Advice for My Teenage Self
If I could go back and give my teenage self advice, what would I say?
As a person-centered coach, I hold strongly that each of my clients has the right to and capacity for self-direction. They know themselves best and, with the right prompting, are often their own wisest guide.
Person-centered coaches explore what advice a client might have for themselves by asking what advice they’d give someone else. It’s a way to tap into whatever wisdom they’ve accumulated, taking a roundabout path to gain insights about their challenges and next steps. Though I’ve asked this question often, it’s been years since I’ve answered it for myself.
What was I like as a teenager?
To understand the advice, I think it would be helpful to have some context about my teenage self, who was a direct result of my experiences as a little boy.
When I was six, my mom and I left our lives in Mexico City and moved in with my step-dad in California. Two years later, I was hit by a car and was left with two broken legs in a full-body cast.
When the cast came off, I was an overweight and socially awkward third grader. My leg muscles had atrophied, and I spent most of the third grade learning how to walk again. My return to school was jarring. After months of quiet homeschooling, I could barely hear myself think in a third-grade classroom full of loud, happy kids.
Then, my mom and I moved to Mexico City for a year. I was enrolled in a private K-12 school for the Mexico City elite because my mom got a job teaching there. I was still clumsy, socially awkward, and overweight. My new classmates and I had little in common, and I quickly became the kid everyone beat up and picked on when the teacher left the classroom.
For years, I lacked the verbal tools (English was my second language), social skills, and physical strength to defend myself. I spent my early teens observing my classmates, running experiments to determine what behaviors, clothes, hair styles, and slang earned acceptance. Through trial and error, I learned how to make friends and stand up to bullies.
To the people around me, fifteen-year-old Pancho might have looked like a well-adjusted kid with good grades and lots of friends. Internally, I struggled every day to feel accepted, worthy of friendship, and proud of who I was. And that’s the dynamic I carried into college – externally put together, and internally racked with self-doubt and a fear of being ostracized.
With that context in mind, here is the advice I would give my teenage self.
These are the good old days
It might not feel like much as you’re going through your day-to-day, working through the unending stream of problems and challenges of life, but these are the good old days.
When you’re no longer in high school and find you can never go back to relive that part of your life, you’ll look back on the fun you’re having with so much gratitude.
Remember when you finally learned how to release the clutch without stalling a stickshift? Or the first time you kissed a girl up against a locker? The summer weekends spent driving quads and playing video games at your friend’s ranch. Those were the good old days.
*Note: Even if you’re no longer a teenager, you may be living the good old days right now.
Instead of working to fit in, learn to be comfortable being you
It’s ok to be weird.
As a matter of fact, you can’t help but be weird. We’re all weird, and each of us has the choice to lean into our own unique flavor of weird.
If you feel the need to be a chameleon or hide, it’s an opportunity to learn more about yourself: what are you trying to mask or hide? Why? Leaning into our own idiosyncrasies and random interests requires that we identify and understand our impulses to conform. What do you believe others will reject you for?
In my experience, the key to being well-liked isn’t fitting in with other people. Some of the most interesting people we meet are the ones who are new, different, and exciting. Maybe they’re from somewhere we’ve never heard of, or they have a refreshingly open, gregarious personality in an environment of formal, reserved individuals. Maybe they’ve devoted their life to a job we didn’t even know existed (see: Ologies Podcast). We all love to meet someone with a unique life and personality.
You’re still exploring who you want to be as a teen, and have no idea who you want to be as a full-fledged adult. Even in a period of unknowns and experimentation, you can still learn to be comfortable in yourself. Recognize what a privilege and gift it is to be you, live fully into each experience, and approach each day with an open heart.
It’s not bad to be alone
Being alone is not the same as being lonely, and just because you’ve chosen to do something by yourself for now, it doesn’t mean you’ll be alone forever. For a kid whose greatest fear was not being accepted by his peers, this would have made sense intellectually, but it would have been challenging to internalize emotionally.
I needed to make two major shifts before I fully internalized this advice:
I had to conceptualize that doing things by myself could be a way to make a statement of non-conformity. By doing things differently, I showed people who were all doing the same thing that they had options, that they could choose something else for themselves.
Though friends and relationships are fundamental to our joy and health, your relationships do not validate who you are. Put differently, being popular doesn’t make you a good person.
Choose yourself over trends
I got in massive fights with my mom because the pants she bought for me weren’t baggy enough. I fought for spiked hair and bleached tips. I genuinely thought Hoobastank was a really good band.
I look back on all of the above with a small degree of embarrassment and a lot of sympathy for an easily influenced younger Pancho.
On the other hand, there are the things I was internally propelled to do, even if nobody else was doing them. They are the parts of my teenage years I’m most nostalgic about.
One summer, I became a hermit and read The Lord of the Rings trilogy basically non-stop. Some of my coolest friends today are people who get my obscure LOTR references.
Unable to run, I started riding my $200 Huffy from ToysRUs on gravel roads across the street from my house. It was the spark that lit the fire of outdoor adventure for the rest of my life.
I figured out how to climb onto the roof of our house to watch the sunset after dinner, waving down to our neighbors as they walked by on the sidewalk. Saying hi to strangers on the sidewalk is still one of my favorite things to do today.
These memories were acts of self-expression, of just doing what I wanted to do, even if no one else was. They are the memories I hold with joy and pride, and they’ve allowed me to lean into my individuality in adulthood.
Your future self will thank you for taking your next step carefully
One of the most common regrets I hear from the people I coach is that they didn’t carefully consider the path they took through life. Now, they feel stuck in a life (or at least a job) they don’t like and wouldn’t choose for themselves.
Most often, people find themselves in this position because they haven’t taken the time to consider what they want. Instead, they’ve taken the path of least resistance, saying yes to whatever job happened to fall into their lap along the way. Many of us make other vital decisions in the same way, like choosing who we want to marry, where we want to live, and what we think will make us happy (it’s not a bigger TV).
If we don’t consciously choose the direction we want to take, we’ll likely end up on someone else’s path, influenced by our parents, friends, and culture to choose what they think is best for us instead of what we think is best for ourselves.
Without hindsight, it’s difficult to know which steps will have the greatest impact on the rest of our lives, so it’s wise to take them carefully.
Your prefrontal cortex is still developing, and testosterone is one hell of a drug
First, listen to David Foster Wallace’s This Is Water commencement speech. As a teenage boy, the water you swim in, the thing that is “so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves” is twofold: your brain has not fully developed, and your testosterone. is. raging.
It’s impossible to step outside of your 17-year-old experience to see yourself through my 37-year-old eyes. The goal here is not to act as if your brain were fully developed or your testosterone had leveled out. It’s to understand how these two things influence your thoughts, emotions, and actions.
You are going to be more willing to take more social, physical, and legal risks than the average person. Taking on risk can pay off, but it can also lead to consequences you don’t envision.
Heightened testosterone makes you more willing to see others’ behavior as a challenge or an affront. That’s not always the case. Notice when you make assumptions about other people’s intentions and what’s objectively happening when you feel offended or challenged.
At this point in your life, your emotions have more of a directive role in your decision-making and thought processes. Look for opportunities to learn more about your emotions, especially from an evolutionary biology perspective. The book Why Buddhism is True is a good place to start.
Friendships are both fragile and resilient
If you don’t tend to them, even the closest friendships can fade away like a wisp lost over the arc of one’s life. First, you don’t talk for a week. A week becomes a month, and then years, and one day you realize the person who was your best friend is a stranger with kids you’ve never met living in a house you’ve never visited.
It’s impossible to hold onto everyone, but it’s also possible to lose people you never thought you would. All it takes is thinking you don’t need to check in today because you can do it tomorrow. This is the fragility of friendships.
On the other hand, friendships are resilient so long as you continue to forgive each other and show up in the friendship. David Whyte’s piece “Friendship” articulates this well.
A friend knows our difficulties and shadows, and remains in sight, a companion to our vulnerabilities more than our triumphs, when we are under the strange illusion we do not need them. An undercurrent of real friendship is a blessing exactly because its elemental form is rediscovered again and again through understanding and mercy. All friendships of any length are based on a continued, mutual forgiveness. Without tolerance and mercy all friendships die.
In the course of the years, a close friendship will always reveal the shadow in the other as much as ourselves; to remain friends we must know the other and their difficulties, and even their sins, and encourage the best in them, not through critique but through addressing the better part of them, the leading creative edge of their incarnation, thus subtly discouraging what makes them smaller, less generous, less of themselves.
- exerpt from Friendship, from Consolations by David Whyte
Know your core values
You are driven by a series of core beliefs and values, some of which won’t change throughout your life. For example:
You value ideas and conceptual frameworks as ends in themselves.
You love to explore: what it means to be you, the mountains, and other people’s ways of thinking. The sooner you recognize this is important, the sooner you’ll start prioritizing exploration for its own sake.
Hacks and shortcuts lead to less growth, foregone wisdom, and fewer opportunities to build durable habits. See challenges as opportunities to grow and learn, not as inconveniences to quickly overcome and leave behind. The Law of Attraction is not worth your time, but a regular meditation practice is.
In conclusion…
Open up
Let go
Take heart
Everything is ok
