#229 The Summer Mistake That Leaves Families Panicked by Labor Day Transcript

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

Lisa Marker-Robbins
Memorial Day, well, it’s barely passed, and I keep hearing the same thing from a lot of families this summer. This one is going to be really different. We’re going to catch up, we’re going to quit pushing things off, we’re going to actually work on that future planning that you talk about, Lisa and my kid by the end of summer. Well, they’re going to be less dependent upon me, and we’re just all going to feel like we’re making progress towards that next chapter of life. Honestly, summer absolutely can create that type of momentum and traction that I keep hearing people say that they want, but here’s the deal, it’s not going to happen accidentally. See, the problem is, and you may have been here before, I see this over and over, and I even remember the best of intentions when my kids were teens and young adults, that without structure, that summer drift that feels good in the moment, it quickly takes over those sleep schedules that we commit to. Well, they begin to slide, and their avoidance, it begins to grow. Anxiety increases, and suddenly you’ll go, “Ah, it’s Labor Day, and everyone’s back to feeling behind again. See, this is a really important season for young people, teens, young adults, those 15 to 25 year olds. I’m always talking about because summer creates an opportunity for them to begin to build confidence, direction, and traction about what comes after graduation, or if they’ve ever, or if they’ve already graduated, what comes next in their life? I am a huge fan of summer for many reasons. One, because if you know me, I hate cold weather, and I love the warm weather, but because, regardless of age, for even us adults, it’s just one of those few times of years, kind of like the holidays at the end of the year, where everybody tends to slow down, there’s an easier pace. So, here’s what I want to talk about today. It’s how to embrace that slower pace that I even absolutely love, and how for us to strategically approach it, so that you get both rest and momentum for you and for your child. I’m Lisa Marco Robbins, and I want to welcome you to College and Career Clarity, a Flourish Coaching production. Here we talk about how to support our 15 to 25 year olds, and we’re off to a great topic as we enter the unofficial start of summer, see a lot of families that I talk to, they often assume that more time will actually relate to more progress, but what often ends up happening is that unstructured time that we all crave, I crave it too, it actually can start to create more of a drift, getting off the path. Think of about a GPS, you put the pin in the GPS, you’ve got a path, but then there’s all these side roads that, when you go past them, oh, they look dreamy, they look great. What does drift actually look like for your kids? When I talk about this, it can present as even though they need that rest, beginning to sleep in by the time you to july 4, you’re like, oh my gosh, now wake up time has crept till 10am 11am it’s staying up on their devices and doom scrolling, or maybe if you’ve got a gamer, it’s staying up to the wee hours of the morning, even though they committed to going to bed at a reasonable time, and by reasonable for young people, I mean like maybe 11pm maybe midnight, but they’re still gaming at three or 4am I raised some boys who love to game, so I’ve been there before. You’ve given them a list of responsibilities of how they can be acting like an adult in helping contribute to the household, but they keep getting pushed off, and suddenly you go like, How did the things not happen? And when that happens, this undercurrent of tension between the two of you, which was supposed to be a sun season of summer, it begins to grow. But you don’t want to push them too much, particularly if they’re already in college and they’re just back for the summer. You think I’ll deal with it later, I don’t have the energy. And then suddenly summer is almost ever now. If you’re listening to this and you’re thinking like, oh, here she goes, she’s gonna make us have like a 40 hour work week for our kid over the summer, when I know they just got out of exams, they got got out of all their activities or extracurriculars, they just got home from college, they need rest, they do. This is not going to be an anti-rest, anti-fun, anti-downtime episode, I promise, because here’s the deal. May I keep hearing this. May is the new December. December always so busy with the holidays, right? May has become the new December for many of you with teens and young adults. So I do know they and you actually need rest. But here’s one thing that I talk about all the time with my coaching clients. Rest and rejuvenation are not the same thing. Hear me again, rest and rejuvenation are not the same thing, and you and your young person need both. You cannot escape rejuvenation, you need it as much as rest. See, rest helps us recover. You’re on a marathon, you better get some good sleep, you better rest, right? That end of school year, it feels like a marathon. So, rest helps us recover, it helps us catch up on sleep, it gives us downtime, it allows us, it’s vegging out in front of Netflix. It’s that slower pace, right? That’s rest. It is recovery, but rejuvenation is really different. Rejuvenation is taking part in activities that are life-giving, that are energizing, that are momentum building and confidence building. If you’ve listened for long, or you follow me on social media at Flourish Coaching Co, in all of the places, you know that I’m a huge fan of the outdoors. I go on a hike, I feel rejuvenated. It feeds my soul. What is that for you? What is that rejuvenating activity that you do that’s different from rest for your young person. What is that? This would be a great.. I’ve always tried to create a culture of conversations, be a great conversation for you guys that have at home. So, what is that life-giving, rejuvenating activity? Is it time with friends? Is it participating in sport? Is it learning something new? Talk about it, and here’s what I see over and over when it comes to rejuvenating activities, and when I look at how young people spend summer, when they spend summer building direction and gaining traction at the end of the summer, they actually feel more energized, not less, so if you spend the whole summer resting, you’re likely to hit Labor Day and feel anxiety, feel like we’re still behind. We said we were going to catch up. When you do rejuvenating activities, you’re going to hit Labor Day with excitement and confidence and accomplishment and feeling ready to go into the next chapter. Okay, see, here’s what I want for everybody. I want to support you in being able to have a better Labor Day and not having regret. One of the ways I’m doing that is normally my career identification compass video is something that’s part of an opt-in. You have to give me your email address to get it. If you’re a listener and you’re not on our email list, I am opening this up only for the next week without our opt-in process. So I want you to have as a resource, that’s how important I feel like this is. I’m going to unlock it and give it to you, so that you can look at what are the mistakes that families make that I’m going to walk through, and what actually creates traction, so you can begin to think, how can we do this summer differently? So, unlike last summer, or maybe the summer before, we don’t hit Labor Day with regret, because here’s the deal, your young person needs to begin to build direction before life will start narrowing the options for them. I talked about that in last week’s episode. If you want to go over there and listen to it, but if you want to get that free video, I’m going to put in the show notes, but it’s at Flourish Coaching co.com forward slash clarity, no opt-in. Go watch the video, because here’s one of the things I want to help you guys correct with what I teach over there and what I’m teaching right here. You probably make the assumption that once school ends, once schedules relax, once everybody. Can breathe a little bit, you’re not juggling calendars and figuring out how you’re going to get to all of the places that that less pressure, more time will naturally lead to better motivation, but here’s the key that’s still missing, and this is one of the things that I do a deeper dive of in that video, when our young people don’t have a framework or a process or know what the very next step is right in front of them, not the 110 steps ahead, but just the very next step that they need to take, they still will not move space of summer relaxed schedules will create opportunity, but that alone is not going to create traction, and we all want to have traction going into the fall. You don’t want to be the ones reaching out to me, going, my kids unmotivated, because here’s the deal, they’re not motivated, they’re not lazy, they’re just overwhelmed, unsure where to start, and often they’re afraid of doing the wrong thing, like you’ve got these expectations, society has these expectations, they’re putting expectations on themselves because of what they see going on with their friends, and so when they have those expectations piling on, and are unsure what to do. They need a process to get there. That is exactly why structure matters. Now, your answer is a parent, it’s not over scheduling, it’s not applying more pressure. So, if you’re hearing this again, I’m not anti rest, I’m just anti wasting time, right? I’m not telling you as a parent create their schedule for them, create a bunch of pressure and control every minute of the their day. Honestly, most of you that I hear from are working parents, and you don’t have the capacity to do so anyway, even if you wanted to, but that’s not the answer. Doing it for them, I talked about this back in May in another episode. What they need is your support that you can offer them, and tools. See, that’s what we do inside Launch Career Clarity. When we’re using our career confidence framework is three simple steps. We build the self awareness, we give them the steps to do so, and we give them the steps to go out and explore and validate career paths. And so this summer I’m going to take that framework and I’m doing something really cool. We are creating a summer clarity cohort. I am adding additional live summer coaching Q and A time with me. Normally, people who are in our program, they meet with me once a month if they can make it, but we give access to the recordings on in the evening, and we do some teaching, we work on motivation and mindset, and we give both parents and those that are in our course, the young person in our course, the ability to have decisions activated with coaching. So, over the summer, because I want everybody to take the extra margin that they have and be super intentional with it, I’m going to add an additional Q and A in June, July, and August, so that by Labor Day, young people have the support and the accountability to feel proud of what they did and have momentum moving into the fall. See, confidence usually is going to grow after action, not the other way around. Confidence then action doesn’t work that way. Confidence actually grows after they begin to take action. Families often are sitting there waiting for that motivation first, but momentum is what will create the motivation. So, here’s what I want you to think about. Here’s what I want you to imagine. Labor Day arrives. Your kid has better self-awareness around who they are, what they value. They have a stronger sense of direction that has been designed, not drifted into. They’ve grown in confidence, they’ve started to build a network, or they’ve increased their network. They’ve had real-world exposure to real careers. Yes, they’re changing every day, but real careers in real time, and they’ve got a clear next step. So we’re going to give them the next step for the summer, and they’re going to leave summer with the next step for the fall. How would that feel for your family, that version of this fall of September? And I don’t mean to wish the days away or waste summer away, because it’s my favorite season. Will not happen by accident if you do the things that you’ve done in the past. Young people are rarely going to drift themselves into momentum, and so this summer clarity cohort that I’m doing is. Not meant to pressure young people to have everything figured out. It is to give them the support and the structure for a summer that has both rest, rejuvenation, and momentum. So, if you’re listening to this in real time, here’s the deal. Families who join us and launch career clarity through june 7. They’re going to get special pricing. They’re also going to receive a bonus Berkman report called Handling Commitment. It looks at when your young person is effective in handling their commitments, how do they behave based on their hardwired personality? When they’re ineffective, what usually is getting in their way, and help to how to help support them on their growth edge to handle commitments better, particularly going into the fall. We’re adding those three additional daytime launch live Q and A’s with me, June, July, and August, in addition to the evening ones, so that your student is not left trying to figure this out alone. This implies this implementation matters. Easy for me to say, right? This implementation matters, but it only matters if they actually do the work, and that’s why I want to be there every two weeks to give them the accountability to do so. So, if you’re wondering how it actually works, or would it be the right fit for your family this week, only I’m hosting three short summer clarity sneak peeks. You’re going to look inside Launch Career Clarity. You can actually, I’m going to pull the curtain back, you can actually see how it works, see how people move through our framework, and you’ll have your opportunity to ask me questions live. You can find those details, as well as that video that I’ve unlocked for this week only, at Flourish Coaching co.com forward slash clarity. So, summer does not need to be perfect, but I do want it to change your young person’s trajectory. Intentional summers create very different falls in very different next chapters for both you and them. So I hope you’ll join me, regardless of which. I hope you have the best summer, and you make time for both rest and rejuvenation, as well as gaining some traction and momentum. Have a great summer, my friends. I’ll be back next week.