#247 4 Steps to Help Your Kid Take Smarter Risks with Matthew Confer Transcript

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

 

Lisa Marker-Robbins  00:57

Whether in high school, college, or a graduate, your young person knows that networking, reaching out to someone for that informational interview, or landing a coveted internship is what they should be doing. Often, though, what gets in their way is not knowing for sure that it’s going to turn out well. It feels big, scary, even. I get it, and I often see the adults in their life assume, “Well, my kid will do it when the confidence comes. It’s then that they’ll send the email, make the call, apply for the opportunity, or put themselves out there professionally. In reality, my friends, confidence is often built on the other side of taking those risks. So, how do we help young people move forward when they’re still scared of getting it all wrong. That’s what we’re tackling today with Matthew Confer. He’s the chief strategy officer at Ability, where he works with leaders worldwide on decision making. His TEDx talk, “Before You Decide, has been viewed more than 1 million times. In this conversation, Matthew introduces us to a tool called a pre-mortem. I’ll admit that his approach of identifying what could go wrong before they even start makes me a little nervous for teens and young adults who are already worried about all the failure that’s out there. So you’re going to hear me challenge Matthew on it, and once we took some time to dig into my objections, I actually loved feeling confident that his tool can help young people move forward. It actually helps them remove some of the fear, anticipate what could go wrong, recognize if things start to go sideways, and then know what to do next in real time. I then said to Matthew, “Let’s put your risk framework to the test, and we did so on a very timely subject: the internship hunt. We also get into the role that parents can play without rescuing their young person from discomfort that actually is probably going to grow them. This is just one more conversation supporting my big idea that confidence isn’t always the prerequisite for taking action. Very often, it’s the result of taking that very action. I’m Lisa Marker Robbins, and I want to welcome you to College and Career Clarity, a flourish coaching production. Let’s dive right into another great conversation. Matthew Confer, welcome to the show.

 

Matthew Confer  03:28

Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here.

 

Lisa Marker-Robbins  03:30

I am too because you are. I have watched your TEDx. I’ve looked at the preview of your upcoming book, and you are so fantastic working with like leaders and helping people make better decisions, and our community is really about helping young people make better decisions. But they need a lot of support along that journey, and so what I really want to think about is like we’re always looking at how to help young people take the risks required to build the agency without like coming in behind them and rescuing from the discomfort and the overwhelm. And I think that you’ve got a lot of great stuff for us around that area. So, with all your leadership work, what is what can it teach us about how we as adults can help our young people get capable of making better decisions for themselves.

 

Matthew Confer  04:24

So, in in my role, I’m the chief strategy officer of a company called Ability. So, we do leadership development training via simulation based games. And this might be a little bit of a tough stretch for some of your younger listeners, but there was this awesome game when I was growing up called SimCity that has evolved into a lot of different iterations, and a lot of people when they see our trainings for corporate leaders, they say it kind of looks like if you had taken SimCity and built it for a corporate audience. So the whole thesis is real world practice without real world content. Consequences, and so I guess what I’d start with is even at the highest echelon of corporate America, leaders are are struggling with this stuff. They have trouble making mistakes. They have trouble talking about the mistakes that they make. And one of the reasons our company has been successful is we thrust people into a simulated environment, force them to fail, and then force them to talk about it. And this is a difficult thing for them to do. So, if your listeners have trepidation about dealing with some of these things, I would say one that trepidation doesn’t go away, and two, some of the most confident people that you might look up to struggle with it too.

 

Lisa Marker-Robbins  05:38

That’s what when you just said all that, and like let’s let that land that the C-suite at big corporations that we’re buying their products and services all the time are struggling with this too. So let’s just normalize the fact that it should feel wonky in your body, to put it in very layman’s terms, when you’re doing these big things. So I I love normalizing that like it’s okay to feel that way, right?

 

Matthew Confer  06:05

Yeah, part of when I give a talk sometimes about the concepts in the book, I give this story about how I was facilitating one of our simulations with a large kind of global CPG company, and there’s this tough round of the simulation where you’re making decisions, and I remember walking around the room, and I look over the shoulder of one of these, you know, senior vice president, very successful individual, and on his screen is Google, and he’s typing in how to make decisions when you don’t have all the answers. And so you’re like literally seeing somebody who is turning to Google at a point where you would assume that after years of making tough decisions, leading a team, being trusted with this, you would have a decision-making framework to lean back on. And I don’t know, maybe it gave me a little bit of confidence that this individual that I would have looked up to, given their stature and their success up until this point was was still turning to Google.

 

Lisa Marker-Robbins  07:03

That’s fascinating, and it’s almost like Google’s soothing. And I see parents, I see adults do that. Like, how can I? Because as parent, I don’t know. Are you a parent?

 

Matthew Confer  07:14

I am two young kids.

 

Lisa Marker-Robbins  07:16

Okay, so you’ve got young ones. I’ve got adult ones, and as parents, because we love our kids and and we’re wired to help and come around them and cocoon them, it can be really hard to let them kind of take some of that on themselves. So, okay, I know that part of the framework that you teach-I love frameworks. Give me a good framework is this idea of a pre-mortem, and most people are, especially if they’re in the business world at all, they use the idea of a post-mortem. What worked? What went wrong? What can we keep doing? Stop doing? Start doing? All those good questions. So, tell us about the pre-mortem.

 

Matthew Confer  08:00

So, back in 2019, I had been facilitating our simulations for three or four years at this point, and one of the things that came up time and time again in our decision-making simulation was you would walk around the room and you would ask teams why they were doing what they were doing, and almost without fail, they could rattle off six or seven reasons why what they were doing would lead to success. You really had to press them to figure out why they thought it might end in failure. And what I ended up finding out was the teams that ended up being the most successful were those that had, I guess I would call it a relationship with failure early on in the process, they were opening, openly deciding, discussing, debating why they were about to make a colossal mistake, and that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. That actually led them to a more confident place of making a bold decision because they felt like they had walked through the negative outcomes, and so I wasn’t inventing the term premortem, but I was looking at the fact that corporate America we embrace postmortems, not in a bad way. I think postmortems are great. You have all the answers. You go through, you learn something for the next time. What I ended up saying was, though, we might want to move that process or embrace bringing that process earlier on in a journey, and embracing a pre-mortem, being at the doorstep of making a decision, and actually say, I might be making or we might be making a colossal mistake. What would that viscerally feel like to make that colossal mistake? And let’s talk through it while we can still change what we’re going to do. And in essence, that’s like the nuts and bolts of a pre-mortem. You’re going to make a decision, assume it’s going to be a failure. Let’s talk about what that failure would look like.

 

Lisa Marker-Robbins  09:59

There’s almost like a mortem sandwich, like

 

Speaker 1  10:02

the

 

Lisa Marker-Robbins  10:02

pre-mortem, the experience or the activity, and then the post-mortem. Because you’re not saying abandon the post-mortem, right? There’s a place for both.

 

Matthew Confer  10:13

Exactly. I think there’s a real case for both, and I think the hope is you might be having more successful postmortems, and you might be able to look back and say, “Man, that thing that we thought might go wrong actually did go wrong. And I’m sure darn proud of us for having a contingency plan in place that maybe we wouldn’t have had if we hadn’t run a pre-mortem.

 

Lisa Marker-Robbins  10:34

Okay, so this is where I get nervous with our population, and I’m gonna, you’re gonna talk me down. I know, but I go okay. I get in the room. We do with our launch career clarity group of students. We do a monthly coaching call, and we work a lot. Like on the front end of that, we start with mindset. We celebrate wins in our community of our students, 15 to 25 that are making progress, landing jobs, internships, all the things, and then I do a Q and A. I have that mindset part in there because you just were use the word like, okay, well, what’s going to happen if we make it colossal? You use the word colossal, and I, I like felt that in my body. I’m like, oh gosh, if I say to a kid, and by kid I even mean young adults, but if I say to these kids, “Oh, you might be making a colossal mistake, when I’m also asking them to have the courage to put themselves out to just ask for an informational interview, like obviously we want to get to like job shadows, because we want to pressure test our thinking in the real world around careers. But if I use the word coloss, this this could be when you reach out for that informational interview or you do this internship. It could be a colossal mistake. They’re already often in flight or freeze mode. Parents read. I they misread that a lot of times as they’re unmotivated. I’m like, no, they’re just motivated to protect themselves so that it feels safe. There’s motivation there. It’s just they’ve got to get courageous because they’re sitting around waiting for confidence to come. So when I say to them, “Oh, get courageous. Confidence will be on the other side of your experience, and I go, and you might be heading into a colossal mistake. I go, oh gosh, they’re going to opt out of this. Help me with this.

 

Matthew Confer  12:28

Okay, I think I can help you in two ways. The first way I would say is, I think, or I would posit that the vast majority of the worst case scenarios, even when you are pressed to go to the brink of this is a colossal failure. The vast majority of times you will find that that colossal failure is not as scary. And giving yourself permission to go to the edge and look down the the cliff at colossal failure is actually powerful because you’re going to be forced to go to the worst case scenario, and the worst case scenario, when spoken aloud and actually articulated, is not as bad as keeping it hidden inside and just being scared about the worst case scenario. So I think that’s part one. Okay. I think part two is a lot of the times the worst-case scenario isn’t powerful if it stays unsaid. Like there is something to be said for putting it out there allows you to put contingencies in place and allows you to potentially deviate from the decision you were gonna make. But most likely, what ends up happening is you end up doing what you were going to do, but you feel a sense of comfort in well, if this starts to go poorly, I have a backup plan, or I’m ready to adjust if I’ve thought through it and this goes wrong. And I talk in the book about the domino effect; like most bad decisions end up not being a bad decision that happened at one point, and that was it. There’s usually a domino effect where things start to go in the wrong direction. A pre-mortem allows you to identify what is that first domino that maybe falls where you can’t make a change, and you adjust your decision making at that point. So those are the two things that I would say.

 

Lisa Marker-Robbins  14:23

Well, you so you could almost you’re mitigating a little bit of risk by anticipating, so that you’re more aware.

 

Matthew Confer  14:29

Correct

 

Lisa Marker-Robbins  14:30

when it does start to go sideways. Okay, I that can work. That makes sense to me because like part of why we have the community element to get in the room, hear the wins, hear other people’s questions. Is when we say it aloud, particularly in a group into others, then it a normalizes and b it it actually helps other people. And there’s that piece of saying it aloud. So I totally agree. I mean, there’s all sorts of like studies on. When you instead of writing down your goals, when you share them, say them, put them out into the world, you’re more likely to achieve them.

 

Matthew Confer  15:09

And I’ll tell you, in a corporate environment specifically, part of the reason why this works is there’s this sense of herd mentality where you’re in a room, somebody says something, nobody wants to be seen as the pessimist, and so everybody goes along with what was said. Whereas instead, if you build a time-a 15-minute mini mortem or a two-week-long pre-mortem where you run and you get together 30 minutes every day to talk about it-if part of the goal is talking in a pessimistic way, you don’t need to worry about ruining your corporate trajectory by being by being the pessimist in the room, and so I think in a group environment that actually might help from your perspective as well. People being openly talking negative might make everybody feel like, man, your worst case scenario is actually not that bad. My worst case scenario is actually not that bad, and I feel a little bit more comfortable having said it and gotten some validation from others. Yeah, you should still do this. That that that’s something that we can mitigate if it goes wrong.

 

Lisa Marker-Robbins  16:09

I love it, and I know a lot of our listeners because I know a lot of the parents in our community are in corporate, are in leadership. So this is good for them too to start applying to their own lives. Okay, can we put your risk framework to work for a second?

 

Matthew Confer  16:24

Yeah, so I love frameworks. I know you love frameworks. Most people love frameworks. When I was in the process of defining a pre-mortem, everybody, every corporate leader we took this to, every person that I took it to, they basically said, “Okay, this is great, but how do you run one? And so what I put together was a four-step framework. I called it risk, so R I S K. Step number one is to recognize the threat, and I think there’s a couple of things there, but the main things that come up in the book is first you have to define the goal. So you need something that you’re evaluating this whole pre-mortem against. If you don’t have a defined goal, it’s kind of possible to recognize the threats.

 

Lisa Marker-Robbins  17:04

So, can I give you

 

Matthew Confer  17:06

one? Yeah, go ahead.

 

Lisa Marker-Robbins  17:07

Okay, so your book’s coming out is october 27.

 

Matthew Confer  17:10

Correct.

 

Lisa Marker-Robbins  17:11

Okay, so we’re dropping this in early October, and we’ll put the link to Matthew’s book in the show notes for sure. But this is-I call it internship hunting season. This is hunting season for college students. Internships for high school students. This will start really in January. It’s the next semester where the internship hunting season is. So we’ve identified the goal for somebody hunting for an internship. I want to land the experience, build the build the resume, okay. So that would be step one, right?

 

Matthew Confer  17:46

Yep, that’s the goal.

 

Lisa Marker-Robbins  17:47

Okay, so what do we do in in I? What’s I all about with our internship hunting?

 

Matthew Confer  17:53

Well, let’s do I guess the second part of R. So you define success first, and then you name what could genuinely prevent it, so you recognize the threats, and this is like the quintessential brainstorming. You are just throwing stuff against the wall. What are the things that could be the impediment for me achieving the goal? You’re not ranking it. You’re not saying what’s more likely. You’re just saying I am going to data dump onto a digital form or whiteboard or notepad, I’m going to name all of the threats. So I’m just going to name all of the threats. I tell this story in the book. Have you ever heard about the monkeys and the pedestals?

 

Lisa Marker-Robbins  18:31

No, please don’t. So it’s

 

Matthew Confer  18:33

this it’s this story from Astro Teller who was involved in Google early on, and he says, “Okay, imagine, and I use this to kind of frame recognize the threats. Imagine that you want to do a show in a main town square, and you want a monkey on a pedestal juggling flaming torches, like the the epitome of like this would knock everything’s gonna go wrong.

 

Matthew Confer  18:57

Yeah, what people end up usually doing is they spend a lot of time on the pedestal. So I’ll give you the example in the corporate world. If you’ve got a big proposal coming out, you spend way too much time on like the fonts in your sales deck. And the goal of this threat or of this step is to figure out your monkey. If you can’t find a monkey that can juggle flaming sticks, the pedestal doesn’t matter. And so the goal when you’re recognizing the threats is you’re throwing things out there that aren’t the pedestal. They’re the monkeys. What are the real impediments to you succeeding? So that’s step number one: recognize the threats. When you move on to step number I, it’s imagine the disaster. So I want you, and this is going to be hard, and for our prior conversation, it’s a little bit difficult. But you need to like viscerally feel this disaster. You take the threats in step number one, you walk them through, and you imagine a total failure. How are. You going to feel, and don’t just stay on the periphery. Like, get a little bit deep with our corporate leaders. We talk about like, don’t just say that like the budget isn’t gonna fit. Isn’t gonna fit the goal. Like, say you went way over budget. You’re pulled into your boss’s office. It’s bad. You’re having to cut something else. Like, viscerally feel that we do this exercise called like headline writing with some of our public companies. Like you’re writing the headline of what would be on the cover of the Wall Street Journal if this went bad. So you’re really feeling the disaster. My favorite story is from India, the Cobra Effect. Watch the TED Talk, read the book. It’s like an incredible story about cobra snakes that really makes you feel the disaster that can go wrong. So that’s step number I. Any questions on I before I? Yeah.

 

Lisa Marker-Robbins  20:49

So I I’m thinking about this with the internship hunt, right? And it’s like what I’m hearing is don’t just keep it logical in your head. Like get it to the point where you’re feeling it in your body. You know, like I’m a pretty practical, grounded, not highly emotional person, but I can get there when things go really bad in areas where it really matters. So, is it more than? It’s not just like I didn’t get an intern. I mean, I didn’t get an internship could be one of them, but then it’s like every single one of what my peers did. I put out 200 applications. I didn’t get a single interview. Like, am I going down the right way?

 

Matthew Confer  21:32

Yeah, and but I I would address it like, let me talk about my history a little bit. So I was an economics major in college. I was convinced I wanted to get into the banking sector, and as a result, all of the internships that I went for in college were in the banking world. That ended up being a bad decision. And spoiler alert: I never worked in the banking sector. So one of the imagine the disaster for me would be I send an internship application to to Citigroup and Goldman Sachs and and all of these banks and I get none of them. What would have probably come out of that later is maybe you should look at auxiliary industries that your skills would be good for, but don’t put all of your eggs in the banking basket. Other spoiler alert: I graduated college in 2008. Not a great time to be going into the banking industry. So I didn’t run a pre-mortem at the time, but thankfully I had internship offers and job offers in fields outside of banking. So if I could look back, that would have been the imagine the disaster. I only go for internships in one sector. That sector is not a good place to be looking for internships. Ergo, I potentially might have deviated my course and put some eggs in other baskets.

 

Lisa Marker-Robbins  22:45

So you know what’s really, and I know your story is back like early 2000s and then 2008 graduating. But here’s what’s really great about your story: we talk more so now because of how entry level jobs are changing and how hiring has changed. It’s skills based now, or is more experiential based? Like it would have been great to hit Goldman Sachs right for you back in the day. Now it’s really I’m not going to say who the internship is with doesn’t matter or where the degree comes from doesn’t matter. But we actually lead with skills now because hiring is skills based, and so the and we think instead of just like singular jobs, we encourage our community to think like ecosystems. So these adjacent spaces where your skills are cross functional is so key. So very fitting for right now. So and I can

 

Matthew Confer  23:40

reiterate having worked with a lot of corporations on their leadership development and their hiring, they are thinking the same way about the people that they want to bring on board.

 

Lisa Marker-Robbins  23:47

Okay, did you all just hear that this is not Lisa on the podcast every week just saying that Matthew is working with the hiring groups out there, and he’s here and he’s like, “Yep. And when they come in here, that’s what we’re developing. So, okay, this is not. I know. I have to just say, like, good. Thank you for the real world validation, Matthew. I appreciate it. Okay, so we we’ve gotten through I. Now where do we go?

 

Matthew Confer  24:12

We’re on to S. So solve for vulnerability. So now you’ve got what is a scary. I will say it is a scary long list of worries. Your goal is to turn this into a short list of priorities. So the way that I do it is normally on three vectors: how bad would this risk really be? How likely is it to actually transpire? And how much control do I have? And you want to put at the top of your list the things that actually would be bad, that are more likely, and that you have some control over. And I want to grant that there will be some things that will be bad, that potentially might be likely, or more than 50% likely, or more likely than you want them to be, that you will have little control over. Putting that on paper, feeling that viscerally, I will grant will be hard, but I think it will make you feel better to having said it out loud, and you can you can gear your focus at the things that would be bad are potentially more likely, and that you have control over, and you will feel a sigh of relief when you get that list organized, and there are some things that you can somewhat take off your plate. Now, in our space, we’re trying to put triggers in place where, if that unlikely thing that, or that likely thing that would be bad that you don’t have control over, does transpire, we do want like a barometer of when do we see that transpiring, even though we don’t have any control over it, and we can start to act to mitigate it. But you really want to focus that top of your grid likelihood control and how bad would it be, and that’s like the forcing question that comes up in this step. Is assume that risk transpires. What do you wish you would have done two weeks ago, and that’s where you start to like solve for the vulnerabilities. You’ve got a list of risk where you might have some control. What do you wish you would have done two weeks ago? Start to work on those things.

 

Lisa Marker-Robbins  26:11

Well, I like that because we always say action. You you action is going to get you traction, right? So there’s a do something in there that I just heard you say the other thing is at the top of those three steps. I’m always saying like we have all these feelings in our bodies about the things, but let’s interrogate the feelings with facts. Like we’re just going to go at those feelings, and it sounds like you’re almost doing the same thing, right? Like you’ve imagined all this stuff, so let’s now interrogate them with like factual stuff, not just like oh, I feel like, which I don’t mean to dismiss feelings all the time, but is that doesn’t get us anywhere, right?

 

Matthew Confer  26:55

Couldn’t agree more.

 

Lisa Marker-Robbins  26:56

Yeah. Okay.

 

Matthew Confer  26:57

I I think I say in the book there’s a line like we’ll keep an eye on that isn’t a plan; it’s just a wish, and that’s really where the four step comes from, which is kickstart the solution. So that’s the K step. So basically, you’ve got these list of risks that made you feel uncomfortable. Now you’ve triaged that list of risks into a smaller list of priorities. Now you need names, dates, triggers. You need the the what are you going to do? What are you going to be watching for? And what are you going to do if some of this stuff transpires? There’s a part in the book that talks about kind of three lanes that you can go. Some of these things will be immediate fixes. You need to do it now. Whether that’s cleaning up your resume, whether that’s making a resume that’s specific for different industries that you want to send. Then you need like structural reinforcements. If one of the things that comes up is, man, I never considered this other space that I want to go in, and I don’t know anybody in that space. Maybe it’s about reaching out to family, friends, friends of friends, getting a connection to somebody for an informational interview in that space, so you can put the groundwork in place. So when senior year comes around and you want to look for internships again, you’re looking in the spaces that you want to be. And then the third lane is kind of contingency plans. It’s that black swan, like it’s that stuff that might come up that you have no control over. What are your contingency plans? And I talk about making it usable, make it specific, make somebody own it, make it actionable without debate is a big concept in the book. In that kickstart solutions, what we found when we work with a lot of corporate leaders, and this probably won’t come as a surprise, is a lot of people do a big old pat on the back when they’re done with this, because they haven’t, and but then nothing happens. It just like sits on a wall. It sits in a shared Google Doc. It sits in an email to somebody, and like nothing changes. You just feel better that you did the activity. It’s great that you did the activity, but if you don’t have solutions, you don’t have ownership. You you didn’t really accomplish the goal,

 

Lisa Marker-Robbins  29:00

right? You know, we have an upcoming episode with with somebody from UVA, and we’re talking about internships. And so, I think for anybody who’s like, okay, they’re they’re applying like this internship or informational interview job shadow stuff that we’re talking about. If you go like, okay, what can the contingency plan be? We’re going to be talking about some things up in that upcoming episode later this month. So, like, there’s a there’s a beautiful ecosystem of these topics that I didn’t even know was going to be there. So, I absolutely love that. I have a question. So, you started with like, hey, whether you’re dumping all the the worst case in a you know a Google Doc, or you know, a voice memo to yourself to get it transcribed. I find a lot of kids do better if they can just talk it out. Right? Do you feel like it’s best to like? We feel that a lot of things happen through conversation.

 

Matthew Confer  29:56

Yeah.

 

Lisa Marker-Robbins  29:56

And so to do this exercise, maybe with somebody. You know, a parent, even a peer, I think, could work. Like two college students or two students together.

 

Matthew Confer  30:06

100% agree. I mean, we are 99% of the trainings that we do are team based training, and the reason is our clients tell us, and we feel this in our bones. But you should train in the same way you work, and you work in teams. Like there is individual work, there are jobs that might be a little bit more individual in nature. You will succeed in the corporate world if you are good at working with teams. And so we believe, and we hear that from our clients. Some people move up, and part of the reason that they’re stuck or they can’t make that next leap is they don’t make decisions well in a team, they don’t cross-functionally communicate. They don’t do the types of things that we’re looking for more senior leaders to do. So, all of our trainings have a team component. I think all of your pre-mortems, even if it’s something that you’re just bouncing ideas off of somebody, really helpful to have a peer, a colleague, somebody to help work through a parent, somebody to help you work through it.

 

Lisa Marker-Robbins  31:00

Well, I’m even thinking like in our community, go do the pre-mortem on your own and maybe share it with your parent or or whatever. But then that’s why we do the Q and A’s, right? So like bring the worst case into the room. Let’s workshop it together because we find that with community. You know, when you said that about the people that are getting promoted makes me think. Like I’ve been looking at this. Like who gets hired? What is the profile? And what we’re hearing is, and you probably hear it too. It’s there’s got to be an AI know-how, right? And AI is not going to replace everybody. There’s got to be some real skills that align with the function of that position. But then the humanness is part of it, right? And I, I really believe that when employers are saying this human side, it is more of the collaboration that you know, and being a real person, right? But it sounds like you guys are are working that in your workshops as well.

 

Matthew Confer  31:56

100% I think the we as an organization have embraced AI probably faster than some of our competitors to our success, but it has not come at the expense of the team that we have. We’re finding that people are are doing a lot more, offloading some of the stuff that was preventing them from doing the high value work. But clients are coming to us. I mean, we’re growing, and we sell human training to humans to organizations, and they are buying more of it than they were last year, three years before that, and five years before that, and they’re worried about their leaders adjusting to a changing world that’s that’s vastly different than the world they grew up in. There is a sense that bringing people in who are AI native but still need those those human skills is a really good accelerant for for businesses.

 

Lisa Marker-Robbins  32:53

Okay, great. Well, this has been fantastic. Any like as you think about parents, you’re one. I I’m one. Different stages, and so we’ve talked about applying the risk framework to the young person doing the work. But any advice for parents who are going to continue to be tempted to come in and rescue? I mean, I could see. I’m sure you see this at times. Maybe the loudest person in the room or a peer who really feels like there’s a lot at stake, rescuing from the discomfort. Any advice around that?

 

Matthew Confer  33:29

Well, in step one of the risk framework, one of the things I highly recommend is that you do the first step of recognizing the threats silently, and everybody in the room writes down their threats because what ends up happening is the voice that talks first to the voice that talks loudest ends up driving the conversation. And if instead everybody kind of brain writes, like not brainstorm, you brain write, and then you put them all on the wall and you see where there’s similarities, that’s where you really start to identify some of the risks. The comment that I would make, like directly to parents that worry about that, and I’m sure I will struggle with this as well. Is I think a lot of organizations hire in some ways based on the story of the individual, not necessarily the boxes that they check. Like some organizations are going to say we’re only going to hire from these schools, we’re only going to hire from these majors. I think the vast majority, though, are looking for some boxes to be checked, but not boxes to be exclusive. And they really want to bring somebody on board who has a story of struggle, has a story of creativity, has a story of the journey that they were on and what they’re excited about. I forget who said it, but somebody said, you know, I hired somebody once because they sent me an email and they said, here are the 10 things that I think you should do to your website to make it better. It wasn’t like I want a job, I want to meet you for a coffee. It’s like here’s some free advice, take it if you want it. And I think more students should kind of think in that terms. I know we’ve hired people at. Organization who have come to us and basically I don’t want to say did the job before we hired them but at least gave us a sense of what they would do not a I want to talk to you about this just random open rec on your website

 

Lisa Marker-Robbins  35:13

well that’s that’s the evidence right I’m like and that’s what we’re seeing with employability we’re looking for skills cross functional in nature. Don’t worry about what the future of work looks like. You’ve got cross-functional skills that are going to adapt if you continue to develop yourself, right? But what I just heard was there’s evidence there, and so we’re doing the reps with all of this work to build the evidence to demonstrate the skills to get the opportunity. So this has been fantastic, Matthew. So the name of your book again:

 

Matthew Confer  35:46

The Upside of Downside Thinking: A Pre-Mortem Approach to Better Decision Making.

 

Lisa Marker-Robbins  35:50

Okay, we’re going to start embracing mortem sandwiches around here. I like the launch community, and we will put your TED Talk, your book in the show notes. Thank you for giving us a real-world parenting and young person application out of what’s coming out of corporate. So I appreciate it.

 

Matthew Confer  36:09

Thank you so much for having me. One

 

Lisa Marker-Robbins  36:17

thing I hope you take away from my conversation with Matthew is that we don’t need to wait for our kids to feel confident before we start encouraging them take that next step, whether it’s applying for the internship, asking for an informational interview, reaching out to build their network, or hearing a no. Those experiences, they are the reps they need to build their future. They’re building the ability to act on their own behalf-that’s called agency-even when they don’t know exactly how things will turn out. As parents, mentors, those supporting them, our job isn’t to remove all that discomfort. We can help them think through the risk, prepare for what might go wrong or right, and then let them take the action. You know, one of the things I see kids delay action on is getting on LinkedIn. It feels scary to them, even if that doesn’t seem real to us. So, to support them with this step and make it an easier lift, I’m sharing my free LinkedIn profile builder to help them get started. It’ll help them create a profile that communicates who they are, the skills they’re in development on, and where they’re headed, even if they’re early in the process and they don’t have it all figured out yet. You can grab it at flourishcoachingcode.com/linkedin. I’ll also put it in the show notes, where you’ll also find the link for Matthew’s upcoming book, *The Upside of Downside Thinking* and his TEDx talk, *Before You Decide* I’ll also give you ways to connect with him in the show notes. His book releases October 27th, and it’s available for pre-order now. And you know what? You probably have a friend, another parent, a young person who could also benefit from the tools that we’re sharing here, and it will make their journey lighter. Can you do me a favor? Take a screenshot right now. Send this episode to a friend, and better yet, you could even post it on LinkedIn, social, anywhere, and tag me Flourish Coaching Co. This helps us support more families in preparing a launch into a thriving next chapter. It’s truly my calling.