Summary: Young people around the world face challenges that prevent them from reaching their full potential. Over the past few decades, Lou Bergholz, author of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Vital-Connections-Harnessing-Relationship-Impact-ebook/dp/B07BL5J8CV/&tag=authorhour-20" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Vital Connections</a>, has worked for children and adolescents from Boston to Zimbabwe. He found that the caring adult relationship is the key to supporting children as they navigate their journey to adulthood.<br> More than games and activities, young people everywhere need vital connections. In this episode, Lou offers his most powerful techniques and heartwarming stories to help you reach out and positively impact young people’s lives.<br> These tools will help you whether you’re a parent or a youth worker to help young people truly believe that they can succeed. Whether you’re a counselor, a teacher, a coach or a parent, this episode is for you.<br> <br> <br> <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Vital-Connections-Harnessing-Relationship-Impact-ebook/dp/B07BL5J8CV/&tag=authorhour-20" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"></a>Get Lou’s new book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Vital-Connections-Harnessing-Relationship-Impact-ebook/dp/B07BL5J8CV/&tag=authorhour-20" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Vital Connections</a> on Amazon.<br> Find out more at <a href="http://loubergholz.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">LouBergholz.com</a>.<br> <br> Lou Bergholz: It was the beginning of 2005, and the summer before that, I was working in Thailand, building and kind of constructing the program design for this unique camp for children infected and affected by HIV.<br> It’s a very powerful experience. We were planning to go back and do more of that work the next year. The day after Christmas 2004 is when the tsunami happened that affected the huge parts of southeast Asia, including Thailand.<br> Just after the new year, all of our work reshuffled and turned towards this crisis and kind of post emergency relief work. We were not equipped to do the physical relief work, but we’re invited to come back and work with a number of organizations that we’re working with children and adolescents who were now in this state of a lot of shock. A lot of visible and invisible trauma.<br> <br> I had to reorganize and kind of play with what could we do that was useful.<br> <br> I began some research before on the most impactful ways, the shape and influence the life of children and adolescence. It hadn’t really come together, and the urgency of this need, it really pushed me to go a little deeper. I felt that I couldn’t show up in the midst of this post disaster work and bring something that I had done before.<br> It needed to be deeper and better. I already seen this research before, but that was where this concept of the impact of relationship on the lives of young people surfaced for me. The light was shown on it.<br> It was very powerful. I didn’t know what to do with it at first, because I was a program guy, I was an activities guy. I thought games and activities and curriculum was the way to move everybody forward. I was tuned in a little bit to culture in the way that program and local culture will shape a behavior.<br> <br> But this relationship piece was not in my DNA. <br> <br> It’s not that I wasn’t relational, but I kind of lived and breathed activities. I was the games guy. Yet all the research was saying it has to be relationships.<br> Relationships are protective, relationships influence behavior. I started this kind of quest to figure out, if that’s the what, then howdo you do it?<br> The Beginnings of Vital Connections<br> Lou Bergholz: As that happened and as we went back and started working workshops for these youth facing organizations, the beginning of Vital Connectionsstarted to make sense to me and started to kind of become something I could teach a...
