Teen Coaching with Anna Kashner

·56 min·5 clips

Anna Kashner reveals how a single trusted adult can make a critical difference in a teenager's life through coaching.

The episode begins with host Casey O'Rourke introducing the topic of teen life coaching and her guest, Anna Kashner. Anna shares her background as a former high school teacher and public health professional who transitioned to youth coaching after seeing the rapid impact of one-on-one support. She defines coaching as present and future-focused, goal-oriented support that helps teens build skills like autonomy, confidence, and problem-solving. Executive function coaching is explained as helping teens with planning, task management, and emotional regulation. Anna distinguishes coaching from therapy using a continuum model, where therapy addresses trauma and severe mental health issues, while coaching works for functioning teens who want to improve. The discussion turns to negative thinking, with Anna explaining its evolutionary roots as a survival mechanism and how it manifests in modern teens through social media anxiety. She shares a case study of a high school senior named Mira who used cognitive behavioral tools to overcome friend trauma and negative thought patterns. Anna then identifies common parental responses that inadvertently worsen teen negativity, such as rushing to reassure, minimizing emotions, jumping to fix-it mode, and becoming emotionally activated. She offers alternative approaches like validation, curiosity, adding the word "yet" to statements, and celebrating effort over outcome. The conversation covers how to approach teens about coaching without framing it as fixing a problem, emphasizing autonomy and choice. Casey shares a personal story about her college-age daughter taking accountability for a grade, illustrating long-term skill development. Anna defines joyful courage as showing up authentically in the messy process of raising teens, having the courage to let them struggle, and finding joy in connection. The episode concludes with Anna sharing her contact information and Casey promoting her workshop, Tending the Garden of Adolescence.

As heard by us

Teen pushback, fear, and a parent staying steady.

Casey presents parenting a teenager as a kind of gardening that is never fully legible, and the idea lands because it turns fear and negative thinking into something familiar rather than abstract.

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Why you'd press play

When teen pushback sends your brain into full saber-tooth-tiger mode.

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