#226 What Your “On Track” Child Might Be Missing Transcript

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

Lisa Marker-Robbins
You’re trying to support your child well. You’re staying on top of deadlines. You want their performance to be strong. You’re thinking about the opportunities in front of them and everything that has to happen to set them up for what comes next after graduation and an eventual successful launch out of your home. You’re doing a lot, and it sometimes can feel like you’re making progress, but here’s what I see over and over, many families, they’re working incredibly hard, but toward the wrong finish line, and what happens after all that effort? Well, it actually doesn’t move your child forward in a meaningful way, they’re busy, but they’re not building real momentum toward what you both ultimately want for their lives. I’m Lisa Mark Robin, and this is College and Career Clarity, where we help families prepare their teen or young adult to launch into adulthood out of your home with clarity and confidence and through this process, here’s where I see families get stuck all the time. You might think the goal is high school graduation or maybe even college acceptance, and schools, the schools that your kids are in, well they’re designed to support that they are 100% doing their job. Probably I hold space for maybe they’re not, but most of them are doing a great job. But here’s what parents actually want, and this is what appears when I’m talking to them, even if they’re not willing to say it out loud to other people, they want something different. They you me. We want our kids to launch and be happy to move into adulthood with direction, confidence and the ability to support themselves without you as their financial backstop one day. See those are not the same goal as what schools are aiming for. Here’s why this matters more than people realize, see your young people, they’re going to build toward the finish line that we all you, particularly as our parent, put in front of them. See whether you’re realizing it or not. You my friends parents are setting that finish line or maybe you’re not even when it doesn’t feel like it, yours is the loudest voice in their head. Yes, you’re competing against others at times, but they’re listening to you. They’re hearing you, and so your actions, how you behave, what you’re doing, what you believe, is setting their eventual finish line, because their brains, as you already know, they’re still developing. See, they naturally cannot think 510, or more steps ahead. So instead, they rely on the structure, the expectations and what the adults in their life emphasize to figure out what they should be doing. So when we’re not focused on the right line, what happens is the focus becomes grades, graduation, getting into college. I see it all the time. However, that’s what they’re going to optimize for, when actually you want them to do something else. So even though they’re working hard and they’re busy, you’re busy. There’s no busier stage of life. I was recently there, so it’s easy to get focused on the next step, but not the full path. This reminds me of a student that I was working with last fall. He Calvin was an Ivy League grad. He had done everything right. He was always focused on what that next step was in front of him in high school. It was performing well in his AP classes and taking rigorous courses. He was busy. It was getting good test scores. It was applying to the right colleges. He landed a space at an Ivy League like amazing. He got on campus. He got good grades. But see, it wasn’t until after graduation, or as graduation was approaching, honestly. Right in the spring of his senior year of college that he and his parents realized that they had missed the bigger goal all along See he earned the degree, but not direction, and as he looked at his peers and what was going on around him, he felt like he was falling behind and he wasn’t set up for standing on his own two feet. So he came through our process, our career confidence framework, through launch, and he was able to build the clarity and through that really get to know himself so that he’s now, a year after graduation, in a full time role that fits him well, but man, it was hard fought because he did it later, rather than earlier. It took longer than he wanted, and he felt that any in his body, his parents were welcome to support him and have him back home for a period of time, but when he fell behind his peers, the feelings were real, and it took longer than it needed to be. See if you’re thinking as you listen to this, oh my gosh, that’s actually happening to us right now, or maybe that could be our family in the future. This is one of the biggest mistakes that I see families make, and I walk through it in my free video. So if you want, you can go over and get it. Is flourish coaching, code.com, forward slash video where we unearth the two biggest mistakes that we’re holding families back, families like Calvin’s families. Because what I’m seeing is, on the surface, everything looks fine. It even sometimes in our body, in our gut, our emotions. We don’t just think it’s fine. We feel like it’s fine, because really, you are making progress. Micro steps are working, and what that starts to do is give families a false sense of security that they’re set up for the ultimate finish line. See, I see kids choosing majors, applying to colleges, following paths that they think fits, because they feel good without any real world validation, and then unexpectedly, they’re surprised when they hit a barrier. And then they begin to try to pivot to figure it out. They start dealing with transferring colleges, wasted time, falling behind their peers, treating their parents as a backstop, and the parents begin to carry a load and a big one, they all began to lose confidence. See, it doesn’t fall apart all at once, but it starts to creep in slowly. It reminds me of a student that I was working with years ago. So in a former life, I exclusively worked as an individual educational consultant. I was there to support families, to find the right schools, pick the right high school classes, maximize their extracurriculars, figure out what colleges to apply to, and then manage the project of applying and then land them in the school that was their best fit. So I had this family that I loved working with, and they were thrilled with the outcomes, the college outcomes that they had in the senior year, and she graduated and went off to college. Everything looked successful, until their daughter realized sophomore year of college what she actually wanted to do. Because she waited till college to start to do this exploration and validation, and when the light bulb went off and she’s like, Ah, this is what I want to do, she found out that her university would not allow her to switch majors because they only in that program accepted and by the way, it was nursing. They only in that program accepted students who had applied their senior year of high school, when they were going to be first time freshmen. They didn’t allow people to switch into this majors. So now she either had to stay and finish a degree that she wasn’t confident was what she wanted to do, or she had to transfer. Time was lost. Money was lost. They the money wasn’t really an issue, but the trust was strained, and they were feeling it. They reached out to me, and they expressed their frustrations. And it’s when I realized, in that moment, that while all of us, me them, we all thought that they were hiring me for a college acceptance, when actually they were hiring me for a successful launch, and the career had to be part of that. See, we had all, me too, been aiming at the wrong line. And you might be thinking, oh my gosh, we are too. You might be aiming at the micro line instead of the finish line. And that, my friends, is when I started to do things. Differently. So who’s to blame? Okay, this isn’t about blame. Let’s just say that you guys know that, if you’ve been listening for a while, you know that this is a place of empathy, strategy, activating decisions and gaining traction. So let’s release the blame. It’s not about blame. It’s about alignment. It wasn’t the parents fault, it wasn’t the student’s fault, it wasn’t my fault, it wasn’t her school’s fault. See, schools, they’re doing what they’re built to do. There’s a graduation line out here, and they’re getting graded on whether they get the students to the graduation line, the college counselors, the school counselors that are in the schools, they are dealing with a lot more than even graduation or college, they’ve got grief groups, divorce groups, mental health, emotional wellness, that they’re focused on, scheduling classes, graduation ceremonies, AP, testing, you name it. And if you’re working with an independent college counselors, most of them are focused, not on the graduation line, but what comes right after that, which is the right college fit. See their goals. While they’re good goals, they’re micro goals. They’re not the same goal as you as a parent have for you, because I’ve heard it over and over and over again for decades with the over 4000 families that I’ve served, the launch line is the actual finish line. So let’s talk about what to do instead. If you’re listening to this and you’re like, Ah, we’re at risk here, or maybe we’ve already fallen behind. So the secret is to begin with the end in mind and stay focused now, not just on any end, but the right end, if you agree with me with what we’re talking about. And you hear these student stories and you go, Yep, the actual goal is the launch goal. It’s to get them standing on their own two feet, happy and thriving and oh, by the way, that’s going to take a career that has a paycheck. So I’m no longer their financial backstop. See if the real goal is the launch line, then everything else has to guide that upstream. That doesn’t mean, though, that we ignore these milestones that I was talking about, the grades, the graduation the college acceptances, the apprenticeship acceptances, the training programs, getting an internship experience. Those still matter, but my friends do not mistake them for the finish line. They’re just milestones along the way. Now I’m not a runner, but if you are, this will really resonate, and we’ve all probably known somebody run a marathon, maybe you’ve been that person on the sideline, like I was for my best friend Jamie, cheering her on as she ran her one and only marathon. Man, it takes mental discipline in miles one or two I hear because this is not me. It takes mental discipline to not rush in the first two miles when you that adrenaline is high, because you know it’s going to undermine you later, when you get to the halfway mark, you don’t ignore the celebration at mile 13, you can still celebrate it, but you’ve got a long way to continue going, and when you hit what I hear is called the wall, because I only cheered, I didn’t run. And that happens around between or around miles 18 to 22 you don’t ignore digging in. And you don’t ignore celebrating when you get to the other side of the wall. Right, those moments matter, but you don’t confuse them with the real finish line that is at what I don’t even know, it’s 26.2 I think I’m sure I’ll hear from some listeners. Drop it in wherever you’re listening and let me know. See, and what I see happen is all the time, families are celebrating those milestones. Mile one and two, oh, we didn’t go in too fast. Oh. Mile 13, we made it through the halfway. We got it over the wall. We see the finish line down there. And what happens when they start celebrating too big on the wrong milestone is they accidentally stop aiming. So let’s talk about what to do instead. Key to this process, and everybody knows it is rooted in self awareness, and it’s starting to build their self awareness earlier. Had a previous episode where I talked about that as your secret weapon. Go back and get it. It was recent. We have to explore careers with more intentionality. And after we explore them, which is often, I’ll even pick up my phone behind their device, we have to get out in the real world and do thorough validation. Mm. Before committing. See that gets switched up all the time. We commit and then we validate, and that’s a problem. So when we hit those milestones, if we’re actually doing this right, deep self awareness, exploring careers intentionally and thorough validation before commitments, when we actually hit those milestones, we can celebrate because we know they’re leading to the finish line, a thriving next chapter for both of you, one that you both can be proud of, because that includes a happy next chapter for you too. Just like I’m in see, if we don’t define the finish line early enough young people, they will still move forward, but they’ll just move forward with something that may not be a fit. So there is a better way to do this, a more intentional way, and that’s exactly what we help families build inside launch Career Clarity, your first step is uncovering our career confidence framework by watching my free video at flourish coaching co.com forward slash video, my friends, you’re working hard. Let’s just make sure that you’re aiming at the right line. And do me a favor if you know somebody else who needs to make sure they’re aiming at the right line and they’re not celebrating too big and getting off course with those micro finish lines, those micro milestones, take a screenshot, text us to them, send them the link. We’re all better when we do this together. Okay, I’ll see you next week.