#246 Why Capable Kids Struggle to Act on Their Own Behalf Transcript

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

Lisa Marker-Robbins  00:00

I’ve been having some experiences lately with some of our clients in Launch Career Clarity that has me asking a nagging question that I think we all need to slow down and think about. I’m wondering how do we raise these young people to act on their own behalf when their future is actually going to require it, when it’s no longer optional? Because as parents, whether you have a teenager, a young adult, a 20-something, even a 30-year-old, you’re not going to be able to do it to for them forever. And they’re not going to get ultimately the independence both they want and you want if they don’t learn how to do these things on their own. The word I’ve got for this is agency. So agency to me means our young people believe that they can influence what is going to happen next, so it’s a belief that they can do it, and a willingness to act on their own behalf. They need information, they go out and get it. They need help, they seek it. They know something didn’t work. It didn’t work out well. They got to a no. They figure they’ll go try another route. See, maturity does happen with time, but agency—I’m seeing a lot of 20-somethings right now—the agency doesn’t necessarily come with it for all of these kids, and I firmly believe that without agency they’re never going to be fully independent. They’re never going to be off your payroll. They’re never going to be standing on their own two feet out of your household. So welcome back to College & Career Clarity. This is where we have conversations. We think deeply about how to support young people so they can confidently launch out on their own, and we believe around here that career is a primary way that they’re going to get there. So why have I been thinking about this? Why am I thinking about it now? We are working with, in most of our in our elite track of our program, some 20-something clients. Some of them have been out of college for a year. Some of them have been out of college for longer. Some of them they have J-O-B’s, jobs, part-time, but they don’t have the career piece figured out yet—yet being the key word. Some of them have told me that they’ve applied to 80 to 100 applications have been submitted with zero interviews. They getting ghosted when they do have interviews. We all read the news. We’re not stupid. We know that at entry level levels, it is harder than ever. But here’s the interesting thing: these are capable young adults. These are kids, some of them have gone to Ivies, not all of them went to college, but many of them have. They are capable young people, and so they’re not incapable of figuring things out. But the barrier that I keep seeing them like bam come up against as a roadblock is that they’re lacking the willingness to put themselves out there, and, you know, this is There’s an important distinction here that I think we as adults need to make. I’m going to put putting yourself out there, taking action, into two different buckets, and and so if you even have a teenager, I want you sticking with me, cuz this episode is not just for parents of 20-somethings. It’s a cautionary tale for those of us that have younger kids, and I won’t say us, those of you who have younger kids. So, let’s put agency, let’s put this willingness to act, into two different buckets. There is a a behind-the-scenes, I’m going to call it a quieter version of adulting, of executive functioning skills. In there could be like, yes, they call for a doctor’s appointment. That’s the type of stuff that does come in time. They can manage the logistics of packing for the trip, knowing when they’re going to get to the airport, flying to go visit a friend, right? Solving everyday problems, that’s the quiet stuff.

Lisa Marker-Robbins  04:50

My concern is with the public-facing, more front-stage things, actions, that can feel not can, do, to a large percentage of these kids, feel very different. So, networking, posting publicly on LinkedIn, asking for a referral, how they show up at the interview, risking rejection, and the deal is, even when we tell them how to do it, I There are kids that I’ve said like, Here’s how you make a LinkedIn post. They are paralyzed, and they can’t do it. They are lacking a willingness to act. So, what’s begun to really nag at me as I’m seeing a growing number of these young people is, how do these very capable 24-year smart, capable 24-year-olds get to the point where what I believe is normal professional risk-taking feels terrifying and paralyzing? So, that’s the first thing that I I, you know, I’m I’m trying to help them in real time solve for that. And the good news is, we are. I’m going to talk a little bit more about that. But the better question for you, those of you that are listening that have teenagers, or you work with teenagers, or you’ve got a kid in college where the stakes aren’t quite as high, I want you to begin thinking about how do you help them build the muscle before those stakes are high, before their independence is at risk if they don’t find the willingness and the agency within themselves. Now, I know some of you are listening to this and you’re going to go, Oh, they’ll figure it out when they need to. But I’m going to tell you, I am seeing that there are 25, 28, 30-year-olds that the necessity is not automatically creating courage, particularly when it is front-stage-facing in a professional way. But I also believe that our kids can figure out far more than we think they can when we get out of their way, when we get out of their way. So what I want us to figure out is how do we not wait for adulthood to require the skill that they haven’t practiced? How do we help them get in their reps? What I see parents doing is accidentally taking them off the practice court unintentionally, and so this removes the reps they need to practice before they’re on the court playing. Like if you’ve got a young person who’s playing a sport, if if, you know, I don’t have a kid anymore, but like my daughter Sidney, she was a competitive gymnast, right? My kids have done varying sports over the years. So if your kid’s going to play basketball this winter, you would never say, Oh, they’ve got too much homework. I’ll go to practice for them tonight. It’s absurd. That’s laughable. Because the practice is what’s going to develop them, the player, right? Agency works the same way. If you take their reps away from them, they aren’t going to become a front-stage player in the professional world in the way that they actually want to show up and you know that they have to. So, the idea here is you’re not going to build those reps through lecturing them, talking about independence, saying, Oh, well, you won’t be independent. That’s not going to do it for them. Just telling them, Oh, be more confident, or giving them the playbook to do it. Agency is built through them doing it themselves, taking action. And once they do it once, there’s going to be a greater willingness to go ahead and act again. You know, I’m as I’m saying as that word literally came out of my mouth, I’m thinking about my friend Jason Rabinowitz, who was on episode 241 of the podcast in August. And you can go back and listen to it. It’s a great one. But one of his core ideas was that our young people should need us a little less every single day. So let’s let’s talk about what that might look like. What would it look like to support your kid in getting the reps in? Early mid-high school, you know, they’re sending the email to their teacher on their own. Might they need to ask you how to word it? Might they need to ask you to look at it before they hit send? Sure, that’s normal. You make them place the order for whatever, even if it’s online, right?

Lisa Marker-Robbins  09:27

This is the behind the scenes, you know, for DoorDash or whatever it is. I personally don’t believe in DoorDash. It’s almost like against my religion, but I know people use it all the time, right? They begin making some of the appointments. It’s low stakes. Awkwardness can happen, and things aren’t going to go sideways, right? Nothing is seriously at risk here. They make that appointment for the wrong day? Big deal. You call back and you you reschedule, right? Once they’re getting ready to, they’re nearing that high school graduation or or have just crossed that threshold, it looks like things like instead of you introducing them to other adults at a family gathering, they go up and they take the initiative to do it themselves. And when they’re at that family party, they ask that other individual about their work. Now, on the front end, you might would say, Oh, Mr. Johnson’s going to be at the party. He does, you know, he’s a CPA, and you’ve been thinking about that. So you tee it up, you point them in the right direction, but then they begin to do it themselves, right? They’re handling getting their car serviced, making that appointment. They’re tracking when the next oil change is, and they’re needing less and less of you as they do it. So that way, once they cross that threshold, and I’m telling you, I’ve talked about this in other episodes, there’s like this this, I don’t know, magic line around 20 where we really do start to expect more of them. And that’s when they are if they’re not crossing to that they’re not hitting a milestone and crossing to that next stage of independence, this is where I see families become begin to become concerned. So you’ve got a 20-year-old and they’re in college, oh, they’ll actually go to career services themselves. They will actually know that, Oh, it’s been almost 6 months and I need to get into the dentist. I we I go. They’re owning the fact that they go twice a year. the internship search on their own. And then once they have the experiences, they have the degree, they have the training, and stakes get higher, they’ve got life agency, they’ve got executive functioning skills enough that now they can have career agency and and these skills are working together. Now when I say that, sometimes I have people some of the pushback I have so many naysayers that come at me, and that’s okay, I’m okay with it. I get pushback that, Ugh, my kid is like the loudest person in the room, my kid’s a total extrovert. I want to tell you that since 2008, I have looked at over 4,000 Birkman personality assessments where we measure 44 personality data points, and I’ve seen the data, and I’ve seen how the personality plays out in real life, and I know this with the confidence of someone who has supported over 4,000 young people. Quiet does not mean low agency and extroverted, loudness, assertiveness, willing to speak up, opinionated kids does not mean high agency. The loudest person in the room is not the most confident or the most willing to act. I have thousands of pieces of data and lived experience with these young people. Agency is not a personality type, my friends. It’s a capacity that gets developed. It’s a muscle that gets built. So if you’re worried because you’re thinking, My kid’s just shy, that does not mean that they can’t develop great agency. Some of the some of the kids as we’re doing the career coaching that they’re seeking roles that are they’re more behind the scenes, right? They’re not They’re not going to have a podcast, they’re not going to speak from stage. Some of those kids have the greatest amount of agency and capacity in this area, and they’re being wildly successful. So I want you guys to start thinking about this career development process, career design and discovery, as an agency training ground. Just like the basketball player’s going to go lift weights and watch films, that’s the training ground. This career discovery and design work, yes, career clarity is the goal for them in the end for that first step into career, but agency, along with stuff like executive functioning, agency is one of the muscles they will build along the way.

Lisa Marker-Robbins  14:18

So it’s ready to go when it’s time to take their place on the court. Career development gives these kids a lower-stakes opportunity where it’s okay to make mistakes, to practice on their own behalf before their livelihood actually depends on it. You know, as I say that sentence, it makes me think of Sabrina Snyder. She is a mom who her youngest is in college and her that’s a boy and her two daughters are out of college now. And all three of them went through our Launch Career Clarity process. So they were very intentional. This is how she she parents with intention. They were very intentional about including career design and discovery as early as high school. And so as her kids went through it, on the other side of what the work that we were doing and the daughter understanding herself, Sabrina came back to me and said, You know what? Once she got excited about some career direction and once we had — she didn’t use these words, but I’m going to say like once they got in some of the reps of exploring careers and talking to adults, her daughter showed started showing greater agency in other areas. And specifically what she said was, you know, Sabrina is a busy professional herself, and with two other kids and a husband and a household to run, you all feel that. I feel that as I say the words, and she said once she got excited about the career piece, she took agency over her college bound journey. She was no longer Sabrina was no longer the one saying we got to schedule some college visits, or we got to get your ACT scheduled, or we got to get your ACT prep done. Her daughter began owning that college bound journey. So, parents, here’s what I want you to do. The next time you get ready ready to step in and do it for them, I want you to ask yourself, is this something that they can’t do yet, or is it just something that they’re uncomfortable doing? See, those two parts of the question, however you answer that, wherever it is that you’re tempted to step in, they’re going to require different types of support. So, you can still support. Like, that’s what we want to do. That’s what I want to do as a mom. Even now, with kids in their 20s, there are certain things that I want to step in with support. My one son and his wife were buying a new car, and they had some questions about insurance. Okay, that’s totally normal to ask, right? And I wanted to give them the support, and we talked it through, and I gave some advice, and I pointed them in the right direction, and then they went out and they found the insurance on their own. So, I supported without taking over. So, we’re not removing ourselves. We always are going to want to be part of their story, right? But we’re changing the type of help that we give. And you know, I think back to the the the lucky 24 and 25 and 28-year-olds that we’re working with, while they don’t have that sense of agency or that bravery yet, it is figureoutable. They are figuring it out, so it’s not too late to do it. But you know what I really want? If your kid’s 15, 17, and they’re faced with something that they need to learn how to do, let them. Because eventually you’re not going to be able to take the rep for them, and for them to have the full independence that you want them to have, that they want to have, out there thriving on their own, is going to require agency. We don’t need to raise young people who aren’t afraid. We just need to raise these kids that when they are, they can still act even when the fear comes up. So, if you want to understand how we use career development and design as the training ground for not just career clarity, but for building things like agency, we got a free video for you. Go over and get our Career Identification Compass video. It’s at flourishcoachingco.com/video.

Lisa Marker-Robbins  18:27

It’s going to show you how there’s a process that not only supports the career piece, but begins to develop them in ways that will pay dividends for a lifetime. Okay, my friends, it’s been great hanging out with you again, and I will see you next week on College and Career Clarity. If you have and if you have a friend who’s stepping in so too much for their kid and you’re looking at your girlfriend, say, I got convicted about this. Go listen to this episode. It might help you guys too. Take care.