YES Youth Coaching

YES Youth Coaching I help parents reconnect with their teenagers, and teenagers reconnect with themselves using the power of songwriting and music. Registered 501c3 organization.

06/05/2026

"I got your back and I know you got mine."

That's the line at the heart of Together We Rise — performed live at TEDx Rockville.

And it's the thing I most want every young person I work with to feel. Not just believe. Feel.

The magic isn't in any one person rising alone. It's in what becomes possible when people rise together. When the walls built in our minds come down. When the hero of your story knows they're not carrying it alone.

That's YES Youth Coaching. That's this song. That's why community matters.

🎤 Comment YES to book a free discovery call.
📅 Join the free weekly Music + Mental Health Kollab call: eventbrite.com/e/1987326803968

06/05/2026

Every young person has a chapter book.

Full of hard chapters they didn't choose. Chapters they're still making sense of. Chapters that feel too heavy to talk about directly.

My second TEDx Talk — From Pain to Playlist — is built on one simple idea: those chapters can become songs. The overwhelm, the anxiety, the stress, the pain — all of it has a melody waiting inside it.

Turn your chapter book into your own album.

That's the invitation. That's YES Youth Coaching. That's why this work exists.

🎤 Comment YES to book a free discovery call.
📅 Join the free weekly Music + Mental Health Kollab call: eventbrite.com/e/1987326803968

06/05/2026

One of the things I believe most deeply — and demonstrate live on stage at TEDx Rockville — is this:

Your pain leads to your power.

Not despite the hard things. Because of them. Through them. Using them as the raw material for something that couldn't have existed any other way.

That's what I help young people do in YES Youth Coaching. And that's what music makes possible in a way that conversation alone cannot.

🎤 Comment YES to book a free discovery call.
📅 Join the free weekly Music + Mental Health Kollab call: eventbrite.com/e/1987326803968

06/05/2026

One of the most important things I help young people — especially young women — learn:

Doing right by yourself is not selfish. It's necessary.

Nobody's Toy was written about the moment you stop waiting for someone to show up the way you need them to and start showing up for yourself instead.

That lesson doesn't have an age limit. But the earlier you learn it the better.

Book a free discovery call: emmagmusic.info/meeting

06/04/2026

Survivordom isn't a word.

But it's exactly the right one.

Because surviving something and thriving despite it are two completely different things. And the young people I work with deserve both.

In a recent session a young person wrote a song — not about the hard things that had happened to him, but about who he is because of how he survived them. Intelligent. Safe. A good human being.

He got to write that. In a song that belongs entirely to him.

That's the work. That's why it matters. That's YES Youth Coaching.

🎤 Comment YES to book a free discovery call.
📅 Join the free weekly Music + Mental Health Kollab call: eventbrite.com/e/1987326803968

06/04/2026

Music calms the nervous system. Regulates breathing. Helps us find a way out of anxiety and overwhelm.

The neuroscience on this is growing. And most of it focuses on listening to music or singing in groups.

Almost none of it focuses on what happens when young people write their own songs.

That's the gap YES Youth Coaching works in. And it's the gap I've been filling — without the peer-reviewed research to back it up — for over twenty years.

The research will catch up. Until then I have two decades of watching young people transform through songwriting to point to.

That's enough for me.

🎤 Comment YES to book a free discovery call.
📅 Join the free weekly Music + Mental Health Kollab call: eventbrite.com/e/1987326803968

06/04/2026

Young people in 2025 are living inside more noise than any generation before them.

Social media. Peer pressure. Academic expectations. Family dynamics. Cultural messaging. All of it — constantly — competing for their attention and their identity.

Songwriting asks them to do something radical in the middle of all of it.
Look inside.

Find their inner compass. Their inner song. Their inner answers. Their own roadmap from pain to power and struggle to song.

That's what Empowerment Through Songwriting teaches. Not just music. The practice of turning down the noise long enough to hear yourself.

🎤 Comment YES to book a free discovery call.
📅 Join the free weekly Music + Mental Health Kollab call: eventbrite.com/e/1987326803968

06/03/2026

I tell the students at Watkins Mill High School the real version of my story.

At 15 I was deep in depression and anxiety. Music was the thing that kept me sane and safe. I wrote hundreds of songs just to survive my own teenage years.

By my early 20s I'd built a music career — hard rock band, X Factor New Zealand, Tough Mudder ambassador. But eventually I looked around and thought: if a goldfish only grows to the size of its container, this goldfish needs a bigger one.

So I moved to America.

I share this because every teenager in that room is the same age I was when music became my lifeline. And I want them to know — not from a comfortable distance but from lived experience — that the hard years don't have to define them.

They can be the fertilizer.

🎤 Comment YES to book a free discovery call.
📅 Join the free weekly Music + Mental Health Kollab call: eventbrite.com/e/1987326803968

Address

North Park Avenue
Chevy Chase, MD
20815

Opening Hours

Monday 12pm - 8pm
Tuesday 12pm - 8pm
Wednesday 12pm - 8pm
Thursday 12pm - 5pm
Friday 12pm - 4pm

Telephone

+12027040445

Website

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