Mentoring Young Adults with Anxiety:
3 Strategies for Success
By Master Level Mentor Ken Rabow
I’ve been mentoring young adults for over 20 years, and this level of anxiety in today’s generation, Gen Z, is the highest I have yet to experience, beyond Gen X or Millennial clients.
When young adults come to me and have trouble performing the simplest duties; organizing their room, going out and meeting new friends, making a phone call, or talking to someone in person that they don’t know, we as mentors find that at the root of these challenges is their trouble expressing the underlying anxieties that cause them.
“What if I say the wrong thing?”
“What if they laugh at me?”
“What if I fail?”
“What if I have an anxiety attack and they see my weakness?”
The challenge we meet as mentors is that these young adults are not in their bodies.
We have to use techniques that get them back into their bodies and start believing that, in the mentor–mentee process, they will feel safe and slowly start to have control of themselves once again—body, mind, and spirit.
There are many ways that the mentor and mentee work on this.They have often been to many specialists who focused on their anxiety. Something I often say to my clients is, “We amplify the things we focus on.”
We begin our work by asking our mentee to choose the goals they would like to work on, and we help them find them. Then we ask what the challenges to those goals would be and what the first signpost of success we should look for is.
Once that is established, they see the mentor–mentee dynamic as allowing them to be empowered in their path forward, with us as their guide.
We then start working on ways to get back into the body: diaphragmatic breathing, short visualization exercises to focus on the breath, and quieting the negative self-speak.
This is just the beginning of our process, and although it takes a month or two to start seeing the changes in their child, most parents are amazed within six months how the anxiety has changed from a level of seven or eight as the floor to two or three as the floor.
The next challenge you may be asking yourself if you’re reading this is:
“How in the world do I convince my child to try this when I have promised that every other thing that didn’t work would work?”
Simple.
Make no promises. Say something like this after meeting with us for a consultation to make sure this is the right avenue for your child:
“I just met with a life coach / mentor named Ken Rabow.
I think he might be able to help you find your way.
I would like you to try it for one session online and see what you think.
If you like it, you can try a few more. If not, we’ll look for something else together.
What do you think?”
This new talk gives back your child their power to make the decision without having to resort to just saying no to feel in control.