindness: They Know the Difference

OK this one is going to sting a little. I say that with love. Myself included, by the way.

Performative kindness is when you are kind in the ways that are visible, affirming, and socially rewarding, but you opt out of the quieter, harder, less celebrated versions of kindness that don’t get you any points. Teenagers are extremely good at detecting this. Better than they can articulate, often. They feel it before they can name it.

It looks like: enthusiastically celebrating the kid who just had a public win, but going oddly quiet when a different kid is struggling and there’s no uplifting narrative arc in sight yet. It looks like having great energy during the group activity but having none left for the kid who catches you on the way out with something real to say. It looks like being the loudest advocate for youth in the room when other adults are watching and being significantly less available when it is just you and the young person and there’s no audience.

Again: I am not calling any individual adult a bad person. Humans naturally orient toward interactions that feel rewarding. Being kind in a way that earns you social warmth is just easier than being kind in a vacuum. But young people, especially teenagers who have experienced any degree of instability or conditional love in their lives, have a very finely tuned radar for kindness that is real versus kindness that is being performed for an audience.

The kindness that builds trust is the kind that costs you something. The kind that happens when no one is going to tell you what a great mentor you are afterward. That’s the kind that lands. That’s the kind they remember twenty years later.

Whether You Actually Listen Or Just Wait To Talk

This might be the big one. The one that underlies almost everything else.

Teenagers know when they are being listened to versus when an adult is simply waiting for their turn to respond with advice, anecdote, or correction. They know the difference between “I hear you” as an acknowledgment and “I hear you” as a segue to what the adult wanted to say anyway. They know when you glanced at your phone while they were talking. They know when you started formulating your response before they finished the sentence.

Real listening is rare enough that when young people encounter it, it actually surprises them.

I think one of the most common mistakes well-meaning adults make is over-advising. Someone tells us something hard or complicated and we immediately feel a responsibility to fix it, to offer the solution, to share the relevant life experience, to redirect toward hope or action. And sometimes that is what the moment needs. But a lot of the time? The teenager who just said something vulnerable doesn’t need your answer. They needed to say the thing out loud to someone who would actually receive it without immediately bouncing back an agenda.

Listening without an agenda is a skill. It does not come naturally to most adults, especially adults who care a lot, because caring often comes bundled with the impulse to intervene. But sitting with someone in a moment without trying to solve it, that communicates something that advice cannot: you are safe here. I am not going anywhere. You do not have to perform resolution for me.

That message, received consistently over time, is honestly transformative. Proverbs 20:5 puts it like this: “The purposes of a person’s heart are deep waters, but one who has insight draws them out.” You cannot draw anything out if you are talking the whole time.

Hypocrisy: The Fast Track to Losing Credibility Forever

I saved hypocrisy for near the end because it is the thing that, when teenagers spot it, tends to be irreversible in how it shapes their perception of you. Not impossible to recover from. But the recovery is long and requires direct ownership, not just hoping they forget.

Hypocrisy to a teenager looks like: preaching a value you visibly do not live. Holding them to a standard you exempt yourself from. Talking about respect while interrupting them constantly. Talking about emotional regulation while losing it in front of them. Talking about kindness while making subtle digs at people you don’t like. Talking about honesty while watching them get blamed for something and staying quiet because saying the true thing would cost you something.

The thing about hypocrisy is that teenagers don’t always have the vocabulary for it when they’re young. They might not walk around saying “my youth leader is a hypocrite.” But they feel it as a disconnect. As a reason not to fully trust you. As evidence that the values being taught are a kind of costume that adults put on for specific occasions rather than a way of actually being in the world.

And what makes this complicated is that none of us are perfectly consistent. None of us live up to all of our own values all of the time. That is not the charge. The charge is pretending otherwise. The most credibility-earning thing an adult can do when they fall short of their own stated values is to say so out loud. Not in a way that makes the young person responsible for your feelings about it. Just plainly. “I said one thing and did another. That wasn’t right. I’m working on it.”

Model what it looks like to own your misses and keep going. Because that, ironically, is one of the most powerful things a young person can see: an adult who isn’t performing perfection, who is just trying to be real and keep growing.

What We Can Actually Do With This

I want to be clear that this post is not a guilt spiral invitation. I am not writing this so that every adult who works with teenagers goes home tonight convinced they are a terrible person and should never speak to a young human again. I am writing it because the gap between what we intend to communicate and what teenagers actually receive is very real, and most of the tools to close that gap are genuinely available to us if we’re willing to use them.

Notice your own inconsistencies before a teenager has to. Ask yourself honest questions about whether you’re extending equal grace, equal attention, equal follow-through. Check your tone, not for perfection, but for alignment with what you mean. Keep your small promises or name it when you don’t. Practice kindness that doesn’t require an audience. Listen more than you fix. Own your hypocrisy without making it a performance of self-flagellation.

None of this requires you to be a saint. It requires you to be present and honest, which is actually a lower bar than sainthood, but somehow still harder than it sounds.

The teenagers in your orbit are not a monolith. They are not all watching the same things or drawing the same conclusions or processing your behavior the same way. Some of them are going to extend more grace than you deserve. Some of them are going to read things in ways that are unfair or that miss your intent. Teenagers are human, which means they are complicated and sometimes wrong in their read of things too. This is not a one-way relationship.

But here is what I keep coming back to:

They are watching. They care what they see. And the adults who recognize that, who take it seriously without being paralyzed by it, are the ones who actually get to be trusted. Not perfect. Not untouchable. Just real enough to be worth trusting.

That matters. The watching matters. The being seen matters. The showing up consistently enough to be worth watching at all, that matters too.

Be worth watching. That’s the whole job.

Let me tell you something that took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out.

I used to think that being a good mentor meant being available. Like, maximally, all-the-time, whenever-you-need-me available. I thought boundaries were something cold people had. Distant people. People who didn’t really care. I thought if I just cared enough, I could be everything a kid needed, and that would be enough, and we’d both walk away better for it.

Reader, I was wrong. I was so wrong it’s almost funny. Almost.

Because here’s what nobody hands you a pamphlet about when you step into a mentoring role: the kids who need you most are often the kids who will, without any bad intention whatsoever, absolutely wreck you if you do not have your stuff together. Not because they’re bad. Not because they’re manipulative. Because they are hurting, and hurting people reach for whatever feels solid, and if you present yourself as infinitely available and infinitely responsible and infinitely capable of fixing things, they will grab hold of that with both hands and they will not let go.

And then one of two things happens. Either you burn out and disappear, which is devastating for a kid who already has a complicated relationship with people who disappear. Or you start making decisions that blur lines that really needed to stay clear. Neither outcome is good. Neither outcome serves the kid.

So let’s talk about boundaries. Real ones. Why they exist, what they look like, and why having them isn’t a failure of care. It’s the foundation of it.

First: What Even Is a Mentor?

This sounds like a dumb question but I promise it isn’t, because a lot of people enter mentoring relationships with a wildly overcomplicated job description in their heads.

A mentor is a consistent, caring, trustworthy adult presence who walks alongside a young person. That’s it. That’s the whole job. You show up. You listen. You share what you know. You point toward good things. You stay.

You are not a parent. You are not a therapist. You are not a social worker. You are not a caseworker, a lawyer, a doctor, a saviour, or a best friend. You are not the primary adult responsible for this child’s wellbeing, safety, or future. You are not the secret keeper. You are not the last line of defense.

These are not failures. These are just not your role.

When we try to be all those things, we don’t just burn ourselves out. We actually create a dynamic that can be harmful to the young person, because we start substituting for structures and supports they need to have in place with qualified people, and we make ourselves irreplaceable in a way that isn’t healthy for either of us. A mentor who tries to be everything becomes a crutch. And crutches, by definition, are not a long-term mobility plan.

Colossians 3:23 says to do your work heartily, as unto the Lord. Heartily. Not infinitely. Not recklessly. Heartily. There is real wisdom in that word if you sit with it.

Time Boundaries: Your Calendar Is Not a Sacred Offering

This one is personal for me because I have been the mentor who said yes to every single request, rearranged my schedule seventeen times, showed up exhausted, and then quietly resented it. Spoiler: resentment is not a great mentoring energy.

You get to decide how much time you give. You should decide this in advance, not in the moment when someone needs something and your guilt is doing the deciding for you. Decide what your regular commitment looks like, communicate it clearly, and then actually honor it.

This does two things. First, it protects you. Second, and this is the part people miss, it models for the young person what healthy time management looks like. It shows them that adults have limits and those limits are not a rejection of them. A lot of kids who end up in mentoring programs have mostly seen adults who either disappeared without warning or never said no to anything and then imploded. Watching you manage your time with dignity and consistency? That’s a lesson in itself.

Set a regular meeting time if you can. Stick to it. When you can’t meet, communicate early and clearly. Do not ghost. But also do not be available at all hours for any reason, because that is not sustainable and it’s not actually what this relationship is supposed to look like.

Communication Boundaries: The Phone Is Not a Lifeline You’re Obligated to Hold

Oh, this one. This one.

We live in a world where kids are used to constant digital access to everyone they know. And I get it. That’s the world. But if you are mentoring a young person, you need to think carefully and intentionally about what communication looks like, what platforms you’re on, what hours you’re reachable, and who else knows that communication is happening.

Most reputable mentoring programs have guidelines about this and you should follow them. Generally speaking, communication with youth should be on platforms that are visible to parents or guardians and through channels that your organization knows about. Not because you’re doing anything wrong. Because transparency protects everyone, including you.

You do not owe anyone a response at 11pm. You do not have to have your phone on all night because a kid is going through something hard. You can say, genuinely and warmly, “I’m here for you during our time together and you can always reach out, and I’ll get back to you when I can.” That’s real. That’s honest. That’s actually more respectful than promising an availability you can’t maintain.

And if a young person is in crisis, your job is not to manage that crisis over text at midnight. Your job is to connect them to the appropriate people who can actually help. Which brings me to the next piece.

Responsibility Boundaries: You Are Not the Safety Net for Everything

This is the one that makes people uncomfortable. Because it can feel cold when you say out loud, “that’s not my responsibility.” Especially when the kid in front of you is struggling and you care about them and you want to fix it.

But here’s the thing. There are situations, serious situations, that need qualified adults. Mental health crises need mental health professionals. Abuse and safety concerns need the appropriate people to be notified. Medical situations need medical people. Legal situations need legal people. Family crises need adults who have both the authority and the training to actually intervene.

You are not those people. And that’s okay. You are not supposed to be. But you are supposed to know who those people are, and when something comes up that is beyond the scope of what a mentor handles, your job is to help connect that young person to the right support, not to carry it alone.

Being clear about this is not abandonment. It’s actually one of the most important things you can do, because it keeps you from operating way outside your lane in situations that need more than you’re equipped to offer. You can be warm and supportive and say “this is something we need to get some other adults involved in.” Both things are true.

If something comes up that makes you worried for a young person’s safety, please do not try to hold that yourself. Get it to the people who are positioned to help. Every time.

Emotional Limits: You Are a Person, Not a Processing Unit

There is a version of mentoring where you become so emotionally enmeshed with a young person’s life that their highs are your highs and their lows become crises for you too. I have seen this happen. I have watched it eat people alive. And I have felt the early stages of it myself and had to actively pull back.

You are allowed to have feelings about what a kid is going through. Of course you are. If you hear something heartbreaking, you are allowed to be heartbroken. You’re human. But there’s a line between caring deeply and losing yourself in someone else’s pain, and that line matters.

When you are dysregulated, you cannot co-regulate anyone. When you are drowning, you cannot lifeguard. This isn’t a metaphor. This is neuroscience and also just basic common sense. You need to be processing your own emotional experience somewhere else, with adults, with your own supports, maybe with a therapist or a trusted friend or your community. Not with the young person you’re mentoring.

They don’t need your emotional processing. They need your steadiness. And steadiness has to be built somewhere offscreen.

I have chronic illness and neurodivergence in the mix for me personally, which means my emotional and physical capacity is not always predictable. Learning to be honest about that, to say “I’m running low right now, let’s pick this up next week,” without guilt and without drama, was genuinely one of the harder things I’ve had to practice. But it was necessary. Because showing up depleted and pretending to be fine helps no one.

Physical Space: Simple, Clear, Non-Negotiable

This one is not complicated but it needs to be said plainly.

Physical boundaries in mentoring are not optional and they are not negotiable. Appropriate physical contact, appropriate meeting locations, appropriate one-on-one situations (which is to say, most programs recommend you are not completely isolated one-on-one with a young person without some visibility), these are not bureaucratic annoyances. They protect the young person. They protect you. They protect the integrity of the relationship and the program.

Know your organization’s guidelines here. Follow them without exception. This is the easy one to get right if you take it seriously from the beginning, and the devastating one to get wrong.

Appropriate mentoring has appropriate structure. That’s not a lack of warmth. That’s wisdom.

Social Media: Tread Carefully and Probably Mostly Don’t

Following the young person you mentor on Instagram. Being their friend on social platforms. Seeing their private life, their social circles, their drama, their aesthetic phases. This sounds harmless and sometimes it is, but it gets messy fast.

You see something on their feed that concerns you. Now what? You are now privy to their social life in ways that blur the mentoring relationship. You comment on a post and accidentally embarrass them in front of their peers. You become someone they feel watched by rather than supported by. Their parent sees that you’re connected online and has questions. Any of these scenarios can compromise the relationship and the trust.

A lot of programs have policies about this. Know yours. If there are no policies, think carefully before connecting on social media with the young person you’re mentoring. And definitely run it through your organization’s structure before you do anything that could be misread.

Keep your own social presence something you’d be comfortable with their parents seeing. This is just good practice for life, honestly. But especially here.

The “Secret Keeper” Problem

A young person looks at you with enormous, trusting eyes and says “I’ll only tell you if you promise not to tell anyone.”

And you want to be the safe person. You want to be trusted. So you almost say it. You almost promise.

Do not promise.

You cannot make that promise, and making it would be wrong. Not because you don’t care about their trust, but because if what they tell you is something that puts them or someone else at risk, you are now bound by a promise that requires you to stay silent when silence could cause harm. You have put yourself in an impossible position and you have given a promise you had no business giving.

The honest and kind thing to say is something like: “I care about you and I want to hear what you’re going through. But I can’t promise to keep every secret, because if I’m worried you’re not safe, I’m going to need to get some other adults involved. That’s not me betraying you. That’s me taking you seriously enough to actually help.”

Some kids will back off when you say that. That’s okay. Better that than you holding information you can’t responsibly hold alone.

And by the way, a young person who needs you to promise silence before they’ll talk is often a young person who is carrying something genuinely serious. That’s not the time to make promises. That’s the time to be carefully, gently present and to make sure the right people are looped in.

You’re Not Their Best Friend Either

This one stings a little to write because I genuinely love the people I’ve walked alongside. But a mentor is not a peer. You are an adult. They are a young person. That is not a hierarchical power trip, it’s just reality, and pretending otherwise doesn’t actually serve them.

Best-friend dynamics with significant age gaps and in mentoring contexts get weird fast. The young person starts to feel like they have to manage your emotions because you’ve shared too much of your own struggles. Or they feel like they’re in a friendship with an adult which can be isolating from their actual peers. Or the relationship becomes so enmeshed that when it naturally shifts or ends, the loss is disproportionate and hard.

You can be warm. You can be funny. You can be someone they genuinely love spending time with. You can share things about yourself that are appropriate and build real connection. But you are the adult in this dynamic, and that role is actually a gift to them. It means they have someone who is not going to need things from them the way peers do. Someone who is consistently the grown-up in the room.

That’s not a lesser relationship. That is exactly the relationship they need from you.

Why Boundaries Are Actually an Act of Love

I know this whole post could read as a list of what not to do. And I get that can feel heavy, like you’re navigating a field of invisible tripwires. But I want to flip this around for a second.

Every boundary in mentoring is actually a way of saying, I am taking this seriously enough to do it right.

The time boundary says: I am protecting my capacity to keep showing up for you.
The communication boundary says: I am being transparent so this relationship stays safe and clear.
The responsibility boundary says: I know my role and I will not pretend to be something I’m not when you need real specialized help.
The emotional limit says: I am managing my own stuff so I can be steady for yours.
The physical and social media boundaries say: I will never put you in a position where lines get blurry or something gets misread.
The no-secrets policy says: I will not make promises I can’t keep because you matter too much for me to say things I don’t mean.
The not-your-best-friend boundary says: I am choosing to be the adult you need, not the peer you already have.

All of it, every single piece of it, is care. Structured, sustainable, healthy care.

Proverbs 4:23 says to guard your heart above all else, because everything you do flows from it. I think about that a lot in the context of mentoring. You can’t pour from a guarded-off heart, obviously, but you also can’t pour from an unprotected one that’s been given away to every wind that blows. The guarding and the giving are both necessary. That’s not contradiction. That’s wisdom.

And One More Thing

If you are in a mentoring relationship right now, and you read this post and felt a twist of recognition in your gut because some of these lines are already blurry, that’s okay. That doesn’t make you a bad person. It makes you someone who cared without enough scaffolding in place. It’s fixable. You can have honest conversations, reset expectations, and rebuild with clearer structure.

It’s not too late to get the framework right. It rarely is.

And if you’re just starting out, or thinking about getting into mentoring, or trying to understand what this role is actually supposed to look like, take the boundaries seriously from the beginning. Not because they’ll protect you from caring. Because they’ll make it possible for you to keep caring for a long, long time.

The young people who need mentors need mentors who stay. Who are healthy enough to keep showing up. Who haven’t burned to the ground by March.

Be that person. Take care of yourself so you can take care of them. Know your role and work it with everything you’ve got, because it matters enormously, it really does.

Just not at 11pm.

Set the phone down. Get some sleep. They’ll still need you tomorrow, and that’s exactly why you should rest.

Boundaries matter. Sustainability matters. Knowing your role matters. And so do you.

OK so let me start by saying something that is going to sound a little harsh and I am saying it with full love: if your go-to response to everything a young person does is “amazing!” or “that’s so good!” or “you’re incredible!” — you are not actually encouraging them. You are making noise in their direction. And young people, especially the ones who are perceptive and tender and already halfway convinced the world is full of people who don’t see them clearly, they know the difference. They feel the difference, even when they can’t name it.

I have been working with young people long enough to know that encouragement is one of those words that gets used like it’s simple. Like it’s just the act of saying nice things. But encouragement and empty praise are not the same thing. They don’t do the same thing. They don’t land the same way. And if we genuinely care about the young people we are walking alongside, it’s worth slowing down long enough to understand what we are actually doing when we open our mouths.

This is not a post about being mean. It’s not about withholding warmth or becoming some kind of strict feedback machine. It’s about being real. Because real is what builds real things. And young people deserve to be built up with materials that will actually hold.

The Empty Praise Problem

Here’s the thing about empty praise. It feels great in the moment. For both people, honestly. You say “amazing!” and the kid smiles, and you feel like you did something good, and for about thirty seconds everyone feels warm and fuzzy. But here is what empty praise is quietly doing underneath all that warmth: it is teaching young people that approval is random. That it has nothing to do with what they actually did. That the bar is everywhere and nowhere simultaneously.

When everything is amazing, nothing is. That’s not a motivational poster. That’s just math.

Think about what it feels like to receive praise that you know you didn’t earn. Maybe you turned in something sloppy, you know it was sloppy, and someone gushes over it like you hung the moon. There is a moment — maybe quick, maybe uncomfortable — where something doesn’t add up. And you file that information away. You start to understand that this person’s enthusiasm is not calibrated to reality. Which means their encouragement is not a compass you can actually navigate by.

Now multiply that by weeks. Months. Years. A young person growing up surrounded by indiscriminate praise learns, consciously or not, that praise doesn’t mean anything. And worse — they don’t develop a reliable internal sense of when they have actually done something worth being proud of. Because the external signal is so scrambled, it never helps them build the internal one.

That is the real cost of empty praise. Not that it’s annoying, though sometimes it is. But that it hollows out the feedback loop young people need to develop genuine confidence. Confidence that isn’t dependent on someone else cheering — confidence that comes from knowing themselves, knowing their own capacity, and trusting that they can read the room accurately.

What Specific Encouragement Actually Looks Like

Specific encouragement is not complicated. It is just honest and it is awake. It means you are paying attention — not just registering that a young person exists and did a thing, but noticing what they actually did and naming it back to them in a way that means something.

Let me walk through some of the things worth noticing, because it’s not always the flashy stuff.

Effort. Effort is huge and wildly underacknowledged. We love to praise results. We love to say “great job” when something is finished and good-looking. But effort is what happens in the middle, in the messy part, when it’s hard and uncertain and the result isn’t guaranteed yet. When you notice a young person putting genuine effort into something — sticking with it, trying a different approach, choosing to try at all — naming that is powerful. Not “amazing,” but something like: “I watched you try that three different ways and you didn’t give up. That took a lot of patience.” That tells them something true about themselves that they can actually use.

Patience. This one is especially worth naming because young people are often told they’re impatient in a corrective tone, but rarely told when their patience is showing up beautifully. When a kid waits their turn gracefully, or stays calm in a situation that’s frustrating, or works through something slowly without melting down — that deserves to be named. Specifically. “That took patience and you showed it.” Two sentences. It lands.

Courage. Courage in young people does not always look like bravery in a dramatic sense. Sometimes it looks like raising a hand when they’re not sure of the answer. Trying something in front of other people. Telling the truth when it would have been easier to stay quiet. Apologizing. Being the only one who did something kind in a moment that cost them something socially. When you see courage show up in those quieter forms, naming it is a gift. It tells them: I see what that cost you and I want you to know it mattered.

Improvement. This one is important and also delicate. Praising improvement means you were paying attention before. It means your encouragement is longitudinal, not just a snapshot. When you say something like “this week I noticed you’re doing this differently than you were at the start — you’ve really grown in this,” you are doing several things at once. You’re confirming that effort over time produces results. You’re demonstrating that someone is tracking their growth with them. And you’re tying pride to a process, not just a moment. That is gold.

Responsibility. When a young person steps up and owns something — a task, a mistake, a role — and follows through on it, that deserves real specific acknowledgment. Not just “good job” but “you said you’d handle that and you did. That’s what responsibility looks like and it matters.” Because a lot of young people don’t get to see responsibility modeled well. When they practice it and it gets named, they start to understand what it feels like to be someone who keeps their word. That is a life skill that outlasts every gold star.

Persistence. Different from effort in that persistence is specifically about not quitting when quitting was tempting. When a young person comes back to something after failing at it, or keeps going after a rough day, or chooses to try again after being embarrassed — naming that is meaningful. “You came back and tried again. That’s persistence and it’s not easy.” Simple. True. Sticks.

Kindness. This one especially needs to be named because kindness is often invisible. We notice unkindness loudly and immediately. But when a young person does something quietly kind — includes someone who was being left out, says something gentle when they could have said something cutting, offers to help without being asked — it can slide right past without acknowledgment. And when it slides past consistently, kindness can start to feel like something that doesn’t register. Naming it tells a young person: this part of who you are is seen and it’s worth something.

The Manipulation Problem

There is another version of this conversation that we also need to have, and it’s about manipulative praise. Which is its own beast entirely.

Manipulative praise is praise that’s deployed strategically, not to build someone up but to manage their behavior. It’s the “wow you’re SO good at cleaning up, I just know you’ll clean up right now” approach, where the compliment is bait with a hook in it. Young people see through this faster than most adults expect. And when they do, they don’t just distrust the specific praise — they start to distrust the person delivering it.

There’s also the version that’s paired with comparison. “You’re so much better at this than so-and-so.” That is not encouragement. That is using someone else as a baseline in a way that either makes the young person feel superior at another person’s expense, or sets up an anxiety around being dethroned. Neither of those things builds anything healthy.

Real encouragement does not have an agenda other than the young person’s actual growth. It is not a lever. It is not a tool for compliance. It is an honest reflection offered with care. When it comes from that place, it lands completely differently.

Why Honesty Is Not Cruelty

I want to address the pushback I can already hear, because I know some people read posts like this and think — but what if I’m too critical? What if I discourage them? And that concern is legitimate. There is such a thing as being too harsh. There is such a thing as a critical environment that chips away at a young person rather than building them up. That’s real and worth being careful about.

But here’s the thing: the antidote to harmful criticism is not indiscriminate praise. The antidote is honest, kind, specific attention. It’s the discipline of noticing what’s actually true and naming it with warmth.

You can be honest without being brutal. You can skip the gushing without going cold. You can say “that part was really hard and I saw you push through it” instead of “that was absolutely perfect” when it wasn’t perfect and you both know it. Honesty and care are not opposites. They live best when they’re together.

And when something genuinely is excellent? Say so. Fully and without hedging. The word “amazing” is not banned from the vocabulary. It just needs to be reserved for when it’s true, so that it means something when you use it. When a kid does something that genuinely blows you away, the authentic response to that — the wide-eyed unguarded “okay that was actually incredible” — hits completely differently than the baseline noise of everything being incredible all the time.

This Also Applies to Adults, By the Way

Just going to park this here briefly because it applies to us too. Most adults did not grow up receiving specific, honest encouragement. Most of us were shaped by a combination of vague praise, direct criticism, and a lot of silence in between. And we carry that forward, often without realizing it. We either over-correct into the everything-is-amazing zone because we don’t want anyone to feel what we felt, or we under-correct into near-silence because we didn’t learn the language of noticing and naming.

Neither of those serves the young people in our lives well. And the work of actually learning to give real encouragement — to slow down, pay attention, and name what is true — is something that can be grown. It’s a practice. You do not have to have been raised with it to offer it. You just have to be willing to be intentional.

Which, if you’re reading a post like this, you probably are. So there’s that.

A Few Practical Things Worth Trying

Because I know some people want the actionable stuff, here is a loose framework that is not a formula. Treat it as a starting point, not a script.

First: watch before you speak. Let yourself actually observe what a young person is doing before you comment on it. Give yourself a moment to register what you actually saw, instead of just reflexively responding with something warm. The pause is where the specificity lives.

Second: name the behavior, not just the person. Instead of “you’re so responsible,” try “you finished what you said you’d finish and that’s what responsibility looks like.” It’s a small shift but it grounds the quality in something they did, not just something they are — which means it’s something they can do again.

Third: let it be proportional. Small wins get warmth. Real growth gets named clearly. Genuinely impressive stuff gets your honest, unreserved reaction. If everything gets the same level of response, nothing is calibrated and none of it means anything.

Fourth: don’t be afraid of silence. Sometimes the most powerful thing you can do after a young person does something meaningful is just be present with it for a second. Not immediately filling the air with praise. Just letting it sit and then saying something real. Silence that holds space is not the same as silence that ignores.

Fifth: let them tell you first. Ask a young person how they feel about what they did before you tell them how you feel about it. “How do you feel about how that went?” is not a dodge. It’s an invitation for them to start building their own internal assessment, which is the whole point. You can add your honest observations after, but letting them speak first means they’re not just reflecting your reaction back at you — they’re building their own voice.

The Bottom Line

Young people are not fragile enough to need constant applause and they are not tough enough to not need to be seen. They need both honesty and warmth, delivered at the same time, by people who are paying attention enough to mean it.

Encouragement is not just making someone feel good. It is giving someone accurate information about themselves, delivered with enough care that they can receive it and use it. That’s it. That’s the whole job.

Effort matters. Patience matters. Courage matters. Improvement matters. Responsibility matters. Persistence matters. Kindness matters.

And none of those things need to be called amazing to be worth noticing. They just need to be noticed.

Go do that.

Let me tell you something I had to learn the hard way, because apparently I was not born knowing how to do this gracefully and neither was basically anyone else who works with kids or teenagers.

Correction is not the problem. Correction is necessary. Correction is, when you do it right, one of the most caring things you can offer a young person. The problem is how we do it. The problem is that most of us were corrected badly at some point in our lives, by someone who thought embarrassment was a useful teaching tool, or who was too tired and too frustrated to slow down and think about what they were actually communicating. And then we grew up and sometimes, without meaning to, we replicated the whole mess.

This is not a post about being soft. It is not a post about letting things slide or pretending bad behaviour did not happen. It is about being effective. It is about actually getting through to a young person instead of just making them feel small, which, spoiler alert, does not teach them anything except that the world is a place where big people use their power to humiliate small ones.

We can do better than that. Here is how.

First: Get Yourself Regulated Before You Open Your Mouth

This one comes before everything else and most people skip it entirely.

If you are in the middle of a hot spike of frustration, if your teeth are clenched and your voice has already gone up three octaves, if you are already composing the sarcastic takedown in your head, you are not ready. You are not in a state to correct anyone. You are in a state to discharge your own discomfort onto a young person and then call it discipline.

Take a breath. Take two. Walk to the other side of the room. Give yourself thirty seconds. This is not weakness. This is strategy. Because the goal here is not to express how frustrated you are. The goal is to actually change a behaviour, and for that you need to be the calmest person in the conversation.

Young people, especially teenagers, are reading your nervous system as much as they are listening to your words. If you come in hot, their threat response fires and their brain goes into defend-or-deflect mode. They stop listening. They either shut down completely or they go on the offensive and now you have a different, bigger problem. You brought a fight to someone who was not ready for one, and now you both lose.

Calm is not passive. Calm is authority. Come in calm, stay calm, and you have already done seventy percent of the work.

Private Is Non-Negotiable

I will say this clearly and without apology: you do not correct a young person in front of their peers. Full stop. Not for big things, not for small things, not when you are tired and it feels easier to just deal with it right there in the moment.

Because here is what happens when you correct someone publicly. They stop thinking about what they did. They start thinking about the people watching them. Every ounce of mental energy they have goes into managing how they look right now, whether they seem weak, whether people are laughing, whether they are going to survive the social damage of this moment. The actual content of your correction? Gone. It evaporated the second you made them a public spectacle.

You also hand them an easy out. Now the story is not “I did something that I need to think about.” The story is “I got humiliated in front of everyone and that was unfair.” And honestly? They are not wrong. It is unfair. You gave them something legitimate to be angry about and redirected all of that energy away from any genuine accountability.

Pull them aside. Step around a corner. Wait for a break. Say “hey, can I grab you for a second” in a tone that is neutral and not loaded with foreboding. Make it private. Make it between you and them. That is the only context where real conversation can actually happen.

Say the Behaviour, Not the Verdict on Their Character

This one is where a lot of well-meaning adults stumble hard.

There is a gigantic difference between “you lied to me” and “you’re a liar.” Between “that was unkind” and “you’re a cruel person.” Between “that wasn’t your best decision” and “what is wrong with you.” One describes what happened. The other declares a verdict on who they are as a human being.

Young people are not finished yet. They are literally in the middle of figuring out who they are and what kind of person they want to be. When you name a behaviour, you leave space for them to be someone who made a bad choice and can make a different one. When you name a character flaw as though it is permanent and settled, you close that door. You tell them the verdict is already in, so why bother fighting it.

“You were disrespectful in group today” is something they can work with. It describes a moment, a specific action, something concrete. “You’re disrespectful” is a label they now have to either accept or spend enormous energy rejecting, and neither of those responses gets you anywhere useful.

Stick to the what. Stick to the specific, observable, this-is-what-I-saw. That is what is correctable. That is what gives them something to actually change.

Be Clear About the Expectation, Not Just the Problem

A lot of correction stops at “that was wrong” and then kind of… trails off. Which leaves a young person knowing they failed something but not knowing what success would have looked like. That is like failing someone on a test you never told them existed.

After you name the behaviour, name the expectation. Not in a lecturing, bullet-point way. Just clearly. “When someone else is talking in group, the expectation is that you’re listening, not on your phone. That’s what respect looks like in here.” Simple. Direct. Now they know.

This matters especially for young people who have not grown up with consistent expectations around them, which is more of them than you might assume. Some kids have lived in environments where the rules changed depending on someone’s mood, where they were punished for things that were fine yesterday, where “respect” meant something totally different from what you mean when you say it. You cannot assume the expectation is obvious. You have to say it.

And say it once. Not three times with increasing emphasis. Once, clearly, calmly, and then stop talking and let it land.

Give Them a Moment to Actually Receive It

After you have said what you need to say, stop filling the silence.

This is so hard. Silence feels like things are going wrong. Silence feels like confrontation or rejection or that the conversation broke. But silence is often just a young person processing. They are taking in what you said. They are deciding how to respond. They are trying to figure out whether it is safe to be honest with you right now. Give them that time.

Do not rush in to soften what you said. Do not pile on with more examples. Do not start asking “does that make sense? do you understand? why are you making that face” before they have even had a chance to breathe. Say your piece, stop, and wait.

What comes back might surprise you. Sometimes when you give someone space and safety, they tell you something real. Sometimes you find out there is a reason behind the behaviour that changes the picture a little. Sometimes you find out they already know they messed up and they are embarrassed and they just needed to hear it said calmly without the world exploding. You do not get any of that if you are talking the whole time.

Drop the Sarcasm. All of It.

I know sarcasm feels clever. I know it is tempting when you are tired and frustrated to deploy that dry, exhausted “oh, wonderful, thanks for that” energy. I know some of us grew up in cultures where sharp wit was basically currency and biting sarcasm was practically a love language.

With young people in a corrective moment? It is a weapon. Even if you do not mean it as one.

Sarcasm requires a level of social and emotional processing that a lot of young people, especially younger teens or kids with different communication styles, are still developing. And even the ones who understand it perfectly know that sarcasm directed at them in a tense moment is contempt with a thin layer of plausible deniability. It signals that you find them ridiculous. That you are mocking them. That whatever respect you are asking them to show you, you do not feel you need to offer them in return.

It also tanks trust faster than almost anything else. And trust is the whole infrastructure here. If they do not trust that you are in their corner even when you are correcting them, they will not hear a word you say. They will just be waiting for it to be over so they can leave.

Be straight with them. Plain language, real tone, no performance. They can handle that. What they cannot handle well is being mocked by someone who is supposed to care about them.

Separate the Behaviour From Your Relationship With Them

This is the one that takes the most intentionality to actually pull off, but it is also the one that does the most good.

At some point in the conversation, either through what you say or through how you say it, the young person needs to get the message that this correction does not mean you have written them off. That you are addressing this because you care what they become, not because you are cataloguing their failures. That the relationship is still intact.

You do not have to say it in a big, formal way. Sometimes it is just the tone of the whole conversation. Sometimes it is as simple as ending with “alright, we good?” and meaning it. Sometimes it is checking in with them later in the day, normally, treating them like a person and not like a problem you dealt with. The signal that things are not broken between you two is enormously important, especially for young people who have experienced rejection or inconsistency from the adults in their lives.

A lot of kids have learned that correction equals abandonment. That when a grown-up is unhappy with them, the relationship is in danger. That is an exhausting way to live, and it means they spend huge amounts of energy managing your emotions instead of actually learning and growing. When you make it clear that you can hold them accountable AND stay in their corner, you change the equation entirely.

They can be corrected and still be worthy of your time and care. Make sure they know that.

What Recovery Looks Like

After a correction, a young person needs room to recover with their dignity intact. That means you do not keep bringing it up. You do not reference it in group. You do not let it become their label for the rest of the week. If it is resolved, it is resolved. You move forward.

This is not about pretending it did not happen. It is about not weaponizing the past. Every time you bring up an old correction unnecessarily, you teach them that mistakes follow them forever, that growth does not count, that you are keeping score. Which means they stop believing they can actually change anything, so why try.

If the behaviour comes up again, you address it again, fresh, calmly, the same way. But one instance does not earn them a permanent reputation in your mind. They are a person in process. Give them the grace to actually be in process.

And if they handle the correction well, if they acknowledge it or clearly try to adjust, notice that. Not in a big performative way, but notice it. A simple “hey, I saw you make a different call there, that matters” does a lot. It tells them the path forward is actually visible. That the effort to change is seen. That is not coddling. That is how people learn.

A Note on What This Is Not

This post is not about what to do when a situation involves something serious that requires other people, proper channels, or people with far more training and authority than a mentor has. There are situations that go beyond the scope of what this kind of advice covers and I am not touching those here. If something needs to go somewhere beyond you, let it go there. That is not failure. That is knowing your role and protecting the young person appropriately.

What this is about is the everyday moments. The phone-on-during-group moment. The tone-of-voice moment. The eye-roll, the cutting comment to a peer, the missed commitment, the small defiance. The stuff that happens constantly when you are working with young people because they are young people and they are still figuring everything out. Those moments are yours to handle, and how you handle them is one of the most significant things you do.

Because Here Is the Thing

They remember this stuff. Not always the specific words. But the feeling. Whether they felt safe with you. Whether you treated them like someone worth talking to honestly or like a problem to manage. Whether being corrected by you felt like something survivable or like something they had to armor up against.

The adults I remember as formative in my own life were not the ones who never called me out. They were the ones who called me out and still showed up the next day like we were good. The ones who were direct enough that I knew exactly what I had done, but calm enough that I did not feel destroyed by it. The ones who made it possible for me to hear them because they did not make hearing them feel like an attack.

That is the goal. Not perfection. Not always hitting the exact right words. Just: private, calm, specific, clear, and intact. Do those things and you are doing it right, even when it is hard, even when you are tired, even when the behaviour in question is genuinely frustrating and you just want to be done.

They are watching how you handle the hard moments. More than anything else, that is what they are learning from.

Private matters. Calm matters. Clarity matters. Dignity matters. The relationship after the correction matters.

Do the hard thing well. It is worth it.

I have a problem. A deeply ingrained, knee-jerk, borderline compulsive problem. Someone starts telling me something hard, something they’re carrying, something that’s been weighing on them for weeks, and before they even get to the part where they take a breath, my brain is already three steps ahead, filing through a mental drawer labeled Solutions I Have Prepared For This Occasion.

It’s not malicious. It comes from a genuine place of caring. It comes from wanting to help, from wanting the person in front of me to feel better as fast as possible. But here’s the thing I’ve had to learn the hard way, through years of mentoring and being mentored and getting it embarrassingly wrong:

The fastest way to help is almost never the first thing that comes out of your mouth.

And if you’re someone who works with young people in any capacity, whether that’s mentoring, coaching, youth work, volunteering, or just being the adult in the room that kids actually talk to, this is probably the most important skill you will ever develop. Not program planning. Not knowing the right resources. Not even being consistent or dependable, though those matter too.

Listening. Real, full-bodied, not-already-preparing-your-response listening.

Let me tell you why I believe this so hard it’s practically a tattoo on my brain.

—

The Fix-It Instinct Is Lying To You

There is something deeply satisfying about having an answer. Like, neurologically satisfying. The moment you identify a problem and produce a solution, your brain does a little happy jig. You feel competent. Useful. Like you’ve earned your place in the conversation.

The problem is that the young person across from you did not necessarily come to you for answers. They might not even know yet what they came to you for. They might still be figuring out what the question is. And the second you start offering solutions, you’ve essentially told them: I already understand your situation well enough to prescribe something for it.

Spoiler: you don’t. Not yet. Maybe not ever, if they don’t feel safe enough to tell you the whole thing.

When we rush to fix, we skip the part where we actually understand. We grab the presenting problem, the surface detail, the thing they led with, and we run straight to the toolkit. And sometimes we’re so close that it looks helpful. They nod politely. They say thanks. And then they leave and go talk to someone else about the real thing, the thing underneath the thing, because they could tell you were already on your way to the answer before they finished the sentence.

The fix-it instinct is not your greatest asset. It’s your greatest liability when it fires too early.

—

What Listening Actually Looks Like (Because It Is Not What We Think)

I used to think I was a good listener because I didn’t interrupt. Which is like saying you’re a good chef because you own a pan. Necessary. Not sufficient.

Real listening has texture. It has presence. It’s not just the absence of talking.

It’s sitting in the discomfort without reaching for the eject button.

When someone tells you something heavy, the instinct is to lighten it. To say but look on the bright side or at least you have or have you tried just. That impulse to lighten the room is not about them. It’s about your own discomfort with sitting in the weight of what they’re carrying. And they feel that. Young people especially feel that, because they’re already hyperaware of whether the adults around them can actually handle what they’re about to say.

If you reach for the silver lining too fast, you teach them that their hard thing is too hard for you. And they will calibrate accordingly. They will give you the smaller, easier version of their life going forward.

So. What does real listening actually involve?

Your body being present. Not half-present. Not one eye on your phone. Not mentally meal planning. Eye contact that says I am here, you have my full attention, the rest of the world can wait five minutes. For kids who are used to adults being distracted or dismissive, the experience of someone being genuinely, physically present with them is sometimes the most powerful thing that happens in a mentoring relationship.

Reflecting back without editorializing. This is a skill. A learnable one, but still a skill. It sounds like: So what I’m hearing is you’re feeling like no one in that situation took you seriously, is that right? Not Oh well your friend probably didn’t mean it that way. Not That’s actually pretty normal. Just: here is what I heard you say, am I getting it right? That kind of reflection tells them you’re tracking, that you care enough to get it right, and it gives them permission to correct you if you’re off.

Asking questions that open doors instead of closing them. There is a massive difference between Did that make you angry? and How did that feel? One has two possible answers. One has infinite possible answers. Always go for the infinite door. Questions like What was that like for you? or What do you think made that so hard? or even just Tell me more about that are worth their weight in gold. They say: I want to understand your experience from the inside, not just the outside.

—

About the Silence, Though

This one is a beast. I will not pretend otherwise.

Silence in a conversation feels wrong to most people. It feels like failure. Like something broke. Like you should say something, anything, to get the wheels turning again. For those of us who are neurodivergent or who have social anxiety or who were raised in families where silence meant tension, sitting in a quiet pause can feel like waiting for the jump scare in a horror movie. You know something is coming. Your whole nervous system is braced.

But in mentoring? Silence is often where the real stuff lives.

When a young person goes quiet after you ask them something, they are almost always processing. They are turning something over, looking at it from a new angle, deciding whether it’s safe to say the next thing out loud. And if you fill that silence with a follow-up question or a reassurance or an it’s okay, you don’t have to answer that, you’ve just closed the door they were about to walk through.

Let the silence breathe. Count to ten in your head if you have to. Become comfortable, or at least functional, in the presence of quiet. Because a young person who learns that silences are safe with you? That you won’t panic, rush, or override them? That person will eventually tell you the thing they haven’t told anyone else.

Not because you extracted it. Because you made the space safe enough for it to surface on its own.

That’s different. That matters enormously.

—

Patience Is a Practice, Not a Personality Trait

I have to be honest with you here: I am not naturally patient. I am a woman who has been known to give her microwave instructions to hurry up. The idea that I would sit calmly and wait for understanding to develop organically sounds like a premise from a comedy sketch about me specifically.

And yet. Mentoring has taught me patience in a way that almost nothing else has. Not because I figured out some secret, but because I kept seeing what happened when I wasn’t patient, and it was always worse than the slower road.

Patience in mentoring is not passive. It is not just waiting. It is actively choosing to prioritize understanding over efficiency. It is reminding yourself, sometimes in real-time, that this person’s timeline for processing and sharing is not going to match your timeline for helping, and that’s okay. The mismatch is not a problem to be solved. It’s just the nature of real human relationships.

Practically speaking, patience looks like not circling back to your point after they’ve changed the subject. It looks like being willing to have the same conversation across multiple sessions instead of wrapping it up in one tidy visit. It looks like not showing visible relief when the hard part of the conversation ends. Young people notice when adults are relieved that a difficult topic is over. They clock it. And they file it under things to avoid bringing up again.

Show up again next week. And the week after. That is where trust actually gets built. Not in the moments of insight, but in the accumulation of ordinary moments where you kept showing up and nothing dramatic happened and you showed up anyway.

—

Checking Understanding Before You Offer Anything

Here is a practical checkpoint I’ve built into my own approach: before I offer any perspective, suggestion, or reflection of my own experience, I ask myself two questions.

One: Do I understand what’s actually being asked here?

Two: Have I been asked?

Because sometimes someone is not asking for advice. Sometimes they are not even asking for reflection. Sometimes they are just asking to be heard, and if I respond to that with a five-point plan, I have completely missed the assignment. The map and the territory are not the same thing. My perception of what they need and what they’re telling me they need can diverge wildly, and it is always worth taking five seconds to check.

So I will literally say, sometimes: Are you looking for input on this, or did you mostly need to get it out?

You know what’s wild? People love being asked that. Especially young people, who are so used to adults deciding what they need and dispensing it without checking. Being asked what kind of support you want is, for a lot of people, a genuinely novel experience. It says: I see you as someone with agency in this conversation. You get to tell me how to be useful to you.

That is not a small thing. That is the difference between help that lands and help that bounces off.

And if they say they do want your input, great, now you can offer it and know it’s actually wanted. But even then, the way you offer it matters. There is a difference between here is what I think you should do and here is something that’s helped me in a similar situation, take it or leave it. One is a prescription. One is a gift with no strings. Young people, especially teenagers, are exquisitely attuned to the difference. They will resist the prescription even if it’s correct. They will consider the gift on their own terms.

—

The Urge to Fix Is Not Neutral

I want to name something that doesn’t get said enough in mentoring conversations: the urge to fix everything is sometimes more about us than them.

When someone we care about is struggling and we can’t solve it, there is a particular kind of helplessness that kicks in. It’s uncomfortable. It brushes up against our own fears, our own unresolved things, our own experiences of feeling helpless or unseen or stuck. And fixing, or at least the motion of trying to fix, gives us something to do with that discomfort. It creates the feeling of forward movement even when nothing is actually moving forward.

This is worth sitting with. Especially if you find yourself working very hard to resolve something for a young person who hasn’t asked you to resolve it. Ask yourself: whose discomfort am I trying to manage right now?

I am not saying this as judgment. I am saying this because I have caught myself doing it, more times than I’d like to admit. The work of mentoring, especially over the long haul, requires some ongoing self-awareness about your own emotional state and what it’s doing in the room. That’s not therapy language, it’s just honest. Your stuff comes with you. Knowing what your stuff is keeps you from accidentally centering it in someone else’s story.

Not everything can be fixed. Not every hard situation has a solution you can hand someone. Some things just have to be lived through, and the most important thing you can do is make sure they don’t have to live through it alone. That is not nothing. That is, in many cases, everything.

—

When Listening Opens the Door to Real Help

Here’s the thing I want you to hold onto: listening well is not the opposite of helping. It is the foundation that makes actual help possible.

When you listen long enough and well enough to genuinely understand what someone is dealing with, the help you eventually offer, if help is asked for and appropriate, is so much more precise. So much more useful. Because it’s based on their reality, not your assumption of their reality. The difference between a guess and an informed response is the entire distance between unhelpful and genuinely supportive.

And sometimes the listening itself is the help. Sometimes someone needs to hear themselves say something out loud to a person who will not freak out, will not judge them, will not immediately try to solve it. The act of speaking something into a safe space can shift things internally in ways that no advice can touch. You cannot shortcut that process by skipping ahead to the advice. You have to go through the listening to get there.

This is also, it should be said, not counselling. It is not therapy. There are things that come up in mentoring relationships that are beyond the scope of a mentor to carry, and part of listening well is recognizing when something needs to be connected to professional support. Being a good listener does not mean being an on-call therapist. It means being a trustworthy person who helps someone feel heard and helps them find the right path forward, including the path that leads to someone more qualified when that’s what’s needed. Knowing where your lane ends is part of the skill.

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Okay But Practically Speaking

In case you want a few concrete things to try, because I know some of you are like me and need the list:

Before your next mentoring conversation, set an intention to ask three questions before you offer anything. Three full, open-ended questions. Not rhetorical questions. Real ones. Listen to all three answers before your advice-brain gets a turn.

Practice the reflection technique. Literally just try: So what I’m hearing is [summary]. Did I get that right? and see what happens. You will be surprised how often you were slightly off, and how much it means to them that you wanted to get it right.

Let one silence go uninterrupted. Just one, this week. Let it sit. Don’t count it as failure. Count it as space.

Ask what kind of support they want. Make it a habit. It takes ten seconds and it changes everything about the dynamic.

After the conversation, notice how much you talked versus how much they talked. There’s no perfect ratio, but if you talked more than they did in a conversation that was supposed to be about what they’re going through, that’s information worth having.

None of this is complicated. All of it is hard. Hard because it requires setting aside the ego satisfaction of being the person with the answer, and settling into the quieter, less flashy work of being the person who makes space. That work doesn’t get applause. It doesn’t always get acknowledged. But it is the work that actually changes things.

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I think about Proverbs 18:13 sometimes in this context: To answer before listening, that is folly and shame. That’s not complicated theology. That’s just wisdom that has been true for thousands of years and will be true tomorrow. Listen first. The rest follows.

The young people in your life are telling you things, maybe not always in words, maybe not always directly. The ones who feel heard will keep telling you. The ones who don’t, won’t. And you cannot retroactively become the safe person someone learned you weren’t years ago. You can only be it, consistently, starting now.

Listening matters. Patience matters. The silence matters. The questions matter. The decision to put down the answer and actually hear the person matters.

Pick it up from there.