Member-only story
I recently joined a Teen Center Staff Team as an assistant one day a week. Since I retired from the city to a small seaport, I’ve focused on deprogramming my Coach Mindset refined over forty years. Working at this Teen Center allows me to test the sustainability of my interrupted coach mindset.
The Teen Center is designed as an Unschooling Zone. Unschooling is a style of home education that allows the student’s interests and curiosities to drive the learning path. Rather than using a defined curriculum, youth gain knowledge organically. I walked in the front door on my first day with an agenda to bring a strike-pad dialogue into the mix. I asked four or five youths if they wanted to do some punching. I received blank stares and definite headshakes and finally retreated to a neutral corner to get grounded. The Staff and Center Manager reminded me several times not to take their response personally, but it wasn’t until several weeks later I realized the youth were in an Unschooling Zone and not required to fit into my expectations of connective communication.
It was an actual test of my interrupting coach mindset practice. I asked several youths if they wanted to draw a basic map about a character stepping on the path and dealing with various obstacles before achieving the horizon goal with me. One youth accepted, and I enjoyed a side-by-side experience of drawing a character and designing methods of clearing obstacles from the path and then drawing the character’s Victory Dance at the horizon. After that, I re-entered the invisible…
