How We Started

In the spring of 2018, Linda and Adam were coaching together in a personal development program for adults. During that process, and through the many conversations that it generated, they saw how their common passion was for working with young people. In reaching out to their network of friends, acquaintances and business associates, the idea of Life Unleashed Transformational Programs for Teens was born. The team of staff and volunteers continues to grow as does the vision to bring this work to more and more teens across the country.

About Transformational Work

Where most teaching and learning (think school, church, books, documentaries, etc.) are informational in nature, our work is transformational. It is an up close and personal look at how we think about things, and even how we think about those thoughts.  Most of us use our memories and thoughts to identify what we don’t know, try to learn about it, and put it into a “now I know it” category. With transformational work, we look at the possibility that there is a whole realm out there of what we don’t know and we don’t even know that we don’t know it! In that realm are our blind spots. And that is where transformational learning begins.  It is the prospect of seeing what was previously not seen.

Another unique aspect of Life Unleashed programs is that they are highly experiential in nature. In American culture, we most often think of knowledge as cognitive reasoning, coming to conclusions, fully comprehending, etc., but to truly know something is to have an experience of it. It is learning through engaging the five senses. It means “doing” instead of just “thinking” or “defining.” This kind of learning goes way beyond the intellect. It usually unfolds in the experience. A simple example is learning to ride a bicycle. You can read about it, be shown how, learn the physics of motion, etc, but until you get on and ride, you don’t really know how to ride a bicycle. It is in the unfolding that understanding happens.

Part of the experience is noticing how we listen, view, and interpret everything in life. Like a camera with different colored lenses and filters, we view life through the filters from our past, whether we agree or disagree, and whether it fits in our limited belief system or not.

At Life Unleashed, we have created engaging processes that are designed for participants to have an experience in the safe environment of a training session, and then see how their actions and reactions to those processes, and their thoughts and feelings, perfectly mirror the way they participate in real life. This is very eye opening for them and enhances their emotional intelligence (understanding themselves, others, the reasons behind why they do what they do and how they interact). Once they identify the reasons behind their choices, they actually can then have the freedom to make new values-based choices from a place of freshness, not just some different version of the same past-based theme.

Once true freedom becomes present, teens look at language-based distinctions like trust, responsibility, integrity, leadership, choice, and commitment to create a future for themselves that is designed for a life of workability.

Lastly, our work is designed to not only show teens how to DO what is necessary to HAVE that kind of life, but to experience the process BEING fully present in the process of living.

And that experience of consciously BEING is transformation.