Steve Lear

Working with youth is exhilarating — full of potential, energy, and discovery. AND it also comes with challenges: navigating ambition, identity, peer pressure, and emotional highs and lows. What if you could give young people a tool to understand and harness their natural instincts — not just academically, but personally and relationally? That’s where Kolbe fits in.

Why Kolbe with Youth Matters

• Identity and self-understanding. Many adolescents and young adults wrestle with “Who am I?” Kolbe offers a nonjudgmental lens into how they act at their best — independent of IQ, skills, or personality tests.
• Reducing conflict and frustration. When teens understand their own conative intuitions and those of peers (or family), miscommunications often soften. What feels like laziness, argumentativeness, or stubbornness may actually be mismatch in how people act when they’re instinctively engaged.
• Empowering agency. Rather than telling youth what they “should” do, Kolbe helps them take ownership of how they do what they do. It’s less about “you must” and more about “you can choose your strengths.”
• Bridging to growth. Once youth understand their Kolbe modes, mentors, coaches, teachers, and parents can more intentionally guide them in stretching (without overriding natural instincts) and choosing paths that amplify energy, not drain it.

Maya’s Kolbe Story

Maya, 16, is high in Fact Finder and Follow Thru, low in Quick Start. In her robotics club, she loves designing the blueprint, testing every detail, and refining the wiring. But when deadlines approach and things shift (new rules, broken parts), she balks. With her Kolbe results, she realized that while others enjoy improvising solutions, she prefers anchoring experiments to structure. She and her teammates restructured roles so she oversees design and testing phases, while others lead late-stage improvisation. Conflicts went down; the project thrived.

How Steve Lear.org’s Framework Amplifies the Youth Experience

SteveLear.org’s (SLO) emphasis on wisdom, identity, and leadership blends beautifully with Kolbe’s conative insights. By integrating Kolbe for youth, SLO is:

• Honoring how young people inherently act, vs. how they “should” act.
• Enabling them to lead with their authenticity — less imitation, more integrity.
• Sowing seeds of self-awareness early, which compounds over a lifetime.

SLO is offering Kolbe as a resource to the first 50 youth who sign up. By making this opportunity available, SLO is helping young adults to discover not only their career paths, but most importantly, how they’re built to walk them.

You can sign up to take the Kolbe Student Aptitude Quiz at the following link: https://www.noblemethods.com/kolbe-youth.