610 CKTB Interview
Aug 25, 2022
KARL DOCKSTADER - LUCY COLANGELO, DISTRACTED WORKSHOP (AUG 31, 2022) - GUIDING OUR YOUTH IN TODAY'S DIGITAL WORLD
Show Notes:
I see the impacts that our digital lives are having on our kids mental health and development.
Next Wednesday’s Distracted Workshop is all about sharing those insights and what I see as being most helpful to supporting our parents and their young people.
I believe our kids and especially teens have only one job. That’s to get to know themselves. That is what I believe increases the chances that they’ll find more of a conscious direction in life. The hope is that they find their way to a meaningful education, meaningful work and live satisfying and successful lives. It uplifts everyone around you and makes society better when people find their way to a positive and productive way of life. That all starts with knowing yourself.
So, I’ll be talking about the biggest obstacle that’s in the way of all that, our digital lives.
The impacts that having devices has on the development of young minds can not be over stated. I’m approaching this from the unique perspective as a marketing communications expert who’s spent more than 20 years watching this evolution unfold online.
I have some ideas to share that I believe will be helpful. We need to learn how to integrate the great things about technology into our daily lives to empower our parents and youth.
I’m no parenting or psychology expert. I’m a mom and a communications expert who knows how difficult this is. I know what’s missing in this conversation.
We’re getting into talking about taking on this monster issue. We all see it, I talk with parents all the time… the question is what to do. I’ll be sharing the key strategies that I believe will help us.
I’m inviting parents to come and get into the conversation so we can share our experiences and together find a better way forward.
I’ll also be sharing free resources about how to get into a better conversation with your young people.
Registration is available right off my website, lucycolangelo com and it’s also all over my social media @lucycdot.
Pelham Public Library
at 6:30-7:30
Next Wednesday August 31
Show Transcript :
KARL DOCKSTADER
She's going to talk to us about how to refocus your kids, players, and students’ attention, and provide them with the support and tools they need to succeed. We're only going to get a taste of it though. If you really want to learn, you'll have to attend the distracted workshop, which is coming up Wednesday, August 31st. That's right around the corner. Lucy is a former communications expert turned curiosity coach and clarity mapping Fanatic.
LUCY COLANGELO
I'm inviting parents, teachers, and coaches to come out, to the public library next Wednesday. In the evening, six-hour-long discussions and workshops. We're going to be getting into all the things parenting and the digital world and the kinds of challenges that we're facing with our young people. And anybody that's in that window of pre-teen, teenager, and even into young adults is welcome and invited to come in and join in the conversation.
KARL DOCKSTADER
So, it's a one-hour workshop. It's going to be at the Pel Library in person.
LUCY COLANGELO
An in-person event. That's what I'm excited about, getting people together. It feels really special. And I got into this work. I'm a communications expert with over 20 years of building campaigns, being in marketing, and I've watched this evolution over the last 20 years of the online world and what it's doing to our lives, our lifestyles, and especially I'm paying attention closely to our young people, and I'm seeing some disturbing information coming through statistically with mental health and young people and their development. And I see something that's lacking in our conversations with young people, and I want to help. So that's where this is coming from. And there's a huge hint in the name of the workshop talking about being distracted. That's a huge clue about what's really in the way here and how we can find our way forward.
KARL DOCKSTADER
Walk us through, who exactly did you have in mind for workshop participants for this upcoming workshop?
LUCY COLANGELO
there are a lot of parents that I've worked with. What's happened in the past couple of years, I've evolved from working with business owners and entrepreneurs to helping them with their business planning. And I've started to be invited into conversation with very young people. They were saying, Listen, I need my kids to have a strategy for how to plan their lives, how to know themselves, how to understand themselves. We were in this conversation about what is the developmental milestone of your teenage years. And that is getting to know yourself so that you can find your way to meaningful education, and meaningful work. And then, you know, our hope for our children is to live satisfying and successful lives. Right? And when I'm looking at that, I'm feeling like there are things that are in the way.
LUCY COLANGELO
Kids are not spending enough time with themselves, and they're not really knowing themselves. So parents call me when they're having struggles. It's, especially, there's a developmental issue, right? When they're in high school and they have to apply to colleges and universities. There's stress, there's anxiety, and I don't know what I want to do. I don't know what education I want to pass, I want to follow, so I'm suggesting we need to get into this conversation earlier, so it doesn't have to be so difficult. And there's a big thing that's in the way, and that's the digital lives that we're leading. We're distracted and there are things that we can do, and there are things that I want to teach and share about how we can overcome this distraction and get the focus back where it needs to be.
KARL DOCKSTADER
I, I still want to talk about, the people whose parents, teachers, and coaches might, might need the workshop. So, so I was, I was sharing a lesson about podcasting and broadcasting with some students. And they wouldn't ask one question and as a presenter and somebody who's doing workshops and facilitation when you can't get a single question out of the group, you're like 40 minutes of material that you plan can sometimes turn into 10 minutes.
KARL DOCKSTADER
I decided not to yell, not to sing or dance, right? Or to use any other, any other technique to, help capture the attention and engagement, of these young people. But since then, I haven't given it much thought, and I didn't even know there, there's a way that, that maybe as, as a parent myself or as somebody that, that sometimes supports educators that, that I could get connected to some of these distracted young people.
LUCY COLANGELO
Absolutely. So of course, there are things that are in the way. It’s very hard to feel that engagement from them. But they are listening, and I definitely know that they're listening. The way that my world works is that I'll work with young people. I teach this thing called clarity mapping that I'm a huge fanatic about, that's the tool that I created to help facilitate this conversation. And it's a tool that helps teachers, coaches, and parents, be in the conversation with young people. the nugget that I'd like to share that I think is the bridge that catches their attention, it captures their imagination, is being curious about them being like, hey, what are you into, what are you excited about? What enlivens and inspires you? And there are a lot of things that are in the way of getting to that conversation, helping them discover themselves, helping them discover their skills and their strengths and their passions.
LUCY COLANGELO
I mean, we're just distracted all the time, So there are ways, there are tools, there are strategies that we can use, in our digital world to facilitate this curiosity. And there are actions you can take to engage that curiosity. I think that we're tapping into a little bit of narcissism if you will. I'm using that totally not as a clinical specialist in any way, but we're into ourselves. We can't help ourselves. People are by nature, they're dialed right in and want to know, and they want to feel better. They want to reach for better thoughts. They want to have an optimistic view of the world. I've had a lot of kids explain themselves to me that they're practical and that they're realists and they look at the world from what it is. It's a black-and-white kind of thing. And I'm here to say, well, there are also opportunities and there's also a whole bunch of other things.
LUCY COLANGELO
There are dynamics to life, and we need to be in that conversation. So, I'm inviting parents to come in and be in this conversation with them because I'm also a mom. I have teenagers, and I want to support people in learning how to be in this more and liven and inspired conversation that's about the future and about possibilities of who our children could grow up and become. And they'll enjoy that. They do. They, they kind of hesitate. They might look like they're not interested, but I get them looking at me. I get the eyes to come up and we make eye contact, and we get, they get it. They're like, Okay, if I don't put any attention to this, then nothing's going to change, right? So they get excited about it. It's, it's nice energy when you feel that shift,
KARL DOCKSTADER
That’s really exciting. In case you just tuning in, I'm talking to Lucy, Anglo Formula communications expert turned, curiosity coach and clarity mapping fanatic about the parents, teachers, and coaches coming out to the distracted workshop, that's, that's next Wednesday, August 31st [email protected]. You don't start out as a curiosity coach and a clarity-mapping fanatic. Can you talk about your personal journey that, that led to you offering these resources?
LUCY COLANGELO
Absolutely. Of course. Thank you. So, being in the world of marketing and communications, my job was always to script the message for whatever client, a company that I worked for. And a lot of times it felt like we were experimenting and we were trying to figure out how to connect with our audience. And so I became really dialed in and focused on how we do that. How do we create that connection through ads? Back when I started, I don't mind saying I graduated from Brock in 1999, it's a long time ago. And back then things were visual, and I print a lot. The projects that I would work on had to do with print materials and sales kits and all these types of things. And then I saw that migration online, out. Now everybody realized they needed a website. And, it all had to do with connection.
LUCY COLANGELO
How do you land? How do you connect with your potential audience? And you had to really understand your audience. You had to have those psychographics, demographics, all these types of things. And now we are at a level of sophistication in the digital world, the marketing world, that our attention is being captured by algorithms that are so sophisticated. They're everywhere. They're all over any sort of website. They're all over social media. They're, involved in anything digital. They're capturing behavior. They're capturing data that they know us at a level, but we don't even know ourselves. And what's happening here is that empowerment is lost. Like I see that I see that connection changing. Like marketing companies have more information on us than they've ever had. And it used to be an experiment. We used to run campaigns, and we used to just be trying our best to land and connect.
LUCY COLANGELO
And now we have algorithms that help us do that. We have SEO and we have all this data that helps us make that connection. And I just came up through this and I started seeing the disconnection of people from themselves. They're being entertained on devices, on different platforms, and there's a disconnect with knowing yourself. And there's this loss of power if you will. Like, people don't feel empowered. They feel pacified and kind of checked out in a way. So that's where I saw this gap. And I started to see parents coming to me. We were in conversations about kids having higher anxiety not wanting to be social, and all these issues. And now we're coming out of a pandemic where we've been in isolation and we haven't been getting together in person. You know, all this kind of disconnection. And what I'm trying to do is just, I'm wanting to educate about it, but there are real strategies that we can help and we can see our children just get more curious about themselves, less distraction, and then a path forward, as I said, a meaningful way forward in their lives where they can feel satisfied and successful.
LUCY COLANGELO
And I think that parents have this huge powerful role in guiding their children that way. And it's all like rooted in this getting, you know, handling the distractions and then getting super curious about who our kids are and who they could become and supporting them in that journey.
KARL DOCKSTADER
I'm definitely curious, and, I think the best way to learn more is to head over to Lucycolangelo.com and register for the workshop.
