Coaching for Teens in Charleston, SC
For ages 13 to 17. Coaching helps a teenager work out what they actually want and take real steps toward it, with someone who is not their parent and not their teacher. In Charleston or online, from Gnosis Wellness Collective.
Life coaching to help you understand what's happening beneath your patterns and experiment with new ways of responding.
Is It Normal for a Teenager to Have No Direction?
Yes. Stanford researchers surveyed about twelve hundred young people for their Youth Purpose Project and around one in five came out as purposeful, meaning they could say what they were aiming at and were doing something about it. Everyone else was somewhere earlier in the process, mostly still looking.
1in 5
High schoolers stated they felt a sense of purpose in the Stanford study.
The absence of direction and purpose is normal for teens, and practice is how it's developed.
One study followed high school students across four points over two years and found that their sense of purpose climbed through tenth grade, dipped partway through eleventh, and then climbed again. So a quiet year, or a kid who seemed clearer about things last spring than they do now, is not evidence that something has gone wrong.
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The finding from that study that probably matters most to you has nothing to do with the percentages. The students who built purpose over those two years were the ones who felt supported by their families, their teachers and their friends, and the level of support predicted both how much they explored and how much they committed. Purpose is not something a teenager assembles alone in their room, which is a part of why this program includes sessions for you and not only for your kid.
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And it is worth building. A team of American researchers ran a randomized study in a California high school where ninth graders spent a short session connecting their schoolwork to something that mattered beyond themselves. Those students went on to earn better math and science grades that term, and the students who had been doing worst gained the most. In companion experiments the same researchers found that students given that kind of reason to work stayed with tedious review questions roughly twice as long as students who were not. Separately, in a study of 444 adolescents, a stronger sense of purpose came with substantially lower depressive symptoms.
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And it is worth building. A team of American researchers ran a randomized study in a California high school where ninth graders spent a short session connecting their schoolwork to something that mattered beyond themselves. Those students went on to earn better math and science grades that term, and the students who had been doing worst gained the most. In companion experiments the same researchers found that students given that kind of reason to work stayed with tedious review questions roughly twice as long as students who were not. Separately, in a study of 444 adolescents, a stronger sense of purpose came with substantially lower depressive symptoms.​​
!. Damon W. The Path to Purpose: How Young People Find Their Calling in Life. 2008, reporting the Stanford Center on Adolescence Youth Purpose Project. Roughly 1,200 young people aged 12 to 23 surveyed across California, New Jersey and Tennessee, of whom about 20% were classed as purposeful and about 25% as disengaged, with the majority in between, either searching without having landed or holding a goal they had not acted on. coa.stanford.edu 2. Chen HY, Chiou H, Cheng CL. Purpose trajectories during middle adolescence: the roles of family, teacher, and peer support. Journal of Youth and Adolescence. 2022;51(2):291-304. Longitudinal, 369 vocational high school students in Taiwan, mean age 15.8, four waves at one-semester intervals over two years. Purpose commitment rose in tenth grade, dipped early in eleventh, then rose again. Perceived family, teacher and peer support predicted both purpose exploration and commitment over time, and commitment trajectories predicted lower depressive symptoms. link.springer.com 3. Yeager DS, Henderson MD, Paunesku D, Walton GM, D'Mello S, Spitzer BJ, Duckworth AL. Boring but important: a self-transcendent purpose for learning fosters academic self-regulation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 2014;107(4):559-580. Four studies in the United States. Study 1 surveyed 1,364 high school seniors across 17 urban public schools in Los Angeles, Oakland, New York, Austin, Houston and Little Rock, where purpose predicted college enrollment six to ten months later. Study 2 was a randomized trial with 338 ninth graders in Northern California: STEM grades rose 0.11 points overall and 0.2 points among students with a GPA below 3.0. Studies 3 and 4 were randomized experiments in which students in the purpose condition persisted roughly twice as long on tedious review work. stanford.edu 4. Barcaccia B, Couyoumdjian A, Di Consiglio M, Papa C, Ganucci Cancellieri U, Cervin M. Purpose in life as an asset for well-being and a protective factor against depression in adolescents. Frontiers in Psychology. 2023;14:1250279. Cross-sectional, 444 Italian adolescents aged 14 to 20, mean age 16.3. Purpose correlated with depressive symptoms at r = -0.53, and depression was the strongest unique predictor of purpose in the model. frontiersin.org5. Weissbourd R, Batanova M, McIntyre J, Torres E, et al. On Edge: Understanding and Preventing Young Adults' Mental Health Challenges. Making Caring Common, Harvard Graduate School of Education, October 2023. Nationally representative, fielded December 2022 via NORC AmeriSpeak: 709 young adults aged 18 to 25, plus 396 teens aged 14 to 17 and 748 parents. The purpose and direction figures are from the 18 to 25 group. The report gives no teen-specific purpose breakdown. mcc.gse.harvard.edu
On the Water, Outdoors, or in a Room
What Can a Teen Life Coach Help With?
These are the things families bring most often. None of them mean something is wrong with your teenager, and each of them is something that can be worked on directly.
Motivation and getting started. You have probably seen this one. The homework doesn't get opened, the form sits on the counter for three weeks, and the thing they swore they wanted to do hasn't been touched. From the outside it looks like not caring, and it almost never is. Most parents have already tried treating it as laziness by the time they call us, and that doesn't work, because the trouble is in the bit between deciding and starting. There are steps in that bit, and they are teachable. You shrink the first move until it is almost too small to refuse, you decide in advance when and where it happens, and then you check afterward whether it did. Most teenagers have never been shown any of that.
When everything feels like too much. With too much going on at once, a lot of teenagers stop being able to tell which thing to pick up first, so they don't pick up anything at all, and from where you are standing that can look like they just don't care. So we get practical about it. They learn how to identify what's truly important to them, and engage in it at a "good enough" level.
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​The way they talk about themselves. A lot of what teenagers believe about their own ability gets stated as plain fact. I'm bad at math. I'm not a people person. I can't do hard things. Usually it traces back to one rough stretch a few years ago and nobody has looked at it since. So we slow it down and get specific: what do you mean by bad at math, when did you decide that, and what has actually happened since then. Then they pick something small to try that would test it, and they come back the following week with real information instead of an old conclusion. That works better than an adult telling them they're capable, because they are the one who ran the test.
Feeling on the outside of things. Being around people all day and still feeling like they aren't a part of the group is a common thing teens bring up. Most of the time they have never been asked what they actually want a friendship to be like, so we start there. Then we look at what they are currently doing, which is often waiting to be included, and work out one thing they are willing to do differently, like being the person who suggests the plan.
When something big has changed. Maybe they changed schools, or you moved, or something shifted at home, or a sport ended and took a piece of who they were with it. Teenagers tend to carry this quietly, and for a lot longer than we expect. We help them connect to and engage in what's meaningful to them, even during change.
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​Not knowing what comes next. Some of them are weighing college against a trade or an apprenticeship, some want to work for a while first, and plenty have no idea at all, which is fine at sixteen. What helps is that they learn to think about and identify what's truly meaningful to them, so it stops being a negotiation process with you.​
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In all of it we start from what your kid wants rather than from what somebody else thinks is wrong with them.
How Does Teen Coaching Work?
Sessions run weekly for about eight weeks to start.
One-on-one
Your teen meets their coach for fifty minutes each week, in Charleston or online. The session belongs to them, and the pace follows what they are actually working on.
Parent Session
You get a session near the start and another near the end, separate from your teen's. These are about how to support the work without taking it over, which is harder than it sounds.
What a Session looks Like
Opening
A few minutes of something regulating before anything gets discussed, because a teenager arriving from a school day is not ready to think yet.
Check-in
They look at what they said they would do and what actually happened, without anyone being in trouble about it.
Practice
Their coach teaches one skill properly, so your teen can use it rather than just recognize the name of it.
Plan
They choose two or three small things for the coming week and how they will track whether those happened.
Eight weeks is a starting point rather than a limit. Some families continue monthly afterward, and some do a stretch of work, stop, and come back when something changes.
Does My Teen Need Therapy or Coaching?
This is the question many parents arrive with, and we want to answer it directly.
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Counseling is the right call when your teen is struggling with something clinical. Anxiety or depression that is affecting how they function, trauma, self-harm, an eating disorder, or a change in mood and behavior that worries you. That work needs a licensed clinician, and it is a different kind of help with a different training behind it.
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Coaching is the right call when your teen is basically okay and stuck. They are functioning, and they cannot get moving, or cannot say what they want, or keep starting things and stopping. Plenty of teenagers need both at different points.
If you need more than coaching right now. If your teen is talking about wanting to die, hurting themselves, or you are frightened for their safety, that needs attention now.Call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, text HOME to 741741 for the Crisis Text Line, or go to your nearest emergency department. We can also help you find urgent clinical care.
What Is ADAPT Coaching?
ADAPT is a five-stage coaching framework developed by Dr. Maia Gill, a clinical psychologist licensed in South Carolina, and refined over more than fifteen years of applied work. It is the method behind every coaching program at Gnosis Wellness Collective, and it opens with one question, with everything else following from how you answer it
What areas of their life are most important to them right now?
Not what they are supposed to say, and not what they think you want to hear. Most teenagers need a couple of attempts before they answer that honestly, and getting there is part of the work rather than a prerequisite for it.
From there they pick one area to move first, build small specific actions that move it, and check each week on what happened and what got in the way. Your teen finishes with three tools they can keep using: the Aligning Purpose Scale, the Stepping-Stones Map, and the IMOK tracking system.
Who You'd Be Working With
Hillary Boyd
M.A. CMHC, Coach
Hillary Boyd, M.A. in Clinical Counseling and Advanced ADAPT Coach, shares her expertise in applied child development, women's well-being, and integration of diverse healing practices into daily life, with a multicultural population. Hillary accomplishes this by teaching her clients how to become unstuck from barriers in daily living to connect with what one cherishes the most in life. Hillary Boyd, M.A., brings over a decade of experience with specialization in how to set healthy boundaries, defy societal/self expectations to soar, and revive your purpose with science-based skills to move along one's path.
How Do I Bring This Up With My Teenager?
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Most parents worry the conversation will land as evidence that you think something is wrong with them. That worry is well founded, because that is usually how it lands when anything gets introduced as a fix for a problem the teenager has not agreed they have. A few things make it go better.
Start from what they want
Not from what you want for them. If they have ever said they wanted something; to save for something, get better at a sport, stop leaving work until midnight, or get out of a town, that is the opening. Coaching works on their goal, so the connection is their goal.
Say what it is not
It is not tutoring, it is not a consequence, and they are not in trouble. Teenagers usually assume all four, and saying so out loud clears most of the resistance in the first minute. It's a space that's all about them, and directed by them.
Offer them choice
Ask them to sit in on a twenty free minutes and decide afterward. That is a much smaller ask than eight full weeks, and it is an honest one, because they really can say no. Then stop selling it.
Enthusiasm from a parent reliably lowers a teenager's interest. Say it once, leave it with them, and come back to it in a few days.
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"There's someone who helps people figure out what they actually want and how to get there. It's not therapy, and you're not in trouble. Would you get on a twenty minute call with her and then tell me what you think?"
How Much Does Teen Coaching Cost?
Sessions run weekly for about eight weeks to start.
One-on-one
$150/hr
Parent Session
$150/ This is the initial intake session, and another one follows the 8 week session.
Consultation
Free. About twenty minutes, and you are not committing to anything- just learning more.
Coaching is not a medical service, so it does not go through insurance. If your teen needs clinical care, counseling at Gnosis is a separate service and billed differently.
Common Questions
01.
My teen does not want to do this.
That is the most common starting point, and it is not a reason to skip the consultation. Bring them, let them ask their own questions, and let them decide afterward. Coaching that someone is being forced through does not tend produce results.
02.
Can I sit in on sessions?
Not on your teen's sessions, because the privacy is what makes them useful. You get your own sessions instead, near the start and near the end, plus updates on themes and progress along the way.​
03.
Is this therapy?
No. Coaching is non-clinical, there is no diagnosis, and no treatment. We will tell you if that is what your teen needs.
05.
How will I know if it is working?
Your teen completes the Aligning Purpose Scale at the start, and the IMOK system tracks each week what they did and what got in the way so they can identify where they get stuck.
06.
Do you work with the school?
Generally no. We do not contact a school, a counselor, or a coach about your teen on our own.