Rosalind Wiseman

The class was over, and I was gathering my notes.

“Can I talk to you for a minute?”

I turned around. Carmen, a sophomore, had been lingering.

“Um, it’s just that I need to get out of my group,” she told me. “I’m, like, locked in to this group of people and I really have nothing in common with them and I don’t want to be with them anymore.”

This is a tough one. At the girls’ school where I work, students cluster at break in loose formations, laughing and eating. To an adult observer, it looks like there’s room for anyone to sit down. To girls, it looks like…well, picture Indiana Jones standing at a precipice 1,000 feet up, looking at a rickety, mostly broken bridge to the other side. Oh, and there are alligators. With snapping jaws. The idea of approaching a new group – or leaving your own – feels overwhelming.

I decided to use the Zone Method from chapter 11 of The Curse of the Good Girl:Raising Authentic Girls with Courage and Confidence. When a girl wants to accomplish a particular goal, she breaks it down into three areas: her Comfort Zone, where she is right now in relation to her goal; her Risk Zone, a step she could take toward her goal that feels scary but not impossible; and her Danger Zone, a step towards the goal that feels impossible to take.

Carmen’s Comfort Zone was clearly sticking with her group. I needed to see what looked scary to her (Risk Zone), and what was No Way territory (Danger). I asked Carmen if she could try sitting with a new group at lunch. She looked at me like I was insane. I took a different tack, asking if there were any girls outside of the group that she liked.

There was one. “When do you see her?” I asked. Carmen said she saw Lizzie in two different classes.

Then I explained Friend Dating. No, it’s not sexual. The idea is this: just like (most of us) have to work at meeting the person we want to be with romantically, we also have to work to find the right friends. And what do you do when your eye falls on that special person you want to date? That’s right. You use your Friend Pick Up Line.

So Carmen and I got to thinking. How could she get Lizzie to spend some time with her? Well, Carmen said, there was a group project coming up. Could they make their own teams? Yes! Our pick-up line was ready.

I asked Carmen to come up with a day and time she could ask Lizzie to work with her. An important part of using the Zone Method is making sure you know when you’re going to take the step. Carmen said she’d do it tomorrow, and I gave her my cell phone number so she could text me what happened the following afternoon.

True to teenager form, there was no news the next day, so I followed up.

I got a bubbling reply, liberally emoticonned: “Yes!! She said that she would love to be my partner! Yay. Thank you soooo much!”

Success! Carmen was on her way, taking small steps toward her goal of leaving her friend group. By breaking down what felt overwhelming into smaller steps, her goal became attainable. Carmen defined her own goals and risks, putting her squarely in charge of her life and giving her a sense of her own competence and potential. With more small victories in the Risk Zone, the Danger Zone was becoming less daunting: the Indiana Jones bridge was slowly growing back its wooden slats, and the alligators were starting to look a lot less scary.