#232 The Step Where Career Clarity Falls Apart—and Why Transcript

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

Lisa Marker-Robbins  00:00

I had parents say to me all the time, my kid’s unmotivated, they’re disinterested, they really aren’t. I mean, when I tell you nearly every kid will take the assessment, and most of them will do some exploration, that is signaling to you that there is a willingness, but when they stall out and you misread it, it really is rooted in it’s just difficult to do, so they don’t get stuck because they lack motivation or information. They’re willing to go out and gather it, but the validation, which is the highest level of knowing that you’re matching to the right career before you pick the way to get there and go get that job, it requires courage. One of the advantages of doing something more than 4000 times is patterns become super predictable, and after working with 1000s of families on career development, supporting young people 15 to 25 I can tell you this, a very predictable spot in the process where things tend to stall out, go flat, things begin to feel really difficult, even for the families that are being very thoughtful and proactive about this process, even the ones that start early with teenagers. So, here’s this like continuum of families I want you to think about. Right, I always, I always like the continuum. We’ve got families who start out going, like, I’ve got this kid, we don’t know what to do, Lisa, where do we start? That might be you, that might be why you’re listening today. On the other end of that continuum are families that think they’re doing all the things, they think, okay, we’re checking the boxes, my kid looks super capable, it looks like we’re going to have a successful outcome, and some of them do, and most families, well, they’re somewhere right in the middle of that continuum. They know where to start, they, or they think they have the support, maybe it’s for their high school or their college’s career development center, and they think they’re doing the things, and for any of those families, what I see is there’s a consistent spot, whether they don’t know what to do or whether they think they know all the things, where things get hard. Things can get really hard, and when I say get hard, it’s not just for the kid, it’s for the parent too. And when that happens, their young person depends on, yeah, they could be a teen, they could be a young adult. They start making decisions before they’re actually ready, and they might be making those decisions because they’re up against a very real deadline or a timeline, like graduation or application deadlines, and they start to just like put stuff out into the world, so if you don’t know that this predictable spot is coming, it’s really easy to misread it, and that’s what I want to discuss in this episode. I want to talk about wherever you are on that continuum, and whatever age your kiddo is, 15 to 2530 that’s typically who we’re supporting around here. I want you to know where it goes off the rails, why it happens, and what you can do differently before it gets there. Because awareness is so key to this. So, okay, many of you, if you’ve been listening for a while, you know that we really support a three step process on helping young people get the career confidence they need to live their best lives outside of your home parent on their own two feet, and we’ve done this with our own kiddos. So, step one is building deep self awareness, right. Step two is where we connect that self awareness out to real world career options that are filtered down to a manageable list that fits for an exploration and validation process. If you already know this, stick with me, because we’re going to talk about where in this process things go sideways once you have a direction, you put that GPS pin. If you’ve heard my map, my driving analogy before, you put that GPS pin into where you know you want to go. Then you got to figure out how to get there. What training education do I need so that I look like a valid candidate for the positions that I want, right.

Lisa Marker-Robbins  04:45

Okay, so that’s the process, and let me tell you that there is one spot where this goes bad, so it’s not the first spot, it’s not the self-awareness piece. There’s a good measure of self-awareness that this age is willing to do. Give them an assessment to take. It’s the rare kid that says, I’m not going to take that assessment. Most of them, because it feels fun, interesting, they’re curious. These assessments are online, click, click, click. They’re on their device, they love their devices, so there’s a willingness, in large part, by the vast majority. I can’t say everybody, but really, I mean, if I had to guess, over 90% of kids are like, yeah, I’ll take an assessment, how long is it going to take? I’m happy to do it, and there’s also hope in that, right? It feels like we’re doing something productive, and something good is going to be on the other side, so that’s not where this goes sideways, because most kids are willing, and by kids I mean this age group, right? I call my own kids, even those of ours that are in their 30s, kids. Most kids say, yeah, I can step into that, right? And so they, they get their results, and then when we move into phase two of our framework, then we do the next part, which is exploration and validation. So, if everybody, nearly everybody, is willing to take an assessment, what I find is exploration is something that research, if you want to call it that, is something that most still the majority, over 50% of kids are like, “Yep, I can do that now. Sometimes they don’t know how to do that, and that’s fair. They don’t have the tools, and it’s hard to trust what’s out there for the exploration process. So, I get that, but there’s a willingness in most young people to say, “Yeah, I’ll read some articles. I will watch some videos, maybe on YouTube or whatever. As a parent and as a professional, I get concerned about the quality of what they’re looking at, but that’s that’s a whole nother episode, right? So, there is a.. there really is a willingness for exploration behind their device, on their device, on their phone, you know, they start doing scrolling, and they might actually run into some good information about what they’re thinking about. And here’s where it goes sideways – validation. Validation is where I see everything, just even if you’re taking good steps, just falls apart, and we’re going to talk about why. So, first of all, I want you to be aware of where it falls apart, and now we’re going to talk about why and what you can do instead. Right? If you’ve watched my free video, The Career Identification Compass, and if you haven’t, you can go get it at Flourish Coaching co.com forward slash video. We have that in the show notes, but if you’ve watched that, I talk about last fall in real time from when I’m recording this last fall, when I had a continuous glucose monitor, CGM, that I was wearing, and I was running all kinds of experiments, you can go watch it and go into it deeper, but here, here’s the deal with the what I call my Coca Cola story. Right, I was exploring, I was validating, and I was learning about how my body responds, and I held out hope that my beloved Coca Cola from my younger years wouldn’t create real problems for me, blood sugar problems. I know that when my blood sugar goes up, guess what, my triglycerides go up. We have a huge family of heart disease, that’s not good. And because I’m in my 50s, my waist continues to grow, something I don’t want to have happen. So when I have that awareness right, and then I validated it in the real world. Now I can know when. Oop, Lisa, at Halloween time or at the holidays, you’re eating a little bit too much sugar, you need to dial it back. So awareness is what we’ll solve for this. So, a now we’re aware, we know it’s validation. Now, why is it that validation, career validation, is where things just, they lose their energy, because it requires getting out from behind their device, you know. We teach six different types of real-world validation.

Lisa Marker-Robbins  09:11

Some of them are in your home at a computer. Yes, most of them, and the highest value ones are out in the wild, out in the real world, talking to people about their jobs, getting a part-time job, right, doing job shadows, landing an internship, and it feels dangerous to their nervous system because they don’t know what to expect, so you know, you go back to the old fight, flight, freeze, fawn. I talk about this all the time. When things feel dangerous, you go into one of those reactions, and you know, there’s hope in the exploration stage, but then when they start to do real-world validation, and no match is going to be a. 100% perfect every day of your life that you show up at work. Then there’s this little bit of like what’s on the other side of this, and I’m hopeful now, but I might land on no when I go do this, right? I might have to talk to an adult, and I don’t know how to have that conversation right, and so that’s the why. It’s not that they don’t want to get the help, you know. I have parents say find the job. Had parents say to me all the time, my kid’s unmotivated, they’re disinterested, they really aren’t. I mean, when I tell you nearly every kid will take the assessment and most of them will do some exploration that is signaling to you that there is a willingness, but when they stall out and you misread it, it really is rooted in it’s just difficult to do, so they don’t get stuck because they lack motivation or or lack motivation or information, they’re willing to go out and gather it, but the validation, which is the highest level of knowing that you’re matching to the right career before you pick the way to get there and go get that job, it requires courage, and that, my friends, is what we’re going to solve for next week, so in this episode I just wanted to create the awareness of no matter what you’re doing, if you’re on the side of, like, we don’t even know where to start, Lisa, that’s why we’re listening, or we think we’re checking all the boxes and doing all things right, the real risk is that validation is going to get hard, but if you skip it, if you could skip steps, you skip results, and that’s where things fall all apart. So, next week, come back, because we’re going to talk about if that’s where it’s hard. How do we help our kids find the courage and the confidence to go out and do them? And I’m going to tell you right now, courage and confidence are two different things, and we’re going to talk about next week how to build them. So, if you want that free video where I talk about my continuous glucose monitor of experiment, and I even show you one of my data graphs, but I tie it to real world career validation, go get that video at Flourish Coaching co.com forward slash video, it’s also in the show notes. And can you do me a favor? And this isn’t for new listeners, but if you’ve been following along for a while and you keep coming back to the content, and you’ve never left me, you know, you’ve never rated the podcast, or especially if you’re on Apple, if you haven’t given me a review and just shared with the world what’s helpful about the community that we have here as launchers, those who are seeking to launch people well. Do me a favor and go out and do that. I would appreciate it. It would be the best gift. So, a little bit of love for your host, please. Okay, we’ll be back next week to talk about how to build courage and confidence. Thanks, my friends.

13:04

Bye.