But how do I actually help my young adult find a mentor??
It's more hands-off than you think.
So you read last week’s issue about how this generation of young adults need a mentor to help them get unstuck. Or if you didn’t…
TL;DR from last week: stuck isn't sick. The thing a rewired, stuck young adult is most starved of is relational nourishment. They need a real, patient mentor who shows up in their actual life and doesn't get scared off when they push back (not another diagnosis, not another round of therapy). I promised I'd walk through how you, as a parent, can actually help them find one, including when you're currently in conflict with them. This is that.
Okay, so now you’ve read last week’s issue. Maybe you nodded along the whole way. I’m sure you were thinking something along the lines of, “A mentor, yessss OF COURSE HAYLEY YOU’RE A GENIUS HOW HAVE I NEVER THOUGHT OF THAT BEFORE??”
Yeaaaa no I know that one was probably pretty obvious to the emotionally intelligent parents reading this. But you probably got to the end and were like, “Cool, thanks for that Hayley, but also like, where exactly do I find one of those for the young adult in my life?”
Don’t worry y’all. I gotchu. Let’s get into the actual steps of how to help your young adult help themselves. The goal is to help them connect the dots on why a mentor might be helpful if they’re stuck right now, and, furthermore, how to find one for themselves.
First, the part that’s going to annoy you
You can’t buy a mentor if your young adult doesn’t see the point of having one. You can’t assign one. You can’t go out, find the perfect mentor, vet them, schedule the first hangout, and install them into your young adult’s life like a software update.
And tbh, thank god.
Since stuck isn’t sick, the fix was never going to be something you could purchase and drop into place. The thing that gets a young adult moving again is the moment they decide to reach for something. Your whole job as a parent is to make reaching feel possible, and then to get out of the way and let them do it.
I know, I know. After potentially years of trying everything, the whole “do less” argument might sound insane. Stay with me here, team.
Why your hands have to come off the wheel
Don’t worry, it’s not a full-on “jesus take the wheel” situation here.
And just to stick with the road/car puns, I want to make a quick detour so we can all make sure my logic makes sense.
When we were stuck as young adults (“we” as in me, and anyone who has ever been in their early 20s and struggling), the last thing on earth we wanted was for our parents to find someone to help us. Not because we didn’t need help (we all did). But every “adult” that might have been brought into our lives at that point (without us initiating it) showed up with a clipboard and potential loyalty to our parents. Like, who even is this person??
A real mentor works because the young adult chose them, or at least feels like they did. The relationship belongs to them. Manufacture it, and you break the one thing that makes it work.
So your hands are off the wheel now, right??? Here’s where they go instead.
The four steps to finding a mentor for your young adult
This is a series of questions and conversations. Don’t expect to do all the steps in one go. In fact, plan for it to be at least three separate convos that, ideally, come up naturally and when you’re one-on-one with your young adult.
1️⃣ Actually ask what they want.
Then, and I say this lovingly, stfu about it.
Sit down and ask what they actually want for their life. Not what you want for them. Not “Heyyyyy sweetie, not to bug you about it again, but have you given any more thought to applying to your cousin’s wife’s law firm’s mailroom??”
Ask what genuinely excites them. What makes them actually feel good about themselves? And not just like dopamine-hit good, but truly proud of themselves.
Most stuck young adults can’t answer this on the spot, and that’s totally fine. You might want to ask them these questions in one convo, then come back to it later after they’ve had time to think about it. Ask them because you’re actually curious, not because you’re expecting an outcome of this convo right away.
If they can’t think of anything after a while, try sharing a story (in an unrelated convo) about how you came to the discovery of loving whatever it is that you’re excited about right now (or at their age).
Remind yourself that you’re not looking for or needing an answer right now. Then, drop it.
The tone here is the entire ballgame. If this turns into an interview (“so what ARE your goals, exactly??”), then you’ve already lost the plot. Be the person who’s curious about them, not the person running a performance review of their life. And if you can’t feel the difference between those two types of convos, trust me, your young adult can.
2️⃣ Tell them about a mentor who mattered to you
Think back to your own early 20s. I’d put money on the fact that there was someone (not a parent, not a peer) who showed you how to do or get something you wanted, something you couldn’t figure out on your own. A boss or manager who actually taught you. A coach. An older friend who took an interest.
Tell that story in a separate conversation. Not as a lesson. Just as a thing that happened to you that you’re glad happened. Something like, “a lot of what I figured out in my twenties came from this one person, and I didn’t even clock how much until way later.”
Then watch whether it lands. You’re just floating the idea that this is a normal, good thing that happens to people, and that it happened to you.
3️⃣ If something piqued their interest, help connect it to a room
This is the only “doing” part, and it’s much lighter than you think.
If your young adult lit up even slightly about something (music, climbing, coding, cars, a cause, a video game they’re weirdly good at, whatever), the move is to help them get into proximity with other people who are into the same thing, or who are living a version of the life they want.
And before you do the whole, “Heyyyy honey, I signed you up for a class” move, DON’T.
Try something more like, “If you’re into that, there’s a whole scene of people who [are into that, do that thing, live that life, etc…insert what they want here].”
Now, here’s where it can get delicate. You’ll have to read the room and know what your young adult responds to, but this is where you can offer, “Want me to figure out how to get in those rooms?” Or, better yet, if you know someone in your professional or personal network who does something even somewhat similar to what they want to do, you can offer to help set up a dinner/activity with the three of you, or offer to just make an intro.
Mentors mostly arrive through serendipity, in rooms full of people doing the thing. Your job is to lower the barrier to the room. That’s it.
4️⃣ And then…leave it
This is the step everyone skips. DON’T BE THAT PERSON.
You ask about their interests with curiosity, you offer your story, you plant the idea, and you offer to help with logistics if (and only if) they want it. Then, you stop.
No follow-up text asking if they ever emailed the climbing gym. No, “so did you think more about what we talked about?” Nothing.
You’ve done your part. They know you can help them, and they know you care. The reaching is theirs.
But what if we’re barely speaking?
“Cool Hayley, EXCEPT for the fact that my young adult and I aren’t exactly on heartfelt-sit-down terms rn.” You read this, and you’re feeling like the whole plan is dead on arrival.
I figured as much, but DON’T EVEN TRIP JESSICA. Tbh, this describes most of the families we work with. I gotchu.
If you’re in active conflict, you do not start with step one. A curious conversation about their dreams, coming from a parent they’re currently at war with, feels like a trap or a setup. Even if you intend for it to be neither. You’ll get a slammed door (literal or otherwise).
When there’s conflict, the order flips. You repair before you recruit.
This takes much longer and more work if you’re doing it without support, but it’s still doable. Honestly, this should be a whole other newsletter series, but in summary:
This doesn’t mean to do a big Apology Summit. It means lowering the temp in small, consistent, no-strings ways. A text that asks nothing and expects nothing back. Genuinely backing off on the thing you keep nagging about. Showing, over a few weeks, that being around you doesn’t automatically come with an agenda attached. You’re rebuilding the basic safety of being in a room with you, before you try to be useful.
And here’s the part that should actually take some weight off you. If you’re deep in conflict, it probably shouldn’t be you who plants the mentor seed at all.
The families we work with at Not Therapy often get further in two weeks than a parent gets in two years. It’s not magic. We just don’t come with twenty years of history, and we’re not the person whose approval the young adult is already exhausted from chasing. Sometimes the most powerful thing a parent can do is recognize they’re too close to the situation to have these convos, and bring in someone who isn’t.
To be clear, that someone doesn’t have to be us. It can be the cool aunt, the family friend, or the old basketball coach. The only requirement is no power-struggle baggage.
Why Not Therapy’s whole model looks exactly like this
Everything I just walked you through is, more or less, what we do for a living. Professionalized, but the same logic underneath.
Parents are the ones who find us (you’re reading this, after all). But we don’t start working with a young adult until they’ve met a potential coach and said out loud that they think the person’s cool, they have something in common, and that this might actually be useful to them. They pick. Nobody gets handed a coach they didn’t choose, and if that buy-in isn’t there, we don’t start.
And that buy-in happens more than you'd expect. Of the 84 teens and young adults who've taken an intro call with one of our coaches, 93% went on to work with us. Turns out, when the person on the other end of the call has actually been where they are, they can feel it in about five minutes. That's what gets the buy-in.
And none of this leaves the parents on the outside. The parents then get their own person, a family manager, whose entire job is to keep them in the loop, help them take their hands off the wheel, and reassure them that their young adult is in good hands. That separation between the coach-and-young-adult relationship and the parent is kind of the whole point. It’s what lets the coaching relationship belong fully to the young adult, which is the only way any of this works (whether it’s us doing it or someone else).
So those four steps up there are the same logic we’d tell you to use if you wanted your young adult to work with us. At the “help them get in the room” step, you just connect them to one of our coaches.
Now, your turn
So that’s the how of it all. It’s smaller than you expected (3-4 convos), but might be harder than it sounds. Because the hard part was never the four steps. It’s the taking-your-hands-off-the-wheel, after potentially years of white-knuckling it.
But that’s also the good news. You don’t have to fix this. You start with one honest convo, tell one true story, help open one door, and then trust your young adult to walk through it. That is a much lighter thing to carry than everything you’ve been carrying.
Disclaimer: I know these four steps are going to collide with real life the second you try them, because every young adult has their own specific flavor of stuck.
So here’s what we’re doing next week:
Reply to this email, or leave a comment below, and tell me your actual situation. The young adult who won’t leave their room. The teenager who’s furious at you. The one who insists they want nothing for their life at all.
I read every single reply, and next week I’m dedicating the entire newsletter to walking through the specific situations you send me.
In the meantime, try the conversation this week. Lead with curiosity, not an agenda.
Looking forward to reading your responses!
Talk next week.
💚 - Hayley