Developmental Health: The Problem with Teaching a Man to Fish

What if the best way to create a good fisherman wasn’t just by teaching him to fish but rather by going fishing with them? When it comes to the overall well-being of adolescents, focusing on development from an experiential perspective is so important to help them become who they want to be. Today on The Reframe, we welcome Executive Director at NeuroDev, Cam Sherman, to discuss the concept of developmental health. Tuning in, you’ll hear all about Cam’s career, what led him to what he does now, why he wants to bring awareness to developmental health, what it is, and so much more! We delve into the imperative third step of the metaphor of teaching a man to fish before discussing why Cam believes the extracurriculars in college are the curriculum, why the application of knowledge is far more important than the acquisition of knowledge, and how NeuroDev supports its students in gaining confidence through experience. Cam delves into why developmental health is so relevant today, ‘learned helplessness’, how we can combat this phenomenon, and when standardization in medicine and mental health care is problematic. He even talks about why intellectualizing doesn’t lead to growth and shares a call to action for how other institutions and parents of young adults can move towards active learning through ‘unlearning’. Finally, our guest touches on the danger of holding onto control as a parent of a young adult. To hear all this and so much more, be sure to press play now! 

Key Points From This Episode:

• Welcoming Cam Sherman to the show. 
• A definition of what developmental health is. 
• Cam tells us what NeuroDev is and what they do. 
• The power of learning alongside more experienced people. 
• Why college is valuable for both education and experience. 
• Steps NeuroDev takes to give students confidence through experience.
• Why developmental health is so relevant for this generation. 
• The phenomenon of ‘learned helplessness’ and how to combat this.
• Cam’s concerns about standardization in medicine and mental health treatment. 
• What institutions can do to improve the skill of active learning. 
• How parents can support their adult children and improve their stress tolerance. 

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

Cam Sherman on LinkedIn

Cam Sherman on Instagram

NeuroDev

‘How to Support Young People on the Road to Adulthood’ 

Douglas Bodin
The Bodin Group

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

I worry that sometimes in the world of medicine or in the world of psychology or maybe in the world of education, our need for standards and standardization can rob us of the developmental experiences that our clients so very much need in order to become full-functioning adults.

SPEAKER_00 0:22

Welcome to the Reframe, where we have real unfiltered conversations about mental health, parenting, and addiction treatment in the changing world. Hosted by Douglas Bowden, a therapeutic consultant with 35 years of experience, we explore the shifts shaping mental health care, featuring experts pioneering new approaches and offering practical advice. Join us as we challenge old narratives and reframe the way we think about the challenges in mental health treatment. This is the reframe. Let's dive in.

SPEAKER_01 1:04

Today's guest is Cam Sherman, who's the executive director and founding partner of Neurodev in Raleigh, North Carolina. He has a background in psychology and counseling and works with students, parents, and mentors to help young people build intentional, fulfilling lives. Cam, welcome to the reframe.

SPEAKER_02 1:22

I appreciate it, Doug. Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_01 1:24

We've talked a lot over the years about all sorts of things related to, especially young adults and development and college. And you talk a lot about developmental health. And I'd like you to jump in and right into what that's all about.

SPEAKER_02 1:37

Sure. Yeah. Developmental health. I'm hoping that Jason and I, and bringing you into this now, Doug, are coining that term. I'd like to hear it used a little bit more, but developmental health is this idea that between the industries of education and mental health, there's a space that is probably that we're expecting to see the emergence of a new industry. And so developmental health is this reflection on what do people need in order to thrive and in order to become independent, especially focusing on adolescents and young adults. And what we really find people needing is yes, the education gives them the information that's important. Yes, the mental health is important for well-being, but what we find there's room to focus on is development itself from an experiential perspective.

SPEAKER_01 2:28

We talk a lot about experiential stuff here. What does that mean in practice? So talk about Neurodev, what that is, what got that started. Because I think you guys are at the cutting edge of some of that thinking.

SPEAKER_02 2:39

So for me, let me just back up a little bit. I ran into Jason and Debbie, founders of Neurodev, about 10 years ago, just as they were starting. And I was in college thinking, oh, I'm interested in psychology. I know a thing or two. Let me get a job, let me see what I could do. I wanted to kind of stretch, flex the muscles, see if I could help some people out. And that was an eye-opener for me because I learned very quickly that I didn't know what I thought I knew and that I had a lot to learn. What I thought I knew is that we needed to follow modalities and that we needed to have specific, reliable things that we could do that would guarantee results. You know, I was thinking like behavioral interventions, behavioral modification structures and procedures, technologies. Yeah, it's actually laughable now, looking back on that, because I'm like, that's the stuff that everybody's talking about now that doesn't work, right? But 10 years ago, that was people were still kind of trying that stuff. And so Jason and I got talking, working, building this structure, not structure, building a framework of what we thought and what Jason really thought would work better for neurodivergent young adults. So Neurodev is an environment where neurodivergent young adults come and get experience, intentional developmental mentoring experience to be able to become more of what they want to become. Usually that's independent, more capable, more aware of the world and themselves, develop their identity. Those are some of the things that we care about there. But Jason's philosophy was that instead of doing treatment, instead of experts putting together a plan and enacting it out on their subjects, I guess I should say, or maybe it would be participants or clients or patients, the better angle was to mentor them through the experiences that they want to have. And so the philosophy kind of became well, let me say it like this. There's this adage everyone knows about, everybody talks about, where you can give someone a fish or you can teach them how to fish. If you give them a fish, you feed them for a day. If you teach them to fish, you feed them for their life, right? Well, uh Jason's philosophy was that that's just not enough. And that there should be a third step. And that third step is you can give someone a fish, you can teach them how to fish, or you can go fishing with them, you can fish beside them. And which one do you think produces a better fisherman? Right. And so it's the experience of doing things together with somebody who knows who's good at it, that helps us learn. And and almost anything that I've learned in my own life, I've learned through a mentoring experience better than through any other experience.

SPEAKER_01 5:17

Yeah, sort of learning how to learn how to fish.

SPEAKER_02 5:20

Yeah. Yeah, nobody got good at it from reading a book. Right.

SPEAKER_01 5:23

But I think that's where the emphasis is, you know, is that everything can be taught. We have so much emphasis on higher education and book learning that the doing has just gotten lost. And we've seen it with our clients, with our young people that I know, where they they have all sorts of credentialing and book learning, but can do actual stuff. And I think it it's an interesting point that we're at now where so many things that used to take book learning as being supplanted by what AI can do that's smarter than any of us, present company included. And we don't need to deviate into the trades and all that so much, but it's that physical hands-on that I think it helps people develop and build confidence, yes, but these are going to be more and more critical skills for people to learn and to incorporate into their lives.

SPEAKER_02 6:11

Yeah, it sure looks like that, doesn't it? If we look at like the college and university scene and where a lot more young people are focusing their attention, building plans for how will I provide for myself. We're seeing a lot of direction going towards trade schools right now. Right? You may be seeing that in California as well.

SPEAKER_01 6:29

It's an interesting thing because there's been so much emphasis just from a cultural standpoint, especially in a place like Silicon Valley, California, where we're so crazy about the importance of college, and I don't want to denigrate that, that I don't think it's filtered down. Filtered down. So there you go. It's a sort of a preconceived notion. It's not filtered through to the point that people really value that yet as much as they're going to need to. Yeah. We'll get there.

SPEAKER_02 6:57

Yeah. While we're talking, let me just glance over at some statistics I found about that. So even right now, and I think this is a nod to what you're saying, Doug. Right now, we still expect, and research that's been conducted still expects that a four-year degree will help graduates earn up to a million dollars more over the span of their career than if they hadn't graduated, while an associate's degree would do 400,000. So there's definitely still earning power a lot of value. And I'm not trying to say that there's less value in college. I actually think college is an amazing developmental tool. But I think there's obviously still this idea of college is essential for a good career. I just wanted to highlight that I think that people's attitudes and reflections on, well, why is college an essential thing for a good career might tend to go towards the academics. And obviously, for some specialized careers and for many, actually, that's very important. There are techniques and trades that we need to learn, ways of thinking, etc. But I think a lot of the time the experiences we have through college, how we grew and how we became and how we developed through the college experience is equally important, if not more, to our ability to provide like a little better career or lifestyle for ourselves after college.

SPEAKER_01 8:18

Well, I know you like to talk about the importance of apprenticeships and mentoring in college and even flipping that model a little bit from the curriculars to the extracurriculars and the value of what you're doing in college.

SPEAKER_02 8:31

Oh, yeah. The way to phrase that that has been kind of just bouncing around in my head lately is that the extracurriculars are the curriculum. Yeah. I think that there are two things, and working with a lot of parents, this is something that I think is just a new idea for a lot of people, is that there are two outcomes of the college experience for young adults. The first outcome is I learned some stuff. I had cognitive development, and college is amazing for that. It challenges us to think and to think in new ways, and it forces us to produce something with those thoughts. And it's really in the producing that those ideas are cemented. And so we have homework and we have essays and we have tests that we take, and we have to produce something with the knowledge that we're acquiring. But what I think is probably understated for most people and most families who are saying, Hey, my son or daughter needs to go to college, this is an important next step, is that it's not the acquisition of knowledge that matters most. It's the application of knowledge that matters most for growth. And so in the college experience, some of the things that you don't even get credit for, or you don't even really think about how much they mattered in the university experience, some of those things like being in a group or a club or in leadership or on a sports team or spending time with your friends or arranging flights to travel to go see family, all of these ancillary experiences in the college experience is what builds the confidence of I can take care of myself. In fact, I'm quite capable. In fact, I know how the world works. So that's why we say the extracurriculars are the curriculum for development.

SPEAKER_01 10:14

I know that my own experience and people I talk to, what they remember most and what I certainly remember most about my college experience, that which I remember, was the extracurriculars. It was working at the radio station, it was working on a city planning project for the city where my college was. It was doing the hands-on things, being involved in stuff other than the classes, maybe that that had something to do with the classes I was taking too, and my overall interest or lack thereof in the academics. But the things that really I took the most away from, and you know, talking to other people, it was the extracurriculars that were most powerful alongside of the academic learning part.

SPEAKER_02 10:51

Totally agree. I had an undergraduate professor. The assignment was preparing for, I got my degree in psychology. So the assignment in the class was preparing for a career in psychology. And one of the assignments was to turn in a resume and build a resume and explore if it aligned with what opportunities are out there. And I had been working a couple of part-time jobs, getting my hands into the material of what it means to work in the field of psychology, line staff at programs, volunteering to do mood intake interviews, just kind of different things. And I turned in my resume and she looked at it, and truth be told, I don't think she thought of me as like an amazing academic student. But she looked at my resume and she looked up at me and she said, Well, you certainly have the experience. Right? And I thought that was pretty valuable. I and maybe it was like a compliment that she didn't intend to be a compliment, but I really valued that because truth be told, and maybe other professionals will feel the same way. I learned so much more hands-on working my way through college than I did from class. I learned some theories in class, but I learned how to do the stuff from work.

SPEAKER_01 12:04

I think that what you're trying to do with Neurodev, and I think other programs are sort of tapping into this sentiment too, but you're trying to give young people, especially those that have some challenges, the confidence to learn alongside of them how to do college or how to do a trade or something. How does that look in practice?

SPEAKER_02 12:22

So I think there's no substitute for time spent with the student. If there's any magic application that seems to make the most difference, it's definitely time. And what I mean by that is our students can probably stand up and teach a life skills class on any hard skill or soft skill. And they could probably, this is not exaggeration, they could probably do it with a lot more finesse and detail than I could. The know-how about the intellectual knowledge of how to do the things that are required for independent, successful life is there. That's been taught. Many of them have done years and years of therapy exploring things like that. Many of them have had specialized IEP programs to help them build those skills. And so the knowledge is there. But somehow the intellectual knowledge does not translate to the applied experiential knowledge of actually doing it. And so what seems to be working better than anything else is you have somebody who is a peer who is close and connected, an authentic friendship with the student, who is quite good at a thing that the student wants to get good at. And you pair them up and you say, Hey, let's do this together. So instead of, hey, go do this, you can, I believe in you, you've got this. It turns into, hey, let's go do this. Come on, we can, we've got this. And that is so much more effective.

SPEAKER_01 13:46

Yeah, and that's exactly what we're doing in our mentoring program. I mean, we're not residential, we're here in the Bay Area.

SPEAKER_02 13:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:52

But that's exactly the mindset there. And that's part of why I love what you guys are doing. Yeah. It resonates that doing it together and their priorities and learning how to learn how to do it and building that muscle memory, building that confidence, making some mistakes along the way. The world's not going to fall apart. Because I think a lot of times for our clients, I'm sure for yours too, by the time they get to this level of needing us, they've felt so many senses of failure that their own resiliency is an overused word, I guess, when we overuse it. But it's important. But being able to push through and to face many failures and overcome them and push through despite that. And we do that, we get them out rock climbing a lot, doing the physical things to build up that foundational confidence to then attack more, taking a college class to build up that base layer of that resiliency and figuring out their priorities and getting them to the point from their own lens where they can prioritize, build the muscle memory of going out into life and being ready to endure disappointments or imperfections or what have you. And that allows them to thrive.

SPEAKER_02 15:02

100% agree. I love that you gotta be okay with the failures and the mistakes along the way. That's critical. Listening to what you were saying about that thought came to my mind. If Doug's cheerleading for me, saying, Hey Cam, I believe in you, you've got this, you can do this, then at the end of the day, I can conclude Doug thinks I can do this. Right. But if I get out and I have an experience where I have evidence, then at the end of the day, I have to be able to conclude, oh my goodness, I can do this. That's a very big difference.

SPEAKER_01 15:34

It's the evidence. Yeah. That's the thing. And I think a lot of kids, young adults, people, a lot of times they're being told you're great, you're awesome, you're whatever, without having the evidence. But they're being told it a lot. People in California had a department of self-esteem, you know, it's like everything. Well, then it starts to bring more and more hollow if you don't have the evidence, the experiential, the concrete piece of data that really reinforces it.

SPEAKER_02 16:00

Yeah, I think it's essential.

SPEAKER_01 16:01

So we're in vehement agreement on the importance of some of these experiences, but zoom out a bit, right? What's happening in the culture? What's happening for young people more broadly that's making this so relevant right now?

SPEAKER_02 16:14

Yeah. So I think a couple of things are happening. I think we're seeing a huge expansion of two things: the diagnosis and recognition of neurodivergence, different types of thinking. And we're seeing this delay of emergence into adulthood from the emerging adult population. And so what used to be maybe adulthood moving out of the home was closer to, oh, I'm just speaking anecdotally here for my grandparents, it would have been you're 18, you're on your own. For my parents, it was like, let's get you through college, maybe 24, 25, you're on your own. For my generation, it's like, okay, let's get you into your first career, you know, 26, 27, you're on your own. And then my kids are probably just gonna live with me until they never move out, right? So I hope for them to move out and become independent. You'd like that, wouldn't you? I would not, I don't think I would like that if they stayed little. I think I'd like that. Yeah, it's not gonna happen. But the research shows that that's the case. Right. And if you look at just the US Census, in 1975, the census measured four metrics for what they thought were hallmarks of adulthood. Okay. That's moving out of your parents' home, working full-time, being married, and having children. Those four things they thought, once you reach these four things, you've exited emerging adulthood and you're into adulthood, right? And so in 1975, that's the generation of the baby boomers, roughly 50% of adults between 25 and 34 were marking yes, all four of those, that's me. 50 years later, in 2025, we're getting 25% of young adults in that same age range. Yes, that's me. And maybe that's some cultural shifting in terms of values of marriage and children and things like that. But what I also want to make sure that we don't miss or ignore is we need to dive into that data to explore is that about wanting to, or is that about being able to? My hypothesis here, Doug, and the reason I'm so excited to be on the show here with you is I think it's both. Especially, I'm very interested in the can young adults do it? Do they have the confidence in themselves to be able to be full adults, contributing, adding to the workforce, society, things like that?

SPEAKER_01 18:33

But I think there's more of an expectation that they have these other things in place before they can go out and get married. So the average age of getting married has gone, I I forgot the statistics on it, and you might have them, but of all those metrics you've got there, that's one that's gone way up over the years. Yeah. And that I think people want to have all these other markers of independence. And the longer they wait, the harder it is to get into that rhythm of getting a job. I know in working with young adults at the Bowdoin Group on the consulting side, we've worked with young adults. My caseload has been primarily young adults for 20, 25 years. But we've seen it used to be that our young adult population was characterized as sort of 18 to 23, 24. And now routinely we're getting clients that are on the consulting side, 26, average age, probably 26, 27, and there somewhere. And the longer they've had, the more time there is to sort of believe that they're not going to be able to move forward. And that becomes harder and harder to address, and they need more and more support and scaffolding because they're not, as parents are waiting for them to snap out of it, and there's not the in-your-face crisis that we used to have when there was a lot more of the sex, drugs, and rock and roll going on. Instead, there's a slow motion crisis of not being able to move forward with their lives. And I think that's pervasive across the culture. I think that's your point.

SPEAKER_02 19:58

Yeah. Oftentimes when I'm talking with my students who are finding themselves in that particular predicament of, look, Cam, what you need to understand is I've been struggling over an extended period of time. This isn't just I hit a wall, I fell down, I need to bounce back. This is I haven't been able to figure out how to thrive. What we end up talking about is the name for the phenomenon that I think you're you and I are describing here is learned helplessness.

SPEAKER_01 20:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 20:24

And so this comes from an experiment where it was an unethical, it would be deemed an unethical type of psychological experiment now, but at the time before ethics boards, kind of an interesting result and an interesting knowledge emerged from this is they had two sets of dogs, one in open pens, one in closed pens, and they shocked them with cattle prodders. And the open pen dogs ran. I would, I would get out of there. And the closed pen dogs had nowhere to run to, right? And they repeated this experiment now with both sets of dogs in open pens. And the set of dogs that had previously been in open pens ran again. And the set of dogs now in open pens that had been in closed pens laid down and let themselves be shot. Wow. And did not try to run away because what they had learned, the reality that they had developed, which is this is interesting because it's actually an interesting way to look at that because it seems so obvious. Well, the door's open now, run away now. But for our young adults who have come up against bad experience after bad experience and sort of learned this, I can't do anything about it, I'm stuck, is what more would you want them to conclude from a series of struggles and a series of failures? So comfort and avoiding the unnecessary expenditure of energy or feeling like I can't do anything about this, I need to shift into an endurance mindset. That's the adaptive thing to learn. If there's no better outcome. Back to our previous conversation on mentoring, I think that's what's so magical about mentoring is a mentor says, No, let me show you. The door's open now. We can do this together. I can lead you out away from the harm and into a new perspective.

SPEAKER_01 22:16

Right. It's going to be okay.

SPEAKER_02 22:18

It's going to be okay.

SPEAKER_01 22:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 22:19

The last thing we want is for young adults 18 to 30 to end up feeling like I got to endure this for the rest of my life. Like there's a whole life out there for them to be living. Just show them they can. That's an important thing.

SPEAKER_01 22:30

But they're also getting a proxy for achievement because now what's also different, of course, is that they can be online, they can be doing gaming or have other social media presences and have proxies for friendships, for achievement, for stimulation that they didn't have half a generation ago. That sort of makes it okay. Layered onto that, of course, is that they were also, at least in California, locked out of life for a couple of years. Yeah. There was almost this reinforced avoidance that they had. And that became a set of habits that we've seen a lot of people just not be able to get out of. You get two years of that and you've lost that muscle memory, you've lost that confidence. You don't know how to do it. You haven't had interpersonal interactions and they become that much more daunting.

SPEAKER_02 23:14

Yeah. And especially in those formative years, 18 to 21, somewhere in there, where you're exploring what does it mean to be outside on my own, or my identity is more aligned with my friend group or peer groups, and now I'm exiting the friend group into more of a prioritization of intimate relationships and having a few close friends or finding my person. In those developmental stages, COVID really did a number on people. That was a really hard thing. And there's data to show that. Now that's interesting, but the COVID piece is for 25-year-olds, not just 24 to 35 year olds, for those who are 25 today, 31% of them still live with their parents. And that's right in that period where they experienced COVID.

SPEAKER_01 24:13

Right. Isn't that nuts? That's really a stunning number. Yeah, it's almost twice as much. Yeah. And I don't want to discount the fact that it's hard, especially where we're based in other areas around the country, but I think especially around here in urban areas, the cost is very high. But I think there's also the expectation that one has to have everything put together and live in the manner to which they've become accustomed. And so there's when everything is comfortable, you're at home, and it's not that challenging or aversive, that becomes habitual. It becomes what you're stuck in. And it gets harder and harder the older you are to get out of that. Where do you get that burst of energy? We're seeing a ton of that. And it sounds like your numbers really bear that out.

SPEAKER_02 24:56

Yeah, that was, I think, a study. I can give you some references if you want to attach them to the bottom of the show, but that was a study, I think, done by the American Psychological Association. And so this is looking at it at a national level. This isn't just a handful of students that I happen to be working with. That's it's really interesting stuff.

SPEAKER_01 25:14

How do we get out of that as a culture? What's the I know there's not any panacea for that, but where does the shift happen or will it happen?

SPEAKER_02 25:23

So the whole point is, I think, if we boil this all the way down, reduce human suffering, promote the optimal opportunities for a life full of thriving. And industries have emerged to do just that. In fact, pretty much all industries want to solve some part of the human experience. And so you think of medicine a long time ago, decades, maybe even longer, emerging as a field, coming into the mainstream of how to reduce human suffering and the advent of medications that could help bring about better human conditions and health, and then finding themselves wanting more, sort of this emergence of mental health is hey, we can do something more to reduce human suffering. We can do something more to benefit the human condition. And from there, I think mental health has done a really good job of setting themselves up as the panacea. Almost for any problem someone could be expressing, an automatic thought is, well, you should go to therapy for that, right?

SPEAKER_01 26:29

Well, I can't help but see the parallel when you talk about reduced human suffering in the medical industry. The obvious comparison is the opioid epidemic, right? That started with a lot of people reducing suffering and having the panacea, which was oxycontin, oxycodone, and people got addicted. And so the reduction of human suffering, it's delicate because you want to reduce it at the same time. If you reduce it too much, you've you've crippled people.

SPEAKER_02 26:51

Yeah, it can turn into a dependence.

SPEAKER_01 26:53

You're dependent on the comfort or the lack of suffering. And what you and I are also talking about is building the resiliency to endure challenge, disappointment. And I think the word suffering has been broadened so much that a bad day of suffering or not having enough of A, B, or C is suffering. And that's not true suffering, but that's because we've broadened it so much, the drive towards comfort or lack of suffering is also what can be paralyzing.

SPEAKER_02 27:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 27:21

Or addicting in the case of the Sackler family.

SPEAKER_02 27:24

Yeah, we come to depend on it. I can think of a quote. I wish I could recall who said it, Doug, but it goes like this it says the world of medicine has developed so much that you can hardly find any healthy people left. Right? Yeah. And it's so good for what we're talking about because it's this next stage of like, okay, we have suffering. How do we identify the problem? How do we find it? How do we fix it? Okay, maybe we need to emerge into mental health. How do we identify more problems? How do we find more problems? How do we fix more problems? Which all of those things are good. And I am not here to rag on medicine or on therapy, Doug, I'm a therapist. And so I'm very much for these things. I'm just still curious, what can we do even more? And that's why I tend to lean towards let's forget about the tool that we're trying to develop that solves these things. Let's look at the need. What is the human need? And almost in every case, in therapy and some of the things that we've been talking about, about growing into independence, almost in every case there's some developmental component of we need to become something just a little bit more than we are right now. We need to grow into our next version of ourselves. Another quote that kind of illustrates that is that which we persist in doing becomes easier to do. Not that the nature of the thing has changed, but that our capacity to do it has improved. So I I think, you know, if you're looking as a clinician, I've got a client who may be just wrestling with some dependence or some addiction. What does the client need to develop through that process into the next version of himself or herself who is no longer dependent on the chemical or process upon which they find themselves dependent now? And so I think there's this dangerous phenomenon in the emergence of new industries or tools. And I think we even need to be aware of it for the emergence of developmental health. That is, we always start with the need. We always want to address the need first and how do we help the people, but then we develop outcome measures and strategies and standards to measure or control that to see if we're really doing a good job. And then the scary thing is when that shifts from the goal is to meet the need, and it turns into the goal now is to meet the standard or to use the tool. So hammers are great things for helping us to build houses, but just because you have a hammer doesn't mean you have a house.

SPEAKER_01 30:01

Right.

SPEAKER_02 30:01

I worry that sometimes in the world of medicine or in the world of psychology, or maybe in the world of education, our need for standards and standardization can rob us of the developmental experiences that our clients so very much need in order to become full-functioning adults.

SPEAKER_01 30:19

That's what's happening broadly. I think it's they're further ahead in the medical world, but certainly we're seeing it in the world of all these therapeutic programs that are taking sort of broad strokes, applying so many hours of this technology or that therapeutic gadget of the week. But that's what the corporate ownership asks for, the private equity firms that are looking for profits out of that mental health treatment. That's what the insurance will pay for, and that's the business model there. And therefore, that individual client becomes themselves the commodity that's being traded for profit in that kind of a system. And it's taking those broad applications of what averages out to maybe being slightly better in the research, but misses the individual and what their specific needs are. And the stuff that you and I are talking about right now doesn't get paid for by insurance. It's hard to monetize it with a corporation. And that's where so much of the mental health field is shifting into, especially the last several years. And that's a zooming out again on sort of what's happening culturally and specifically in the mental health field. That's a big part of it, I think.

SPEAKER_02 31:25

Yeah, yeah. And that's the industry that I think you and I live in and work in and that we're familiar with. And I don't think it's the only one. I think we see that a lot in higher ed as well. We want our young adults to become profitable, career-enjoying enthusiasts, right? We want them to succeed.

SPEAKER_01 31:46

We're making them widgets.

SPEAKER_02 31:48

We're making them widgets, we're getting them standards. Well, if you do well, if you get A's and B's, then you'll have that. Well, now the goal is to be get the A's and the B's, not to learn or to get to be capable. The goal has changed from that to get the A's and B's. If you can test well enough, then you can get there. So institutions that offer amazing opportunities for development sometimes prioritize the non-developmental things like the intellectualization or the focusing on the tests or the tools that really didn't make me. I don't know, I won't speak for you, Doug, but for me, I didn't, I don't feel like I'm good at my job because I got A's and B's. I feel like I'm good at my job because I had experiences.

SPEAKER_01 32:33

I went deliberately to a university that had narrative evaluations.

SPEAKER_02 32:38

Yeah, well, tell me about that.

SPEAKER_01 32:39

Oh, it's how UC Santa Cruz was back in the 80s when I went there. In fact, they were even moving away from the narrative evaluations, but I was sort of an idealist and thought, oh, well, A's and B's are stupid, mainly because I didn't want to have all that, you know, it was whatever. But instead, you would get depends on how big the class was, but oftentimes, you know, a full-page write-up on all sorts of aspects of your performance within the class. And I loved it conceptually. I thought it was a great way of doing things. I I think they've moved away from it in years since. But I I thought at the time that that was a great way of personalizing it and making it more than just the letter grade.

SPEAKER_02 33:16

Yeah. It sounds like it's a lot more personal. It sounds like it would be harder to scale.

SPEAKER_01 33:20

That's exactly why I think it went away. Yeah. How do graduate schools look at that and try to take a make that into a transcript? So it kind of moved over the years more towards the standard format.

SPEAKER_02 33:31

Yeah. It transitioned from experiential learning, maybe into more of a sage on the stage or Sage on the stage. That's a good rhyme, huh? I've got another one. I got they go together in my mind. Then the other one is from the student's perspective, it's a set and get. I'm gonna sit here and they're going to do the learning for me. My job is to absorb. And so turning this around, trying to get this on its head, there's a few places. It sounds like your university did a great job of that. Maybe things have changed. There's a few places that I think are on board with this kind of notion. In fact, Utah Tech that we work with really closely at our Utah location. Funny enough, I did not plan this, but I am actually wearing one of their shirts today. So I guess I'm really repping them. But I do have a plug for them. Utah Tech is doing a great job of this. Their whole university goal and their motto is active learning, active life. And so they're serious about it. They don't just say that and then expect the students to do all the active learning. They're changing the way they want the learning experience to be because all learning comes from experience. A lecture is an experience, but it's not the best experience to have to learn, right? My best learning I mentioned earlier came from my mentors. Somebody who took me and said, Cam, you're good at this. Let me show you how to be even better at this. Or, hey, you let me show you how to do this better. You were kind of struggling. That was amazing learning.

SPEAKER_01 34:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 34:58

Right. And so Utah Tech recently they built a brand new science, engineering, and technology building. You know, this is for the engineers. And two things that I think they're doing well, that listeners here on the podcast can sort of absorb and think, okay, we can put this into application. The first thing is they built more labs than lecture halls. New building, almost every classroom was a lab. There was hardly any just sit and desk space. Everything was functional. Very cool. The second thing that they did was they had their advanced mechanics, mechatronics classes as the first megatronics? Mechatronics, yeah. They're building robots. Yeah, it's it's this it was an engineering class their students could take to build a robot and to have it perform a function. And so it's a pretty advanced class. It's normally in most universities a higher level class, but they put it as the freshman sophomore type of level class, even though they knew students would struggle with it, because doing it and having the experience trying to build it makes them much more curious about the math and the electrical circuitry and the things that they need to learn in order to make it work. So they had one that they built was a little functional, but man, I could really do something more now. I need to study. Isn't that interesting? So I think the active learning part is that's new for them. I hope that it spreads. I want other universities to get good at active learning.

SPEAKER_01 36:31

What can other professionals in the community, other therapeutic programs out there, transitional living type programs, bring to the table with this mindset immediately? What's the call to action for them?

SPEAKER_02 36:42

The call to action is whenever you're learning something new, there's always unlearning involved. And that's an important bit. The first thing I would want people in our industry to unlearn is intellectualization. Intellectualization does not solve hard problems. And if our students are up against something hard, intellectualizing with them transitions it from a hard problem and tries to make it into a complex problem instead so that we can solve it intellectually, because that's really great. Our brains are good at demystifying complex things. And we can do that in the comfort of our office and sitting down, and that's all nice. But it doesn't make the hard thing to do any easier. It just gives us a better understanding. If we can unlearn the process of, hey, let's get in there and intellectualize it, we can just say, hey, let's skip some of that and let's roll up our sleeves and go out. And it is it's much harder this way. Let's go out and do the hard work of getting the experience you need in order to develop. I went to therapy as an undergraduate student. My therapist was brilliant. Phil Wynch in St. George, Utah, really great guy. He said, Wow, Cam, it sounds like you're really struggling with the human condition in this way. And I was like, Okay, yeah, I can see where you're going. I guess it's not all on me. It's good about being human, okay. And then he said, So what experience do you need in order to get out of that line of thinking? And that gave me so much clarity because what I had been doing was intellectualizing. I had been thinking, how do I solve this? It's in my head. And what he said was, how do you get out in the real world? This is about being human. You're not gonna solve this in your head, you're gonna solve this out in life. That would be the unlearning. Then after industry professionals in our field unlearn to prioritize the intellectualization of everything, after we can get back to okay, experience, what I'd like for them to learn is that it's okay to throw away the rule books in favor of what's effective. So we're curious, we're trying new things, we're getting as curious as we can. I already said trying new things, but we're not favoring tried and true modalities. We're experimenting with what does and doesn't work. We of course want to do that ethically, and we of course want to build a foundation on no cattle prods. Yeah, we want to have things founded upon scientifically empirically validated things, that's good. But within the realm of what's effective, we want to explore the old way of doing things, is not the new way of doing things. What is more effective? So our biggest loyalty needs to be loyalty to results, not loyalty to a school of thought or to a way of doing things or to a business policy or an industry standard, but to what is effective.

SPEAKER_01 39:46

One of the things you and I have talked about over the years is parents, and that to do your work and for any program out there or therapies that are trying to help young people. This is true for our mentoring program too, to help young people have these experiences. It also takes the parents on the other end sort of bolstering that and expecting that they're going to carry forward. And I think a lot of the times what we encounter, and I think you do too, is parents who have a lower tolerance level for their child's distress at the failure or at what it takes to persevere. Can you speak to the parent side of this for a minute?

SPEAKER_02 40:23

Yeah, and who can blame them, really? Because take a look at our typical, we call them students, you might call them clients. Our typical audience is somebody who's had a really hard time, right? And so in some ways they may be vulnerable and in some ways they may be somewhat fragile. And so the natural thing to do for someone who loves somebody is to protect them or to reach in to help. And nobody wants to see their own kid having a bad time. You can start with empathizing with the parent situation because it's real. These are parents who they catch a lot of flack for being helicopter parents or snowplow parents because they are, but they've also had to be in some circumstances, right? This was about survival for my kid, and I had to plow the street. And so that's probably effective at some junctions of their kids' development. And where their kid is in treatment getting support or in a developmental experience like ours getting support, I think parents can take a new perspective. This is no longer effective.

SPEAKER_01 41:27

They have to unlearn some stuff too.

SPEAKER_02 41:29

They have to unlearn that this is no longer effective, this is no longer necessary. I don't need to be the parent or in charge or fight their battles. I don't need my distress tolerance to impact their distress tolerance. In fact, I need to follow suit. I need my kid to lead out. How much learning and stress is healthy for them, that's for them to find out. Right? So if they're outside the comfort zone and I try to rescue, they may not be outside the comfort zone to the point of overwhelm. They may be okay with it. So then the next opportunity is to change from the parent role to a mentor role. I will lead with you, I'll be beside you, I'm not going to make decisions for you, I'm not going to provide for you, I'm going to partner with you and watch and admire. And what I tell parents a lot of the times is your job at this stage, right now, is to enjoy. Enjoy your son or daughter. Get to know them as the adult that they are, enjoy their progress, get curious about them, focus on what's exciting about what they're trying, what's new. They don't need to be on the stage. They get to be in the audience at this point.

SPEAKER_01 42:37

That's a switch that parents have to make is being the parents of an adolescent and then switching into being the parent of an adult. And there's a different skill set there. It's one that we don't talk about a lot culturally, but I think it's because that age of emerging adulthood has shifted so old. But I think it's a really important transition for parents to be able to make as well.

SPEAKER_02 43:01

Yeah. And expecting your kid to develop in a system where all other parts are anchored down and not developing and changing now, that's a big ask. So the idea that I think is helpful to parents is that if we are here expecting our young adult or even our adolescent to make a lot of growth, change, development, and all other parts of their system are tied down, that doesn't give them a lot of room to grow and change. But if we can adjust the whole family system, and I as a parent would be flexible to adjust my dynamic out of the parent role into the mentor role, thinking, how can I show up differently? I think that gives them a lot more latitude on I can explore who I am, what kinds of things do I want to become? My parents believe in me, they're not leading out, they're telling me, we're gonna sit back a little bit and let you figure it out. It might involve some struggle, but you can do this. Now I can see. I get to create my own future. That's a really important thing for parents to be able to do for their kids.

SPEAKER_01 44:05

But they're inadvertently often sending the opposite message when they're continuing the snowplow role as the parents of an adolescent into the individual's adulthood. It's sending the message that we don't believe in you. We don't think you can do it without our ongoing snowplowery.

SPEAKER_02 44:24

Yeah, Stephen Covey talks about that in his book, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. He says he was that way as a parent. He had a kid growing up and they tried to protect or help or support or lots of extra coaching. And they realized that they had accidentally planted this idea in their kids' mind, oh, my parents don't believe in me. They feel like they need to be in charge. So he says he adjusted and pulled back, and that his kids started to thrive. I don't know that that's a causal relationship all the time, but I do believe that it often causes problems to continue to be in the driver's seat.

SPEAKER_01 45:02

I totally get it where their parents are coming from because it's out of fear and it's out of an abundance of information out there of where things can go badly. One of the great pleasures that we have in our mentoring program, and I know you you see it in yours too, is helping the parents as they start to see their child, their young adult child, make these strides and start building these confidences, they're also able to relax and start to trust their kid in ways they haven't been able to either in a long time or or ever. And it's incremental for them just as the building is incremental for their young adult child. That's really an amazing part of what we get to watch.

SPEAKER_02 45:43

Yeah, what a payday for them, too.

SPEAKER_01 45:45

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 45:46

To not have to be the one in charge to see my son or daughter's succeeding, and they're succeeding without me. That's what we want.

SPEAKER_01 45:53

Well, now you hit on an interesting subject because there's a part that goes on that I think there are some parents, and I I see this instinct in myself too, that we want to be needed. We want to have that relevance and that meaning. And if it's always been in our kids at some level, we have to be conscious of what am I getting out of being that snow plow parent or being overly involved in our adult child's life in a way that might be giving us a whole lot of meaning and purpose, but is depriving them of their right to move on and be that adult independent of us.

SPEAKER_02 46:25

Yeah, I could see that. It's I think really natural. And if the goal is my satisfaction as a parent, then that's a path towards that goal. But if the goal is my son or daughter's thriving, then our goal can change to help me learn to enjoy them, help me learn to put the ball in their court, let's watch them struggle a little bit, let's see if they can develop. And ultimately, I think that that supersedes the need to be important for parents, is like, okay, my kids actually are doing really well. In my mind, that's a bigger payday.

SPEAKER_01 46:58

And the parents have to trust that we're gonna get there.

SPEAKER_02 47:01

Yeah, which is, I'm sure, excruciating.

SPEAKER_01 47:04

It's excruciating. Can this has been great? I knew it would be it's great to see you. Thank you for being on the reframe.

SPEAKER_02 47:11

I really appreciate it. I love the reframe. Love what you're doing here, Doug. Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_00 47:16

Thank you for tuning in to this episode of The Reframe. Follow the show wherever you listen to podcasts, so you'll never miss an episode. Please share this episode with your friends, colleagues, innovators in the industry, and anyone you feel would benefit from listening.