Horizon Point writes about dozens of leadership, career, workplace, and workforce topics. Sometimes we write whatever we want. Read this category for general blogs from the HPC team.
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Stressed about helping your high school senior pick a college? The acceptance letters have started coming in and you’re not sure what is the best option for them, or you feel like you do, but you’re worried you will be too vocal with your opinion of what you think is best.
Experienced your freshman or sophomore in college leaving to go back to school from the Thanksgiving holiday almost in tears because they hate the classes they are taking and thus their major?
We get calls this time of year from concerned parents seeking help on how to advise their child who have experienced just these things. One mom told us, “I didn’t know what to do. She got in the car to go back to school crying. I had no idea what to tell her.”
In weighing decisions, big or small, it’s always good to make a pros and cons list, not a good and bad list.
You think the smaller, liberal arts school is a better fit for your child instead of the big university, and you are probably right. But if you frame one school as all good and one as all bad, you may wind up in a fight.
Know you can’t afford to send them to the Ivy League school even though the got in because no scholarship money is available? Yet they have been offered a full-ride to the state school? Make a pros and cons list comparing their options including the con that they will have to work to help pay for their top choice school (which, by the way, may not be a con at all- working to pay for ones own education may be a pro).
Think they need to stick it out in physics even though they hate it because it’s a necessary step in fulfilling their dream (or is it your dream?) of being a doctor? Make a pros and cons list surrounding the decision to switch career focus with them instead of telling them to suck it up.
You’ll find that if you help facilitate a pros and cons list, instead of telling them what to do, nine times out of ten they’ll make the best decision on their own and will be more apt to stick with it because they see it as their decision, not yours.
How have you helped your child navigate career and college decisions?
Last week, I discussed how many parents often discourage their children without even knowing it by the comments made about career and college choices. We do this with good intentions. We want to see our children succeed and be better off than we are, and as older and wiser parents, we should know what is best for them, right?
There is, however, a good way and a bad way to impart our wisdom in shaping decision-making. Taking on the role of coach may be the best way to do this when it comes to giving career and college advice.
In What I talk About When I Talk about Running, the author, Haruki Murakami describes how he finally found a swimming coach that was able to help him improve his stroke.
Below are the reasons she was a good coach. These lend themselves well to how we can be good parent-as-coaches in order to help mold our child(ren)’s paths:
A good coach:
Like this example, confidence may be a key issue in helping your child achieve success, and you, more than anyone else as a parent can help make or break their confidence through the type of encouragement or support you provide them. I’m not advocating for helicopter parenting when I say this or advocating for giving them a trophy when they come in 13th place, but I am advocating for having dialogue with them that helps them work through, themselves, the issues that plague teenage and early adulthood confidence. Being supportive of who they are and what their dreams are (not who you are and what your dreams are) is an important step in this process.
How has someone who has acted as a coach for you helped you to achieve success?
Reading is key to writing, or so I believe, so 2013 started with a personal goal to read 30 books. I’ve got a few weeks left until the end of the year, and I’m on number 28. I’d like to make a habit of creating a year-end book review to point others in the direction of what reading I found most insightful and meaningful.
The 2013 list:
Topic: Personal Leadership
Choice: First Things First
Blog posts from this year that include excerpts or ideas from this choice:
A Lesson in Personal Leadership 1: Define and Focus on What’s Important
Personal Leadership on Purpose
Topic: Leadership
Choice: The Way of the Shepherd: 7 Ancient Secrets to Managing Productive People
This short gem of a read tells the story of how an MBA professor teaches the lessons of leadership to a student through the analogy of raising sheep. The people you lead are your “flock.”
Quote from the book: “What distinguishes a great leader from the mediocre one is that a great leader has a heart for his people.”
Blog posts from this year that include excerpts or ideas from this choice:
2 Questions for Striving Servant Leaders (this has been our most viewed blog post this year)
Runner-Up in Leadership: Leadership and Self-Deception
Topic: Career Development
Choice: The Alchemist
Really a novel, like the choice for the year on leadership, most often the best points about a topic are made through a story. Many lessons on career and life pursuits are interwoven through the story of a young shepherd boy (maybe I have a thing about sheep and shepherds considering this years picks!…) seeking his Personal Legend.
Quotes from the book: “….when we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better, too.”
Blog posts from this year that include excerpts or ideas from this choice:
Are you Offering your Child Gold for Career and College Advice
Topic: Novel
Choice: And the Mountains Echoed
Khaled Hosseini author of The Kite Runner, has an exquisite way of painting the human condition across cultures and economic boundaries. He demonstrates through his storytelling that whether we realize it or not, we are all connected.
Quote from the book: “….one is well served by a degree of both humility and charity when judging the inner workings of another person’s heart.”
Topic: Miscellaneous:
Choice: What I Talk About When I Talk about Running by Haruki Murakami
Many of you know I run (although much less now and much slower at, currently, six months pregnant). I run for my sanity, as a way to cultivate meaningful relationships with some of those that I love the most, as a way to stimulate my thinking, and as Murakami so poignantly describes in his memoir, running in many ways, is a metaphor for work and life.
Quote: “Most runners run not because they want to live longer, but because they want to live life to the fullest. If you’re going to while away the years, it’s far better to live them with clear goals, and fully alive than in a fog, and I believe running helps you do that. Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that’s the essence of running and a metaphor for life.”
Our blog post on Thursday of will pull from this book as a reflection on what it means to be a good coach through the perspective of parents taking on the role of coach in helping their kids make wise career and college decisions.
A category all its own:
The Bible– through The Message translation
I took on the 90 Days with the Bible Challenge this summer. No, I did not finish it in 90 days. A beach trip to cap off the end of the summer resulted in catching myself up by reading the entire New Testament (I was really behind), but as a lifelong Methodist I’ll have to admit, I was not taught nor trained to read and study the Bible as much as some other denominations do. Reading the Bible all the way through was something I had to do in order to be able to relevantly understand, question and strengthen my faith.
What I found in reading it through as a story of humanity is that we are all flawed (I couldn’t believe what some of the people in the Old Testament did! But its really not much different than all of us today) and that the best form of redemption, grace, and love has to come in the most unlikely way. Humankind’s paradigm had to be shifted, and God’s love had to come in the form of human relationships in order to truly be made real.
Quote from The Message related to work: From the intro of Nehemiah “Separating life into distinct categories of ‘sacred’ and ‘secular’ damages, sometimes irreparably, any attempt at a whole and satisfying life, a coherent life with meaning and purpose, a life lived in the glory of God… the damage to life when separating the sacred from the secular is most obvious when the separation is applied to daily work… work, by its very nature, is holy.” Italics mine
Blog posts from this year that include excerpts or ideas from this choice:
What was your favorite read of 2013 and why? Please share your favorite quote from the book with us!
