What are some things you know now that you wish you knew when you were a teen? Think about all the mistakes you made when you were younger; what did you learn? How did that benefit you in your growth as a man? How would you use that information if you had it then? Those are the questions we asked ourselves before connecting with the young men at the Summer Youth Empowerment Program (SYEP) in Albany, NY.

If you are unfamiliar with Summer Youth Programs, these programs connect youth 14 – 24 years old with career exploration opportunities and paid work experience each summer. For 4 Fridays, starting at the end of July 2020 we had the pleasure to work with a group of young men of color, learning about their challenges while sharing our life experiences. 

what did we learn?

As young black men growing up in Brooklyn and Queens in the 90s and 2000s, Mario & I had to grow up fast. Your childhood was different than kids that grew up in middle class or affluent families. You had duties and responsibilities. You had to be smart because the streets were dangerous, and survival was your priority. Today, for young men of color, not much has changed. For them, there is no such thing as “kids these days” because being a “kid” is a luxury and the young men we spoke to are providers for their families, have anxiety about the future, and are angry about America’s response to their murders at the hands of police, public servants sworn to protect, and their peers, other men of color that look just like them. Those are grown folks’ problems.

As a friend of mine said, “one of our biggest cultural flaws raising our kids to think they need to be overly tough”. Toughness is and was our shield growing up. Being guarded with your emotions allows you to seem less vulnerable. It was a difficult talk to get their defenses down, but our approach was applying these four themes to each session:

Meditation & Mentoring

Breakdown Your Problems

Absolute Ownership

Profit from Your Passions

meditation & mentoring

Why meditation? Because I have yet Pythagoras' theorem in my adult years, but meditation has become a significant part of my life. It provides clarity when I wake up and allows me to clear away a day’s anxiety once the day is done. Teens do not often think about taking time for stillness. It is no secret that today’s youth are conditioned to be attached to their phones and dialed into media. At some point you must learn how to disconnect from technology and reset yourself. 

Why mentoring? Some young people don’t understand the difference between having a role model and having a mentor. A role model is someone you admire and may want to model your life after. A mentor on the other hand is accessible and helps you achieve your goals in life because he/she has been there. For me, Muhammad Ali has always been a great role model. Seeing how much he achieved in life and his convictions to standing up for racial equality has always been inspiring to me. However, even when he was alive there was no way I would ever get a chance to sit and learn from Ali. We also talked about the life of Malcolm X. As “controversial” as some may still consider Malcolm X to be, his life was the epitome of a comeback story. We draw inspiration from Malcolm, but he has been gone for some time now. But some of my teachers throughout the years or businessmen that I met through volunteer programs have invested invaluable time and knowledge in me that would have taken years for me to learn. 

“We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give.”

— Winston Churchill

breaking down your problems

It can be easy to think that teenagers are carefree. They sleep late, play video games, watch anime, and do stupid (sometimes amusing) Tik-Tok videos. But when you speak with them you realize they have more on their minds than you first thought. They have opinions about what’s going on in the world and want to do something about those problems. They must balance the desire to make change with high school, college prep, relationships, their friends, and helping their families. It is A LOT of responsibility and it is easy to feel overwhelmed and stressed. 

Our approach was cracking open a consultant’s playbook and teaching them how to make a Decision Tree to help them break their problems down into smaller and more manageable pieces. When you’re organized, you’re less stressed and when you’re less stressed, you’re more efficient. Imagine that you wanted to build a house. We all wish that we could just have the finished product but that's impossible. You have to build it in phases and once you understand that you're not heading to just one finish line but several smaller ones in between, your impossible task seems more doable.