Get Better at Being Yourself with Meredith Walker, Co-Founder of Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls

As co-founder of Smart Girls along with actress Amy Poehler, Meredith Walker has spent decades on the road visiting schools, leading workshops, and speaking at conferences to empower young people to become their authentic selves. Her experiences inspired her to write Be Yourself and Other Bad Advice, a book to guide young people to better know themselves and think for themselves. In a world of social media where “everything’s coming at you all the time,” she felt the need to create a resource that parents can share with teens to help teens figure out how they feel about what’s happening in their lives and begin forming opinions. 

Get a sense of your goals…and next steps 

While on the road, Walker found one constant. Young people she spoke with said they felt pressured to have their entire lives figured out. With her book, she hopes to help young people start to get a sense of some goals and figure out what to do next. I spoke with Meredith about helping young people build skills they’ll from. The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity. 

Eden Pontz: In the book you talk about the physical signs of adolescence being visible to the whole world, but emotional development is happening invisibly inside the brain. What words would you offer to parents who want to read this book with their teen to help them check in with their teen on that side of development?

Meredith Walker: Well, there’s this thing that happens where young people start getting a sense of what to expect as their body is changing while they’re growing. You start to think, I’ll get taller or these parts of my body will start to form. But what is not talked about as much is what’s going on inside your brain. 

When we’re thirteen and we’re feeling intense emotions, we aren’t thinking, “My prefrontal cortex is developing right now.” We don’t connect those dots. But when you explain that part of things, it takes a lot of the drama away. They can say, there’s a reason behind why things feel extra dramatic or why I feel hyper angry instead of just slightly irritated. That helps them connect with their own emotions and what they are going through. I think that’s one of the tips in the books that can help when parents want to read this book with their child.

EP: You give teens and adults the perspective that emotional intensity can dissipate within a minute and a half, ninety seconds, if you let it. You suggest a three-step process for teens to manage these intense emotions like anger or sadness. Tell us more.

MW: Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor says that within about 90 seconds, the stress, the complete intensity of an emotion may subside. If you can help yourself pause and let yourself have that intense wave crest and then come back, you can then decide how you want to react. That can be very helpful in many ways. 

Three steps that I point out are to express the emotion, name the emotion, and then choose your next actions. You need to feel what you’re feeling. But also when you can name the emotion, that can take some of the charge out of it. The more specific you get, the more control you have over that moment. Then you choose your next actions. And when you can pause to do those three things, it helps short circuit the overreacting and the overwhelm that comes with some emotions.

EP: We love the recommendation that you give to set up regular emotion check-ins throughout the day. How do you think that practice helps a person spot patterns and avoid stress?

MW: Checking in with your emotions throughout the day and making a practice of doing that helps you understand that your emotions aren’t out to get you. It helps you see that emotions are messengers of information. You’re collecting data, you’re collecting information about what’s going on. The more you take a moment to practice it, the more you recognize emotions for what they are. They’re helping you understand situations.

EP: Values are often handed down through families. Why do you think it’s important for teens to examine those values or take in new values? 

MW: Values aren’t just this list of beliefs that you carry. They actually evolve, they change, they grow with you. They’re something that you practice in your real life. They help you decide what to do in the small and big moments. Becoming more aware of your values as you go through life is important because they do change. 

When we first start thinking about values and things that we think are important in life, they come from the world around us, from our family of origin, from people who are important to us. Sometimes we inherit these more than create or discover them on our own. That’s why it’s really good to get curious about them, think about them, question them, and keep evolving and thinking about which ones are important to you and which ones you want to apply to your life. Then make decisions accordingly.

EP: If our values change throughout time, how often do you think we should re-examine our values? When should we do it?

MW:  I think that pulling this book down yearly can help you stay in touch with what your values are. As you learn things, as you experience things, as you travel, you might go and experience somebody else’s story, or you might hear things. Maybe you’ll start to incorporate those in your life. That’s when it’s good to pull down this book or any list that helps you do this and evaluate, check in, make sure that you still think what you think. If not, start letting yourself adjust.

One of the ways to do that is to start paying attention. There are prompts in the book that are helpful for this process. Some of them are like, “Think about the last time that you felt really proud of yourself. Who was with you? What were the circumstances?” I would also say the same goes for times when you didn’t feel great about yourself. Ask yourself, “What was going on then?” Then you can start connecting the dots about how you were acting and if it matched up to something that you think is important or if you went against it.

EP: You talk about a process that can help a young person discover their values. 

MW: Something that I like to talk about when I’m talking about values, especially with teens, is the award-winning author George Saunders. In a commencement speech he mentioned a story from when he was in seventh grade. Here he is, this accomplished, amazing author, so many decades later. But he brought it up because it still bothered him. He spoke about how there was a girl at his school in seventh grade and people were mean to her. And while he wasn’t mean to her himself, he didn’t do anything to try to comfort her or fix the situation. He called it a failure of kindness. It stayed with him all these years. And that’s why it’s important to understand your values because then you can understand when you’re having a failure of kindness or a failure of whatever your value is. That’s an example of how it can affect how you think about yourself. And how you do the next right thing.

EP: You talk about how teens can make purpose and passion work together to help figure out their future. 

MW: There’s a chapter in the book titled Purpose Over Passion. I included that because I am one of the people that didn’t identify a passion very early on. I remember feeling somehow abnormal or flawed because of that. It can make you feel like how am I gonna move forward in life if you’re supposed to follow your passion but you don’t have one? There was a study done via Making Caring Common at Harvard, looking at how a sense of purpose is something to try and start to develop even before you have an idea of what may or may not become a passion or a deep interest. Because a sense of purpose can be a thread throughout your life that gives your life meaning along the way and it doesn’t hinge upon a specific act or a specific interest. So, if you have a sense of wanting to help people, the planet, to help organize in your community for better causes – all of those things can serve as a foundation that stays with you. Then purpose and passion – can come together or apart as many times as needed in your life. If you don’t feel like you have a specific passion, that’s okay. You might find one, you might not, that’s all right. But if you can figure out what matters to you in a way that you want to spend time with it and spend time out of making that a part of your life, that will help you along the way.

EP: You shared your own failure in the book. It is so important for teens to see the whole picture that everyone, even adults, fail. Tell us how teens can use self-talk to get through some of the rough patches they may encounter.

MW: Writing the chapter about failure was one of the toughest for me because even though I’m down with my mistakes and I talk about how failing is part of life and you learn from it, I still have feelings about some of the major mistakes or failures I’ve made in my life. One of those I mention was my freshman year of college. I absolutely blew it. I did not do time management or prioritize things well. I didn’t study the way I normally study. They said, “See you later.” They were like, you can come back if you get straight A’s somewhere else, but you gotta go do that first. I remember being crushed for failing myself and failing my parents. 

But what was really more damaging was the way I talked to myself about it. It became, “I’m never gonna get anything right, I’m a failure. I’m not capable. I’ve ruined my life.…” It became negative talk playing in my head. What we now know  because of Dr. Kristen Neff, is that talking to yourself gently and compassionately after you’ve processed a failure or disappointment is essential.

The way you talk about yourself is how you learn from it, and it’s how you come out of it. If you just sit there and criticize yourself and beat yourself up for it, that’s not really giving you the space to learn and apply that knowledge for a better outcome later. But it’s about building a relationship with yourself. We’re gonna be with ourselves our whole lives. We need to find ourselves interesting, forgivable, and like ourselves. So, it’s important to try and talk to yourself the way that you would talk about somebody you care about. 

EP: You mention the impact of social media throughout. In reality, most teens are probably not going to log off social media. What is one thing teens (and their parents!) can do to scroll smarter? 

MW: Everybody can learn ways to scroll smarter. Some of the important things that you can do to help yourself not completely destruct from it include checking in on your emotions throughout the day, checking on how you’re feeling as you scroll, paying attention to which accounts bring you down and which ones lift you up. Which ones nourish your brain and which ones drain you? It’s easy to slip into, “That makes me so mad. I want to find out more about this thing that’s making me mad.” That can happen to all of us. 

Something that’s very helpful to remember is that social media isn’t just merely entertainment. People are trying to sell you things. People are trying to hold your attention for ads. And when you realize that that’s part of it, it can help you disengage a bit from being so pulled in and not being able to pull yourself out. Remind yourself there’s an algorithm at work, companies are behind it. And try to ask, “What is this for? Who benefits if I’m mad about this? Who benefits if I feel bad enough about myself that I feel like I need to buy a product to fix it?” Keep asking yourself good questions.

Not just for teens

By the way, while the book was produced for young people, Walker says it’s also good for “any person who was ever a young person.” As a parent you can guide your child towards the book or experience it together. And you can also take the ideas offered here and share them directly with your child.