Resilience and Being A Teenager

When I look back on my teenage years I both smile and grimace. Those years were awkward, fun and there were several times when the risks I took could have cost me my life. Like many people, my teen years were the most formative years of my life, at least thus far.

Toward the end of my teen years, I started to suffer from depression. It wasn’t sudden and it certainly wasn’t obvious but drip-by-drip, I started to notice something was wrong with me. It was as if I had a small motivation leak that I couldn’t fix. Every day it got worse until eventually I cracked and pursued my Life List along with professional help.

It is with those memories that I partnered up with Resilient Teen: Supporting independence, confidence and resourcefulness in youth. To be clear I am not being paid by the organizers of this project. Instead, my reason for partnering with them is out of a desire to show other people who may being going through a similar experience to what I went through that there is indeed hope for a better future. Being a teenager can be extremely hard but it is not the finish line. Life changes considerably after High School and College.

What is Resilient Teen?

Resilient Teen is an online summit with video interviews from 21 speakers (myself included). Each interview will cover different perspectives on teenage resilience and the content is intended for both teenagers and parents of teenagers. You can register today but the online conference starts on May 1st.

Starting on May 1st, one video interview will be released per day. Each video will be available to watch for free for three days after its initial release. To watch videos after the initial 3 days and to get access to all of the videos indefinitely, you can choose to pay for the course ($97 CAD).

Cue the Resilient Teen organizer:

Her name is Deanne Barrett, and after teaching in public high schools for 14 years, she founded Gratitudeworks to bridge the gap between the skills students were learning in school, and the skills they needed to thrive in life.
As a high school teacher, Deanne could see that her teenage students were already under incredible stress and pressure to do, and be, and have it all. Under this intense pressure there was no room for failure, so some students took themselves out of the game completely by skipping school. Others attended school but had an attitude of “I don’t care”, “this is stupid”, or “It doesn’t matter”, or suffered silently with their own devastating inner thoughts and tried to be invisible. In her last semester of teaching, two of her students were hospitalized for their mental health. It was then that Deanne realised that there was a gap in her student’s skill set, which led her to found Gratitudeworks, to teach teens and their parents how to overcome the inevitable challenges of the high school years.

Deanne has taken on a research project to learn how other though leaders understand resilience so that we can help teens to understand that life’s challenges actually provide an opportunity for building emotional strength.

The project is called: Resilient Teen: Supporting independence, confidence, and resourcefulness in teens.

It is FREE for you to attend. You can register by clicking here.

This event is for teens who want to know how to overcome the tough times, and for parents who want to understand how to set teens up for success in school and life.

You can watch each 30 minute video interview from your laptop or mobile device, so you will have strategies and inspiration at your fingertips.

Here is what we’re talking about in the video interviews:

Developing a positive MINDSET to learn from past mistakes
How to walk through TEEN DEPRESSION with renewed purpose
How CONNECTING with their school community helps youth develop resilience
How teens can THRIVE even when they don’t complete high school
The KEY SKILLS of resilience and how to teach them to your teen
How PARENTS can be a supportive resource to their teens

What would it be worth to you to be able to hear from over 21 resilience experts who have spent their careers learning through their inevitable challenges?