An upcoming course will help equip young women with skills to help them face life’s challenges.

Clinical psychologist Mijke van Weert, health coach Jess Warburton and mental skills coach Taylor Rapley have come together to create Thrive in Life, a six-session mental skills course for teenage girls.

Thrive in Life will help teach young people to deal with the typical stressors that teenagers face, like managing friendships, exam stress and family conflict.

“It’s all part of normal life but we need to equip young people with skills to deal with those things,” Mijke told the Wanaka App. 

Thrive in Life’s ‘pilot programme’ will begin in late July with a group of 13-15 year old girls, but its founders hope to expand to offer help to people of different ages and genders. 

Mijke said life can be “very intense” for girls in their early teen years.

“Just naming a few things, I think it’s really tricky to deal with the changes that happen through adolescence, physically but also mentally because there’s lots of emotions, and ups and downs.”

“I think all kids, boys as well, don’t really know how to deal with those challenges: They don’t always have the coping strategies to ride them out.”

The idea for Thrive for Life came from Mijke’s own experience feeling like she is often “the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff”.

If young people have a toolkit of coping strategies it can stop issues from spiralling, Mijke said: “What we need to focus on is preventing things from getting really bad in the first place.”

A cross-disciplinary approach to the sessions will include everything from meditation to activity-based learning and helping the participants to understand themselves better.

“A very big part of this is being a bit more aware of the dialogue we have in our minds and how we can be kinder to ourselves,” Mijke said. “There are things that happen in life we can’t control but what we can control is how we deal with things.”

Mijke said a seventh session had been added to the course to help participants’ parents learn how to support their child.

“It is an age where young people are becoming more independent but they still need a lot of support.”

The course, which runs every Thursday (7-8.30pm) from July 29 until September 2, costs $249 but funding is available upon request.

Learn more about Thrive in Life’s upcoming course by emailing [email protected]

PHOTO: Supplied