[00:00:12.910] – Speaker 2
Well, hey, everyone. I’m Chris Tompkins, and welcome to the Shaping Our World podcast. My goal is to invite you into a conversation that will leave you more confident in understanding and inspiring the young people in your life. Each episode, we talk with leading experts and offer relevant resources to dive deeper into the world of our youth Today, we have Dr. Karen Bluth on the show. Karen is Associate Professor Emerita at the University of North Carolina and a leading researcher in the field of self-compassion, and particularly how it influences the emotional well-being of teens. She’s the co-creator of the widely used Mindful Self Compassion for Teens curriculum and a developer of several programmes supporting youth, young adults, and educators in building compassion-centred emotional skills. She’s written several books, including The Self Compassionate Teen: Mindfulness and Compassion Skills to Conquer your Critical Inner Voice, and The Self Compassion Workbook for Teens: Mindfulness and Compassion Skills to Overcome Self Criticism and Embrace Who You Are. In 2022, she received the inaugural Mind and Life Foundation Award for Public Communication of Contemplative Research, which recognized her commitment to making research accessible and impactful. Karen is also a longtime mindfulness practitioner and educator with over four decades of experience in the mindfulness space and 18 years in the classroom.
[00:01:38.830] – Speaker 2
She regularly speaks, teaches, and trains educators around the world in how to bring mindfulness and of compassion to teens in meaningful ways. I’m really looking forward for you to jump in and listen to this conversation with Karen as she brings such a thoughtful and research-based lens into the emotional challenges teens face today and how we, as adults, can better support them. Whether you’re a parent, a teacher, a coach, a mentor, there’s so much for you in this conversation. Before we meet our guest, a quick I’ve heard about an opportunity at Muskoka Woods. Starting as a staff member here, I found it to be more than just a job. I discovered a pathway to personal and professional growth. We are committed to intentional staff development, providing training, and building a network that can propel your career forward. Imagine working where you’re nurtured to grow with access to amazing facilities and staff care events. If you’re seeking a role that prepares you for what’s next, visit jobs.muskokawoods.com for more details. Now, let’s get into the heart of our show. Welcome to the show, Karen. It’s great to have you.
[00:02:52.830] – Speaker 1
It’s great to be here. Thanks so much for having me.
[00:02:55.310] – Speaker 2
Really looking forward to this conversation, and we’d love to get to know you a little bit better before we dive into the real content that we’re going to talk about today. So what shaped your world when you were growing up? What were the biggest influences on you?
[00:03:08.800] – Speaker 1
I think the biggest influences on me, particularly when I was a teen, influences on the outside and then also on my inner experience internally. The ones on the outside when I was a teen were really very much about my friends and very much about theatre. I was involved with theatre programme at our high school, and that was my whole life. I loved it, and that’s where my friends were. In fact, I still communicate with those friends on a several times a week. They’ve been lifelong friends. That was a big influence on my life. Then my inner experience was different. I felt very not confident, insecure. I felt maybe unworthy. This really was a huge challenge for me, as I think it is for a lot of teens. It’s really what shaped my inner world very much when I was growing up and really has influenced what I do with my life.
[00:04:20.840] – Speaker 2
We’re going to hear the connexion to that in a minute when you talk about your professional work and what you do. But before we get to that part, what’s shaping your world from an interest’s sake, spending your free time? Do you still love the theatre? Tell us a little bit about your life today.
[00:04:37.130] – Speaker 1
I don’t do a lot of theatre or any, actually. Right now, I live in a very small town on the Coast of North Carolina. I am incredibly, incredibly fortunate because I live right on the marsh. I look out on the marsh from both sides of my house, actually. We’re on a little piece of land. Just being in nature in that way on a daily basis and being able to look up and see marsh birds, egrets, and blue herons, it just really changes the whole way that you relate to life, I think. So there’s that. And then the other thing that’s shaping my world as an adult is how much teens are struggling and how difficult occult the world is right now for teens to navigate. That’s what’s shaping my world now.
[00:05:36.020] – Speaker 2
Your setting and your environment definitely shapes some of the things that you have given your life to as well, and even your perspective of teens and young people. And so can you tell us a little bit more about the work you’re doing, have done, and are currently thinking about when it comes to the world of young people and teens?
[00:05:55.600] – Speaker 1
Sure. Well, I went back to school for my PhD very late in life, but around age 50. Before that, I was a classroom teacher. But what has driven my… What my mission has been, really, for all of my adult life is trying to help kids to and particularly teens, to have an easier time of it. And so, of course, my own experience as a teen had a huge influence on this. I just wanted life to be a lot easier for teens it was for me. And unfortunately, we’re in a world today that’s very challenging. So my work really has been about finding tools, skills that teens can learn that will help reduce anxiety, depression, increase their resilience, improve their mental health. It’s really centred around self-compassion and learning self-compassion skills. My research, when I was at the university, was about teaching teens these self-compassion skills. I developed a programme, adapted a programme from an adult programme on self-compassion Compassion, where we teach teens these skills and give them assessments before the programme and after and see how they do.
[00:07:24.470] – Speaker 2
When we think about self-compassion, I think it’s interesting because on the surface, it may seem like a pretty easy thing to define, but I’m sure there’s more to it than that. So as we get on into this conversation, can you start by first telling us how you would define self-compassion? What does it look like? What is it?
[00:07:44.920] – Speaker 1
Sure. Well, the easiest definition of self-compassion is treating yourself the way you would treat a good friend. And we know that we’re much kinder and we’re much more supportive with our good friends than we are with ourselves. In fact, about 80% of us are kinder to other people, kinder to our good friends, than we are to ourselves. We tend to be really hard on ourselves. We tend to say things to ourselves that we would never in a million years, say to our friends. We tend to be pretty self-critical. That’s the case for most of us. That’s the easiest definition of self-compassion. There’s a more formal definition of self-compassion, and that involves three different components. The first component is mindfulness. In this case, mindfulness is about keeping a balanced perspective when something difficult happens. In case of teens, if they got a bad grade on a test or on a project or something wasn’t going well in their lives, often, like us, they tend to be pretty self-critical. But mindfulness would be having that in, holding that in perspective and recognising that this doesn’t mean that it’s the end of the world. It doesn’t mean that you’re going to fail the class or you’re not going to get into college or your life’s going to fall apart.
[00:09:15.460] – Speaker 1
It means just knowing that it’s not going to be the end of the world, basically. Right. Yeah. That’s the first component. Then the second component is common humanity. Common humanity is is the understanding that whatever difficulty we’re experiencing, whatever difficult emotions we’re experiencing in the moment, that this is part of the human experience, that this is That we all experience at times feelings of anger and loneliness and sadness and anxiety and depression and frustration, confusion. That might seem really obvious, but often when we’re the ones who are experiencing that, when we’re having that moment of feeling lonely, we think we’re the only ones. We look around and we may think, Everybody else is okay. They seem like they’re doing fine. What’s wrong with me? This actually is really key for teens to have the understanding that others are going through this as well. Most of the time, they really don’t know that. Then the third component is self-kindness. Self-kindness is just pretty much what it sounds like. Taking an active step to support yourself, to say some kind words to yourself, to be nice to yourself the way you would to your friends.
[00:10:57.500] – Speaker 2
Just a little anecdotal input on the Common Humanity. At Muskoka Woods, we have a CEO leadership programme that runs for four weeks in the summer with mostly 16-year-olds. They get to do a serve project where they go to the Dominican Republic with an organization called LiveDifferent, and they build a home. As you can imagine, the stories that come back are amazing about the impact in their lives. But one of the unexpected benefits are because of the setting and where they are and what they’re doing together, we have debrief sessions with them at the end of the day. Part of that is they are invited to share their own personal story as they’re hearing the stories of other folks around the world. Just these young people, really many for the first time talking about the journey that they’ve been on as young people. One of the things that so many of the teens come back with is this, like you said, common humanity shared. I didn’t know that other people were walking through similar and sometimes even more difficult things than I’m going through, not just around the world, but in my own backyard and people that I’ve been friends with for a while.
[00:12:10.990] – Speaker 2
The advantage to their own journey and the perspective that they gain from that gives them a lot of more grace and compassion and really changes the nature of their relationships, which we all know relationships are so significant for thriving and developmental assets and all those sorts of things.
[00:12:31.470] – Speaker 1
Yeah. And in fact, I would say that it’s rare to find somebody that has it all together. It may look that way on the outside, but scratch the surface and everyone’s struggling Everyone’s struggling to some extent, and especially as a teen. They often don’t have any clue about that, how much their friends and their acquaintances and their classmates are struggling.
[00:13:00.390] – Speaker 2
I read on your website that your life has been about trying to find ways to make the road through adolescence a bit easier and less painful. You talked a little bit about that earlier and the connexion to self-compassion and what that looks like. This may be obvious for us, but can you connect the dots? How can teens in particular benefit from self-compassion? Is to become more compassionate for ourselves using the definition that you talked about and all that surrounds that. How does that actually help us on a day-to-day basis? Why does it work?
[00:13:37.490] – Speaker 1
Yeah, it’s a great question. Well, we know it works because we have done numerous research studies at this point, many with adults and quite a few with teens. The research is pretty consistent. The outcomes are pretty consistent in that we see reduced anxiety, depression, and stress, increases in resilience, and in our most recent study, which was done with kids who had some suicidal ideation going in, it significantly reduced their suicidal ideation. There’s lots of explanations for this, but I think overall, when teens understand that they don’t have to be hard on themselves when they make a mistake or when something doesn’t go the way that they wanted it to, they don’t have to be self-judgmental and self-critical. They can recognize that, Oh, wow. Well, this isn’t because of me. This is because this is life, and these things happen. That doesn’t It doesn’t mean if I made a mistake, I shouldn’t go back and fix it or learn from it or apologize or whatever. I have to do that. You’re not off the hook. But often, teens come out of this understanding that this is how life is. Life has ups and downs and moments that don’t go well, it doesn’t mean that I’m a bad person, and I’m completely unworthy and a complete mess.
[00:15:13.820] – Speaker 1
It just means that this is a bump in the road of life, of which there will be many bumps in the road. And this is one, and I’m just learning how to navigate it.
[00:15:23.870] – Speaker 2
What you shared there has probably been true for teenagers for longer than I can have been around. I think learning to navigate life as an adolescent, there’s a lot that factors into it. But as we started the conversation, you mentioned that it’s really difficult for teens today. In this cultural movement, there is some uniquenesses for young people as they’re growing up. We’re even seeing accelerated or higher rates of anxiety and depression. Can you maybe talk to us a little bit from your perspective, what you’re seeing, the work you’ve done, why self-compassion is even more important right now for young people?
[00:16:07.110] – Speaker 1
Yeah. Well, the world, as I mentioned, it was hard for me as a teen growing up a long time ago in the ’70s. It’s so much harder now. It’s so much harder now. As one principal of a school said to me, there’s no break. If you’re being bullied or you’re being harassed at school, there’s no place to escape. I knew that if I was having a hard time at school, I could go home and I could close that front door and I was safe until the next day when I had to get on the school bus. But kids don’t have that now because of social media. There’s no safe place. There’s no place that they can go to and block everything out. Of course, the statistics that you’ve mentioned are alarming, to say the least. Suicide attempts and ideation and all of that has increased dramatically over the last decade, as well as anxiety and depression. What we think, it’s due to many different things, but of course, social media has a huge impact. Just to talk to mention, social media isn’t all terrible. I don’t want to make it sound like that. There are things about it that are It can promote connexion among people, but yet there’s so much negative about it that it far outweighs the positive, in my opinion.
[00:17:42.210] – Speaker 2
You mentioned that one of the things that young people struggle with when they’re wrestling through their own things is thinking that, well, everybody else has such a perfect life. I think the whole curated nature of social media reinforces that and makes everybody look look like they’re doing all the things that are the best of life all the time. They look perfectly, and they’re doing the right things, and they’re shaping their world around the things that are really significant. We all know that That’s just a real fraction, and most people don’t live the way that they do on social media. I think that’s another way that just reinforces what you talked about earlier, this struggle with finding Finding self-compassion, as we think maybe our story and our journey is so unique when we’re facing hardship and difficulty. I think that’s another way that social media really accentuates that.
[00:18:41.310] – Speaker 1
It promotes social comparison, which is what you’re talking about this idea that, why isn’t my life like that? Why don’t I look like that? Why does this person have a better life than I do? What’s wrong with me? We know that, obviously, It’s very harmful. There’s so many other things about social media, too, that are really hard, including the fact that these days, teens aren’t spending, or I hear from parents that they’re in their rooms with their phones, and they’re not going out and just hanging out with their friends the way that they have in generations past. And so it’s also what they’re not doing, what they’re missing out on. They’re not out riding their bikes or playing sports or shooting a basketball as much as in previous generations. And that’s worrisome.
[00:19:40.070] – Speaker 2
So you talked about practising self-compassion to building a muscle. Can you tell us what that means? Can you explain that a little bit?
[00:19:48.190] – Speaker 1
Sure. Well, if we go to the gym or we do something physical to become stronger, you’re working on building that physical muscle. Self-compassion and cultivating self-compassion is really about building a habit. We’re building the habit of not criticising ourselves when something doesn’t go the way we would like it to go. I’ll give the example that we were talking about earlier that a teen gets a grade, perhaps they didn’t study as much as they should have for a test, and they don’t get a good grade. Rather than beating themselves up and saying harsh things to themselves, they could say, Well, you know what? I didn’t study as much as I should. So this is a good lesson for me. And next time, I’ll study more. And so it’s getting into that habit. It’s getting into the habit that when those self-critical thoughts come up, recognising them, being aware of them, and then saying, You know what? I have a choice here. I can go down one route of being hard on myself and beating myself up, or I can recognise that this was a hard moment, and I can be supportive to myself. I can say some encouraging words to myself and take responsibility for my mistakes.
[00:21:20.480] – Speaker 2
As we move forward with today’s episode, I want to highlight an experience that reshapes the way students and teachers see each other. Muscoka Wood’s overnight trips offer more than just outdoor fun. They’re a catalyst for personal growth and classroom unity. Teachers become mentors, students become leaders, and together, they discover potential they never knew they had. With comprehensive safety measures and engaging curriculum connexions, it’s an overnight trip that makes a difference. Explore more at schools. Mascokawoods. Com. In your book, The Self-Compassionate Teen: Mindfulness and Compassion skills to Conquer your Critical Inner Voice, you impart skills and tools like we just were talking about to help teens build this muscle. Can you share just some of the exercises that help teens do that?
[00:22:24.680] – Speaker 1
Well, if you saw the book, you know that there’s a lot of them. There’s a lot in there.
[00:22:29.160] – Speaker 2
Yeah, I’ll give us a couple of examples.
[00:22:30.630] – Speaker 1
Sure. Well, we’re talking about social media, so I’ll give you our social media exercise that we go through. We have teens take out their phones, actually, and open to their favourite social media platform. Actually, before they do that, we have them notice how they feel. We give them a moment to just feel whatever they’re feeling and take note of that. Then we have them take out their phones, open to their favourite platform, and We spend a few minutes scrolling. As they’re scrolling, we ask them to just be aware of what they’re feeling as they’re doing this. Then they come out of it and we talk about what they’re feeling and how they can, if they were not feeling good, if they were feeling this comparative mind or social comparison, or they’re feeling lonely or disconnected, we asked them what they can do about that and what would be the kind thing that they could do to support themselves. The idea here isn’t telling them that social media is bad, but rather to bring awareness to how they feel when they’re engaged with social media and empower them so that they can make the choice, they can make the decision as to what they want to do about it.
[00:23:55.210] – Speaker 2
That’s really great.
[00:23:56.930] – Speaker 1
That could be spending Adding less time on social media, shutting it down altogether, or just keep noticing what they’re feeling. But of course, we know it doesn’t help to tell teens not to do something because that just makes it more attractive. We want to empower them to notice and bring awareness to what they’re feeling as they’re engaging with that particular activity. That’s one thing that we do. That’s around social media. We teach Some physical gestures that they can do that we know are soothing and comforting. The teens really like that because it’s very easy and simple and portable. They can do it whenever, wherever they are.
[00:24:48.580] – Speaker 2
Can you give us some examples of those?
[00:24:50.550] – Speaker 1
One is just putting a hand over your heart and noticing the feeling of your hand on your heart or cradling your face in your hands. So these are some of the teen’s favourite ones. Another one is putting one hand on your forehead and the other hand on the back of your neck. And that feels also like you’re taking care of yourself in that way. Another one is just rubbing two hands together. And we always explain ahead of time before we actually take them through these different gestures, we explain why it works, and that’s that there’s actually a physiological response when we do this, that there’s a release of the hormone oxytocin, which is soothing and comforting when it’s released, and it just makes us feel good. We talk about how we readily do comforting gestures for other people. If our friend’s upset, we’d give them a hug or put our arm around them. We do this for other people, but we really don’t think to do it for ourselves. We’re not in the habit of doing it for ourselves.
[00:26:10.900] – Speaker 2
Earlier, you mentioned in your own life, where you live on the marsh, getting outside, seeing the birds in nature. And you also referred to kids being pulled into their rooms. Is there anything from your work that you can maybe encourage parents or other adults that care with you on how to get kids to get outside? Because some of the things you’ve explained are in that bucket of mindfulness. But there is something about nature and reflection and outdoors that is so therapeutic and good for us.
[00:26:46.240] – Speaker 1
Yeah, absolutely. I just can’t agree with you more about getting outside and getting into nature. Well, I’ll share one other activity that we do that involves nature, and it does involve kids using their phones. It’s a gratitude practise. As we know, we have this negativity bias, and we tend to remember all the negative things that happen in our lives, and we tend to not take in as much the positive things. This one practise involves, we ask the kids to just take pictures of things that make you smile. It can be indoors or outdoors, but certainly parents can encourage kids to go outside and and take pictures of things that you enjoy. It doesn’t have to be a big, major thing. In fact, we encourage them to notice the little things. Notice an aunt crawling on a leaf, or notice the colour of a flower, or notice your cat crawling up in your yard. It could be anything. But it’s a way to really encourage kids to notice What is the positive things in their lives? That’s one way to get kids outside. It can be done, of course, without phones. You could do it as a drawing activity, which we’ve done.
[00:28:10.500] – Speaker 1
Gratitude is huge. Gratitude is huge when it comes to leading to positive outcomes and just shifting the whole feeling of your life. It’s a practise that I’ve been doing over the last 5 or 10 years that has made a huge difference in my life. And there’s a lot of research on that also. Tremendous amount of research on gratitude.
[00:28:37.200] – Speaker 2
Again, anecdotally, we’ve been working through in our organisation just some good practises around managing anxiety and some of the things that we’ve just talked about today. And one of the things that we encourage our staff to do is create what’s called a life-giving list, things that really give you life. And one of the things when we were going through that I remembered that I discovered a little while ago is I like to exercise. One of the things that I noticed is that when I exercise outside, whether it go for a run or a walk or even just do something active outside, there’s something that is even better for me because it’s just looking up and seeing the sun or feeling the wind in your face. It just adds a whole lot more to that experience that’s already good for my body and my mind. I I recalled that. As I have that on the list, and I always remember that, I can choose to actually like, Oh, I’m going to exercise or do some weights or whatever. It’s like, No, today’s a good day. I should get outside because there’s more to it for me than I know.
[00:29:44.080] – Speaker 2
It’s good for everyone, but I know for me, I’ve noticed the difference. Being able to choose that and where you can make really healthy choices in your day to be outside in nature and watch a sunset and experience all that is outdoors, I think is really great. So yeah, I love sharing that.
[00:30:07.280] – Speaker 1
Yeah, I couldn’t agree with you more. It makes a huge difference in my life. Just huge. I just thought of another practise that parents could do with their kids is get them outdoors and just listen. It could be for a long period of time, but I would start small and For one minute, just pay attention to sound. You can stretch out, lie down, whatever, or sit, it doesn’t matter. And just listen to the sounds. It’s really remarkable at what you hear that you didn’t even acknowledge or recognise that’s there. You might know and recognise the obvious things, but there’s so many more subtle sounds that are there that when you’re really quiet, you’d be surprised to notice. Then, of course, you could extend it and make it longer than a minute. But it’s a really nice activity to do.
[00:31:10.250] – Speaker 2
That’s really great. Can you maybe share some breakthroughs you’ve witnessed in working directly with teens who start to practise this? Are there any stories that stuck with you? Again, obviously, I’m not looking for names or specific things, but just things to encourage us on how this practise of self-compassion works with young people.
[00:31:29.130] – Speaker 1
Yeah. Well, one is something I alluded to earlier, and that’s that I remember one time, this was quite some time ago, I was teaching teens self-compassion, and these were teens who were hospitalized for eating disorders. We went through the class, and at one point, one of the teens said something like, they were just so surprised that they didn’t have to beat themselves up. The words that to use, I remember, was eye-opening. This class was very eye-opening. I didn’t realise I didn’t have to beat myself up in order to be successful in life. So that’s one. I remember a 15-year-old teen boy saying at one point, and this was the second time he had taken the class, and I think it wasn’t so much what he said, but the way that he said it. He said, I don’t care if other people don’t like me. I like me. Just the way that he said it was obviously this sudden realisation. I’m a person. They’re people, so what difference does it make? I can like myself. It doesn’t matter if they don’t like me. I hear a lot from kids at the end of the class. They’ll pull me aside and they’ll say something like, My mum wanted me to take this class, or my therapist wanted me take the class, and I didn’t really want to take it at the beginning, but I’m so glad I took it.
[00:33:06.210] – Speaker 1
It’s so funny. It’s gotten to be a joke because we hear that a lot at the end of the class. I’m so glad I took it. I didn’t think I was going to like it, but I really liked it. So it’s always nice to hear that.
[00:33:18.290] – Speaker 2
That’s great. Thank you for sharing those. Just as we wrap up this conversation, I wonder, obviously, we can encourage people to look at your work and your book and other things around that and maybe point us in that direction. But also, are there other resources or opportunities you can direct parents or caring adults who want to help their kids practise self-compassion?
[00:33:44.520] – Speaker 1
Yeah, sure. Well, I actually have a number of books out. I have five books out. Several of them are for teens themselves. One’s a workbook for teens. One is which is called The Self-Compassionate Teen. It’s not a workbook. I did with a co-author, which is on teens, self-compassion for teens with ADHD. The most recent one is for educators because I had been really pushed and encouraged to get this into schools so that we could reach all kids, not just kids whose parents knew about this or kids whose parents had money to send their kids to special after-school classes. So that’s for educators. There’s also an audible original. It’s called Self Compassion for Girls, which is free. Also for parents, I would really encourage them to go to Kristin Neff’s website. Kristin Neff is the person who is really the pioneer in Self Compassion. She’s the person who defined self-compassion originally and published the first studies. Her website is selfcompassion. Org with a hyphen between self and compassion. She’s developed a self-compassion fashion community and offers free introductory classes and guest conversations with experts in the field and lots of different things. I’d really encourage people to go there.
[00:35:27.290] – Speaker 1
Also, my website. My website is more about teens. Kristen’s website is really more for adults. My website is just my name, karenbluth. Com. We’re in the process of developing a website for teens. My website’s about teens and about self-compassion for teens, but the website we’re developing will be specifically for teens.
[00:35:54.360] – Speaker 2
That’s great.
[00:35:55.160] – Speaker 1
We train teachers all the time. I travel internationally training teachers. I’m going to be in China in a few weeks. I was in Korea earlier in the year. Anybody who is interested in becoming trained in this to teach teens, we have trainings out there.
[00:36:14.190] – Speaker 2
That’s amazing. Those all sound like really great resources that parents and other adults can get into. With a lot of the topics that we talk about, there’s always this realisation that what we’re talking about with young people, oftentimes we need to pay attention to ourselves and maybe even model. And so I know one of the challenges in parenting is we can get overwhelmed and even down on ourselves. And so maybe even as we conclude, I’m wondering, Karen, if you would offer some words of encouragement to parents who are working through challenges with their kids or just feeling up against it when it comes to navigating being a parent or a leader or a teacher is all about.
[00:37:04.520] – Speaker 1
Yeah, absolutely. First of all, I am a parent, and I always say that parenting is the hardest job in the world. My kids are grown now, and of course, it’s much easier than it was, but it’s so hard. These are tools that can really help you. The best thing that I think that we can do for our kids is model self-compassion, because our kids are watching us. They’re watching us all the time, even when they’re teens, even when they look like they’re not watching us. They are. If we are self-critical, they’ll see it. If we’re self-compassionate, they’ll see that also. And also, knowing that you’re going to make mistakes, and that’s okay. Kids are resilient. There is a way through this. And the kinder and the more supportive that can be for ourselves, to ourselves with these tools, the easier it is for us and the easier it is for our kids.
[00:38:10.390] – Speaker 2
I know that self-compassion for many of us, maybe most of us, doesn’t always come easy or is the first thing that enters when we’re up against difficult times or navigating challenges, even in our own lives, or whether it’s parenting or just navigating life in general. And it’s one of those practises that, like you’ve mentioned, takes practise, and it’s a muscle that needs to be exercised. And so I’m leaving this conversation not just thinking about all of the great connexions to the work that you’re doing and how you’ve approached helping young people thrive. But I’m also thinking about for myself and how to practise those things. Because as you said, as adults who are living and caring for and involved in the lives of young people, many of them look to us for how to model the way. I think there’s some encouraging things that you’ve shared. I hope even parents look at your resources, get your books, not just to help their kids, but even for themselves. Really appreciate this conversation today, Karen, and the work that you’re doing and what you’ve even left me pondering with today as I head on to the rest of my day.
[00:39:24.370] – Speaker 2
So thank you so much for all you’ve contributed today.
[00:39:27.620] – Speaker 1
Well, thank you so much for having me, Chris. I appreciate Well, that’s a wrap on today’s episode.
[00:39:32.670] – Speaker 2
I know there’s so much I’m processing and thinking about as we leave that conversation. If you were inspired by Dr. Karen Bluth’s insight on self-compassion and supporting the emotional well-being of teens and want to learn more, or if you want to explore more topics like this, head over to muskokawoods.com and pay attention to our blog posts. You’ll find a blog post for every episode full of highlights, key takeaways, and a link to listen to again. While you’re there, explore how Muskoka Woods is creating life-changing experiences that help young people grow in confidence, character, and connexion. Don’t forget to subscribe and share this episode with someone who you think needs to hear it.
