The Feel Your Best Self Team Heads Back to High School!
In March Feel Your Best Self was invited back to a place I don’t often imagine revisiting: high school. Teens may not seem like the target audience of FYBS, but our team has worked to make FYBS scalable to both younger and older ages, and this visit only reiterated to me two things: 1. Feel Your Best Self can be used at any age and 2. We never grow out of having fun!
A few months ago, we received a request from counselors at a Capitol Region Education Council high school for a Feel Your Best Self puppet-building workshops to take place during an annual Day of Prevention and Wellness. While we have done events for high school kids before, I was still skeptical if we could pull off an event with hundreds of teenagers in a short period of time, and if they would even want to participate. For our team, we were nervous about the logistics, prepping puppet supplies (we hoarded cereal boxes for weeks!), and most importantly, engaging with the students. How do we present Feel Your Best Self to a teen audience in a 30-minute slot? And I am not going to lie, fears of returning to high school crept in as we inched closer to the event. Would these Gen Z teens think me and my puppets were lame? Would they be bored with puppet-making? Would they think FYBS was a waste of their time?
Preparing for the workshop on top of my other work responsibilities made that week especially stressful—I’d say I was definitely leaning toward the stormy cloud on our Feelings Forecast.
But guess what? As adults we can also benefit from Feel Your Best Self to check our negative or nervous thoughts. I’ve always kind of defaulted to the worst-case scenario—in this case, the kids and counselors hate FYBS, and we run out in shame. But is our worst-case scenario ever really the reality? Rarely. So, on the day of, I used an old trusty of mine, Turn the Dial.
One perspective is that this event took a ton of preparation, included a lot of uncertain variables, and was with an age group I am not as used to working with. But when I Turn the Dial…This was an amazing opportunity to reach a group that desperately needs these strategies. The counselors had already seen us lead a workshop and were certain the kids would connect with puppet-building and the content.
So, what was the reality? We had a blast, and the students loved it! Yes, it was a hectic two hours, and yes, I was losing my voice by the end, but these teenagers left their skepticism at the door and embraced the activity. Their tired, bored demeanors when entering the space, quickly turned to conversational and happy. The creativity in the room was amazing and contagious. It was fun to watch human and puppet friends pose for photos and star in TikToks. Of course, not all the strategies seem relevant for a teen audience, but it was nice to chat with them about how strategies might look for them as teenagers. For example, Shake Out the Yuck could be playing a sport or working out.
And for me, this workshop highlighted two Feel Your Best Self core values: Creativity and Joy. As we get older, opportunities for play in learning decrease. We are worried about grades, test scores, and college prep, and where does that leave creativity and play? Often last on the priority list. But creativity and joyful learning opportunities can also help with our overall wellbeing. It allows us to lower the stakes, be silly, and have fun—all of which can help us shift our skies from stormy to sunny—even for just 30 minutes as we make a sock puppet.
As I walked through the tables covered in yarn bundles, socks, and gemstones, I heard more than one student say to their friend “I am happy we did this, this was so fun!” The counselors shared that it was the students’ favorite activity of the day, and puppets could still be seen in the hallways days after the event. And for me, this shows that small moments of creativity and joy, can have longer-lasting effects than we expect and help shift stormy feelings to sunnier ones.
Emily Wicks, FYBS Co-Creator and Director of Puppetry Education