CHOICE: Adulting With Choice, and for Choice

A Coaching Model By Ruth Kwakwa, Young Adults Coach, GHANA

Adulting With Choice

Early adulthood, what I call the “Twenty-Plenties,”* provides an ideal opportunity for exploration and growth. At this stage, the future looms large, and many young adults are cautiously optimistic about taking exciting steps that give more leeway than their childhood. However, this is also the stage in which they start to face challenges independently, and so they sometimes feel stuck, and ill-equipped, wondering if the guidelines they received from their parents are enough to get them through. Sometimes it even seems as though Twenty-Plenties want parental refreshers (albeit minus the parents), as they assess the new waters and start implementing what they envisioned for adulthood. This is the gap that coaching can address. My coaching model around CHOICE is designed to help older teens and young adults navigate into and beyond their twenties and build muscle around making their first big decisions. Coaching with choice at its center will help them to understand, interrogate, and even disrupt some of the norms that were handed down to them, and to reframe and enlarge their understanding of choice. Making choices while launching into adulthood, will empower them to take ownership of decisions and actions, as they become more independent.

Early Adulthood Is a Pivotal Time

When teenagers start creating their own independent lives beyond childhood homes and parental authority, they start overseeing their own decisions. Or, as popular culture describes it, they start “Adulting.”Adulting’s five “conventional markers,” according to LythcottHaims, have been “finish your education, get a job, leave home, marry and have children,” (Lythcott-Haims 2021, p. 3-4)These markers still hold in Ghana, where my practice is based. Along these lines, the transition from teen years to adulthood symbolizes the end and the start of many things. The end of required schooling and taking notes, and the start of careers and applying the notes. A shift from being labeled and pigeonholed among siblings, to the start of a relatively anonymous presence outside the home. The end of receiving money and the start of generating income. The end of singledom and a newly heightened focus on coupledom and creating a family.

As teens move away from home literally or figuratively and start “fending” (Lythcott-Haims, 2021, p.13), they carry a full bag of guidelines and norms from their parents, that the parents had received a generation earlier. The guidelines are often an accumulation of their parents’ own experiences which were shaped by achievements, fears, hopes, trauma and missed opportunities, etc. So, what teens sit with on the cusp of adulthood are multiple generations’ worth of other people’s experience-based rules, often uninterrogated, and often taken as given. By default, this becomes young adults’ foundation for adulthood.

CHOICE Is at the Core and Takes Twenty-Plenties Out of the Limiting Box

The core of my model will be CHOICE, which I believe is essential for young adults as they come into their autonomy. Many in my cultural setting, do not believe that they have much of a choice, or sometimes even a say in what matters, before adulthood.  Engaging with choice, should hopefully motivate shifts in the following areas, and eventually move young adults beyond the limits that have been built around them over time. Choice fuels, and is fuelled by:

1. Awareness
2. Perspective
3. Insight
4. Possibility
5. Agency
6. Commitment
7. Action
8. Ownership and Accountability

Choice helps to push through the box created by the major limiting issues that arise in young adults’ lives. Such as:

1. Age
2. Gender
3. Traditions (Cultural and otherwise)
4. What they will say (Peer pressure, social control)
5. The way it is
6. Religion and dogma
7. Finance
8. Status

The Timeline Tool

Visual tools such as the timeline below, are very impactful for teens-turning-adults and highlight the relevance of choice. Admittedly, this timeline has cultural nuances that are specific to where I live, but as a visual tool, it serves a strong purpose, regardless of the context. The timeline:

• puts young adults’ life into a time-based, lifelong framework, which tends to be quite novel and fascinating for them
• reminds Twenty-Plenties that they are the curator and driver of their life
• allows clients to locate and ground themselves in the present, while the plans and dreams swirl around them.
• gives clients a sneak preview of the critical decisions and influences that may occur over their lifetime.

The timeline tool demonstrates in the oval:

• that young adulthood is likely to be the only time in which a person is not strictly responsible for, and is not fully accountable to another person, as per societal rules. Even in traditional circles when young adults are never truly autonomous, the twenties represent the “lightest” stage vis-a-vis family responsibility.
• that Twenty-Plenties tend not to bear the weight of long-term relationships, and parenthood.
• how ‘perfect’ the twenties are for being creative and intentional about choice, big decisions, and independent thinking. After some discussion, the clients arrive at this awareness of where to use their own “ah-hah” language, they note that the twenties probably present an opportune time to ‘risk’ stepping outside the traditional decision-making boundaries, and to make mistakes and self-correct, as Lythcott-Haims (2021) advocates for.

This timeline always evokes gasps and ‘wows’ whenever I get young adults to draw it with me. Usually, seeing their current stage relative to the years ahead of them catches them off guard, mainly because it hasn’t occurred to them that they have only lived a short chunk of their expected life. Then, their eyes open wide with the growing realization that in the grand scheme of a lifetime of opportunities, the twenties are a BIG DEAL. A sense of “carpe diem” comes over them. The timeline creates a wonderful platform on which to have coaching discussions about choices.

Springboards for Discussing the Teen-to-Adult Transition

A conversation about how certain childhood guidelines and sentiments evolve in the move to adulthood is useful for helping an older teenager to shift to making empowered choices. Building on the idea of ICA’s Power Tools, here are some reframed ideas to use as springboards for discussions.

As clients and I collaborate in these conversations, we also explore the use of language to inspire a shift in thinking.

My “Twenty-Plenty” Coaching Practice

I want to provide a space for adults in their twenties, who are transitioning from teenagerhood to adulthood or engaging in early-stage adulting. My practice commits to optimism, curiosity, and suspending judgment, and will welcome those who want to collaborate with a neutral and confidential adult who is upbeat about their potential. Owing to the specific traditional background in which I sit, it will be a space free from age hierarchy and other traditional limiters so that clients can feel at ease exploring widely and disrupting their own limits. I will validate Twenty-Plenties as capable and accountable adults. My intention for coaching Twenty-Plenties is to equip them with the gift of choice and to create greater and renewed opportunities for them to grow and shine.

* “Twenty-Plenties” is an expression that I have coined to express optimism and abundance about the years between 20 and 30 years old, plus a couple of years on both ends. I think the twenties are some of the most exciting years of someone’s life, brimming with possibility.

References

Lythcott-Haims, J. (2021) Your Turn.How to be an adult. New York: Henry Holt and Company