Where Are Tomorrow’s Leaders? The Youth Leadership Crisis Explained

[0:00]  I just met this morning with a guy who's a big supporter of our work here at Crossroads whose Grandparents were immigrants to this country he grew up in um Fall River Massachusetts as a as a a kid without much of anything in his background and over time he got himself through school in a really positive way he had support of uh neighborhood organizations and he went on to college and did some great things there he's built a a business and done really well for him self and he spends his time giving back to communities like ours and sitting with kids like the kids who we work with all the time to say to them um you can be more than your current circumstances might make you believe that you can be and I think that more people need to be delivering that

[0:47]  message to kids all the time I completely agree you know the most valuable asset one of our youth has is an imagination for the future that does not yet exist I often think about some a simple exercise everything that sits around you today Ned that even the cup that you just drank from the desk that you're sitting on the computer that sits in front of you came out of someone's imagination right there was no playbook for these things but someone created the world around you and getting our younger generations to believe in a future that does not yet exist is so powerful and it's an amazing opportunity to have such an impact on the Next Generation Like You Do by being so intentional with your time in helping these young individuals to think bigger all right guys welcome back to a brand

[1:45]  new episode of the heart and hustle podcast today I'm sitting across this digital table with an amazing leader and CEO of Crossroads Youth Development Ned Parsons is joining the show today we're going to talk a little bit about the the mission that is so important in empowering the next generation of great leaders we're going to talk about the challenges faced by the youth today we're talking about Bridging the opportunity Gap cultivating curiosity and resilience in Youth Development and so much more Ned welcome to the show man thank you thanks so much for having you this is going to be a really exciting uh story for us to be able to tell today you know part of why I thought having you on the show was so important was the pivotal role that you're playing in inspiring the Next Generation my father always told me something when I was young he said in order for you to achieve it you first have to believe it

[2:33]  and one of the things I often think about is how pivotal the older or more seasoned generation is in inspiring the Next Generation beneath them to be able to see and think bigger in the world that they're kind of in so Ned I just can't once again thank you enough for coming on the show man um today's gonna be an awesome conversation my pleasure you're speaking my language so I'm eager to have the conversation thanks so n let's let's rewind a little bit and talk about a young version of Ned who were you as a youth did you have great leaders who inspired you to be the person who sits across the table from us or what were you like um that's an interesting question because I think that actually as a youth um while I had plenty of opportunity to observe um strong leaders in my life I don't think I would have pointed to anyone in particular who was a particularly powerful Mentor for me um I was close to my father but I don't

[3:22]  think that I ever saw myself doing the work that he was doing um and so I don't think that I really saw him in that way I saw him as a support I saw him as um my dad and my guide and the man I loved but not necessarily the man who's um uh life path I wanted to necessarily emulate my dad was in sales um I don't think he ever liked it all that much and so it didn't inspire me to want to necessarily do that although I actually did do sales right out of college it was the first thing I did um but it didn't last that long what about your interests what type of things got you charged up when you were a kid because I love hearing the backstory of the man who sits across from me um well for sure as a kid as a as a boy I love sports I was I I played every sport I could play um at all times whenever I could be playing

[4:12]  them um I ended up sort of specializing as a hockey player it was a passion of my fathers that he and I had in common so we um we spent a lot of time with hockey but um I also was raised in a house that believed very strongly in education and the power of Education and um my father for all of his passion about hockey was always very clear with me that uh my life was not likely to be in hockey um it was likely to be in something else and that um my schoolwork and other ways of being engaged in the world were as important as my sports and Athletics were um I was probably more interested in the sports but um As I Grew Older I began to recognize that I loved learning I really loved um School in that way I'm not saying that I was the world's best student in fact I went

[5:01]  through some difficult times and periods of my life when I was one of the world's worst students but um but I I did love learning I did love being in learning environments and it's interesting to see to me uh see for me how as I've grown grown older I continue to find ways to learn because I enjoy that as a part of um existing in this world one of the biggest realizations that I had when it came to my personal development my P and my professional success was I was never a good student Ned I'm talking I got C's and D's I made the Honor Roll the final semester in high school and my mom said why' it take so long and I'm said at least you aren't you glad at least it happened but when I uh I went to college and played Sports and then after I got done with that I had a mentor talk to me and said Keenan you know you put so much

[5:49]  of your energy and time into becoming a professional baseball player now that that chapter is gone you're going to have to apply this competitiveness to something else so what are you going to turn pro in next and I started looking around and I was like okay well I do want to start a business because my father was an entrepreneur he said that's a great idea because guess what the season of Learning and Development is for the rest of your life you're not going to be 34 years old and washed up how have you taken that competitive greatness that you had when you were playing sports and that hunger into the world of learning as you've kind of developed as a person um interesting question I think that what I've come to recognize is that um I get energized and passionate about um serving other people working for the betterment of the experience of other people um and I hope

[6:37]  that doesn't sound overly self-righteous but I I just know that um when I get into a situation like whether I'm I'm teaching a class uh of of high school kids or coaching a team or running a school as I was doing in my last iteration as a as a head of school in the independent school World um my competitive Drive is always how can I make this experience the best experience in the realm in which it operates for these kids um every day that I'm with them um and I obviously can't claim that I always get there but I do find that I'm competitive in that way that I I I don't want to just go in and punch the clock I always want to go in and find a way to make it better um and I can trace that back to uh the competitiveness I

[7:25]  learned in sports and the competitiveness that um still drives me to want to get out and play sports as an adult um so I think that there there's a direct relation between those things from when I was a child to As I Grew Older and and and joined the workforce I'm so interested in our our career paths I had a a CEO on the show her name was Pamela Sanchez and she said often we think our careers are going to be like a ladder but they're actually like a spiral staircase and I think I mentioned this in our previous conversation your experience is as the head of an independent school now you're the CEO of an organization that's investing so much time and energy into the Next Generation why did you choose to do this work now instead of exploring and doing something else um that was a very considered decision on my part so I was in Independent Schools um for over 30 years

[8:15]  as a teacher coach I I worked in boarding schools for a long time I was a dorm parent I moved into Administration as a DEA students and then a DEA faculty before I became a head of school and so um over the course of that time I loved my work in schools I really L the kids I got to work with um and my wife and I often look back on that Journey that we went through we raised our children on boarding school campuses um and we think to ourselves how lucky we were to have had the opportunity to live that life and to have built our family uh in the way in in the places where we were able to do that and then um I got to a point uh a couple of years ago where I realized it was kind of time for something new and um you know just to be frank about it the last several years in school leadership were not easy um they

[9:04]  weren't impossible and we made it through covid uh well in the school where I was where I was uh the head of school um and and also um a lot of the turmoil that surrounded uh George Floyd's murder and what came after that um and those were hard times in schools and uh the hard times continue to resonate in some ways in schools but um for me it gave me time it was a time for me to think to myself um what else can I do to serve the world in a larger way than I've been able to do even in the years that I've been working in these schools um so I actually took uh some time off I didn't necessarily intend to take a year off but I did take a year off um to think about where I was going what I wanted to do you know my age and

[9:53]  and sort of thinking about like how much time do I have left to kind of impact the world in a larger way and at that point I made the determination that I was ready to step away from my work in schools as much as I loved it and apply what I knew of leadership and what I knew of Education to see if I could impact the lives of young people in a broader way in some other context and so I started looking at nonprofits um I'm I was living in Boston um Boston is uh r with nonprofits there's there there's a lot of opportunity to serve kids and a lot of and families and a lot of different ways in Boston and so I began um exploring those opportunities and options and it took some time um and I feel like I'm incredibly lucky to have

[10:40]  found the opportunity that I found because it did give me the chance to to bring um the skills that I developed as a school leader into an environment that needed those skills specifically fundraising um strategic planning um campus Master planning uh uh program development for um for bringing kids into the Adult World um I could bring all of those skills and um and my leadership of capabilities into an environment that needs it and that impacts in our case um over 700 kids a year so all of a sudden I feel like I'm able to really have a larger impact in a broader way um which is really um empowering and um and energizing for me you have a direct impact on the next

[11:29]  generation which is so beautiful to think about you know I my mom always said something to me every day when I would leave her school she said Keenan be a leader not a follower and it seems like the world that we live in today social media everything else copy and paste Trends a lot of people are more often to be a follower today than to be a leader why do you think we have such a shortage of leaders in our communities today especially at a young level I think that part of it is a lack of imagination for understanding what leadership is and what a leader looks like um I think kids will have the tendency to understand leadership in a particular way um and it has a tendency to be pretty stereotypical in terms of what a leader looks like they will have a tendency to think of um frankly a male at the front of a room speaking in a

[12:19]  loud voice commanding people and telling them what to do they sort of think of the general as a leader right um and while that is a form of leadership um one of the things that I've worked with kids on throughout the time my my time in schools and that we work with them on here at Crossroads is an understanding of the vast array of leadership um skills and approaches that are available to kids as they grow older um and begin to understand that they actually can be leaders in their communities even at a young age and um and to develop the skills around um how to do that and and how to bring them themselves into the world in that way is something that we work at every day with the kids that we're in contact with so I think that

[13:06]  for younger kids um they don't really imagine themselves in that leadership role because they imagine that leaders are born and not made and we have to change that Paradigm for them and help them understand that authentic leadership is is made and developed over time as we grow and experience more things and um and understand how to bring our authentic selves into a space and uh and uh exercise that self in a way that encourages others to follow us that's leadership um and it doesn't require you to be an extrovert in fact I used to always talk to kids about leadership by starting by saying I'm an introvert and I have always been an introvert um and yet I find myself in

[13:54]  leadership roles and have many times in my life throughout the course of my life from kid from from my childhood all the way through to my adulthood and I've had to ask myself a lot of questions about how as an introvert I continually found myself in those situations um but I think it's because I could imagine um making a difference in the rooms that I was in um and I think that the way I was raised enabled me to do that and I'm not sure everybody um feels that empowerment as they grow older it's a big it's a journey that we go through and becoming a leader and you mentioned something there authenticity which I think is really important there was a a science experiment that was run by these scientists they brought 40 people into the room right and they started asking them to demonstrate different types of behaviors being funny being um you know

[14:44]  having sorrow being curious XYZ and they were measuring the levels of connection between these two people now you would think that when somebody's funny right other people light up and so you get the biggest sense of connection but what they found in this experience was actually or the experiment was was that the people who were being authentic with one another got the biggest readings on how they were measuring the interaction which I thought was really interesting but you can obviously tell today when somebody is authentic and shows up at themselves that they have a confidence that is really tough to fake and I feel like that's a really beautiful form of leadership I couldn't agree more and I think that um if you were to present that to most young people say high school age students they would recognize it and understand it though they may not totally have confidence to be able to do it I think that um I've seen it happen

[15:33]  over and over again when um leaders in a high school setting emerge from a crowd of kids who you might not necessarily have immediately penned or pinned as the leader in the group but that something about the way they bring their authentic selves draws people to them and keeps them there um and I do think kids respond to that really well they respond to the child who has the confidence to be him or herself in a space full of other kids um unabashedly and unapologetically um and that they'll follow that that student as a leader um regardless of whether that person is loud boisterous funny um or any of the things that they might necessarily name as leadership characteristics they will

[16:22]  just find themselves drawn to somebody who's real and who um is caring and empathetic and thoughtful and um unafraid of being all those things in a setting where you know adolescence aren't always comfortable with those kinds of emotions are you ever concerned about the prevailance of the stereotypical image right of leadership masculinity and everything else that gets put in front of our youth today because often like you said there are images that are being portrayed on social media being loud and being Brash and being mean and being strict like all these things are leadership but often the opposite couldn't be more true right and I am worried about it for a variety of reasons number one it precludes girls from the possibility of seeing

[17:08]  themselves as Leaders um in many cases and that is uh worrisome to all of us I think that you know we work here Crossroads with boys and girls and and see all of them as as leaders and teach them all to see themselves in that way and I think when you have a definition of leadership that um by its um uh by its the parameters that are set for it um almost automatically excludes introverts and um and in many cases girls um and and those who may see the world in a different way um you you really have taken them out of the equation in a way that um is both unfair and also um limits what that space is going to be able to be because those

[17:56]  kids voices won't be in the mix um and unfortunately you know kids as they grow they can begin to believe the narrative that they're hearing about themselves from around them and I think it's really um worrisome and and uh and hard for for me to think about um kids who get to a place where they just decide that um what they what they've sort of come to understand about themselves from external sources is their reality um and that's just the way it's going to be we know that um kids can be empowered and we want to empower them all the time to make the narrative about their future to to build that bigger vision for what they can be um and to go out into the world and and

[18:43]  execute on that Vision so um yeah I do worry about that all the time and I worry about it too because I think that particular narrative about what leadership is is so narrow um and so confining um that I I would want to see it um eliminate as quickly as possible I mean even the time in which we're recording this right it is October 30th 2024 and a couple days regardless of your political affiliation right we have kamla Harris a woman who's standing on the global stage of being the next potential leader of the United States do you think about how something as small as that depend independent of what you think about you know the different political parties going to inspire the next generation of girls to think about how they can lead something as powerful as the United States oh there's no

[19:30]  there's no question that that would be uh momentous in that regard and um in so many other ways too um you know as a a biracial woman who is um uh really extraordinary in her in her many ways that she is as a leader um and uh as a as an effective um uh voice for uh you know kind of moving the country forward I think I guess I'm I'm uh putting my politics out there which I didn't really want to do on this podcast but um I I think that that's an extraordinary message for girls as they look out at the world to understand that and I think it's it's been it's been infective effective um in the way that kamla Harris has continually told her story from the perspective of herself as a

[20:17]  little girl um being raised by her mother and close to her sister and um and thinking about how she moved from you know middle class um girl uh with a biracial background um living in a relatively urban area and how she moved herself into the position that she's in right now you know one of the things we're trying to do with kids all the time here is to get them to reframe the future that they see for themselves it's it's common for kids to understand the future in the context of their present and we're trying to get them to understand that actually um the the story of your future is not limited to the reality of your present right now you are actually the author of something that's bigger than where you are

[21:04]  currently um and that's true for all kids in all situations but um so many kids feel limited by where they are currently sitting and I would want them to be able to look out at the world and see how many times um there are people in front of them who are in leadership roles making a difference in the world who didn't start off in in a in a way that would necessarily um uh predict where they are right now I just met this morning with a guy who's a big supporter of our work here at Crossroads his grandparents were immigrants to this country he grew up in um Fall River Massachusetts as a as a a kid without much of anything in his background and over time he got himself through school in a really positive way he had support of uh neighborhood organizations and he

[21:53]  went on to college and did some great things there he's built a a business and done really well for himself and he spends his time giving back to communities like ours and sitting with kids like the kids who we work with all the time to say to them um you can be more than your current circumstances might make you believe that you can be and I think that more people need to be delivering that message to kids all the time I completely agree you know the most valuable asset one of our youth has is an imagination for the future that does not yet exist I often think about some a simple exercise everything that sits around you today Ned that even the cup that you just drank from the desk that you're sitting on the computer that sits in front of you came out of someone's imagination right there was no

[22:40]  playbook for these things but someone created the world around you and getting our younger generations to believe in a future that does not yet exist is so powerful and it's an amazing opportunity to have such an impact on the Next Generation Like You Do by being so intentional with your time in helping these young individuals to think bigger but here's how here's a tactical question when you have someone who comes through your guys's program and doesn't believe that they have a future that's worth pursuing how do you change that mindset and get them to think about that bigger Vision uh great question because that's our work right um is in a nutshell um we work with about 700 kids a year from grades second from second grade through high school and then we actually stay with them for a couple years after they graduate from high school in a couple of different ways and um a couple of different programs so we

[23:29]  second through eighth graders in um overnight summer camps we have old sort of an old-fashioned summer camp where kids learn to swim and ride bikes and do archery and um and uh all sorts of other opportunities to be outdoors um as much as possible playing in the dirt building forts um working on the high ropes course climbing walls all sorts of ways for them to be building confidence and seeing themselves grow from what they are when they arrive to what they can be by the time they leave just um 12 or 24 days later depending on how many sessions they're with us um we also run a leadership development program for older kids from 8th grade through high school which is um also camp-based they start with us in summer

[24:16]  camp programs but then the challenges that those kids face increasingly um grow over time when they're with us um in their first three years they're doing um camp-based programming that includes TRS where they go out and do camping and and long hikes um culminating in their third year with a 9-day hike in the Tetons um where uh working with the national outdoor Leadership School they learn to um uh navigate by Compass make their own meals sleep under the stars um it's a real challenge for them that they have to overcome and very far out of their comfort zone the kids we work with are coming out of um inner city Boston and Brockton um these are kids who are 7 % or over 70% of these kids qualify for free and reduced lunch 95% of them

[25:04]  identify as bipo um these are kids who are coming out of neighborhoods um that don't have the resources for them to be able to participate typically in um extracurricular um after school and summer programming we know that those programs have a major impact in helping kids to develop confidence strength and their social and emotional um skill level in addition to their uh ability to connect and be a part of communities that support them as they learn and grow so one thing we do in our programming to um get to your question is We Begin everything we do with all kids we work with with a groundbased understanding that until kids are in a place where they know they belong where they know

[25:52]  they are known cared for respected and challenged they can't really do much else and so the first thing we do with them when they come in is make sure that they understand those things about where they now are they come into a a community that is um steeped in the knowledge of how to help them with their social and emotional learning and how we help them to make friendships you know the younger kids were working like how do you be a good friend we work with them in team-based activities um we work with them on problem solving um communication the kinds of what what are some sometimes referred to in leadership circles as soft skills to help them be able to make connection first once they're connected and they feel confident that they can really be them

[26:39]  their authentic selves in an environment that supports them cares for them and respects them for that authentic self now they can start to take risks and try things they've never tried before let me give you one quick example um one of the things we focus on here in the in the camp setting is learning how to swim many of our kids coming out of inner city Boston don't know how to swim many of the kids who show up here actually um uh show a an abject Terror of of bodies of water um because they've been taught as they grw up to stay away from water because the parents never learn how to swim and they're terrified of what could happen if their kid gets near water so we go from there with kids to getting them through the Red Cross swim levels to level seven and many of them become

[27:28]  Junior Lifeguards by the time they're done with us and we work them through that program a little bit at a time building their confidence in the pool in a life jacket floating in a pool with a lifeguard without a life jacket eventually getting to a place where they earn what they refer to as their deep end tag as a band around their wrist that says they're allowed to swim in the deep end so we're able to say to them look where you were look how hard you worked look where you are now so that even young kids can see the connection between um where they began what they put in and where they ended up um and they can take that lesson into any challenge for the rest of their lives understanding that um where you are doesn't necessarily mean you're going to

[28:16]  be there uh you know down the road you where you end up is a function of how you approach where you are how you take in the teaching that you're being given how hard you work at the skill skills you're being taught then how you apply those skills when the challenge shows up so I think that's what we do with kids in a really really positive way and the other thing we do with kids is we exercise patience with them I watch our counselors on our campsite at times um there'll be one kid for example um sitting off to the side and I say to the counselor what's going on over here quietly and the councelor will say she's not ready yet but when she's ready she'll join and and I've taken that wisdom from young people who work with these kids all the time and and backed away and I've watched and it happens

[29:04]  right um understanding that not every kid is ready for every challenge immediately in the moment lots of times um for example on our high ropes course it's all a kid can do to put on the harness right and they'll watch every other kid go through the high ropes with the harness on and they won't go near it on day one but by day 12 they're up on the high wire walking across it in the harness being cheered on by the kids down below who are screaming at them for the accomplishment that they've just that they've just um uh made as they got themselves up on that high rope it took them 12 days to get there but by exercising that patience with them and cheering them on when they get there we demonstrate to them their strength and their ability and they now can believe in themselves and say maybe I do have

[29:53]  the ability to do things I didn't think I could do when I go out into the world Ned you got me jacked up right now man just like hearing the impact that you're having on this next generation is incredible and if I had a son or a daughter I'm definitely sending them uh through Crossroads so they can learn some of these important lessons man so some someday in the future brother um you know so you said something that was really interesting at the end of one of those values you said and challenge them right I feel like we live in a world where often we think that nerfing the world of all challenges and all you know all types of adversity that will'll face is the right way to build a child why is challenging them something that you guys say that you're going to do because the only way for a child to truly believe in themselves is for them

[30:40]  to prove themselves to themselves so you can tell a child all you want that they can be anything they want to be in this world um but they can't believe that if they can't see themselves doing um say I don't know surgery right you can say to a child when they're young if you want to be a doctor you dream it you go out you can be a doctor but if you can't teach that child the science they're not going to be able to be a doctor right so we take these young kids and we say to them you can do it but that's not enough you have to say to these kids you can do it and I'm going to teach I'm going to show you how I'm not going to put you in the deep end yet because you're not ready for it but you will be so so you

[31:28]  do your work I'll do my work and together we're going to overcome this challenge that's in front of you you'll see and I know it can happen because I've seen it happen for so many kids exactly like you so stay with me we're going to get you there let's go to step one right you just break it down break it down and break it down for them um and as you break it down and they begin to overcome those challenges a little bit at a time the more you're able to say to them okay good you got it let's go to the next challenge the more they're going to see that their growth is directly related to how hard they can push themselves and eventually as they get older and understand it this way to how willing they are to take the risk to put them I don't want I don't want to

[32:16]  say put themselves at risk but to take a risk and to fail sometimes and that they'll begin to recognize that failure isn't death failure is learning and that failure is a way that you begin to understand how to do it right right because once you learn how to do it wrong you know you just learn something and you can get up from that and do it again so um it's really important to challenge kids the other thing that challenging kids does is it demonstrates to them your respect for them you're saying to them um you're capable I know you're capable and you can do this thing you don't have the skill to do it yet because no one's taught you the skill yet but you can get there and when they they feel that respect from you um it's amazing what kids will do and try when they know that they're in a safe space

[33:07]  where they can take that risk and they're going to be supported even if they don't get it right you know um once they try and fail in front of you and you're able to say okay that didn't work tell me what didn't work Why didn't it work what do you understand about what needs to be done differently great now let's try it again show me that you can do it at that point you got them they're going to be able to then step into the next challenge and not worry about whether it works right away or not but think differently about how to break it down and go forward challenging kids teaches them that you respect them and teaches them that their limitations their self-imposed limitations are too narrow and that um they have to keep breaking through those self-imposed limitations by trying I am deep in my feelings right now because I had an

[33:55]  experience of impacting a younger person a couple weeks ago my sister's stepson his name is uh I'm going to call him levy on this show he is um 11 years old and he's playing baseball for the first time first season he wants to be a catcher right and we went through the process of making sure that he knew what to do behind the plate and what we found was he was scared of the baseball so he started throwing some little soft balls at him he was like pulling away from it now what we did what together was show him that the ball first of all didn't hurt and by the time we were done instead of throwing little softballs into the ground and having him Block in he's literally taking full baseballs off the chest and seeing how excited he was because he pushed beyond that limiting belief made me smile for days and

[34:43]  literally I still get chills when I think about it you have to feel so jacked up Ned just seeing the impact that you're having on this next Generation day by day I mean it could have I'm imagining that it's incredibly addicting to do the work that you do there's no question about it um when we run Camp during the summer here um you know my my role here as president CEO is not to run camp on a daily basis um but I'm out there on Camp every day in some way shape or form um so I can see and watch and get to know some kids and really get to know the counselors well to I really love learning um their work with with these young people who are working with the youngest kids that we're working with we have got kids from all over the world here um working with these kids um but it is addicting to see this happened I'll tell you a really quick story of my first um day here I I

[35:32]  only started this job six months ago so um you know I'm still learning myself um but I've worked with kids for a long long time right 35 years working with children um I know education but I don't know the camp world as well so my first day here I walked out on Camp and part of our thing our um our Focus here is getting kids into the natural world um these are kids who are growing up in urban environments we really want them to experience the the pond and the pools and the trees and the you know the the hills around us and whatnot and so as I walk out um towards uh where some kids are engaged in an activity I noticed one boy in our youngest group he's a second grader and I I can see he's off by himself and he's digging in the dirt off off to the side so I walk over to him and I say hi what what are we doing and

[36:22]  he looks up at me with his bright eyes and he says to me I'm looking at nature and I thought okay okay um you know show me what you're looking at and he he pointed to a a holly bush and he said that's a scary plan it's really sharp and I said yeah Holly is sharp we started talking about it a little bit and you know then he right away was showing me something else and then there's a bug over here look at the bug look at the bug he was out of his mind excited about the natural world that he was discovering on his own and I thought to myself okay we're doing something here like this kid is opening up in a way that he doesn't even understand at this point he's in second grade right and right at that moment he got called by his counselor to come over to the group because they were heading off to their next activity and so he just turned and started to run off with the with the group right and about four

[37:10]  steps away from me he stopped and he turned around and he came back to me and he put his hand on my arm and he grabbed onto my forearm he looked me right in the eye and he said will you be here when I get back and I thought to myself okay this is this is what we're doing right the combination of this boy just discovering discovering discovering and then wanting relationship and wanting to make sure that um that a male in his life who he just met was going to be here when he returned um it was was so arresting for me that was the time when I realized okay we're doing something here we're doing something real here and I got to tell you he I said to him Absolutely I'll be right here when you get back he turned around and ran off with this group I didn't see him for the rest of the day and when I ran into at dinner I went over to him and said hey

[37:57]  how was the rest of your day and he looked at me like who are you because he's in second grade and he had no idea who he was talking to in that moment but over time I developed a relationship with that that little boy and I watched him grow and it turned out he had certain challenges that he was facing down and he grew in exponential ways right in front of us and it was it was great to see I had an amazing CEO a younger guy named or Kevin Irvin who was on the podcast he uh grew up in the Bronx and he was incredibly gifted went to an amazing um Charter School became a musician he now keyboards with Imagine Dragons and it travels the nation right one thing he said was if I could have something on my Tombstone it would say born in Brooklyn raised at Camp because he went to a camp very similar to

[38:46]  Crossroads and experienced life for the first time do you really think about the experience of being out in nature and seeing that second grader looking at nature with wide eyes and so much excitement as maybe the antidote to a lot of the mental health challenges that the youth are facing today by spending so much time net on these devices y I see it absolutely um I don't know if you've ever um come across the book um last child in the woods um uh the author's last name is Lou L UV um it's a book I read maybe 10 or 12 years ago that really changed a lot of my thinking about this issue and how I think about the impact of the natural world really forced me to think about the the the role of the natural world in my own life I grew up in a Suburban environment but

[39:33]  as I look back at my life I real excuse me I realized that um we we were outside all the time and I was always climbing trees and digging in the dirt and playing at the lake and riding my bike and just it was a constant um need to be outdoors and as I got older as an adult I am very very closely tied to being outside in the natural world um and so uh the hypothesis in this book is um something the author refers to as nature deficit disorder and what he says is that at that time this was before the current um Mental Health crisis for adolescence was sort of Pop you know made made known to us all this is maybe 2010 or so 2009 but at that time he was saying you

[40:20]  know that it's his hypothesis that the actual physical um separation that kids exper experience from the natural world literally um the not playing in the mud building uh mud pies and climbing trees and building forts um has created in The Souls of children a void that they're struggling to figure out how to fill and I came to believe that this is really true um and there's a lot of a lot of work out there that's been done on the power of restorative the restorative power of being in the natural world and how many kids who are struggling with um uh mental health disorders and U mental health um challenges get out into the natural world and they find that um a lot of their challenges are are

[41:09]  dissipated particularly anxiety and depression um and I can tell you that my a lot of my staff here at the camp are teachers in the public schools here in the Boston area and they know a lot of our kids at during the school year and they'll tell me that there are some kids here at our camp during the summertime Who present in school settings with IEPs um and um medications for a a series of things that they're struggling with um and Who present in ways that need to be managed while they're in school um in in active Ways by school Personnel they come to camp and none of these things are apparent to any of us in the course of their time here um in

[41:57]  particular we had one young young boy in one of our youngest groups who was um who was uh on the autism spectrum in school and was non-verbal in school who's absolutely verbal in his time at Camp here wow and although I could see signs from time to time of behaviors that I think I'm not a qualified um uh clinician to be able to say this um in a clinical way but he certainly exhibited behaviors at times that could easily appear to be um uh on the autism spectrum um but they were mostly things like separating himself from a from the group at times to kind of catch him his breath and and gather himself but overall this is a boy who is singing and

[42:46]  dancing with the group and standing on his chair at lunch and and and dancing to music that's playing in the background um friends with kids in this cabin um very much connected and you know the the people who know him from school are looking at me with wide-eyed saying you can't understand how different this is from what we see in the school setting every day with this very same child so I'm very much a believer that the natural world and human Connection in spaces where you get to be who you are without any kind of constraints on you um are the antidotes to the feelings that a lot of kids are struggling with right now yeah man we we live in a world where where we're being fed a narrative where hyper connection through digital devices is the answer to all this isolation and loneliness that

[43:34]  we're feeling yet we continue to take more bites of that poison apple that leave us feeling more alone I had an amazing um had an amazing leader on the podcast before who uh is the president of the Massachusetts uh applied behavioral analysis board so helping with children that have disabilities like autism ADHD and things like that he said it's really interesting to me that we are diagnosing children with attention deficit disorder ERS consistently but yet when you put them in a different setting that's outside of the classroom that is four White Walls these kids are more engaged and more attentive than ever so do we have a disability or do we just have an engagement and an interest problem I thought that was really interesting to me but you just kind of hit it on it as well yeah I think that that's something that that Educators have been struggling with for a long time and I and and it's true that um in the world of Education

[44:23]  the the the um the prevalence of you know ADHD and and diagnosis and medications for those things has really um skyrocketed in in recent years and you know which came first the chicken or the egg it I think people are really wrestling with um where this is coming from whether we just didn't know what it was before and didn't diagnose it or whether we are too quick to think about um ways of of sort of diagnosing those things without looking for other ways of approaching um what's happening for kids in school I had the privilege of interviewing a um a neuroscience or I'm sorry a brain surgeon with a neuro PhD in neuroscience and I asked him one question I said what is the most important skill set an individual can develop across their

[45:09]  lifetime and he said emotional regulation and we got down this tangent because there's a really good book out there the name of the Auer escapes me but it's called indestructible and what he talks about in this entire book is how he's worked with companies like Facebook and Instagram and all these other people to help those platforms for as much engagement as possible and he said one of the things I didn't recognize that I start to observe now is whenever somebody is in an uncomfortable situation specifically mid to level aged adults and children whenever they find themselves in a feeling of being uncomfortable or a little awkward or a little anxious the behavior that we've anchored in our brain is pulling out our device Ned everybody escapes to their device and if you've anchored this Behavior over hundreds of thousands or millions of times of your lifetime it's

[45:57]  really easy to understand how we don't have emotional regulation because every time we feel one of those flareups inside of us we run away to being alone together in this device and in this digital world that doesn't exist it's really interesting to me well one of the things that we do here is we remove that um device uh Temptation from kids so on Camp there are no phones and there are no electronic devices and I love this um we just we just push the kids to be outside and to be together um to sit around the campfire to um to play uh you know team oriented Sports to um ride bikes and learn how to swim and all these things that um are are so much more enriching in many ways uh and you know a lot of our kids as they get older will really miss their devices and you can see what happens the minute we hand

[46:44]  them back to them as they get on the bus to go home they all go silent the bus ride home is silent right because all of a sudden they're catching up they're back on their devices um but um but I I love that when I was in uh working in my last school we took um devices away not devices sorry we took phones away from all of our middle school kids every day and they would come to a place by the end of their middle school years where they would thank us for that and they would talk about how much better their days were not being on the phone all day long there's a major university um one of which is equivalent to the ivy league here in the United States over in the UK where members of parliament and Royal family members go to and I was listening to this podcast the other day and the Headmaster was talking about one of the

[47:32]  things that he does that other universities would never even consider he said as soon as these students I don't care how affluent how well-connected or resourced your family is when you get on campus here as a freshman we take out your sim card of your smartphone and we put it in to a flip phone that doesn't have access to the internet and doesn't have access to social media why because we realize the Magic in this experience of higher education here is you actually being present enough to start ideas and have conversations with your classmates now parents threw a fit when he first started doing this but the results on the other side of it have been insane because people are more attentive they're more focused they're less distracted and they're coming up with beautiful great ideas that they're implementing in the real world that affect everybody when they're not dealing with the element of distraction man right right so cool well I wish I

[48:21]  wish all the universities luck in making that happen maybe after your tenure at Crossroads we can have you be the head of Education in the United States and change our country man which would be absolutely amazing net so one of the traditions we have here on the podcast net as we kind of put the wheels down is our previous guest wants to ask you a blind question okay now when it comes to Leading when it's most difficult what conversation do you have to help yourself stay steadfast like the leader you want to be that's a great question um and it calls to mind the many times when um crisis arrives which it always does or what I should say which it never does at a convenient time um and the Instinct as leader is to want to react immediately to it I think the conversation if I

[49:10]  understand the question right the conversation I have is um comes from a mentor of mine who I worked with When I Was Dina students who used to always um stop the conversation to say what problem are we trying to solve um because more often than not um the surrounding Buzz around a a a thing that shows up on your desk one day um is louder than the thing at the center of it itself and it's easy to react to what's loudest when sometimes what is in the middle of it is what you need to actually be trying to solve for um and that has been a learning curve for me I I I literally would watch him do this

[49:57]  and be amazed at how well he could parse out what the actual issue was that we were talking about um when I was young younger at this work um as a Dena students um there is just so much noise around it I was reacting too much to the noise so the conversation I have in my head is what are you trying to solve um and how do you best impact uh the situation um for everybody involved um by solving the right problem a beautiful place for us to put a bow on this episode Ned I just can't thank you enough man for being the true representation of heart and hustle and I can't thank you enough for everybody who's tuning in watching and listening today for coming on the show thank you so much thank you so much I appreciate it and uh I wish you the best and that's a wrap guys we'll catch you the next one