#164 Unlocking Neurodiversity & Career Planning Success with Rebecca Whittaker Matte Transcript

THIS IS AN AUTOMATED TRANSCRIPT… PLEASE FORGIVE THE TYPOS & GRAMMAR! xo-Lisa.

Lisa Marker Robbins  01:02

Do you have a neurodiverse teen who struggles to see their strengths? As parents, we often focus on helping our kids overcome challenges, but what if shifting our perspective could open up exciting new possibilities for their future? Today, we’re exploring a powerful college and career planning approach for neurodiverse students that starts with strengths rather than challenges. I’m delighted to welcome Rebecca Whittaker Maddie, who brings valuable insights from her work at Landmark College where she uses a grant from the National Science Foundation to help students persist in STEM fields. Through her experience with neurodiverse students, Rebecca has discovered how the right tools and perspective can transform how students view themselves and their future possibilities. We’ll explore practical strategies for helping your student discover and articulate their strengths, understand their ideal work environment, and find career paths where their unique abilities can shine. You’ll learn about assessment tools to help your team better understand themselves, and how to use real world experiences to build confidence in their career choices. I’m Lisa Marker Robbins, and I want to welcome you to College and Career Clarity a flourish coaching production. Let’s dive right into a great conversation. Rebecca, long time coming to get you here, my friend, my fellow Berkman expert, welcome to the

 

Rebecca Whittaker  02:37

podcast. So it’s super good to be here.

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  02:40

These are the most fun when it’s like, somebody you actually talk to quite a bit, and you’re so like minded with a heart to serve, and you’ve got your specialty there at Landmark College, working with neurodiverse students in the career area. And it’s like, it’s just easy and exciting and fun to get together, yes? Well, it’s the stuff I love to talk about. It makes it fun. So and now we’re going to be helpful to those that either are new, neurodiverse teens and young adults, or they’re working with them, or they’re parenting one we’re both parents also, so we know that jam

 

Rebecca Whittaker  03:22

makes me highly qualified. I say

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  03:24

exactly, actually, that’s probably our highest qualification, right, right, being a parent. So let’s talk at Landmark. Just i know i i said that you work at Landmark, but talk a little bit about specifically as it relates to the work that you and I both do and love with career development for this age group, what are you specifically doing? So our listeners know you’re you’re speaking from vast experience and working with kiddos,

 

Rebecca Whittaker  03:53

indeed. So Landmark College is exclusively serves neurodivergent students, and I think that’s a really important fact to wrap your head around, because, you know, most institutions, 20% of their population has disabilities. That’s 100% of my population, and I’ve been doing it for 30 years in a multitude of departments. I started in student development, teach in the classroom. Have done experiential learning excursions, and so I sort of have this vast, vast experience. My specialty is the transition from high school to college and from college to career. So I love to help students adjust and find themselves as they’re entering into the college arena, into that new space of identity development and finding self, to that place where, what am I going to do and how am I going to apply these things to the rest of my life as a, you know, a functional citizen, which is what we all want, right? Right? Isn’t that what we are exactly as parents? Again. Matter well, and

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  05:01

even if you don’t, aren’t a parent, just as a member of society, like, that’s what we want. I love what you talked about. And this is the, you know, I have a three step framework that I use when doing this work. So I we’re going to work on knowing ourselves really well and building self awareness. Then we work on, like, knowing careers. A lot of parents say to me like, I mean, I know that while I can have some conversations with my kiddos, I don’t even know the all the possibilities are out there, and the possibilities are always increasing. But and then we look about knowing paths, like, how do you get to those careers? But it sounds like I so I always start with self awareness, building self awareness. We use Berkman as part of that. And it sounds like you really focus a lot on self awareness as well. Is that right? 100%

 

Rebecca Whittaker  05:49

that’s the biggest piece. And if I could just dive right into that strengths based piece of what I talk about all the time from the very outside of my career, it was clear that the neuro diversity world, which, back when I started, was only just in its infancy, that idea wasn’t quite yet born, yet that the concept was kicking around, and that is where I started. And then the term was coined in the late 90s, but we had students with learning disabilities, and they came in very aware of their deficits. They would come into my classroom and they could tell me all the things they couldn’t do. Well. They were dyslexic. They had poor decoding, they had poor working memory. They were impulsive. They had poor executive functioning skills. Whatever their neurotype is, they sort of knew the thing we didn’t do well. They didn’t actually really know how it played out, yet they knew the language, but when I asked them about their strengths, and I’m afraid that this still happens to this day, it’s one of the first things I ask students, what are your strengths? It is really disturbing how many times students will say they don’t know or start to cry. It’s pretty brutal, because they they can name all the things that they can’t do well, and that’s because they come through a program that is really trying to support them and develop their skills. No Fault to the school systems that are trying to help students develop their reading skills, their writing skills, their their critical thinking skills, but what students hear is deficits, and that’s the deficit based model. I’m thinking that we have to fix all of these things that are wrong, and then we try to shift to a strength based model, which is what I do. And for all of my career, I’ve used a number of different tools, starting from way back to Myers, Briggs, Keirsey, temperament, sorters, cold learning style, inventories, gardeners, theory of multiple intelligences, I would use many different tools to help students find language, to describe things they did well, to identify their strengths and then look in their lives to see where those things manifested and my my task then was okay. So what kind of job can you get doing that, right? How can you leverage that for success in college? And furthermore, how can you spend the rest of your life doing mostly that which can’t do it all? You know, there’s about 8020 is what I say, right? You’re going to love you can find a job where you love 80% of it, that’s fantastic. 20% of it’s going to be a grind. You’re always going to have to pay the bills, or some people like that. But not me so much already gag me like, you know, you’re always going to there’s always something you have to grind through. What is it that you love to do?

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  08:35

Well, I think, you know, it’s funny. I was just meeting with a 25 year old who wants to do a career transition isn’t really even sure that the job that he’s in, the tasks of the job and his talents aren’t a fit. I always say, as a business owner, has had a lot of employees, I think people quit, people, not companies or jobs, usually, unless they really are in a poor fit, and I think that’s one of the issues there. But I had to manage his expectations around and this is, he’s not neurodiverse. I mean, this is for all people there will be. Yes, I think you have maybe a person or an organization that you need to quit. I’m not convinced that you’re in the wrong job. And here are some other options where you could do well, but it’s like I said to him, I’m a coach. I love people. I love helping as a business owner. I gotta take some time out to pay taxes and make budgets, and I have a CPA to help me with those things. But yeah, it is. It’s awful stuff, but I have to do it, but as long as I’m but we’ve got to manage those expectations, because I think you hit two things there that I see come up a lot, like he was thinking, maybe I think I might be completely in the wrong job. And I’m like, I’m not convinced that you are. I do think we should look at some other stuff. I think you’re in the wrong environment with the wrong boss in your. Putting a person. But the other thing is, and you hit on it, there’s not a soul mate job out there. You know, I don’t believe in soul mates. My husband knows this. We have a very good marriage, so this won’t be shocking to him, and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t listen to my podcast anyway, but there’s not a soul mate job. There are jobs that would be a horrible fit, probably not an ideal fit, but there’s going to be a number of jobs that you could do, but eventually you got to double down and go after something.

 

Rebecca Whittaker  10:29

To that point, one of the big, one of the tasks I have at Landmark now, very recently, in the last four years, I’ve been working on a big S stem grant, which is an NSF grant for the specific purpose of helping stem scholars persist in STEM, pretty tricky business, right? High dropout rates in STEM for a traditional student, nevermind our student. So we’ve been tasked with doing this, and we’ve created a mentorship program. And there’s two things that are component, key components to that. And the first is sort of the cohort, that sense of belonging, right? So that they they are together in a group with other people who are pursuing STEM it helps create that stem identity. The second one are internships, experiential learning, whether it’s and we start with outreach, we start with independent projects with depending on a student’s level, but it is a stepped program I’ve created where students come in, and it’s a course, they come in at the 2000 level, they graduate to a 3000 level, to a 4000 level, and we push them and create opportunities for doing science outreach, for developing a sense of competence out in the world. And then they come back and they’re like, well, here’s what I liked about that experience. Here’s what I didn’t like about that now going back to that strengths based tool, which we’re going to keep going in circles here, but yeah, I then say, how did that experience track with your Berkman findings or your Clifton Strengths, findings, how does that language? How can you use that language to describe what you did? Well, now with my cohort, I exclusively use the Berkman because it is my favorite and has the deepest sort of pool of language and Descriptors to help a student describe why they did or did not like an experience, and that is the best way I can use that tool. It’s not just to describe myself, but it’s how I react in environment. So then we have students do outreach, then we have them do an independent project on campus, then we have them do an internal internship or an external internship, or multiple external internships, and every single time we have them cycle back, circle back, come to us and reflect openly in presentation format to their peers. So there’s this group mentoring happening, and their peers are learning from them about, oh, that student struggled, but they knew it wasn’t them. It was the fit of the environment. Here’s how they advocated for themselves, and here’s what they won’t do again, right? Like these things we choose.

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  13:10

That makes me think of years ago. So I’ve been using Berkman for about 15 years. With this age group, 16 to 25 and some adults, I had a nurse, somebody who was already a nurse, and she was in her 20s, and she again, came to me and was like, I wish I would have known you when I was in high school. Maybe I wouldn’t have been a nurse. And I’m like, Well, okay, that’s let’s start with where you’re at now. And so as we started going into it and a building the self awareness, took the Berkman, looked at what that said, and then you called it. You said, internships. I I teach. I have a module. Module Four is curated experiences, so that could even be like a job, as easy as a job, Shadow, informational interview, things like that. But as we looked at it, she was really just in the wrong setting. So she was in a hospital, like a critical care hospital setting, and she was somebody who, as you and I know, like she was a high reflector, not decisive, not an action oriented but a thinker. That was her strengths and I cook where, yeah, so talk about didn’t have the self awareness, right? So all we had to do was look at her Berkman results and talk through like, well, the Berkman says, because it generates that job list, nursing healthcare was a top job family for her, and so as we dug in deeper, she was in the right job. She was just in the wrong setting because she was a high again, going back to this language around it’s not, it’s it’s a better fit to be decisive and action an action taker, to be in critical. Care, but there are other nursing specialties where being a deep, reflective thinker and taking your time and meeting a more moderated pace, right? And so literally, she just switched her setting and but I love the conversations you’re having. You’re like, let’s go put these kiddos out into the world. Call them kids. I mean, these are college students. They’d probably be hate that I’m calling them kiddos. But let’s go get some experiences, and then let’s reflect on it through language, positivity, positive mindset, strengths based and tie it together to make informed decisions, and

 

Rebecca Whittaker  15:40

it’s empowering and invalidates that stem identity, yeah, and they come back with a sense of competence and self efficacy that you can just see it. They come back and they’re just empowered pieces. They just make better use of their college courses, right? They do it in their second or third year, they come back and they’re, they are a little more deliberate, like, here’s what I need to get out of this next class. Or I really should take another course in, you know, I’m a natural science major, but I should probably use more about how to use a database. So I’m gonna, I’m gonna go take this course in another department. So they can be more deliberate and purposeful and intentional, because they know what environment they want to be in, quarter of their time in the laboratory, three quarters of their time in the field, or all of their time in the lab, and no field work like students will vary. Yeah,

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  16:38

you know, I know you’re working exclusively with these college students I bridge, you know, the teens and the 20s. Here’s a question for you, because I know, as moms raising our own kids, and our kids are similar ages, and you know, they’re they’re older, we obviously took some intentionality about this when our kids were younger. Let’s, I want to go back to the comment you made about how often the student even might be brought to tears when they start thinking of themselves through a lens of strength and positivity. And that there’s I always say when I look at somebody’s working, I’m like, there’s no bad I mean, okay, there’s people who do bad things in the world. Yes, okay, there are serial killers out there, whatever. There’s no bad wiring. There’s no right, wrong or right style. And I, I’m normalizing that for all, all kiddos. But if we can go, and I’ve even had parents like, if, if we’re doing a session, or it’s during our monthly Q and A, or I’m even working one on one with somebody. I’ve had parents start to cry because they start to see their kids through a different lens, right? And they’re starting to see freedom and and positivity and growth in a, oh, this is figure out able, what can we go back to like, I know we’re gonna have people listening who work with these kids, even when they’re teenagers, when they’re a little bit younger. Like, what’s your opinion on things that we could do so that by the time they hit college, it’s not like an aha, I have strengths, or they’re not brought to tears. Like, that’s part of my my passion is, I do feel we need to start earlier. And what, how can we do? Like, how are we going to get a kid to you, to not go, like, oh yeah, no, I don’t have any strengths, and they are coming to you, not in tears, not that. I

 

Rebecca Whittaker  18:39

love that question. I’ve actually spoken a bit on that, and that’s really where the strengths based model neuro diversity has come from, which actually has been more codified, as I mentioned, the last couple of years, Lauren strong and Nancy Doyle have really proposed this model which looks at the actual strengths of these neurodivergent profiles so but those strengths of neurodivergent profiles are not the strengths that one needs in the traditional academic setting, right? Actually, a paper came out just looked like last month or last summer. It popped up on my feed this morning about ADHD impulsivity being an evolutionary mismatch, which, of course, one of the things I say is like, like, who, who thought to get in a goat and go sailing, just in case we run into a land mass? Like, really, like, an idea. No one normal, right? Like, that’s

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  19:42

know how to take the university

 

Rebecca Whittaker  19:43

at work, baby. Somebody who is, you know, wired a little bit differently, thought that was a good idea, but discard a new continent or new body water, and brought two communities together. That didn’t necessarily go well at first, but here we go like that. Hyper curiosity is a mismatch to a contained classroom. Yeah, right. It’s an evolutionary mismatch, which is right alongside that idea that disability is contextual. And I like to say disability is contextual, just like strength is contextual. I I can tell you that my hyper verbalness, my hyper verbosity, did not play well at Catholic school, but I certainly make a living off of it, so right here. So it is a strength that was a mismatch for you know, Sister Kateri, third grade classroom, but it does really well when I’m speaking to large groups of people and can connect. So it was a mismatch.

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  20:47

So when they’re back in high school and they’re because High School is even more rigid and contained than than what they’re going to have in college, regardless of whether they go to college, I know you guys do some really great things at Landmark. You know, I love the Colorado College model on their block schedule, one class at a time for two and a half weeks. I mean, that is fantastic for some of these students, so that the mismatch is going to be most painful, probably even in high school. Right? Academic bars are high. There’s a lot at stake. Or in this contained classroom, we’re no longer on a team of teachers. You’re just and

 

Rebecca Whittaker  21:29

so emotional, emotional development is working on a different sort of in a different trajectory as well, right? So there’s that spiky profile, and that includes that intellectual you know, curiosity and prowess could be exceeding limits, but the ability to bundle it up and make use of it in that academic space is maybe sliding behind. But to go back to your question about, what can we do with the earlier ages, we remember the negative better than we remember the positive, and so the really important piece is not just doubling down on the expression of explicit and specific strengths that you see in action, but creating more opportunities for students to discover that on their own right. So for a Dyslexics who may have difficulty in reading, making sure they have opportunity to make use of their visual spatial skills. We just know that there’s a predominance of visual spatial abilities that students with who are wired with dyslexia may not be playing out well in the classroom, but if you’re only doing reading and remediation and not letting them make use of their you know, sort of neural wiring that allows them to see bigger picture problem solving to make a kickball game more efficient or to demonstrate their leadership skills, and then highlighting that by name, if you don’t create those opportunities and name it twice as often as you’re telling them that that you need to remediate, they’re yell

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  22:59

at Carn hire twice as often

 

Rebecca Whittaker  23:03

they’d feel that. So finding those islands of competence, that’s a Barkley term, but you know, finding those islands of competence and really making sure a student knows what they are is pretty key. And this, and then go back to the strengths based tools, right? Like just Yeah, so that you can sprinkle them with an array of language for, you know, the V, I, A, is one that you can use when students are little, littler, you know, and then when you get to those older grades where you’re looking at, this is where I am, a big fan of Berkman, right? Or, or cliftonstrength Somewhere in the middle, something that helps give students language. The Berkman is just robust, because it really strips it down to, I’m this, you’re this, neither of it’s wrong.

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  23:50

Well, I think that’s yeah. I mean, let’s talk about that for a second, because the Berkman, while all you named a lot of great tools earlier, they all look at how we behave. They look at behavior through a lens of positivity and strength, but the Berkman layers on, what do I expect? Yes, of other people, what I expect of my environment. So that goes back to that nursing example I gave you right my behaviors look like I would make a happy nurse. That’s what the jobs list tells us from Berkman, but my needs and expectations are around environment which no other assessment measures needs and expectations, and so therefore those needs of don’t rush me. Don’t make me make a quick decision. That changes where I practice nursing. Then

 

Rebecca Whittaker  24:51

it gives a lot of that. So this is where I harness the language of the Berkman is to help students come up with the script and be empowered. Word to use the script to say, you know how to professionally say, Don’t rush me. Yeah, I don’t make it but, but don’t rush me. Yeah, you know I, you know what I’m I’m reflective, and I would really be best if I could sit on this to come up with some language or in an interview, you interview for a job, you know what I would do best if I got the bulk of your questions in advance. You can ask for things like that. You have any idea the difference an interview will go with if a student is, you

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  25:30

know, every student, not just neurodiversity or exactly

 

Rebecca Whittaker  25:34

you know what the interview questions are in advance. It’s not like you’re going to make up the answer. You’re going to fabricate anything. You just tie it into cogitate, right to sort of let it filter through and thought all those great ideas, the ideas that are better than the ones that might come off the top of your head, but that have sort of like, oh yeah. That was a profound experience. Probably not as glamorous as this other one, but had a deeper,

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  25:59

a deeper hit. You know, one of the things that I’m thinking about this with, like what you guys do at Landmark, and the work that you’re specifically doing with this NSF grant, and using the Berkman with this in this cohort model. How many years is that? Because one of the things I come up against is somebody that’ll be like, well, just give me a report that. So that report tells me what I should be. They want the jobs list, and I get it. I want the jobs list too. I want to show somebody the jobs list. But again, there’s not like a soul mate job listed at the top, and then that just tells you what you need to do. You need to curate experiences, which you guys are doing, which we’re teaching students to do, and how to ask for them and get them. I I’m always like, ah, take your foot off the gas. Start a little earlier, because it takes time. So is this like, A, do they do this? Freshman year, freshman, sophomore, junior, like, how do you guys do that?

 

Rebecca Whittaker  26:54

So, well, there’s a, well, there’s a couple things in the NSF grant that you’re referring to, where I use the Berkman students tend. We typically don’t take first semester students because they need to sort of demonstrate some commitment to stem the ideas persistent. So we’ll have second or third semester students, but yes, we like to keep them and actually, we were just in discussion the other day, we’ve had a few students who were only in at the very beginning, who were only part of our cohort for one semester, and their take on the Berkman is not as and on the program was good. I don’t think they realized what benefits they got, but not as deep as students who spent two or more semesters. You spend two or three semesters. Those are the students who created the workshop presentation for educators called Get burped. Yeah, I love that. That was theirs, right? Well, God, we all had to wear our colors like the students created a game with Berkman profiles to sort of demonstrate how it had benefited them. Students created this for at a summer institute that landmark holds, and they presented it like, here’s how this tool helped us better understand ourselves.

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  28:13

So can I ask you a question about those kids? Like, early on, you had a greater number of kids who started this multi so it sounds like a multi year program for this persistence when they left. This is because this is another thing, and I think all students struggle with this, but I could really see the neuro diverse student coming in and because they’ve been all the negativity has come at them, and they see themselves through that lens. I think it could be more of a problem when someone does a curated experience, a job interview, an internship, a job shadow, and they go, Oh, this might not be for me. And there are some times where it’s not as simple as the nursing example that I just gave, where it’s like, well, you know, okay, you just have to switch settings, or, Oh, we have to normalize. There’s going to be things in your job that you don’t like, you know, if it’s 20% not a big deal. You’re spending 80% of your time that you love, right? But I’ve seen kids get super discouraged when, you know, so you had some kids that did some of this stem stuff, and they’re like, You know what stems not for me, and they look at that as failure. What are some of the things that you do to again, take a strengths based positive approach, even on a kid who leaves the program because you said, hey, they got a lot out of the Berkman and that experience still, oh,

 

Rebecca Whittaker  29:37

yeah, for sure. Well, in some cases, it’s just sort of, you know, if you were looking it, to look at their profile, they were sort of STEM art in one case that I can think of, but that student had, you know, so much art experience that we were working toward. Maybe you could write field guides, or how could you apply your art? But then the end, they just. Decided, like, No, I just want to be an artist. Yeah. I was like, okay, so that was an empowered decision, right? And it was based on, I may apply sciences, but I’m going to apply sciences to my art, not art to my sciences. And so we sort of flipped the script a little bit in terms of strengths and how they wanted to apply them in their life and and there’s values there that come into play. Yeah,

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  30:23

why I do it? I actually created an interactive drag and drop values assessment and that they can take as much time as they want on but, yeah, it’s like I say to people all the time on my values. Sort I want to get people down to their top five values or top five, they’re high, they’re top, they’re five, medium, and the rest go in the low. And it pains, maybe even for myself, because at the very top of my low list are things that I I hold in high regard and I still like. But if I look at how I use my time, what I tend to put off, I think a time on it is very reflective, you know, it’s very informative on this. Then I’m like, if I have to really get honest with myself, Lisa, which we need to be if we’re gonna make wise decisions, then that’s when, you know that’s when I’m like, okay, these are the top five. So I like that idea of, Am I applying science to art or art to science? There’s not a right answer. You’re just going to have to make a decision, and without curating some experiences and taking your time, you’re going to make a bad decision, and

 

Rebecca Whittaker  31:41

they discovered it. And there was, there was one other thing I wanted to mention about this whole experience that we promote a lot, is that when you are neurodivergent, it’s very often that you have a super strength, right? And that you still do have this challenge, this thing that’s challenged. And the idea is that this super strength allows you to lean into that and away from the other thing. That’s hard, but the the other benefit that we really drive home is that interdependence component, that if you know yourself, you can find your compatible work partners. You can more readily identify and name the traits of someone with whom you might work. Well, you might have a gut, but then you also know the questions to ask, and my, my co PI and I, that we put ourselves forward very often on our absolute you know, so where we where we align right in our values and our strengths and our service. You know, we’re both, I mean, I’m ridiculously high in service, and she has a high service, but higher administrative. And so we, we put ourselves in front of our students. And when students ask a question, I’m like, You got to talk to Monroe? Like, no, I sort of point. Like, that’s a and I can say it guilt free. She takes it on just because she knows she’s better at it. And likewise, she volleys things back to me all the time. She’s like, you’re gonna have to ask Maddie and and it’s so freeing. And we get we demonstrate that to our students on the on the daily, because we want students to recognize that they can they have a role in a group that’s really valuable. They have to know how to sell themselves and find support when they need it.

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  33:27

Wow, I love it. I hope conversations like this are creating kiddos and families that are having conversation. Teachers, special educators, creating environments and conversations at the Teen level so that when they land on campus, whether it’s at Landmark where, clearly, these kids are super blessed to be with you guys, and I’m sure they’re very grateful, um, they already start to see some of their strengths, and that’s not a surprise to them, that they have strengths so and that they’re making informed decisions, because we all need people making the right decisions as they launch into the world. So the key Thanks, Rebecca, this is fantastic. We’ll do it again. So fun.

 

Rebecca Whittaker  34:12

Good to see you.

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  34:19

Thank you to Rebecca for sharing insights to remind us that focusing on our teen strengths can open up exciting possibilities for their future. One simple way to start shifting to a strengths based perspective is to keep a small Journal of your teens daily wins those moments when their unique abilities shine through. Now don’t do this for them, but do it with them. Not only will this help you both see patterns of strength, but it will also create positive conversation starters for career exploration, and if this episode made you curious about the power of the Berkman assessment for career planning with teens, young adults, and yes, even adults, check. Got our most popular episode of 2022 with Berkman, CEO Sharon Berkman, it’s found at flourish coaching, CO, com, forward, slash 043, I’ve also linked to it in the show notes. If you found value in today’s conversation about neuro diversity and strengths based approaches, I’d love for you to help other families discover this perspective too. Share this episode with a friend or even those who are supporting your neuro diverse student. Then follow the podcast or leave a rating and review together, we can help more teens discover their unique strengths and find paths where they will truly thrive in the future. Thank you for listening to the College and Career Clarity podcast, where we believe every teen has unique gifts to share with the world. You.