Help Me! I’m Nearly A Teenager!

Do you ever wonder what your teen years will be like? Everyone knows that being a teenager isn’t easy! You’ll probably have to deal with hormones, body changes, school stress, arguments with parents, friendship dramas, and worries… But don’t fear because You Grow Girl is here for you!

You Grow Girl Is a monthly well-being group for girls in year 8. We want to help you to learn the skills you need to take on your teenage years feeling positive, confident and strong! School teaches you loads of great stuff, right? Well, mostly(!), but there is also a whole load of useful stuff that school doesn’t teach you! Things Like:

  • How to feel your best, get the most out of your life & look after your well-being
  • How to figure out who you are & what’s most important to you
  • How your brain works & why you have different thoughts & feelings
  • What anxiety is & how it affects us all
  • What you can do to help yourself when life is hard, and you feel stressed, anxious, angry or down
  • How to be a friend to yourself

If learning about these things sounds interesting to you… Read on to learn more about You Grow Girl.

You grow girl is an exciting new well-being group starting this October; It’s all about girls learning, sharing and growing together.

The group will give you the chance to meet regularly with other girls your age to learn about how to look after your well-being, share your experiences and support each other to feel good!

We will meet once a month for a couple of hours on a Saturday morning, 10.00-12:00 PM. The group will be nice and small (max of 10 girls) with the same girls at each session and there will be free snacks and drinks!

The group will go on for a year so that you can all really get to know each other and learn new skills that will help you to feel good and look after yourselves. The group will be relaxed, fun and Interactive, with a range of different activities thrown in. We will get out into nature when possible, get active and be creative.

There will be something for everyone! The group will take place on a special lakeside lodge in Wychnor, near Burton-Upon-Trent. It’s a beautiful, calming spot surrounded by trees and wildlife.

The group will be run by Anna and Sarah, who are both Psychologists and former teenage girls! We are both passionate about helping girls to feel good in their teen years and we would absolutely love you to join us for the group

We want you to enter your teenage years feeling confident, strong and positive… Knowing who you are…. being a friend to yourself and with the skills to take on any challenges you may face! We also hope that friendships will blossom from the group, so as well as gaining important life skills, you could also gain a new friend/s!

We really hope to see you there.

Come and Grow with us; we’d love to have you
Anna & Sarah

Questions?

If you still have questions about the group, please read on to see if we have answered them here. If your question is not here, please get in touch to ask. There are no silly questions, and we will be more than happy to discuss any worries you might have about coming along to the group. After all, it’s totally natural to be nervous about something that is new and different.

Most people feel nervous or have worries when joining a new group. Remember that with You Grow Girl, everyone will be starting at the same time so we will all be in the same boat! At the start of the group, we will spend time getting to know each other and bonding as a group. We will do everything we can to help you to feel comfortable and safe. We really hope that you will make new friends from joining the group!

We will never force you to talk in the group. However, we ask that everyone who comes is willing to talk and share at some point- this will help the group to work better. We really believe that if you get involved and join in the discussions, you will get more from the group, but you don’t have to do this until you feel comfortable.

There will be a lot of talking and sharing but that’s not all that we will do! We are going to make stuff and do creative activities as well as some fun experiments and exercises to help us practice different well-being skills. We will do some different mindfulness exercises and guided imagery, where we will get you to use your imagination to think of things in your mind. We will get up and move about a lot and every session we will try to get out into nature (as long as the weather is ok!). And did we mention that we will eat some snacks?!

No, not really! Sometimes we will give you a bit of teaching about a topic so this might feel a bit ‘school -like’! The only other similarity is that we will have some ground rules in place like you do at school. This is just to help make sure that the group is an enjoyable and safe place for everyone. Overall, we hope that the group will feel much more relaxed than school and that you’ll find everything we talk about interesting and relevant to you (which might not always happen at school!)

Oh, and there will be FREE snacks and drinks, so that’s not like school! 😊

Not like the stuff you get from school! We will give you some little things to practice between sessions. We think that you will get the most out of the group if you are willing to give things a try at home and come back and tell us how you’ve got on! These tasks will help you practise important life skills or learn helpful habits to boost your well-being.

The group is being advertised in the towns and villages around Wychnor, so the group members will be from these areas. We are hoping to get group members from a few different schools.

No, in most cases we will not tell your parents specifically what you say in the group*. However, parents will be given information about each session topic, and we will encourage them to talk to you about it so that they can share in your learning and support you.

*The only time that we would need to talk to your parents, is if you tell us something that makes us worry for your safety, or the safety of another young person you might talk about. This is because we have a ‘duty of care’ to look after you and keep you safe. We will explain all of this to you at the start of the group.

We really hope not!! We will do everything we can to make the group a welcoming, fun and relaxed environment. At the first session, we will spend time doing team building activities and helping group members to get to know each other. Hopefully, this will help everyone to feel comfortable and ‘at home’ in the group.   Although we will be learning stuff, we also really want to have fun and laugh a lot too.

For You Grow Girl to work best, we need all group members to come to every session. Of course, we understand that you might not be able to come if you are ill, or there is some other unavoidable reason.

You will get the most out of the group if you attend every session, as some topics will build on things we have done in previous weeks.

We will do our very best to make sure you have a positive experience of attending the group, but if you give it a try and think it isn’t for you, please let us know and we can talk it through with you.

If you still have questions about the group, please email anna@groundedpsychology.co.uk and ask away!