Building trust…

How do youth workers build trust, foster safe independence and maintain open communication with young people?

Psychologist and former teacher, Michael Hawton and his team, present Tough Conversations with Youth. A practical workshop for youth workers in overcoming the challenges of engaging with adolescents to manage their challenging or uncooperative behaviour.

Michael, author of Engaging Adolescents which has sold over 10,000 copies worldwide since May 2017, shares his formula for building communication skills and clear boundaries.

This workshop provides the practical elements and skills for having tricky-to-hold, but necessary, conversations with young people. Youth workers will walk away with a renewed sense of confidence about the role they can play in teenagers’ lives, without conversations becoming arguments.

Attendees will see video examples of both poorly conducted conversations and, by contrast, more effective conversations using a semi-rehearsed script. This course tackles the best strategies to make a positive difference in teenagers’ lives.

What’s included

• Knowledge and procedures to introduce and implement Tough Conversations™ with Youth into a community environment
• A training manual containing course notes
• A certificate of completion

Expected learning outcomes

• Reasonable expectations to hold about a teenager’s ability to exert some self-control.
• What constitutes ‘normal’ versus ‘abnormal’ in the behaviour of teenagers.
• New understandings of adolescent brain development and its implications for having to intervene.
• How to communicate effectively and develop conflict resolution skills that can be used to manage tough conversations with teenagers that are regularly exhibiting difficult behaviour.
• Skills to hold tough conversations with teenagers about their poor behaviour.
• Coaching a teenager towards better behaviour for their own good, and for the benefit of others.
• Re-usable worksheets.

Lesson framework

• Why young people overreact.
• Self-control factors in young people.
• What are reasonable expectations to hold about adolescents?
• How ‘frustration tolerance’ develops in people.
• What to tolerate: how to sort what you let go and what needs your attention.
• New understandings of adolescence: social landscapes, brain snaps and body makeovers.
• What young people will do if you challenge them.
• A step-by-step process to address a problem.
• How to tame tigers – how you effectively deal with offensive behaviour.
• A video demonstration of the concepts applied to a tough conversation between a youth worker and a teenager.

Please note that this is not a train-the-trainer course and it is not designed for the subsequent on-training of other workers at your workplace.