#51 Navigating the College Bound Journey: Tips for On-Time Completion Transcript

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

 

 Discerning with your mindset what to hold loosely and open-handed and what to hold onto firmly is really important to your success in this journey. Now, I also want you to get comfortable with being uncomfortable.

 

Happy New Year my friends. Welcome to 2020. If you are listening to this in real time, when it goes live at the beginning of January, 2023, you might be like me and wondering how did we get here so quickly? Perhaps you had all of these ideas at the beginning of this school year, of everything that your family wanted to accomplish, things that you wanted to check off along the way as you went, and now, , you’re feeling a little bit behind.

 

Now remember, that’s a feeling. And feelings aren’t always based on facts. So first, you should stop and check to see whether you actually are behind or not. If you discover that you are, I wanna give you hope that it is possible to get where your college bound family needs to be by the end of this academic school.

 

We are after all, only at the halfway point, and there’s still plenty of time. If perhaps you’re listening to this at a different time of year, I wanna encourage you that everything is figure outable. Some of you might be in a, we got a hustle phase. Others of you might have ease and flow in a non rushed journey, but you can get there with intention and let’s talk about how.

 

First of all, you’ve gotta go into this with the right mindset. So mindset’s gonna be key. So I just mentioned one part of that, which is everything is figure outable. This is doable. Although different paces will vary among our listeners. I wanna remind you on this college bound journey, no matter where you are, that it’s important to hold things loosely.

 

Think of it as an open hand and just, I don’t know, putting something in that open hand right now, if you can see me, I’m putting an earbud case in my hand. We have something with an open hand and we’re holding it loosely, then we’re not clinging to preconceived ideals. We all have them. We all have biases, and we go into any experience we having with expectations.

 

I’m gonna urge you to keep many of those expectations loose. So if you’re thinking about colleges and your student maybe has a target college or an ideal, again, hold that loosely and be open-minded along the way to have a good experiences and learning something that may even take you in a different direction, or maybe it won.

 

You know, I think back to one of my students who I was working with just a year ago. Zach had always wanted to be a civil engineer. Well, he wanted to be an engineer, and then he started to think like, I wanna be a civil engineer. And one of the things that I was encouraging him to do during his second semester of his sophomore year was to have conversations with civil engineers to see if it aligns.

 

And you know, what he confessed to. But he was afraid of having those conversations because what if he learned that what he wanted wasn’t a fit? And I had to remind him that that would be a win. Anytime we learn something and we get clarity, and we’ve got information to make informed decisions, that’s a win.

 

Even if the information we gained is that’s actually not a fit for. It took him a little while, but he eventually had those conversations and actually he confirmed his fit. So, however, even if he hadn’t, everything would’ve been okay and it still would’ve been a win. Now, while I want you to hold some things loosely, I want you to how hold other things firmly.

 

Firmly. Like your budget’s probably your budget for college. And if you don’t yet know what that is and your student is a sophomore or older, it’s time to get clear on that and not entertain colleges that are gonna break the bank. You find out, you discover that a school has academic requirements for admission that you are not going to be able to meet, or it’s a huge reach for you, then that’s something that you’re probably going to have to hold firmly.

 

So discerning with your mindset what to hold loosely and open-handed and what to hold onto firmly is really important to your success in this. Now, I also want you to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. This journey requires us to do things that maybe we rather wouldn’t do and would feel uncomfortable.

 

Have you ever tried brushing your teeth with the opposite hand? So, I’m, I’m right-handed. I brush my teeth with my right hand. And occasionally, because I hear it’s good for our brains and it’s good to prevent Alzheimer’s, I’ll put that toothbrush in my left hand and I’ll give it a try. It takes longer. It feels weird.

 

It feels uncomfortable, but I still get the job done. So get comfortable with being uncomfortable on this journey. I want you to also along the way, be sure with your mindset that you are celebrating wins big and small. It doesn’t have to just be at the end of submitting college applications or getting admitted or making that final decision that we celebrate.

 

If you meet your goals along the way, If you get clarity plan, ways to celebrate as a family or as an individual, because that will keep the momentum going into this new year that we’re embarking upon with all of the many things that you need to get done. So now, once you’ve established a good mindset, I want you to start next with intention.

 

You’ve got to hold that. The way I teach families to do this is to set a college bound conversation or a work session. So depending on where you are in the college bound journey, whether that is you have a sophomore or a freshman, and maybe you’re just having a conversation each week or my second semester, sophomore year, or certainly within the junior year, it’s not always just a conversation.

 

It might actually need to be a work session. So keep that in mind. That work session could be, I don’t know, test prep or registering for your a c t or s a t dedicating an hour or an hour and a half to vetting colleges online. Your work session may actually be going and getting on campus. The most successful families that I’ve worked.

 

Set aside a minimum of an hour a week on a consistent day and time, usually on the weekend, and they commit to holding that time sacred. If something absolutely has to get in the way of that time, they reschedule it, but they hold that weekly session sacred. What I hear from the families is, at first somebody in the family, parent, or more likely, your teen might be a little resistant and not necessarily excited, but over time it becomes expected.

 

And if the parents do as I advise and they go ahead and they say, I will not put pressure on you, I will not have conversations about future planning and college planning, college bound journey stuff outside of this appointment that we have each week. It starts to go really well. The students appreciate it and it.

 

One of my most successful families that I worked with, they were kind of on a get hustle and timeline just a year ago in January of 2020, that mom said, I will not interrupt your week with my college bound conversations unless I ask your permission. I’ll tell you more about them in. Now that you’ve established the right mindset, the right intention, well now it’s about what do you do?

 

What do you actually need to accomplish by the end of this academic year? Or if you’re listening to this anytime, you know, what are those benchmarks that you need to hit? What do we do when so that we’re not missing important deadlines and we don’t get behind, which can lead to being really overwhelmed and kind of feeling like we’re in a hole and we can’t find our way out.

 

I have a college planning timeline that is free to everybody, and it literally takes you step by step from freshman year all the way past to that graduation, to that summer before students head into college. So I’m gonna link to that in the show notes, but. Get that college planning timeline, download it, print it out, post it somewhere.

 

Kind of use it as your checklist. This is going to tell you things that you need to accomplish when it comes to perhaps test prep, testing, vetting colleges, getting clear on your college major, when to visit colleges, when to start applications and essays so that you know what to do. I have families who have kids from eighth grade to 12th grade, and I’m not gonna go through what every kid should be doing every year along that college bound journey.

 

Instead, I’m going to encourage you to download that timeline and figure out what needs to be done when. So let’s go back to Patty and Kristen Perry. Last January when Kristen was a junior. They were feeling behind, and in fact they probably were a little bit behind, but it was figure, outable and doable.

 

Patty jumped on the good old internet and started Googling away, looking for resources and trying to figure out what she should do when, and she stumbled into my flourish coaching world. The first thing they did was start that college bound conversation weekly, and it was on the weekends. Patty quit approaching Kristen with all the future planning stuff during the week, and Kristen told me later she really appreciated.

 

And what did they do next? They did the work week by week, sometimes in as little as a 30 minute segment, and sometimes in segments that maybe lasted a couple hours, but they did the work. They knew that everything that they said yes to doing was no to something else. So if they were tempted to skip out on their meeting for something else and say yes to that, they were saying no to intention and making progress on their.

 

But by saying yes, they were saying no to getting behind on the college bound journey. Next up, they embarked on college major identification, which led to then visiting the right colleges that could get Kristen to her dream career that she established. They at the same time, because some of these things need to happen simultaneously embarked on test prep and testing college visits, and when school got.

 

They were right where they needed to be at the end of the academic year. Kristen then dove right into applications and essays. I received an email from them in September to say that between January of the junior year in September of the senior year, Kristen was right on. Apps and applications were done to the right schools that had the right college major, the right college to lead to the right career.

 

And Kristen was enjoying her senior year of volleyball season, her friends and keeping her academics up. And I share that story to say the Perry’s were behind a year ago and they met all their deadlines. You can do it. So happy 2023. My friends. I’ve got a lot of great things in store for us as we enter into this new year.

 

Thank you for letting me into another year of your family’s college bound journey. See you soon.