What does standing up and standing out mean?

It means when everyone is standing over here, you can be over there.

At first, I wanted Pivot Adventure to be accepted amongst the mental health community. To be like everyone else. To be familiar. To blend in.

Once we made the decision to be different, not to be capital “T” Therapy, to be over there, by ourselves…

It freed us.

It freed us because we realized that the therapeutic model has too many problems with it for what we wanted to accomplish. We didn’t want to have to diagnose our students in order to code and send to insurance. We didn’t want to use a deficit-based model.

And it is exactly what families and teens have been looking for. Many have lost faith in the current therapy regime. There isn’t time commitment, it’s costly and there is no time table of when it will work. So, we did the opposite.

More time commitment, cutting costs, move the classroom outside, teach skills, use adventure as a teaching tool…

This doesn’t mean that the current therapy model doesn’t have a place but it does mean there is room for something else.

Pivot Adventure is that something else.

This is what we mean when we tell our students to stand up and stand out. To be vulnerable enough to say, “Yes, this is me and this is what I offer.”

It isn’t the critic that counts. We don’t need to be everyone’s friend (or client), we just need somebody.

Somebody is waiting to be impacted by your contribution.