“A Conversation with Emma O’Donnell on Teen Reconnect, Mental Well-being, and Navigating the Challenges of Today’s Digital World”

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Party Talk Podcast where we Empower leaders in youth drug prevention. And today I am sitting down across the world with Emma O’Donnell, let me tell you a little bit about her. She is from England, and she’s the founder of a coaching business called “Teen Reconnect.” She’s originally from Ireland, where she studied Psychology at the University College Dublin. And after 20 years, working for international and global organizations, she got her MSC as a behavioral change coach at the Henley Business School in UK. And so she has now dedicated herself to helping young people and helping parents communicate well with their young people because of the world that we live in with teen anxiety and stress, and especially the suicide rates. So I thought it would be such a good idea to have her on the show. And the last thing I definitely want to get a little bit about too is she’s a co creator of the Q Pathfinder, and it’s a digital resource uses her in her work that makes it explains what makes each of us unique in the way that we behave. And it has six key areas of young people. So it’s definitely something that I think we can gain a lot from Emer here today, over the next half hour. So, Emer, first of all, thank you for being on the show. And I’m super excited to talk with you more.

Well, I’m delighted to talk to you too, Jake. So thank you very much for having me on here.

Well, tell me a little bit about this, the prompting for you to get into this kind of work and maybe your your heart or your why behind this whole mission.

Emer O’Donnell Shares How she got Involved With her Line of Work

Sure okay. So as I said, as you mentioned earlier, I have a background in psychology and you know, worked in business for many years, I wanted to have more children, so retrained as a behavioral change coach. And what I really found at the end of that journey was I thought I was self aware, and I was anything but and it astounded me that I’d got to the age I was, and I was only discovering amazing tools and techniques that you can get through coaching, which are transformational for well-being, and performance. And who doesn’t want well being and who doesn’t want to be able to perform in the world. I mean, it’s basically what we want, right? And we want to be happy. And when we can have both of those, it has a really, really positive impact in us being able to be happy. And what really struck me was, “Why have I got to this age, and I’m only discovering the stuff now. Why isn’t this something that I learned when I was younger, where I was able to make much more informed, better decisions in my life, so that I could create more of what I wanted, as opposed to lessen it.” And if you don’t have that self awareness peace, I always say if you don’t know who you are, how can you create a life you love. And I think we live in a world right now where young people and parents are very stressed. Because we are subjected to 24/7 media, which is feed with a lot of fear. And we’re we’re programmed to tune into that our brains have not evolved to be able to manage it, we get more data in a day now than a person gotten their whole life in the 1900s. And you know what, we shouldn’t be surprised we’re stressed and anxious. Because we’re just continually being triggered. And when we’re stressed and anxious, we don’t operate from our best selves. Often our relationships aren’t as good as they could be. Because we can be more angry, we can feel more guilt, we can feel more shame, we can feel we can just feel annoyed. And when we bring that to the party, it doesn’t create them loving relationships for your want. And why do we want them because we’re hardwired for connection. We’re hardwired we’re social creatures, and we want to connect but we’re living in a world that is more digitally connected, but we’re less humanly connected. And so for me, I feel that we shouldn’t be surprised that we’re having a rise of anxiety and stress and the world we live in. I believe that we young people need new tools to be able to navigate the world we live in in terms of kind of psychological tools. So they’re not getting triggered by their externals but they can create what they want within and that starts with the calm mind. And also it starts with understanding who you are. And and we know that this stuff is not been delivered through the education system. We also know that the presence of a good adult in a young person’s, like the research shows has a significant impact in reducing depression, reducing suicide and reducing self harm at a time where they’re exceptionally vulnerable to mental health issues. And I think both parents need an upgrade in terms of the skills they need. And that’s why I, I’ve written a book in order to help them with that. And I also think we need to understand that the teenagers that we’re dealing with now, are not us as teenagers, they have huge pressures. And if both can’t stand in each other’s shoes, we’re going to have a real problem.

“A Deep Dive into Teen Reconnect, Myelination, and the Power of Experience in Teen Stress and Anxiety Prevention”

Wow. And that’s what I love about the book that you’ve written. Because you’ve highlighted just now in even just a couple minutes, the mountain that we’re up against that we need to climb together, and emphasizing that it’s not our job for these students, these youth to do that, by themselves, their life is difficult enough, but that they can have one, one caring adult, one, you know, good adult, as you say, in your book, that is going to climb with them help them because like you said, you are given these tools as a young person, and you wish you had them. And as much as we’d like to believe. Or maybe we don’t want to believe this. But a lot of people think, oh, “kids don’t want to listen to me, or they don’t, they don’t listen to what I say,” that’s not true. The studies prove otherwise, they do listen to us. And so you’ve given us a guide, with this, well, basically is a guide to teenage stress and anxiety. And I think you’re gonna make a dent in the world with it. And even from going through everything with all the stories, the data, the graphs, the toolkits, the checklists, it’s very practical resource, and I love to dive into it with you. There are a few places that I’ve marked, and I’ve highlighted already. So the first one is, I’m going to read this quote. And then I’d love to talk a little bit about the teenage brain. So it says, “teenagers don’t think as much as they feel the connection between the thinking brain and the feeling brain is still developing, which is why when parents ask, What in the hell are you thinking? they truly cannot explain their actions.” It says, quote by Aaron Smith, that opens up one of your chapters about the brain, and you highlight a few different things that the teenage brain is doing. Can you talk to me a little bit about that?

Sure, I’d love to do that. So I think it’s really important that parents realize, even though their child is growing up and maturing on the outside, that’s not necessarily what’s happening on the inside. They are operating with an 80% mature brain, because it’s actually being rewired. So if you imagine, when you’re a kid, a baby, you get in your brain, you get all these TV channel options, right? So every channel in the world is available to you. But by the time you were a teenager, you weren’t attuned to all those different channels. So your brain starts to prune those away the ones that are not needed, it’s a bit like pruning a, an apple tree, you know, get rid of the dead bits that are no longer used, I wouldn’t use the word dead for your brain, but it’s just the analogy I use. And so what happens is that young people are operating from the back of their brain, which is their limbic brain, because that’s where the weak, the rewiring starts. And then it moves forward all the way to the front of the brain, which is the prefrontal cortex. Now, in your prefrontal cortex, this is where you make logical decisions. This is where you make good decisions. It’s where you’re able to manage and control your emotions. It’s where you’re able to have better self awareness. And it’s enables you to connect the dots. Whereas if we just assume, as adults, that teens can connect the dots in the same way that we can, when we make decisions. We’re actually not serving them. And we’re probably judging them to be more capable than they are able to be in certain circumstances. That thing about the teenage brain, it’s a double edged sword. It’s primed for learning. So believe me, if they want to learn about themselves, and all sorts of things they’re interested in, they will learn it. They may not be so keen to learn some of the stuff at school, but equally, they are sometimes not able to make good judgment calls. And so for me, the certain things you need to know, they’re more prone to taking risks, and that also is influenced by their predisposed behaviors, how they’re naturally wired anyway. Some people be more risk takers than others. They also You will experience emotions at a different level than adults will. So they will experience a greater high when they’re having a really positive emotion. And they will experience a much deeper low, when they’re not feeling good. You will also learn about the teenage brain in the sense that it doesn’t handle stress as well as an adult will either. And we all know how stress can be in the world that we live in. So it’s much, much harder for them. So there’s lots of other things I could tell you about the teenage brain. But I think there are key things and the other thing that you need to know is certainly in terms of addiction, is because the brain is being rewired. And it hasn’t got that myelination cover on it, it’s like a little protective layer, that sooner that a young person. So you know, a very young teenagers is exposed to drugs or alcohol, or any kind of addictive substances, they’re much more unlikely to get addicted than someone who may start drinking in their early 20s. And I’m sure that’s something you know, already. But it’s about educating them about their brain, it’s about supporting them. And, again, it tunes back into that good adult, don’t judge, be curious about why they behave the way they do. And be opening to questioning them, so that they can try and understand why they behaved they did. And then for me, it’s very much about going through different scenarios saying, Okay, if you have the chance to do this, again, how do you think you would behave differently, because if you shout and scream at them, believe me, they ain’t gonna listen to you, they’re gonna look down, they’re gonna go out of here, I don’t need this. Because also as a result of their brain, they’re much more sensitive to criticism.

And that’s when you talk about it. And I’m, I’m going to ask you about it later, too, is that it is so important to connect with them as well. And we all want that connection. And the danger is you have you have this information, you have helpful tools for your students. And then if you don’t connect with them, it won’t be useful. Like they won’t hear you or they want to understand you or want to take your your information to improve their own life. So it is so important to not only know the information, but then have the tools that are laid out for us to actually build that connection. I want before we go to that actually, maybe we can go to that next. You mentioned somewhere in the book, you were talking about how you would role play scenarios with with young people. And you know, I might be speaking off the cuff. So let’s say this. There, there’s a part of the brain that maybe you haven’t experienced something yet yourself. So you don’t know what are those channels you’ve never tuned into before. And then a caring adult is able to have this fake scenario for you, hey, let’s say you go out to a party, and a friend offers you something or you made a mistake and you you did something, but you need a ride home and a stranger invites you to ride home with them, I think is the specific one that’s in your book. And you should you take it. What is the importance of having that? Because it seems like how could asking a simple question like that really make a difference? Because it can you talk about what difference it makes for a young person to have that scenario given to them and what it does.

That’s why I think talking through scenarios are so important because we relate to stories like we really connect to them. And if you’ve never had the experience, and then all of a sudden, it’s a bit like being in the rabbit in the headlights. She knows I mean, oh my god, I’m in the situation, I don’t know what to do, I might have had a couple of drinks, my brain isn’t connecting. Whereas if I run through the story in my head about what I’m supposed to do in this instance, I’m not necessarily going to be the same rabbit in the headlights. So even though you don’t want them to be out there experiencing that you can go through these scenarios and say, Okay, imagine this, you want to go to this party, okay? Let’s just go through some scenarios and let’s talk through what you would do in that instance. And, and by doing that you’re empowering them to put themselves in that situation and think about their behavior out rather than just ending up in that situation and not knowing what to do.

Wow, so is it almost like that, that lesson you have on? Is it called myelination? When the brain gets better at remembering something?

Myelin, myelination is what helps speed up the kind of decision making the synapses in the brain. So it enables that information from one part of the brain travels much more quickly. It’s kind of like going from really basic broadband to a high fiber connection, if that makes sense. Yeah. And what’s happening because it’s not fully myelinated to into the kind of 20s, then those those, those connections aren’t happening as quickly as they would in a in an adult’s brain. So what you’re doing is helping them go through stories, so it becomes more embedded in terms of, okay, I remember somebody telling me something about this. So it’s not totally alien to me, so that I can imagine what it is that I could do to make a better decision.

Yes. Okay. That’s good. I think it’s so important to realize, because people do this to us all the time when they’re like, Oh, I told you something, how come you didn’t remember it? So okay, well, we need a couple times a practice, or I needed to tell my child this. And then we went through a scenario that strengthened that myelination that give them an experience or a story. And then maybe it happened, and they got to practice it, and it shrinks and strengthens that. So that’s, that’s really cool. I love I can feel my own myelination happening right now understanding this material.

So what’s really important is when we learn, we can be told, we can be told and shown, or we can be told, shown in experience, and to the story, you help them experience and that’s much more likely to be embedded in their memory. And if they just told or told and shown.

Oh, I love that on so many levels. Experiences

The thing in the book that shows that graphic.

Yeah, that was one of them. That really, I love all the graphics in there, because it makes it so easy to understand. And if it’s just what like you said, “told or told and shown or told and shown and experienced.” That was that was definitely from my, my perspective as a college student is when I had thought about my whole vision of helping people party without drugs. And alcohol is always like, what if I can tell people, they can have fun without it. But then I can show them. But what if I could invite them to an event where they could experience it themselves? And it is 100 times more powerful when you get to experience it. And and now it makes sense to why in your brain that is actually the case.

Yeah, because you embed the feeling. And so though, you can tell anybody anything, but if they often don’t embed it and experience it for themselves, it just can kind of just get lost. So it’s because you have already been doing this right? So you just didn’t realize what it was that you were doing so well done.

“Insights from Behavioral Change Coach Emer O’Donnell on Understanding the Teenage Brain, Breaking Negative Cycles, and Connecting with Adolescents”

Yes, exactly. So on page 43 of my version, you talk about this thing, and it’s called the negative cycle. And it’s all about the teenage brain. But I would love to hear how you introduce it. And there’s there’s a lot of information here. So go as little or as much as you’d like to. But can you tell us about the negative cycle and what that means for those of us who work with teenagers or have teenagers at home?

Okay, so I came up with the negative cycle because as a result of the work as I do with the coach, I started to notice the things were happening when teens would come to me and needing support in order to navigate their way, whether it’s trying to figure out what they wanted to do with their lives, or if they were dealing with existing anxiety or stress, whatever the issue. And what I just what I realized is that we live in a world right now where we’re our senses are bombarded with information. And unfortunately, young people don’t have the tools to know how to calm that down. And so they constantly feel stressed. You know, we know there’s a huge amount of addiction to devices. And, and a lot of that’s happened because unfortunately, parents didn’t realize the dangers of device addiction. And, and they cannot kind of disconnect themselves from that. Also, because we’ve talked about the teenage brain only operating 80% mature. They also in the education system we’re in, it’s all about filling up the vessel. All the information is being poured in to the point that the inner knowing that’s inside us can get drowned. So I liken this to the noisy marching band on the outside, all that stuff going in. But there’s a quiet flute within player within all of us, that we have to calm everything down to be able to hear to get that sense of inner knowing. And I think because of the noisy world we live in And the overwhelm that information and social media and social comparison that goes on, it’s really hard for your person to understand who they are. And so it’s important to be able to help them with as well. One of the things, the reason I created, the Q Pathfinder was to be able to empower young person to be able to articulate who they are. And I didn’t just create it myself, I created with a number of other psychologists in the in the UK. And the other thing that that’s a problem is that we all have limiting beliefs. And they can be condensed into 12. But if you don’t know what they are, they will continue to sabotage you. And so you have to enable yourself to uncover them. And once you know them, we can see that when they show up, it’s that Gremlin on your shoulder telling you, you’re not, you can’t be this, you can’t be that. The other thing that’s really important is to learn that, you know, we got to be able to learn to fail, in order to succeed. And we live in a world often and certainly in an education system where you’re told things are either right or wrong. But actually, maybe the thinking isn’t all the way through, there could be 10 other scenarios. And when we go through that education system, we often believe that we’ve either failed or we’ve succeeded. And actually it’s not if that’s not what the journey is about. If we don’t, we’re not prepared to fail, we’ll never really learn, we’re never going to move beyond our comfort zone. So that’s really important. And I think it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s a combination of all these factors that basically are fed into young people’s minds all day, every day, even before they show up at school, they can be struggling to process everything. And they end up in it in a freakout zone. “So we have a comfort zone, we have a learning zone and we have a freakout zone.” And if we don’t know how to move from comfort to learning without ending up in a freakout, so that ends us ends up in a negative cycle. So that’s pretty much the might be one or two steps and messed up. But that’s, it’s that combination. It’s like a cauldron of stuff going on. That’s changed in the world. Since certainly since I, I grew up, I mean, the only person I had to compare myself against, but I was a kid who’s whoever I hung out with at school or within my community. And I was also able to run around and be outside all day long. And I didn’t fear strangers, I didn’t fear that I hadn’t the capability to walk from my home to get on a bus or being on a train or have the fear that I might be murdered or abducted. And so there’s that constant fear. And that creates our stories, which ultimately creates our behavior.

Yeah. and, and, you know, as a professional in this field, that when we are under that stress, and that anxiety and the cortisol is running, you’re never operating at your best you’re operating with the lowest portion of your brain that isn’t thinking clearly, on top of all the maybe that the brain isn’t developed when you know when you’re younger. So yeah, that’s, that’s huge. Thank you for sharing more about that with me. The last thing that I’d love to touch on that was in the book, towards the end was the there’s the thing, you call them connectivity blockers, and then you also give some tips on like, how to connect. So can you tell us a little bit about connectivity blockers. Or maybe there’s just a couple that come to mind, and then share some tips on how we can better connect with young people.

Okay, so I’m trying to remember exactly which way in the book this is because there’s the team connecting blockers. And then there’s the connected blockers, which are all about the biases. Is that the one you remember which one are you referring to?

Let me name a few because I highlighted a bunch of them. So I’ll rattle them off, because this might be cool for people to hear. So connectivity blockers, there’s 36 of these. And then the first ones. I’m gonna generalize some of them but so assumptions generalizations, distortion, deletion, and then I’m gonna name off a few more because there’s biases. And I thought bias was just bias. But I learned from your book, there’s different kinds like confirmation bias, self serving bias, optimism or pessimism bias, hindsight. And then you have some fallacies, so the sunk cost fallacy, availability, cascade, halo effect, so some of this stuff, I thought, Oh, this is normal stuff. I’ve heard that term. And now I’m connecting it to how it actually hinders our communication. It was super interesting to me. So yeah, anything you want to add or tips people can learn from being aware about this.

Okay, so there’s over 200 of these, and I’ve only put 30 order them in the book. And And at one point, I think and you people will want to read them, but actually, we were not aware of them, then they can what we’re not aware of controls us. If we are aware of things, we’re much more likely to be able to control what goes on in our in our in our lives, because over 95% of the decisions we make are unconscious. And if we can’t raise this information, these these biases and what I call thinking errors into our consciousness, then we’re just going to operate on automatic pilot, and we’re gonna get the same results. Because if you roll out the same old behavior, you’ll get the same old results. And if you’re not getting the results you want, you got to do something different. It’s very, it’s kind of really obvious, but but I’m gonna roll it back a little bit for us before we get to those because there is a big long list there is that we all operate and view the world differently. So we might we make assumptions that because the way we see the world is how someone else sees it. And it’s we it’s not the case, you know, we get access to over 11 billion bits of information per second, our unconscious gets access to that, however, our conscious mind can only access 40 to 50 bits of information per second. There’s a big gap between the two, right? So there’s a huge amount of information that’s available to us that we don’t we don’t process. So how does our brain manage that. So we it basically has a filter. And unfortunately, it’s not perfect our filter. So we will make connections based on past experiences, when we’re faced with a similar, a similar situation. So an example would be a young child was bitten by a dog. So the brain connects for them in the inner sense of dogs are dangerous, I can’t go near them. So when they find that there’s a dog walking towards them, rather than realizing this is a brand new situation, it’s not the past, it’s not the future, it’s a different dog, I’m in a different place, the brain will have red alert, Red Alert, you’re you’re generalizing in terms of now you’re going to have, you’re going to get bitten. And so if you’re not aware of the fact that we do those things, then we’re going to end up with the wrong information. And we’re going to make the wrong decisions. And so and the whole point is, it’s really hard for us as humans to be fully objective. Because we have our experiences, both good and bad. We have prejudices, we have thinking errors, we have biases, but the more that we can bring them into consciousness, the more likely we can operate not just from our own world, but it gives us the opportunity to step into someone else’s world and really figure out what it is for them. Because when we can do that. That’s what builds connection. Who do you want to hang out with, it’s the person you feel that is listening to you. It’s the person you feel that you can trust, it’s the person you can feel that you can turn up at your most vulnerable at your worst, who you can call at 3am in the morning, and you know, they’re not going to judge you. And that kind of all ties back to that good adult. When you’re a parent, you need to be that good adult, you need to be aware of the story you bring to your relationship with your child and what drives that is your need for them to have academic excellence more about you than them? Well, it often is. Not always. And I always say this to people, you can push your children to be doctors or dentists or lawyers. And that’s great, if that’s what that’s good for them. But also remember, doctors and dentists are the highest profession that commit suicide. So be careful what you wish for. It’s a calling. Your job as a parent is to empower your child to know who they are, to know what their talents are, to give them the skills to navigate the world so that they can blossom and serve in a way and find purpose that will fulfill them and enable them to spread that beyond themselves. Because that is the greatest thing you can do. Whereas if you’re driving them from your own needs or your own fears, you won’t serve them and you will not serve your relationship with them either.

Hey you are really really fun to talk to Emer I would love to end with this. So our audience is filled with, with professionals who work with students, whether they’re in schools, oftentimes, they’re focused on helping them make better decisions. So to not use harmful substances like drugs or alcohol at young ages. And, yeah, there there is this struggle to connect sometimes, or to feel like we can connect with young people. So I would love to hear as difficult as this may be to pick one. But to pick one last piece of advice that you might share, from your experience or your your education, that might be helpful for them to better do that. And then I’d love to have you share how we can get your book. And the I’ll share the free resource that you mentioned to that we can get as well. But we’d love to end on that if you have anything in mind. 

One Last Piece of Advice & Where to Find O’Donnell’s Book

Okay, so I think the most important thing you can do as an adult in a young person’s life is don’t judge. Be curious, want to understand their story. And I do this with my own kids all the time, if they get upset, or whatever I say to the “what is the story you’re telling yourself right now?” Because actually, they can normally communicate that. And then that gives you an opportunity to sit down and talk to them about why that is driving their behavior. And to be able to say, is this story really truthful? Can we just kind of analyze this to get to the truth of it, so that they don’t feel judged that they don’t feel scared, because they’re on a developmental journey. And it’s your job as a parent, or a teacher, or anyone else that looks after young people to go on that journey with them. And that requires you to develop yourself as well. Don’t bring your baggage with you. Don’t bring your they’re being rude to me. How dare they behave like that? Be curious. Why are you behaving so badly that you’re behaving like that? Don’t make it personal. I think that’s the because you’re the adult in the room, they’re not. And I always use this. When you first have children, as a parent, God helped us we screw up. I’ve had three, and you don’t have to be perfect. You just have to try and learn and do more every day to get better. They forgive us so much when they’re little. So it’s payback time when it comes to 10 years. That’s what you have to do as well.

It’s payback. Oh, I love that. That’s perfect. How can we, How can we learn more and get your book? Where can we find it or if you have a website?

Okay, so the book is called Understanding Teen Stress and Anxiety, a parent’s guide to building love and connection. And it’s available on Amazon. So whether it’s dot com in the US or .co.uk. In, in on Amazon in the UK. And then I think other jurisdictions, you just have to change the ending depending on where you are. So if you’re in Germany, it will be de. So, so that’s where you’ll find it. I have a website, which is teenreconnect.com forward slash Emer, which is e-m-e-r o-d-o double n, e and double l. And there’s the some details around the book on there, but basically go to Amazon. That’s where it is.

Okay, perfect. Well, thank you so much for being on the show. And I have to I’m gonna highlight this gift that you have, because I think you were very generous enough to offer it to us is, she actually has a free guide on the teen brain and addiction. She has another one on sleeping. And so if you go to teenreconnect.com/freedownloads, you will get a free gift from Emer. And just speaking from somebody who has read your book, is you put out great, helpful, thorough content. And so I would highly encourage anybody who’s out there to definitely go ahead if she’s if if she’s offering something for free. We better get on that. So thank you so much for for everything today Emer. O’Donnell. This was awesome.

I love to Jake. Thank you so much. You are a wonderful interviewing. You’re great at listening, and you probably didn’t need my book. But there you go. You do a great job and I love I’ve listened to some of your other podcasts too before this one and I just love what you’re doing. You’re doing a wonderful job.

Ah, thank you so much that means a lot and for everyone listening, this has been another episode of the Party Talk Podcast, where we empower leaders and youth drug prevention. Please go today knowing that you are one of those good adults, those caring adults in people’s life. Keep up doing the amazing work because you are making a world difference. See you next Monday for another episode.