Six Subtle Ways You're Missing Connection With the Teens You Serve
- 3 days ago
- 4 min read
Written by Dr. Lonna Gordon, The KNOBS LLC
Dr. Lonna Gordon is a board-certified adolescent medicine physician and Enneagram-informed coach who believes every teen is navigating a threshold moment. She blends clinical expertise with the Enneagram to help young people and the adults who love them know their voice matters, and they're enough to become who they're meant to be.
“You work with youth? Wow, you’re brave.” Or “Teens are so tough, I don’t know how you do it!” If you are a youth-serving professional, you have heard these expressions several times in your career. I certainly have. Most of the time, you brush them aside because they do not really resonate until they do.
You didn't get into this work to miss anyone. This isn't about effort. Youth-serving professionals are some of the most committed people in any workforce. However, somewhere between the caseload, the bell schedule, key performance indicators (KPIs), and productivity metrics, connection can quietly slip out of the room while everything still looks fine on the surface. The reality is that the tough part of the job is rarely the youth we serve. It’s the clock, the gap created by time pressure as you work in systems that are built for efficiency rather than relationship.
Here are six behaviors that, when you notice them, may signal that efficiency is hijacking the relationship. If you see them, take a breath and consider how to pivot. Don’t beat yourself up. It happens to the most dedicated professionals. Just take a deep breath and make the next best decision.
1. You're managing behavior instead of meeting the need underneath it
A teen who shuts down, talks back, or checks out is communicating something. When we react only to the surface behavior, we miss what it's signaling. That signal teaches us where to respond instead of reacting.
2. You're answering before you've heard the real question
Teens ask big questions in small, indirect ways. Sometimes, efficiency makes our brains move fast and want to give a solution immediately. If we're already formulating our reply while they're still talking, we answer the question we expected, not the one they asked. To hear the real question, we often have to dig deeper, maybe ask the question, “Why?”
3. You're treating every teen like the last one you talked to
It's efficient. On the surface, youth often look similar. They have their own generational language, culture, and way of dress. While they fight hard to look like each other, at their core, they want to be seen uniquely.
4. You're mistaking silence for "fine."
Silence is rarely neutral. It's often a teen deciding whether this is a safe place to say the real thing. Whether what they say will bring connection or cause you to run away.
5. You're running on your own nervous system's timeline, not theirs
When we're rushed, teens feel rushed even if we never say a word about the clock. Make sure the adolescent in front of you feels that there is no one more important than them. Press for depth at the speed of their nervous system, not yours.
6. You're skipping the pause
The single biggest connection-killer in youth work isn't lack of care. It's lack of a pause between what a teen does and what we do next. The pause is for you, not the young person sitting in front of you. That pause is where reacting turns into responding, and it's the one move that makes the other five easier to catch in real time.
If you have caught yourself doing one of these things, nothing has gone wrong. They do not make you an inadequate youth-serving professional. They make you human, in a role that asks for superhuman bandwidth, read the room, manage the behavior, track the metrics, protect the schedule, and still be emotionally present for whoever walks in next. Most of our training addresses the tasks and expertise. Almost none addresses the pause.
The incredible gift is that these six patterns aren't permanent traits, just defaults that can be changed. The professionals who shift out of them aren't the ones who try harder. They're the ones who build a new code for their nervous system so that the better response becomes the automatic one. This new code starts with a single move, the pause.
If this pattern sounds familiar and you want to build real change into how your team shows up for teens, individual coaching and team workshops are open now here.
Read more from Dr. Lonna Gordon
Dr. Lonna Gordon, The KNOBS LLC
Dr. Lonna Gordon is a board-certified adolescent medicine physician with 15 years of clinical experience and leadership roles across academic institutions. She is also the founder of The KNOBS LLC, a coaching, speaking, and workshop practice for parents, teens, and the professionals who support them. Drawing on the Enneagram and her clinical background, she helps young people and the adults who love them navigate the threshold moments of growing up. She also hosts Tweens, Teens & Everything Between, a podcast exploring identity and connection during the teen years. Her mission is simple: to help every young person know their voice matters, their experience makes sense, and they are enough to become who they're meant to be.
