There’s things we want, like acceptance, food, sleep, fun, novelty and there’s things that we fear like judgement, pain, discomfort, exclusion.

The intersection between these two driving forces is where our decisions and choices begin to emerge, where we will shape our identities based on the paths we choose. We might be lonely, so we think about trying to make friends. But we’re afraid of being judged or ridiculed or being rejected and so we don’t try, or we instigate failure by only barely trying.

When we’re facing these challenging moments, especially when we’re young, one of the key behaviours that we’ll exhibit is known as “Avoidance Behaviour”. This is where through our choices, actions and behaviours, we try to diminish or reduce our exposure to these moments. Learning to watch for, and engage in avoidance behaviour is a powerful pathway to better resilience.

If challenges weren’t difficult, or were within our circle of comfort and ability, then it wouldn’t be a challenge! However, especially for young people, this means that they’re often rarely equipped with either the strategies or the personal experience to face this adversity.

For that reason, often the early reactions to challenge will be avoidance. A young person might enrol in a program (like Risky Kids!) and at the start of their journey everything is fun and exciting and learning is easy because it’s all the basics! But as learning slows down, challenge and adversity begins to emerge. They need to be persistent in order to succeed, and persistence is hard and involves failure and frustration.

Our young person begins to weigh the pros and cons. They might stop trying as hard in class, to avoid the frustration of failure, but now their learning has slowed and the classes aren’t as engaging because they’re not trying. They start to feel like they’re not good enough as other kids progress, and to avoid all of these feelings, they quit.

But how do we spot avoidance before it becomes refusal?

• Changing Subjects – When challenged the young person might leave to do other things or talk about unrelated topics,
• Standing back in groups – When in group environments avoidance will express itself as hiding at the back.
• Being vague about emotions – When we’re trying to avoid feelings, instead of saying them out loud we’ll use words like “bad” instead of “afraid”,
• Describing thoughts rather than emotions – Someone avoiding their feelings will talk about how something might go wrong, instead of that they’re afraid of something going wrong,
• Over Analysing – Avoidant behaviour will include rationalising, justifying, and making excuses for choices or actions,
• Toxic Positivity – Contrarily, someone being avoidant can become overly excited and positive about challenge, adversity. This is their way of defusing anyone saying they’re not challenging themselves, because they’ll indicate how positive they’ve been, but use other reasons for why they won’t participate.

One of the most critical distinctions you can understand about avoidance is that when we’re engaging in avoidance behaviour, we’re not trying to avoid a situation or circumstance. We’re trying to avoid the feeling that it triggers within us.

For example, a young person might turn up to Risky Kids for their first time, and immediately become upset and ask to leave. They’re not asking to leave Risky Kids, they haven’t even done a class yet! It’s a new environment, they don’t know our values, or our Coaches or the other Risky Kids.

What they want is to not feel overwhelmed and upset, and the way they achieve that is by leaving. This is proven by the fact that the next kid through the door won’t have a problem! It’s not just that this kid is more resilient, they’re just having different feelings. On a different day, under different circumstances, their experiences could be easily reversed.

Avoidance should kick in when we’re trying to leave a toxic or harmful relationship. Avoidance should kick in if we’re in physical pain and want it to stop. When we’re distressed or upset we should take action to get help, to navigate those feelings and move beyond them.

This is the challenge though. Every day we’re going to participate in avoidance behaviour in heaps of different situations. We need to begin to build up the skill set to be able to understand and examine our thinking to determine what’s healthy and what’s not. It’s never just the case that we can trust our own thoughts or feelings! We should believe that we can always be better.

Sometimes this means avoiding things when we normally wouldn’t, and learning that it’s OK and how to do it. Like realising we need to end a friendship where the other person never reciprocates our care or efforts, which we’ve been stuck in for a decade. Other times it’ll mean that we need to overcome our avoidance, like asking for a raise at work, even though we’re afraid of being rejected and having our manager tell us we’re not worth the extra money.

Read on in our “Art Of Quitting” and “Stages of Becoming” article series to master how to understand and navigate avoidance behaviour to achieve deep, lasting resilience and help your Risky Kid to become their best!