#214 “You Can Be Anything”: Why This Advice Backfires with Your Young Person Transcript

THIS IS AN AUTOMATED TRANSCRIPT… PLEASE FORGIVE THE TYPOS & GRAMMAR! xo-Lisa.

Lisa Marker-Robbins  00:00

When we begin sharing how we made and still make informed choices, it literally is giving our kids permission to do the same and to normalize making mistakes, making informed decisions, turning down things that maybe on the surface look good or would be lucrative, but they aren’t in alignment with who you are, what your superpowers are.

Lisa Marker-Robbins  00:34

You can be anything you want to be. Most adults say that phrase with the very best of intentions. On the surface, it does sound really encouraging, it sounds supportive, it feels kind. But I want to slow down that phrase for a moment, because I see this over and over again with the 15 to 25 year olds that I work with. Instead of making possibilities, it’s actually creating pressure. It makes it harder for the kid that you’re trying to help to actually take some action. So today, in this episode, I want to talk about why you can be anything. Often it’s backfiring. See what you think, interrogate kind of how you’re using it and what you’re seeing in your own lives. I want to shift over to what I’ve seen help more than this well meaning phrase over the next four solo episodes of College and Career Clarity, I’m going to do something a little bit different. We’re going to do a series. I want to talk about some of the well meaning advice, pieces of advice that adults often give kids about future planning, careers, perhaps College, any other kind of training or education, they’re going to get things that sound encouraging but actually makes it harder for them to get moving and take action, which is what you really want to see from them, right? So this doesn’t come from a place of blame. I mean, I’ve been there. I’ve heard myself, I still occasionally catch myself saying some of these phrases, and most of us are just repeating these, these, I don’t know, sound bites, because we care, but over and over again, I see how it’s quietly increasing pressure on the kids that we love, and how ultimately it ends up stalling their progress. So let’s slow down. We’re going to unpack these week by week and talk about what helps instead and when we do these episodes. I want you to know that this is not about blaming parents. Parents. It’s not about you. I see all sorts of adults using this kind of language. It’s parents, teachers, coaches, youth pastors, the aunt at Thanksgiving. So what are you going to be when you grow up? Even sometimes they’re peers, because the peers begin to absorb the language that they’re seeing the adults model. And so sometimes it even comes from their friends. And what this teach us is, when we see things quietly, slow down, that intention and impact are really not the same thing. The best of intentions doesn’t always have the impact that our hearts desire. So this the world’s your oyster. You can be anything. And let me say something about that wording of this same message. It really lands way worse than the other one, because the kids go, the world’s your oyster. Like, that’s an old people phrase. What do you even mean by that? Right? But to kids this, you can be anything. It can sound appealing at first, like we want kids to feel hopeful. That’s our intent. We want them to feel confident and excited and motivated that anything could happen that would just be absolutely fantastic. Behind it. It comes from love, belief and protection even a little bit over what the future holds for them. So I get why we’re all doing it, and let’s talk about how to do something a little bit different. See, when we do this, it’s not just stalling. Here’s what it really looks like. They move into cognitive overload. First of all, cognitive overload, emotional overload, when they get all these options on the table, they begin to have a fear of making the wrong choice. So instead of choosing and thereby maybe closing doors or taking options off the table, they just start to shut down this encouragement that we’re giving them without boundaries from us is actually removing roadblocking, the traction that they want to see and we want to see, because here’s what we as adults know, but we’re not saying to our kids, and I think we really need to consider no one. Can be everything I get. I get into this conversation all the time, like we already know that as an adult, but yet we’re sending this opposite message to the kids. Everyone has limits, right? Everybody has like, a cognitive limit. One thing I’ve really been unpacking lately is, you know, the STEM majors, math, computer science, things like that, applied math, they’re the most changed out of switched out of major because kids have this false sense of math confidence. And then they get on campus and they realize they hit the limit of their cognitive load, and they’ve got to make a different decision. And that’s okay. It doesn’t mean something’s wrong with them, and that’s what we have to make Okay. So first of all, let’s start acknowledging that everybody, even the smartest people, have limits. Everybody has superpowers. After all, we’re all one in a million, right? At this point, I have looked we give everybody that we work with the Berkman personality assessment, and I’ve looked at over 4000 Berkman results over the last 16 years. And guess what, no two personalities are exactly the same. Everybody’s unique. Everybody has those innate strengths and their hardwired personality, and everybody has things that motivate and excite them and things that drain them. You know, energy patterns typically come into three areas, and this is what we measure. You either get your energy from engaging with people or doing things, sometimes both, or emotional energy so social doing an emotion. And if you aren’t energized around dealing with ambiguity and emotion and things like that, the opposite of that is things that are precise and practical. We need to start acknowledging the limits, and not even the limits, but just what lights us up and what drains us, that the stuff that drains us is not failures. And so when we start to acknowledge that there are things that drain us and don’t fit us, we begin to take some of those. Everything’s on the table, options off of the table. So the constraints that some people look at as failure, they actually begin to create clarity. See limits are not trapping the kids. They’re actually just helping them become focused. Yeah, it reminds me of years ago. You know, I think a lot of people eat that cheesecake factory at some point, right? And I remember my kids were little Cheesecake Factory had just come to Cincinnati, where we live, and the excitement was there, like we’d heard great things about this restaurant. The menu is fantastic. The food’s delicious. It’s a great option. So our family of five decides to go, and we do the long wait. We get to the table, everybody’s excited. They literally have to hand you a binder, not a typical, you know, couple page option of menus, because they brag about they have 250 made from scratch, items to delight everybody. Every food option from all the different continents are on the table. And when my family was sitting there with our binders looking at all the options, all of the sudden, what had been excitement, had a huge emotional shift. We moved into indecision. People started talking about what they were going to get. FOMO kicks in, and once we finally placed our order, there was regret and ultimately frustration. You know, all it really would have taken was a well meaning waiter or waitress to come to the table and say, here are the favorites. Here’s the thing that I’ve never heard anybody complain about. Here’s the thing that people order and sometimes get sent back to the kitchen to limit our options would have really helped us be able to enjoy the whole experience a lot better, our satisfaction wouldn’t have dropped and it and honestly, it became one of my least favorite restaurants to go to. So this piece of career advice is the exact same way. All we need is to start narrowing the choices, shifting from you can be anything to, hey, let’s figure out what fits you. You can start with that energy piece, right? You could start with a task piece. I often frame it as get tos and have tos. So if I’m working with somebody one on one with career coaching, we’ll talk about like at school. School or even part time jobs or in extracurriculars or in volunteer work, or if it’s an adult, because I work with those two, we’ll talk about previous jobs that we’ve had. What are the tasks you gravitate to that when you do them a whole day, of them at the end of the day, you’re like the best work

Lisa Marker-Robbins  10:18

day, and what are the things that you tend to procrastinate on or put off? Those are the get tos and the have tos. And that begins to point us in the right direction. Instead of endless possibilities to align possibilities with your unique wiring, Progress begins to come from alignment, not this unlimited choice. And when that happens, I watch these 15 to 25 year olds begin to have agency and less of parents pushing and kids going ahead and taking the driver’s seat. You know, they begin to become relieved. Another thing that I think that we need to do better as adults in this arena is model our own limits. Let’s start talking more honestly. And I get it like as adults, we feel like we should have the answers, we should have the advice. So let’s quit shoulding on ourselves, one of my favorite phrases, and let’s like, remove that. Like we we shouldn’t have all of the answers, but we should be able to support them. So when we normalize talking about things like, you know, when I was working on this, what do I want to be when I grow up, or what do I want to go major in, in college? Or any of the things talk about what you ruled out, how you made those choices based on fit, and maybe you even made a choice somewhere along the way that wasn’t a match. You know, we all meet other adults for like, oh, you know, I’m 40, whatever. I’m 50, whatever. I’ve never loved my job. We all meet those people along the way, and if that’s the case, or you, you had a situation like that in the past, let’s be real about it and say, You know what? I made a bad choice. This is why I made it. But it wasn’t a failure, because here’s what I learned from that. When we began sharing how we made and still make informed choices. It literally is giving our kids permission to do the same and to normalize making mistakes, making informed decisions, turning down things that maybe on the surface look good or would be lucrative, but they aren’t in alignment with who you are, what your superpowers are. You know, if you’re wondering if this is a problem with your kid, the way that this shows up when we’re giving this wall meaning advice, and is shutting them down and it’s adding pressure, are things like, you see avoidance of conversation. You speak up. They leave the room. You see disengagement, they quietly shut down. Lots of I don’t know or what you might say, looks indifferent, and it gets labeled as laziness, lack of ambition, when in reality, is just self protection. We are all wired for safety, right? They’re not unmotivated. They’re just overwhelmed. So let’s dig into this over the next four episodes. I’m going to I’m going to end each one. I’m going to do this in just a second by giving you conversation starters that you can use with those that you’re working with, or the kid in your family who you’re trying to help support. I want us to banish some of these pieces of well meaning advice that sound good on the surface, and I get why we do them, but they’re ultimately stalling momentum, instead of us as adults feeling like I’ve got to say the right thing, because if I don’t, oh my gosh, I’m supposed to have all the answer to saying the helpful thing. Don’t worry about saying the right thing. Just say the helpful thing. And one practical shift that you can do right now is, let’s just start by saying, what gives you energy? What do you feel satisfied with and still have energy left at the end of the day when you do it. And what are the things that you tend to procrastinate on, the things that drain you clarity on the future that we’re launching them into is going to grow through observation, not pressure, I promise you. So if you heard like that list of symptoms, and you’re going, that’s my kid or or you said, oh gosh, I’ve said not only you can be anything, but I’ve even said the world’s your oyster. Here’s what I want you to know. There is a clearer, calmer way to support this process. It’s what I do every day. Is what we do in our launch Career Clarity community. And all you need to do is start having great conversations at home with your kiddo. And if you want, go ahead and join our newsletter at flourish, coachingco.com forward slash newsletter. We give weekly support. We give you a conversation cue to use with your family, and we send you this week’s podcast episode. I just am here to remind you this is figure outable, and your child is not behind. So join me again next week when I give you the next phrase that you probably have found yourself saying at some point you