#82: Advice from a Developmental Psychologist: How to Help Your Young Adult Thrive in Today’s Challenging World

My guest today is Dr. Isabela Granic, a professor, psychologist, and developmental researcher with 25 years of experience studying what young people need to thrive. She’s also a parent of two young adult children and the founder and CEO of Liminal Learning, an innovative program designed to help young adults develop the social skills, confidence, responsibility, and a sense of purpose they need to navigate adulthood.

Even though we're talking about the program at the start, Dr. Granic offers incredible suggestions for parents to reconnect with their adult children and help them to thrive. As always, it's closer to the end of the episode. Please don't miss this invaluable advice. You'll leave feeling as though you can do something.

I'm really excited to share this conversation with you because I believe Liminal Learning is incredible, and so is Dr. Granic. 

If you're interested in knowing more, here's Dr. Granic's website:

https://liminal-learning.com/

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As always, thank you for joining me! 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I'm Sherry Jonas, and this is Launch, the podcast for parents of older children in their 20s and 30s who are struggling to become independent. Each week, you'll hear from leading experts, authors, therapists, young adults themselves, and sometimes me, sharing personal insights, professional guidance, and practical strategies to help you strengthen your relationship with your adult child and guide them toward a more confident, capable, and fulfilling future. My guest today is Dr. Isabella Granick, a professor, psychologist, and developmental researcher with 25 years of experience studying what young people need to thrive. She's also a parent of two young adults, as well as the founder and CEO of Liminal Learning, an innovative program designed to help young adults develop the social skills, confidence, and sense of purpose that they need to navigate life as an adult. I'm really excited to share this conversation with you because I believe liminal learning offers young adults a unique opportunity for long-term personal growth while giving you hope that there is a positive path forward. So let's begin. Hi, Isabella. Hello. Can I call you Isabella even though you're Dr. Granick?

SPEAKER_01 1:19

Yes, please. Okay.

unknown 1:21

All right.

SPEAKER_00 1:22

Thank you for joining me today on launch. I'm really excited to introduce our listeners to Liminal Learning because it is such a unique approach to helping young adults navigate this very challenging stage of life. But before we get into the program, I'd love to hear your story. What led you to this work?

SPEAKER_01 1:47

So a few things. It feels like all of my life has led me to this work. So I was for a long time, about 20 years in academia, 25 years, I guess, if you um add in graduate school. And I was, you know, right before my 40th birthday, got the full professorship, tenure position, was really, really happy with what we were doing research-wise. And all of my research has always been in the um area of mental health and well-being of young people. So it started with treatment and prevention of anxiety and depression, and it went into thriving and flourishing and trying to do more good than just the preventing the bad. And so I was doing great. I we had tons of money in terms of my research lab as a my lab was huge. I had 14 PhD students. I did not um stop that because I was burnt out, which most people assume that's the case. That's not it. I loved what I was doing. The problem was that even though I was very successful as an academic and my students were, you know, graduating with their PhDs with very successful projects, we were successful in this small tiny world of academia and the ivory tower. And so we know what works for young people's flourishing. And we've known for decades the details, you know, change slightly, but they're the basics that have been there forever. And then we also know from my research and many other people's research how to intervene when things go wrong, how to amplify when things go right, all of that thing. But it's not getting to the front line of parents and educators and programs and so on. And so I became obsessed with this area of knowledge translation, trying to get the science out into the real world and doing a lot of work in the academic context to try to do that. And that just became increasingly difficult. Um, and so many people were trying to do good stuff in the real world without the science. So after a lot of hand-wringing and freaking out and so on, I ended up deciding to resign from academia because you cannot do good full-time science and good full-time frontline work. And so I left. I still have one foot in the sort of science world. I have an adjunct position, which allows me to be able to apply for grants and so on. And I still do science around a lot of the things that we do. But I left academia five years ago so that we can take all of these evidence-based practices and put it into where young people most need it. And it became increasingly clear in the first two years when I was doing sort of my own field research outside of academia that an incredibly underserved and not even on the landscape of most people in terms of thinking about programming is this transition from adolescence into adulthood. It's this kind of no-man-woman's land right now, um, where there's so much going on, as you say, developmentally. And yet there isn't a container in which we can take young people from their adolescent period into adulthood in many, many cultures around the world, including, you know, Western-ish cultures and uh Eastern and Indigenous cultures, had these rites of passage that we used to do. Um, there are still some that that practiced rites of passage, but this was specifically aimed to take young people and and welcome them with a you know rigorous ritual into adulthood and hand them over responsibilities, but also celebrate where they've come from their childhood and into a bigger um context of community and culture and so on. We don't have that anymore. Very little is about the soulful work of looking at your own identity and purpose and looking to what you want to contribute to a community. So I became really obsessed really about trying to find ways of creating this one-year transition program. And that's what liminal learning really is. It's it's a set of, it's a four-phased program with evidence-based practices throughout that really focuses on community building and community involvement, social connection, and then building agency purpose and a um a sense of humility in a greater world, right? And so we can talk a lot more about that later.

SPEAKER_00 6:14

So your tagline that was great, thank you. So your tagline for liminal learning is a collective launch into purposeful adulthood. I love that. I love that. So I want to know more about liminal learning, but let's start off with the mission. How does the program actually help? You know what, stop. I actually had to look up what liminal means. Can you explain it to our listener? Because I think once you explain it, it'll be like forever. Explain what liminal means and why did you choose that name as the name of the program?

SPEAKER_01 6:50

Oh, I love this question because I get two groups of people, people who have never heard the word before in their lives and like, what is it? And those people are always telling me, change the name of this damn program because nobody knows what you're talking about. And then these other people who are like, oh my God, liminal is used for everything, and everyone's using this phrase for. So for those somewhere in the middle who are open to thinking about this word, and now for me, it's it's like a great word that drives curiosity. And so I'm happy with, you know, we can't do anything about it anyway, because we have a website and all that. So um liminal is a beautiful word. It actually comes from uh and liminality has a very long tradition, 1900s and before, um, in the rites of passage world, where they talked about a space in between. So liminality basically means that is a place, space, time in between. It is liminal, a liminal world is sort of the the phase between two worlds. It can be when you're in liminality, middle age is a beautiful liminal stage, right? Where lots and lots of things are reorganizing, nothing has stabilized into something new, but it's also you're not in the back old thing. So it's a it's the place of in-betweenness. What we can learn, we know from things like complexity science, if we want to get really, you know, hardcore science, all the way into spiritual dish uh traditions that talk about liminality as a place that you have to go through before you come to a new part of yourself and so on. So, so that word really evokes a time in between other more stable times where work is being done to develop further, where work is being and where the system, whether it's the individual system, the community system, and so on, is at a time of flux and and and more flexible as a result. Because even in times of chaos, in times of change, in times of in-between, yes, things are very, very scary and often chaotic, but that means that also there's room for change in a lot more um hopeful way than when we're in stable periods. The other place that I think it's really relevant is right now in the world. We are, from a certain perspective, for many of us who are talking about the polycrisis and the metacrisis, which means the set of crises around the world, that is the climate um disruption, AI disruption, and what it's doing to work and the way that we think about uh employment, um, the wars around the world, the polarization in the way that we talk to one another, all of these crises are happening at the same time. And from some people, some philosophers and other scientists are talking about this happening at the same time for a reason because we are potentially in a civilizational change, a moment of change. And so that's another liminality that we often talk about in liminal learning is that not only is the individual young person in a period of change, but also the world is changing as they're changing. And so what is going on there and what can we learn at liminal learning about ourselves and about the world as it changes so that we have a better fit and we're able to feel that fit in ways that that give us skills to keep navigating these changes.

SPEAKER_00 10:13

What a beautiful explanation. Thanks. I love that. Okay, now that we know, we will never forget. You know, of course, what keeps popping up in my mind as you're saying this is a gap year, but it's a gap year with intention. Because people, young people will take a gap year not knowing what they're even going to do in that gap year. Well, some will say I'm just taking a year off, some say I'm gonna travel. But, and I think there's nothing wrong with that. Liminal learning sounds like it's got so that there's a it's a year packed with growth. How does the program help young adults transition into adulthood?

SPEAKER_01 10:54

So, really good point that we have gap year programs, and so people have heard of people going and taking a gap year. Mostly that actually means this young person hasn't made up a choice, their choice as to what one thing that they're going to go and search for in the rest of their lives, right? So that's how we used to think about uh a gap year. And gap year programs right now are very much about we're gonna, it used to be we're gonna teach you life skills, how to balance your checkbook, how to do pay rent, that kind of thing, right? And now they're they're variations of that same kind of thing. We're doing something very different. And and the difficult thing that we're doing, and that I'm increasingly inspired to think this way, is that we're really building an entire different um type of service or way, a class of looking at um what is needed. So think of the way that I think about this right now is you remember about 10, even 20 years ago, there you there started to be this huge movement in science, but also in education with the Head Start program, right? And others, where this was what they were saying is zero to three years is actually a time where we haven't talked about much in the media and so on, but it's crucially important for the rest of a child's life. And we need to focus on this zero to three years old, not as this like mushy blank state of childhood, whatever, but we need to get kids ready for school. So then, after you know, a decade of tons of funding going into why those first 36 months are so important, there was money put into school readiness programs so that we can even the field and all children, no matter what background they come from, would go into kindergarten feeling ready for learning how to learn their alphabet, to read, to socialize, and so on. So it was school readiness programs, and Head Start got that from there. I think of liminal learning, and I think programs that will eventually come from us starting this class of a new transition sort of mindset is a new way of thinking about what is required over development. Like Head Start was a school readiness, world, we are world readiness. The world is changing constantly. We are not trying to have any kind of dogmatic frame for how you get ready for this world. We are not saying take these politics or take this religion or take this scientific view of what's going to happen. We are not predictors of the future. What we do do is prepare young people with skills and with social connection that they're going to need no matter what the change looks like. So we teach them how do you tolerate uncertainty? How do you rest in a time of unpredictability? How do you prepare your body as well as your mind and your social relationships for a period that is in flux and is hard to predict? How do you feel at home in your skin and your mind as things like the computer, you know, science degree that you thought you were going to have and would take you for the rest of your life when that just literally dissolves in front of your face in one year? You know, you can now vibe code with AI, and people were taking four years to get to what somebody can get to in one hour, and I'm not exaggerating in terms of skills. So, what do you do with that? You absolutely need a way to sit back and first of all cope with the anxiety that that absolutely rightfully evokes in you. You need to figure out how to bring in people who you care about and could help you through this process. You need mentors and you need peers to support you. And so we give you skills to figure out how to do that socially with grace and with humility and with humor and with fun. Um, and then you need to find out what it is in the world that hums with something inside of you that is your small P purpose. We often talk about small P purpose, not big P purpose. Once you have presence, you can start listening to how the kind of universe is calling you in small ways. Maybe you're a good writer, maybe you know how to like record something, maybe vibe coding is totally your thing now. And you can't really figure that out until you've learned how to slow yourself down, put away that phone that is yelling at you to be all these things that you don't know, you don't know if you want to be, and try to listen to the things that want to come out from yourself. And I can tell you about how the actual program does that, but that's part of the essentials of what we teach.

SPEAKER_00 15:33

So your goal is to help adults create a life of purpose, responsibility, and meaning. How does your program do that?

SPEAKER_01 15:47

How does that happen when we, at least I, as a middle-aged person, have had to readjust all of those things a few years?

SPEAKER_00 15:55

I was just thinking, I need your program.

SPEAKER_01 15:58

I mean, 100%. And if you ask me what the 10-year, like joyful vision of this is, is that actually that middle-aged transition where we move from doing the things for our children and ourselves and our acquiring, and it goes to a sense of purpose, like what you're doing, a sense of service, I should say, to other people, joins with this group of 20-year-olds going through their young adulthood transition. And there, I think there's some magic that can happen in that co-ventorship. But because I think we're both looking in both these age groups, there's a reorganization of meaning and there's a sense of where's my agency coming from, and so on. And so here's the how. We have a one-year program. I'm gonna try to do this in not the usual 10 minutes that I usually spend with young people when they call me for an a um discussion, but I'll do it a little shorter. So it's a one-year program. There's four phases. We start with the quest. So the quest is a one-week um wilderness retreat. They put away their phones. They're invited to put away their phones, by the way. None of them take them out, but we ask them to put them away in their cabins. Um, they they are allowed to check them either throughout the day or at night. They never do, I will tell you that. And the relief that they feel that they have an excuse to put it away, I cannot emphasize this enough because parents think, you're never gonna get my kid off the phone. Oh, yes, we will. And it doesn't take any coercion. So we do that, and really it's not about the digital detox. The point is to put away the phones because what we're also putting away is all the old narratives about ourselves that we got from school, from society, from our parents, from ourselves, from our peers, all that pressure and all the story and narratives that have constrained us up until that moment. We're gonna take a step away from those. And we have a bunch of social practices that we do where we first identify those narratives that seem to have a hold of us. And many young people don't realize that they've assented to narratives of going to college even though they don't really want to, um, going through a major that maybe mom and dad really taught us to love at eight years old, but no longer is relevant now, um, doing things that our our friends are doing, et cetera. So we start with a bunch of storytelling social practices that help us unearth those narratives that are in us that are actually directing our lives in ways that we don't know. We put them aside, and then we start with attention practices. So meditation, but social meditation and ways of opening our attention that are not just like shutting down, but opening up our attention to the world around us, being able to notice how nature is calling to us always, and how even in a city like Toronto that I live in, there is always a sense of connection to the universe and to nature if we allow that in. And we teach them that. And across the board within 24 hours, kids are going, Wait, I've never focused for this long in my life. How did I just sit down in a circle time for an hour and a half and listen to other people? Well, because you're surrounded by trees that that breathe in a different way. Your physiology changes when you're out there and so on. So this is why it's really important that we go out into the wilderness. And then they're taken through this arc over the week where they increasingly get to hear parts of themselves speak in a way that they've never heard them. We silence that critical, self-critical voice for a while, and we do creativity practices. We have an incredible teacher, Kevin Bowers, um, who teaches he's been doing this for 30 years in a high school context, and he's recently retired to be with us for full time. He teaches them how to listen to how the world kind of squawks and whispers to them and what in inside them sort of goes, Oh, I'm noticing something different. And everyone notices that we all notice something different. And we then come together in these creativity practices to create something entirely new. And that's a very long story of how we do that. But there's lots of journaling, there's lots of other different kinds of creativity practices, and then we end with a sort of sense of a ritual of what we're going to take with us to the rest of the world. They at the end of this have gone through some challenges where they've had to rely on each other and they create deep, trusting bonds and friendships among the approximately 16 uh young people go in each cohort. And then we come back, and instead of what most retreats and wilderness kind of things go, which where you've had an amazing time, you might have like a WhatsApp, you know, group that you have your each other's contacts, but that's it. And often that peters off. What we do is say, okay, that's just the beginning. We now have you. You have a set of practices that we're now going to integrate. And all those aha experiences that you had about yourself and your friends now, you're going to use to integrate into the rest of your life. And so we spend the next three months in a digital hub every week for an hour and a half, talking and doing these very specific practices, small group practices and others, um, that bring in the challenges that we have in our everyday. And I can go into specifics about the kind of practices we do in the digital hub. They're not lectures, they are literal things that we do, dialogical, conversational, experiential practices that we do for the next three months to integrate things like fear, um, fear-facing processes, uh, trust-building processes. Um, we have an appreciative inquiry practice every month where one person gets 10 minutes. The rest of us listen to the challenge that they talk about. Most of these kids don't get 10 minutes to be not interrupted. And then the rest of us are asking deepening questions for them to continue their own inquiry about the challenge, not for us to give them top-down uh advice. It's a very powerful exercise for an hour to hear other people question and support and explore with you a challenge. That's just another example. The last the third quarter of this, we then it we go into heist training and heist launch. And a heist, you know what a heist movie is, right? Right. So You know, with all heist movies, the difference is we don't take the treasure out of the world, we put it something into the world. But that's the only uh difference. The idea of heist like mentality is we're getting our friends together. All of us have different wacky talents that we're gonna pull together for one job for a short period of time. So we're not gonna do this for like two years. We give them six to eight weeks, we give them a thousand bucks to pull off a heist, which is a real world project that they do with three or four of them together. They pick each other who wants to work together around a topic that they care about. And normally they start with these huge problems in the world that they want to change, then homelessness, loneliness, depression. They want to change the world. Awesome and lovely to see how much they have, you know, so much drive to do good in the world. But then we teach them a process called Bloom Box, but basically it's about taking design principles and scientific practices, putting it into one evidence-based toolbox, and we teach that toolbox so that they then can learn how to identify a problem, figure out how to make that problem way smaller, collaborate, give feedback, take feedback, really hard to do, even for adults. We teach them how to do that, how to ideate, come out with different solutions, pick the solution finally after iterating a few times, prototype that solution, test it out in the real world, and then do the real heist out into the real world. And so this is a project that will, there's tons and tons of examples. They can be online or offline. We had examples are like yoga in the park, where the the young people had to, from the very beginning, figure out a marketing strategy, figure out how to get the posters out. Somebody was a great drawer, somebody really got turned on by yoga, and that's why they did it. But she learned how to teach it and sat in front of 32 people in a park, taught it for the first time. It was awesome. They got merch, they got the whole thing, and they raised enough money to give $1,200 approximately to a woman's shelter in Kingston, for example. That's one example. Another example totally different of a heist is they came up with a letter writing pen pal project where 60 to 80 year olds were matched with uh 20, 20 year olds, early 20-year-olds in the letter writing process where once a month they write physical letters because apparently, who knew? People are really into stationary and like gel pens. And of course, the older generation loves this idea of letter writing. And so they did this thing and launched it, and it's awesome. Once a month they write letters to each other. Um, I just went to a weekend heist last weekend, which was a peer support wellness full day, where they learn practices of how to support each other if you have, you know, friends that are having trouble. But it was a really playful, wonderful six hours together in a cafe learning these different things. So they pulled off that heist beautifully. Sorry. So I'll end there, but those are some examples of the heist. But the main thing is they find agency, they figure out, hey, I can do this in the world. And even if it fails or some of it fails, the point is they've done something and they've done it with other people. They usually learn that they don't show up as often as they thought they would. They usually learn how to apologize, etc. Um, so they learned a lot of these kind of collaboration skills they wouldn't have otherwise if they didn't try to put something real in the world. And then the final quarter of this uh year, last three months, is an introduction to our international community. So all of the co-founders, six co-founders are in vastly different domains. I'm a scientist, but there's a writer, a philosopher, a marketer, two designers, and so a teacher, and so on. And so we have these huge networks around the world, and we'd make warm introductions for the young people, and we also bring in guest speakers who show them that everybody's path was an absolute nonlinear path. These kids only think of you start learning about medical science and medical school, you go to medical school, you become a doctor, that's your life for the rest of the world. Most of us have gone very zigzaggy, and that's what they get exposed to. And then they get warm introductions to people who can continue to mentor them or take them on in their networks. So that's that's how we build what we build.

SPEAKER_00 26:01

I don't know why everybody is not doing this. Honestly, I could just, I feel like people are going to be like clamoring to get involved. So, other than the first week, where they're obviously it's so important to be out in nature and obviously to see and see each other in person in real life. That's a that's a whole other conversation because there's no more in real life going on with these kids. Totally. Everything else is online?

SPEAKER_01 26:25

Yes and no. So the heist, so the question is right. The head and then the heist, there's two things. One, that's definitely offline for many people who pull it off, but also the planning of it. And the so we have a uh heist training, which is a weekend where we all get together, okay, sitting around on couches and so on in lovely spaces in Toronto that we have that are co-working spaces, where they learn the actual methodology for eight hours a day kind of thing. And then they have all sorts of practices where they try it out and so on. So that's another time. But then, really importantly, when they're in the quest, um, and we're just iterating on this and for this next cohort, they're gonna be um giving each other commitments for the rest of the year where they say, I'm gonna show up not only digitally, but each of them gets responsibility for one month of one get-together that they plan that is face-to-face kind of thing. So this could be a game night at the at the local game board game place where you just hang out. Um, they had it last a couple of months ago, they had a game night and like hangout movie watching at my place, actually, because my son was in the last cohort. That's how much I believe in this stuff. Um, and so each each of the young person will have one month where they have to organize a face-to-face thing and have to is not a have to, of course. They love this, but they need the kind of scaffolding, they need the invitation to do this, they need the confidence that actually you can totally call up 15 other people and they will totally show up in your like living room, basement, or cafe and do this for free with each other. But they don't have the reps, they don't have the experience. One of the young people that I just spoke to that is going to be in our next cohort talked uh about sitting and watching friends the show with his uh father. And he was like, Dad, dude, what the hell are they doing? Like episode after episode, just talking, like, where are they? And the dad said, Oh, that's what we did in the 70s all the time. We just hung out, like we just like totally shot the shit. Like we weren't doing really anything. There was no productivity around it. This kid's mind was blown. He was like, We literally never do that. We don't have the malls or the everything costs 20 bucks before we walk in. If we go to like a bar, it's like a cocktail. If we go to a movie, it's 40 bucks, you know, like it isn't the same around just hanging out. And so the point of that is that we're trying to give young people now the agency and the courage and and just the opportunity to go, just do something really simple and easy. You can do this, and we can reinvent the thing that worked already again in our community in liminal learning. So that's really important for us.

SPEAKER_00 29:16

So let's talk about some transformations. What have you seen when you get a young adult coming in, they they lack direction, they're feeling uncertain, they're not motivated. What kind of changes do you see with these with these kids?

SPEAKER_01 29:30

Yeah. So before I go on, the most convincingly beautiful, inspiring way to hear these stories is to go to our uh website and we have stories of young people themselves talking. So the teacher, Kevin, has taken it upon himself because he basically loves doing this and just has chats and videotapes them. Um they're about a half an hour. And so we have lots of examples of young people either during the year, but also afterwards, who talk about what they got from liminal learning. And anything I say, it pales with when you hear them saying the same, the kinds of messaging. But essentially what we see is a lot of most the thing that you see mostly when they first come in is a huge amount of uncertainty. They often report being anxious. They often lead with either diagnoses or potential subs. So I'm anxious, I'm ADHD, um, I'm on the spectrum. Um, that's they lead with that, right? And we're like, okay, interesting, everyone. The last cohort was awesome. They asked for a session, a whole session, they asked, because we asked them to give us ideas of what they're really buzzing about that we can provide um sessions on. And they're they're quite different depending on what the cohort is. And the last one said, we want to talk about labels and categories of pathology like this ADHD, depression, anxiety, et cetera. Do you have it or do you experience it? Is it a label you get forever? Is there what is the good from that? And what do you get that's bad? And we had a whole hour and a half about it. And it's fascinating how much they think about, you know, the extent to which these labels are both helpful because you can get help and support, but also really problematic because it feels like you're put in a box that then is really difficult to come out of. Um, but that's where they start is those boxes that they've put been put in by adults in their world, by other peers, by themselves, often self-diagnosed from TikTok and so on. And we start by just putting those aside. And and and they um slowly during the quest, what you get is a actually, I say slowly, it's not slow at all. Over the course of that one week, the opening that happens is so moving. Most of them feel completely awkward when we sit around in a circle. We start every morning on a gazebo on a lake kind of thing, and we do this um circle process that's very much we are indebted to these indigenous indigenous cultures that have given us these practices of circling where you start the day by centering in yourself and saying exactly where you are in that moment. Not something that you've practiced, not something that you're anticipating somebody else will think about, but you talk about how you feel in the moment right now. And almost everyone starts giggling or feeling very awkward, apologizing that they're an introvert and they don't talk about this by the second circle, second day. They are there's at least 10% of us that are weeping because they're not because they're sad so much, is that they are open and there's an opening that you see in young people because they see what happens and they feel what happens when they are being listened to, they are being heard, they're not being judged, they're just coming in. It's it, I this isn't rocket science, right? Like it really isn't rocket science. And people are amazed, and they themselves surprise themselves by how they show up. And then they increasingly, so I I mean, I can talk about very specific um young people without naming them, but you know, one young man came in and was very much thinking of himself as first of all attention problems. So he immediately talked to us about, I warn you, I probably will have to walk out of circle. I warn you that if I have if these social, like we get them to sit down with one other person, have a conversation for a half an hour. I mean, for some of them, they would be wiggling and wobbling and going all over the place. He would talk even from the very first day at the end. He's he talked about, I've never been so calm. What is it? And of course, we said, he, and he said, it's probably nature, right? It's like nature. Sure, it's nature. And it's also other people are listening to you. And it's also that you have forgotten how to pay attention to your racing heart, you know, and so on. And so he started to notice, first of all, how different he was in nature. He then, second of all, started to identify these narratives that he started feeling like, oh, wait a minute, that's not my narrative at all. That's my parents' narrative that I'm an introvert. I actually love helping people. Wait, that isn't introverted, it isn't, is it? And so he would reframe a lot of these labels that he got. We have a practice also that's called that comes at around the um second day or third day. It's called who are you? And you sit down with one other person. It's the simplest thing. We can give out all of our secret practices because really it's about intention and sitting together with us. This practice is simply you and me like this. And I ask you, who are you? And um you will go for as long as you'd like with answering. I am a mother, I am a podcaster, I am a da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da, a wife, da da da da da. Okay, great. Once you finish and you think you're really finished, I'm like, okay, Sherry, who are you? Oh, I love it. And then you go on again, and then you realize, well, actually, I'm a really caring person. And actually, I'm way more ambitious than I usually people think, and da-da-da-da-da.

SPEAKER_00 35:09

Right.

SPEAKER_01 35:09

You think you're all done, and then I do it a third time. What ends up happening is this excavation and this in, and again, somebody all they're not the hardest part is for the other person not to go, oh my God, or oh, I really hear you. I've had the same problem, or whatever. You have to just sit present. You're not ignoring, but you're also not saying anything really hard to do. But what happens is then you're not performing this kind of supportive friend thing. You're just witnessing. It is remarkable what comes out of this simple practice and how much they learn about themselves, all from their own witnessing, right? And then how they start reframing. So this young man started to reframe his own story. I'm really helpful. I actually think I can really be the one that steps up and become a counselor to people, maybe. Wow, all this trouble that I've gone through probably is amazing, fodder for the next time that I see people. And so he, over the course of a week, became convinced that he wanted to do this kind of work himself of supporting others and so on. And then when we came back, he had a couple of real fallbacks. He had some family stuff that went on and he didn't show up for a month. Um, people in the community were texting him saying, Come on, and he was like, Now I'm doing my classic thing. I'm I'm checking out now. This is me. You should have known this about us. Uh, me, the the friends in liminal learning would constantly be texting him and saying, Doesn't matter, keep coming back, keep coming back. And he did come back and he started to integrate again. And by the end of this, it's we're not even at the end. There's a lot of a much more complex and nuanced sense of well-being and what causes his own well-being or not, and also a real sense of how much agency he has, how much power he has to either be his worst enemy than his friend. He talks about being a friend to himself. He also talked about how he wants to go and learn and get trained to be a facilitator, a um therapist, or whatever, because he realizes how difficult it actually is. So that kind of arc isn't, oh, we made somebody figure out who they are and they did it, and now they're off to the races. They just, they were able to work through their own issues, still have deep struggles, but now have a community that comes and backs them up and has this responsibility to return and trust that he can return. And in that, he feels incredibly empowered. The other two stories are pure success stories. Like Samira, I can say her name because she's online saying her own name. And she started in university. She went through university. When she came, she was at her in her last year of university and just graduated. And what she learned from Liminal Learning, and she talks about it so beautifully and articulately, is that there is not one path.

SPEAKER_00 37:56

Okay, we are talking a lot about the young adults. I want to talk to the parents right now, because I'm sure that you speak with many parents who are seeing their adult child struggling with the anxiety and the lack of motivation, the isolation, the uncertainty. These are the same parents, Isabella, that are actually listening right now. What do you want them to understand about this stage of life? Or better yet, like what can they start doing today to support their young adult or encourage them? I don't even like the word support anymore. I'm sort of off of it because support feels very like warm and fuzzy. Where I'm thinking it's not about just love supporting them. It's because people support financially. Like I'm saying encourage, believe, teach, guide.

SPEAKER_01 38:47

Yeah, I think this is really important. And I'm writing a book and a substack that's free. It's called Open Nest. And the reason it's called Open Nest is that we often think about empty nests, like that's it, our kids are off, they're adults, they're either out of our hands, yay, or um, there's a sense of like loss and so on, especially this generation is different than mine and our parents. This period of young adulthood, emerging adulthood is seems much more fraught and important to Mark, whether they live with us or whether they're just back for a safe landing for a while, I think it's not only normal, it's actually deeply adaptive, I think, for the times we're in. I think the first thing that I would love for parents to think through, and I think can make a very big difference, is a massive mindset shift in terms of this period around 18 to 25 or so. Instead of thinking of it as this is the go-no-go time where they're either going to be a failure or a success, this is the period of exploration, of liminality, of a time where I can be alongside my young person as they explore the different aspects of themselves. They've been taught a certain way of being by school and society so far. And now there's a world that they're meeting that is offering them a ton of other ways of being. And what I can be is first and foremost a um a comrade in arms, if you will, or somebody here that is not just, as you say, supporting, but first and foremost listening. Do you know how many young people I hear who come in and say, oh my, this is so crazy that for five whole minutes somebody didn't interrupt me, somebody didn't give me advice, or just interrupt, or get on their phone immediately when I start talking. Presence. If there's one thing I can ask parents to do is be present with their young person and ask questions. This is essentially, you know, 50% of what we do in the digital hub is be present with one another and ask certain questions in different activities. All of this is accessible to any parent. You know, the who are you thing that I just did with you, you can do as a parent and say, hey, let's do this together. And let's say that we're both changing and there might be a surface level that we're here at, but I'd love to get to know these lower levels or these different levels that you might be exploring yourself. So that's one thing. And alongside that is an encouragement of very specific experimentation. We we talk about this oscillation in the program. We have very deep philosophical roots of thousands of years that we combine Western and Eastern cultures. We have not even gotten into that, we don't have the time. But one of the ways that we do that is we teach young people how to oscillate between the concepts, the abstractions, the logic, and their experience and their embodied intuition. This is a philosophy that was developed by Brian Cam. We have a publication that just came out. So anyone can read about it. But the essential idea is that you can oscillate between these concepts and stories that are abstract and the experience. Does it still hold true to you? Does it feel right anymore? Do you want to iterate on this story so that your experience changes? And when your experience changes, how does your story, how do you update your identity and how do you present yourself to other people that way? So one way to do that as a parent is to say, okay, you've always thought of yourself as an introvert. What evidence do you have of that? Let's talk about your experience. Let's talk about my experience with you and get into these conversations that help them question and deepen their sense of their self and try to trust their intuition. So that's another kind of very simple ask questions, listen deeply, and then encourage a wide array of experiences. Go volunteer, go try writing, take an online course. All of it is experience. This is not, I mean, there's a great Alan Watts um three-minute talk, and he talks basically about we've been taught that this life is a journey with some kind of ending. And like all the way through, we have to get better and better and closer and closer to that ending. It's all bullshit. It's actually a dance, it's a song, it's a way of being with life that has us have a bunch of experiences, and at the end, no one is checking whether you got, you know, straight A's. So, so the idea of a parent encouraging experience because what experience does is it shows that young person what they're uniquely connecting to, what they're uniquely interested in. And it will never be that they have to be top writer or top singer. My point there is it's the combination of experiences that makes us unique and gives us our unique contribution. And if parents thought more about that, what are the wildly different ways that my young person can have these experiences? Then I think young people would be more relaxed to experiment with those and then find their thing, you know. So I think that's part of it as well.

SPEAKER_00 43:57

I'm so enjoying this conversation. Such a pleasure to just sit and listen to you. So much of what you're saying just resonating for me. I feel like the parents who are listening, they might have some aha moments.

SPEAKER_01 44:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 44:12

The simplicity of parenting an adult child.

SPEAKER_01 44:15

Really good point. The simplicity, yes.

SPEAKER_00 44:17

Yeah, it's not as complicated as parents are making it.

SPEAKER_01 44:21

No. The point you just made is so important. If there's one thing I would ask parents to do is stop reading the sensationalized negative media about young people. These kids are falling under the pressure of this stigmatizing. There's lots of research I can share with you and links and so on that says that we are stigmatizing our young people by calling them lazy, lethargic, addicted. It's not helping them. And noticing what is interesting, unique, fun. Have some fun with your kid, man. Like that, that really just go out and have some fun. Um, it's really important to stop telling them only the negative stuff and throwing our anxiety about them onto them. Like if we can just halt that, that would be doing a lot already.

SPEAKER_00 45:10

I really want to stop here.

SPEAKER_01 45:12

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 45:13

I do because I you you've answered so many questions that I generally ask towards the end, like the suggestions. You've made incredible suggestions, leaving on a positive note. You just did. Can we just sit with everything you just said and not say another word? Except for this. Thank you for being here.

SPEAKER_01 45:33

Thank you very much for having me. I really appreciate it.

SPEAKER_00 45:36

I do have to say, for the parent that wants more information, I'll leave everything in the show notes. They can reach out to you, they can watch the videos, but I'm sure there's going to be a lot of questions. And so everything will be there. And thank you so much. This has been so inspiring. I first things first, I'm asking my children this weekend, who are you?

SPEAKER_01 45:56

Oh, that's so great. I can't wait for this. I really can't. I'd love to hear your response because do it with them. They need to do it back to you.

SPEAKER_00 46:04

Oh, a hundred percent. I am lit up.

SPEAKER_01 46:07

Oh, thank you so much. Really, it helps a lot. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 46:11

Just a quick reminder that if you enjoy listening to launch, hit the follow button so you never miss an episode. And if you know another parent who would benefit from it, please share this with them. You know, I very rarely ask, but apparently, leaving a rating and review is one of the best ways for launch to reach more families who are looking for answers. As always, thank you for listening.