Becoming Who I Want to Be
A Good Lives Workbook for Young Men
by David S. Prescott, LICSW

Young men and boys face significant challenges in today’s world. These challenges include a lack of support and structure from the family—often due to tough economic conditions—and unhealthy messages from social media about how to lead their lives. The social pressures on youths today are powerful, and helping young people turn their lives around is equally challenging for mental health professionals.

Do you have young male clients who are:

• At risk for family violence or sexual abuse?
• Actively involved in bullying others at school?
• Viewing online pornography?
• Involved with drugs and theft?

To address these challenges, professionals can utilize the Good Lives Model to help reduce the risk of reoffending in young men and boys.

Like many strengths-based models of helping, the Good Lives Model (GLM) of rehabilitation is an approach that focuses the conversation between professionals and clients not on what is wrong with the clients but rather on building clients’ understanding of what they want their lives to become. The model helps clients focus on eight “good life goals.” These goals, once clearly thought through and written out, guide clients toward leading a self-determined lifestyle.

What Are “Good Life Goals”?

The GLM takes its cue from many humanistic perspectives, all of which posit that all humans have similar goals: we seek to make our lives better. Some of those goals are:

• Having a purpose in life
• Enjoying life, having fun
• Connecting with other people
• Being physically healthy

In the GLM approach, the therapist and client explore how the client is currently pursuing these good life goals. Through these conversations, healthy—and unhealthy—ways of achieving the goals are uncovered. For example, one client might pursue the goal of “connecting with other people” by joining a gang. Instead of unhealthy routes such as this one, therapists and clients explore how this universal desire to connect with others can be achieved in the client’s life in healthy ways—ways that don’t include violence or substance abuse, and don’t lead to incarceration.

What Are the GLM Workbooks?

Inside each workbook, you’ll find:

• One chapter for each of the eight good life goals—14 chapters in all.
• Concepts expressed in simple language.
• Realistic case stories to drive those concepts home.
• Full color illustrations.

Inside the young men's edition.

These workbooks are intended for use with young people (early adolescence into early adulthood) with problem behaviors in a wide range of areas. They can be used in both group and individual counseling modalities.

With significant input from professionals who work with troubled youths, the authors and Safer Society Press have created these workbooks to be fun and engaging for young clients whose adverse childhood experiences and problematic behaviors have caused them to choose dangerous and illegal life paths instead of fulfilling ways to lead their lives.

Although the GLM has been widely accepted by clinicians as an overarching rehabilitation framework for the treatment of sexual offending, it is relatively new to counselors who work with the wider population of court-involved youths. For those counselors, this workbook is supplemented by a Counselor's Edition.

About the Counselor's Edition

The Counselor's Edition provides an introduction to the Good Live Model and, as seen below, author annotations that track the pages of the client workbook. The author's annotations explain the purpose of exercises and stories and offer suggestions for how to use the material in the workbook to engage clients in conversations about the concepts and how they apply in the clients' own lives.

Click here to learn more.

About the Audio Files

Concepts in the workbook are illustrated by "real life" case stories and examples. To help those clients who would get more out of listening to the stories than reading them, a set of 19 mp3 audio files of author David Prescott reading every story in the book is available for download free of charge. The audio files are included as a download with the purchase of a workbook.

NOTE: The workbook for young women will be accompanied by its own Counselor's Edition and Audio Files.