Today I’m going to let Rocky Balboa do most of the talking:

“It aint about how hard you hit,” says Rocky. “it’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward”.

As a martial arts instructor, this is what I’m looking for: Someone who can learn to take the “hits” and keep coming back for more.

Do you put yourself through the gruelling 4-hour grading process? Do you willingly submit to year after year of bruises, breaks, blood, sweat and tears? And once you’ve done that, do you continue to look for harder and harder ways to test yourself?

Martial arts aren’t about learning to fight. The Rocky movies aren’t really about boxing, either…

The longer I spend working with kids, the more clear it’s becoming to me that the key to a healthy relationship with a young person is this (you’re going to want to write this one down!):

Great communication.

Not the startling revelation you were hoping for?  Ok, stick with me.

I spend time working with young people with mental health issues, and I think it’s important to understand just what it might be like to actually be a teenager with a mental health challenge.

Now there’s a couple of approaches you could take here.  Go ahead and find a young person in that situation, if you like, and say this:

“Hello there young person.  I’m adult and I want to understand you.  Please describe for me what it feels like to have Bipolar disorder“.

Then sit back and put on a thoughtful, caring  and understanding expression.  You can even pull out your clipboard and pen if you like, and prepare to take notes.

Maybe you can imagine the probable outcome of that conversation.

Or you could go to YouTube and you might find something like this:

Now stop for a moment, and ask yourself this:  Have you ever felt frustrated with teenagers who seemed unable to communicate?  Have you thrown your hands up in frustration wishing that a certain young person would just open up to you, and “let you in”?

Would you consider the person who made that particular video incapable of communicating clearly and effectively?

So here’s my question:

If I’m attempting to communicate with you right now, who is responsible for making sure that my communication is understood correctly?

I ask this question of young people a lot, and do you know what the most common response I get is?  It turns out that most people (adults included) have never stopped to think about it. Now, that should be a revelation in itself.

If you are trying to get a message across and you’re not sure who has to do the work of creating the correct meaning, I think you’re setting yourself up for failure.

Another common answer to the question is also “Well, I guess it’s 50-50″.  In other words, I create half the meaning, and the rest is up to you, the receiver of my communication, to make of it what you will.

Others will tell you that it’s 100% the other person’s job to assemble the communication, make sense of it, and respond.  Have you ever met someone who says something like this:

“I like to speak my mind and if you don’t like it, that’s your problem!”?

Look at it like this:

Imagine, if you will, that you had a hundred thousand dollars in cash.  You can’t make it to the bank (let’s say for the sake of argument that you have a broken leg), but you don’t like the idea of having that much cash sitting around.  You have a teenage son, and you figure that he might be able to take that money and put it in the bank for you.

You figure if you can deposit that hundred thousand and let it sit in a term deposit, at some point in the future the value of that money will have grown.  The magic of compound interest is a wonderful thing.  Maybe it will have generated enough interest for you to be able to purchase your son a new computer, or something else he’ll find useful in his own life.

Of course, he’s a teenager and it’s natural for you to be worried that he wouldn’t understand how to set up a term deposit, or that he’d be careless with the money, maybe lose a bit on the way to the bank, or spend some of it on stuff he wants instead.

Would you want to make sure, in that case, that your communication to your son was as clearly understood as possible?  You probably would.  In fact you’d probably take great pains to make sure that he understood every single thing about that transaction.  If he messed it up, after all, there’s a chance that hundred thousand dollars of yours could become much  less valuable.  Not only would there be no interest, but there might even be built up resentment about the loss of value, due to carelessness of your son!

It’s up to you, folks.

In order to communicate effectively and clearly with young people (none of this applies to any other sort of communication, of course!) you need to take full responsibility for the communication.  You can’t “hope” they understand.  It’s your job as an excellent communicator to ensure that your message is received and understood just as you require it to be.

I don’t think you can spend very long with a group of adolescents without seeing a manifestation of what’s often referred to as “peer group pressure”: The supposition that kids do stuff because all their friends do it, too.

There’s no doubting it exists. I’m sure that you can think of plenty of examples of it from your own experience.

When I was in High School I was regularly described as a “problem student”. Whether that was because I was a pathologically troublesome teenager or because I was simply bored and frustrated with the education system, I’m not sure.

I am sure that I heard the canned speech about the impact of peer group pressure on my behavior more times than I care to recall.

I mixed in some rather interesting social circles during that period of my life, to be sure. Much to my parents’ exasperation I regularly chose to associate with the smokers, the long-haired, heavy metal loving kids, the academically challenged and the general misfits of the school.

As a result, I found myself in a lot of situations and participating in a lot of activities that were at best dangerous, at worst illegal and perhaps (in some cases) even potentially lethal.

Now my point is this: It’s pretty clear that if I had chosen instead to hang out with the “goody-two-shoes” kids, I probably wouldn’t have spent so much time in the Principal’s office or in detention. The peer group was undoubtedly a catalyst. But by calling by behavior a result of the influence of “peer group pressure” I think we’re kidding ourselves:

• We’re kidding ourselves that the inclination to go along with what our friends are doing is a conscious process. Especially as an adolescent where concepts as “identity” and “maturity” are being constantly redefined on a daily basis.
• We’re kidding ourselves that by pointing out that kids are doing what they are doing because of peer group pressure will actually cause them to have a “lightbulb moment” about it, and be instantly capable of switching off that unwanted behavior.

Peer group pressure is social proof.

Social Proof, if you’re unfamiliar, is the phenomenon whereby, when faced with uncertainty about required behavior, an individual looks for consistent patterns in the behavior of people around them and models their behavior on that.

There’s volumes of evidence on this (go check Wikipedia if you’re interested.)

If you’re attempting to influence a young person, talking to them about “Peer group pressure” is probably counter-productive. It’s like talking to them about gravity: Would you expect someone, having realised the effect of gravity, to be able to unshackle themselves from it and fly?

Social Proof is a human characteristic. It’s a survival mechanism. You don’t want to be the antelope running toward the lion when the rest of the herd is running the opposite direction.

I don’t like labeling it “Peer Group Pressure” for a few reasons:

• Firstly it carries the suggestion that the peer group conspires to influence an individual toward unwanted behavior.
• Second it carries a negative connotation. You never hear teenagers who work together to achieve positive results referred to as having done so “under the influence of peer group pressure”.
• Finally it neglects other, broader influences on the child’s behavior: Social conditioning, environmental concerns and parental, cultural and gender conditioning.

Behavior is not created in a vacuum.

If you’re attempting to influence a teenager (or indeed any person) to change the way they behave, you need to consider the entire spectrum of possible influences on that behavior.

Telling kids that they behave in an inappropriate way simply because they associate themselves with the “wrong” people does everyone a disservice.

• It teaches young people that people they like may be fundamentally “bad”, bringing into question their moral compass.
• It teaches young people who fail to counter the effects of social proof (an instinctive trait common to all humans) that they may just be failures.
• It teaches young people that they be incapable of thinking for themselves, that they are stimulus-response animals at the mercy of external pressures.

The phenomenon exists. No doubt about it. But it’s only one piece of the puzzle. If you want to influence someone, you’re going to need to look deeper than a blanket diagnosis of “peer group pressure” if you want to be able to influence them in an effective way.