To help adolescents achieve freedom, opportunity, and self-respect through education and interventions that motivate and create positive change. We offer hope and an answer to the question Why Try in life?
Ten Principles Taught in the WhyTry Program
WhyTry teaches critical social and emotional principles to youth (K-12) using a series of ten pictures (visual analogies) which each teach a principal.
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2. The Reality Ride:
This picture of a roller coaster shows the reality of life. This visual analogy gives adolescents insight into the consequences of their decisions. The other visual analogies can be tied back into the Reality Ride because they illustrate the principles that will keep students on the track to opportunity, freedom, and self-respect.
3. Tearing Off Labels:
This picture of cans with labels teaches students that negative labels must be torn off. This visual analogy encourages students to let their strengths emerge and not to live up to negative labels that may have been placed on them because of their past actions.
1.Channeling Anger & Challenges into Positive Motivation:
This picture of a river with a series of dams that channel and control the flow of water is an analogy to help adolescents understand how to convert challenges into positive motivation. In this visual analogy, the water represents negative decisions that hurt our self and others. The use of dams shows how a powerful river, instead of causing damage, can be controlled and channeled into something positive, like electricity.
4. Defense Mechanisms:
This visual analogy uses armor to teach students how to make good decisions when they are angry, frustrated, or scared. This analogy teaches positive coping mechanisms so that students can choose a defense that won’t hurt themselves or others.
5. Climbing Out:
This picture of crabs trying to climb out of a pot shows students how peers can affect them both positively and negatively. This visual analogy encourages students to not let others pull them down.
6. Jumping Hurdles:
This picture of a tennis show and a hurdle teaches students how to overcome their problems. The steps for doing so are as follows: identify the problem, create optins, get help, take action, believe they can make changes, and “jump back up if they trip.”
7. Desire, Time, Effort
This maze helps students understand and experience the importance of desire, time, and effort in meeting their challenges. Just as they used desire, time, and effort to make it through the confusing maze, they need to use these principles to overcome their daily challenges.
8. Lift the Weight: (What makes me strong?)
This picture of a weigh lifter helps students see that having self-discipline will make them stronger, not weaker. This analogy shows how resistance and challenges can produce opportunity, freedom, and self-respect.
9. Getting Plugged In:
This picture of five sockets and a light bulb teaches students to connect with the light to see their future.
The light Corresponds with a support system, such as parents/caregivers, a positive friend, a teacher, a school official, a positive mentor, or something that motivates them to do good.
10. Seeing Over the Wall:
This visual analogy of a brick wall and stairs teaches students to see more in life than just problems, and challenges. Applying the above eight principles will help them see their potential and dreams more clearly. When one’s view is limited by failure, drugs, anger, fighting, an “I can’t” attitude and family problems, hope is hard to see. Through this program, students will learn one step at a time how to get on top of the wall and see opportunity in life, how they earn freedom to make the most of their opportunities, and as a result, how they achieve more self-respect!
see the similarities between situations that happen during the sessions and experiences and situations that occur in other aspects of life;
see the possibilities of the resulting benefits that the new knowledge and behaviors acquired during group sessions
be able to identify opportunities to use their new knowledge and motivated to use what they have learned through the group sessions.
Through the group activities and discussions, adolescents will:
The visual components are then reinforced by music. You can hear a sample of new tracks by clicking on the links below.
Counseling Center Serving Macomb County, Oakland County and Wayne County [Metro Detroit Area / Tri-County]
Providing Psychological Services for the Surrounding Areas: Royal Oak, Clawson, Birmingham, Rochester, Rochester Hills, Farmington Hills, Troy, Sterling Heights, Madison Heights, Macomb Township, Bloomfield Hills, Chesterfield, Plymouth, Southfield, Warren, Shelby Township, Clinton Township, Pontiac, Waterford, Detroit
