#224 Why “Feeling Clear” Can Lead Your Child in the Wrong Direction Transcript

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

Lisa Marker-Robbins 0:43
I want to talk about something I see happening with both high school students, upper teens, 20 somethings, who are trying to figure out their direction in life, what comes after graduation as they launch into adulthood, often this shows up particularly the older they get. They start out feeling stuck, unsure of they what they want, overwhelmed, sometimes even feeling like they’re falling behind their peers. And then when they begin to put in the time, the effort to do the work, they start exploring, having a career conversation or two, maybe they try something brand new, something begins to shift, and they feel a little bit better, more hopeful, clearer. And that’s when I see people make one of the biggest mistakes in this process to Career Clarity and a confident launch. They rush to the answer. They assume that feeling better in the moment means well, I’m ready to decide, but what’s actually happening? They’ve just not got enough clarity to begin the real work. I’m Lisa Marco Robbins and around here on College and Career Clarity, we support families and educators who are supporting young people to make confident, informed decisions as they move forward. And what we’re doing now is we’re kicking off, and they’re not going to be right in a row, but we’re kicking off a bit of a series around the mindset shifts that will help young people, if they can make these just shine and gain traction faster. See there are degrees of clarity, early clarity. When you’re early on in the process, it feels like relief. Ha, I can breathe again. It feels like progress. Ah, I’ve gained some traction, but often early on, not often, almost always early on. It’s not yet been tested, validated, and frankly, it’s incomplete. See, feeling better is often just the beginning of the process, not the ultimate destination. My client, Maggie, recently experienced this. She’s in our elite coaching program with launch Career Clarity. She’s in her mid 20s. She’s out of college, already working, but she came in feeling stuck, not sure that she was in the right job. So we started doing the work. After she did just a little bit of work, her energy already improved. She reported back going into our second session, oh my gosh. I had a great week at work. And then she said, but I just want to know the answer. I just want to know what the right job is. And then she added to that statement, and I know this is what we’re doing. So first of all, I celebrate the fact that she could reel herself in. That kind of comes with maturity, right? And she was able to go like, okay, that that’s the work that we’re doing, right? And I said to her, when we met Maggie, we’re only 25% on the way into the process. And while I celebrate and I’m thrilled that you had a great week and you’re already feeling better, I want you to think about something here if you were on a weight loss journey, which she does not need to be to lose 100 pounds. And you had lost 25 pounds, and you started to feel a little bit better. You had more energy, and you were you’re active, and you’re maybe sleeping better, you would start to feel a little bit better. But we wouldn’t quit at 25 pounds. We’d keep going right, feeling better in the moment, especially after we felt bad, it can make it tempting to stop, but we’re not done yet. Let me tell you about two other clients. One of them was a young 20 something who was just starting the exploration process. He had earned a degree in computer science and he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do. Another student similar. These two stories are kind of similar. Mary, she was in high school when we were working together. She’s in college now, and they’ve got something in common that happens a lot. Okay, so the first student, John, he. Started exploring, like he was doing the online exploring, researching, gathering information, and something in his mind said, Oh, I think maybe one of the traits would be good. And he started going down that path. Okay. Mary was doing her work. She was getting ready to go to college. Knew that she probably wanted to be in the business school, but wasn’t really sure, and so she did an informational interview. John, he did a conversation, an informational interview, and he does a job shadow. So both of them got some early exposure, and

Lisa Marker-Robbins 5:41
they didn’t make wrong efforts. They were doing the right things, right, informational interviews, job shadows, right? But they got a little bit of traction, some positive signals, early, positive signals that they were headed in the right direction. And they both made a quick decision for John, he jumped to an informational interview with a friend and a job shadow and applied for apprenticeship programs right away, Mary did an informational interview with her uncle, whom she loves. We’re gonna talk more about that in a second, and got a lot of positive feedback, and she immediately decided her college major without further exploration and no real world validation. So this is a common pattern that I see up come up. It’s not that they’re putting in the wrong effort on the wrong things. It’s not just not enough of it, and so we need to do more before we decide, Okay, now here’s what came from those experiences that matter. One thing else besides like jumping too early to the opportunity, and both of them now have corrected that, by the way, but they also have something in common, where the experiences they did for John, 50% of what he did the informational interview was with someone he already had a relationship with. It was a peer who he hadn’t spent a lot of time with in a while, and I could tell he had fun reconnecting. That person was in a trade, a different train trade than he pursued. And then Mary talked to her uncle. Of course, she already knew him. Well. She admired him. She had a positive relationship. So what happened was, in these relationship driven informational interviews, they were borrowing confidence from the relationship that they have, not from the reality of the work. Okay, familiar people, they’re easier to find, and they can give us comfort because of connection, but not always accurate insight. The reality is better data is often going to come from our what LinkedIn would call our second and third degree connections. So not the people that we know well, but the people that they behind them that can connect us, that they can connect us to. Okay, so when you remove the personal like the personal social energy from it, you’re able to focus on the actual job at hand. So don’t make the mistake of that. And here’s the other thing, we know, that when people go after jobs, you actually have a better chance of learning, of earning a landing a new position through a second degree or third degree connection than you do through a first and this is not Lisa making this up on a fly. There are actual studies that show this. So let’s pay attention to the research and the studies. So here’s what’s coming up with this. And this and this is a mistake young people are making. Something feels good. We get a little little bit of promise. It reduces our anxiety. It gets misinterpreted as I must have made the right decision, so that early positive feedback, while it’s good and actually feeling better helps us gain momentum to keep going. It’s not the time to stop. I remember an oldie but a goodie podcast episode I had Dr Abigail Sussman on. I was August. I bet you it was August 2022, I’ll have to look it up. I’ll put it in the show notes. And we talked about decision making frameworks, right? Dr Sussman works at the University of Chicago. She researches at the intersection of psychology, economics and finance, but the heart of what we talked about there was we make better decisions in a cold state than in a hot state. So there’s cold states, warm states, hot states, the closer we. Get to having to up against a deadline, having to pull the trigger on something, the hotter state that we’re in. So when we’re in that hot state, emotions run high. Things feel urgent, and we become reactive. When we’re in a cold state, it’s easy to stay instead of in our body and the emotions, it’s easy to stay up in our heads, more logical, calm, pre, planned and intentional. This is where a lot of people make the mistake. So what happens is urgency increases.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 10:35
We tend to want to shorten our process and sometimes, gosh, if it’s like pulling the trigger on where to enroll in college. That’s something people are thinking about this time of year, we might have to because we might be up against a deadline, but that’s where mistakes can happen. So let’s talk about the shift that we want to make before you even begin a process. And it could be anything. It could be buying a new car. It could be we’re doing a master bath renovation right now. It could be that it could be exploring careers, career development. I want you to make a logical, calm, intentional decision around the process that you’re going to do. And I don’t just mean the fact that, like I have a career confidence framework that I work use with individuals. I don’t just mean, oh, we’re going to use the Lisa’s career confidence framework her, you know, build self awareness, explore, validate, then choose your training or educational. Educational path I want to really go into, like, how many informational interviews am I going to do? How many different jobs will I actually explore? Right? How many types of experiences do I want to have? We actually teach six types of experiences that we use for real world validation. And I’m not saying you have to do all six, and I’m not even saying that you know you, but I’m just saying you have to do more than one. Don’t do just one informational interview with someone who’s familiar to you. Think of it like this, if you were driving a new car and you’re you’re not driving you’re buying a brand new new car, you wouldn’t just go out and test drive one car. You do your online research. You try to get down to, well, what’s the true value for negotiating power? And you would go out and you might even drive different different trim levels of the same car. You’re probably going to drive different cars that are similar. I was buying an SUV a couple years ago, year and a half ago, and I drove similar size SUVs for different manufacturers. So same idea here. We don’t base a life direction on one conversation or one experience. The reality is that when we go to school, K through 12, when I say this to young people. You can see it. Try this with the young person. You would see their body language right? When I say, Well, you go to school 16,000 hours, kindergarten through 12th grade, and when I say that, it hits emotionally, right? They’re feeling that. Oh, yeah, Lisa, yep, I feel that. And then when I frame it up with the average individual is going to work 95,000 hours in their adult life, the light bulb goes off. We do not want to base a major decision like this on one conversation or one positive experience, okay, because the reality is, when you skip steps, you’re going to short change your results, and you might have to back up and do it all over again. See that speed, it can feel good in the moment, but it often cost you a lot of clarity later on. But I also want to say that if you’ve seen this happen in real life, or you’re afraid that you’re on the slippery slope of this happening. This is only normal. It’s a human experience, because we all want to reduce our stress and relief. Feels good, right? Progress can feel exciting, like, oh my gosh, I might have what could be possible. Parents, you want movement. And your kids, they want resolution. They want a target to aim at. And the older they get, the more they want it. And I see this with the 20 somethings, because they’re already in that hot, reactive state. This is why I’m so passionate around okay, we’re going to help those 20 somethings that are already in a reactive state and they feel like they’re flattering or they’ve already fallen behind. But more importantly, I’m hoping to create conversations and community around let’s get these kids while they’re still teenagers and they’re in a less reactive state. And we can take a calmer, more methodical approach to this work, because the more pressure that they start to feel, the faster they try to decide without taking the right steps.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 15:15
So when your young person starts to feel clarity, resist the urge to accelerate to the destination. Stay in exploration mode and deepen the validation mode. You should be asking yourselves and having a conversation as a family. What else do we need to test? What might we not know yet? Who else should we talk to? Not just those people that are familiar to us see clarity that hasn’t been tested is not clarity that you can trust. If your child is starting to feel clearer, but not fully confident yet, this is the time where what we’re doing matters most. That’s what we do inside launch Career Clarity. If you want to learn about our career confidence framework, we have a free video for you. You can find it at flourish coaching co com, forward slash video. We don’t drive to the answers quickly, but we drive to answers that you can trust. Okay, my friends, don’t rush the process and just take the next best step, not all the steps at once. Okay, see you again next week. You.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai