Ready for the Ivy League Challenge? 

Transcript of the podcast

What if you could help your team gain an incredible advantage in college admissions without sacrificing their childhood?

It's not just a dream.

Real college preparation is about identifying and aligning with core values.

It's about making your community better in ways that align with those core values.

It's about developing emotional intelligence and problem-solving self-efficacy.

All of these things should build a teen's confidence while giving them critical success skills as they go.

Preparing for college should be the most motivating, the most exciting, and the most fun.

It should be the most life-supporting process, the most amazing time in a teenager's life.

For way too many teenagers and their parents, it just isn't preparing for college is stressful, it's overwhelming, it's daunting.

That's just not right.

If you've been listening to my podcast that we help students become the most impressive versions of themselves, not someone else.

And so, if you are the parent of a teen or a pre-teen, and you want to know how to build their confidence as they build their resume, I am excited to share some really great news.

I've just created a new Facebook group, and I'm inviting you to join.

The Facebook group is called parents of ambitious teens, personal growth, and healthy college prep.

When you join, it would be best if you join on a desktop computer or a laptop computer so that you can get the questions that I ask when you request entry.

In those questions, I'm actually quite serious and quite interested in answer to the question.

What is the single greatest challenge, frustration, or concern that you face when it comes to college preparation?

I'm so interested in that because I am addressing your biggest issues regularly in the Facebook group, based on what we've heard so far with the first 20 or 30 people who joined over the last 24 hours.

I've begun creating two different workshops, one to help you decide which activities are helping you get into your top-tier college and which activities are wasting your time and making you feel overwhelmed.

And another master class that I guess we'll call for now success architecture, all about how you make decisions ahead of time so that you're not depending on willpower or self-discipline, to become the kind of person that you want to become.

I'm committed to spending time and energy in that group to give you the resources that you need so that you can help your teenagers or your pre-teens prepare for what is coming ahead.

Here's the thing, so many parents and so many teenagers, even their teachers and their college counselors.

But so many adults in these teens' lives put off college preparation until it's time to apply for college.

College prep is something that happens before you apply to college.

And there's a good reason why correctly done.

College prep builds your self-efficacy, build your confidence levels, build your critical thinking, problem-solving skills, leadership skills, your communication skills.

Because if you prepare correctly for college, you are preparing for a successful life.

How do we do that?

Again, if you've been a part of this podcast if you've been listening, this is no surprise for you.

But step one or phase one is we identify your core values.

You need to understand your core values because those core values are the key to understanding how you're going to make a difference in the world.

Understanding your core values is also the key to getting out of one of the biggest traps that most teenagers and pre-teens are stuck in.

And that is this idea that life is going to begin sometime in the future.

So you'd better work hard now to prepare. We hear that all the time.

Parents and teachers alike might say things like you better work really hard in junior high because high school is coming, and it's going to be so hard.

You wanna be prepared.

And then you get to high school, and new adults in the world are saying you better work really, really hard because college is coming, and you need to be prepared.

Guess what's going to happen when you get to college? Other adults are going to say you'd better work really, really hard because real life is coming; your first job is coming.

And then your first job works really, really hard. And then you can get your first advancement, your first promotion, you can move up into management or whatever the case may be.

This mindset is a mindset that says you'd better prepare now because life is about to begin.

And what does that mean?

Tragically, it means that for you, life has not yet begun. And I challenge that idea.

I know pre-teens who once they identified their core values, began living life on their terms and began developing responsibility and making better choices, developing their meta-cognitive skills and their ability to interact with the world in more healthy ways.

And once you begin living your life, once you identify your core values so that you can align your daily choices courageously with those core values, life really begins, and it has meaning, and it's exciting.

And what's the alternative?

What do so many of these students do?

Who is told they'd better work hard because life is about to begin? What do they do?

So many of them are exhausted.

They're burned out at school. They're disengaged at school, but they try to use willpower and self-discipline to get through the day.

Then once you're exhausted, you've run out of self-discipline and willpower. And what are you going to do?

You're going to veg out in front of Disney plus or Netflix. Or if it's social media or some other time kill, whatever it is, you're going to get lost in this fantasy world, disengaged from reality. Instead of aligning your choices with your core values, which feed you energy, which charges up your batteries, and give meaning to life.

So the alternative is this idea that we just need to work really hard, and then we can be prepared for the next stage of life.

It has a real cost associated with it.

The cost is students eventually decide that they don't do things just to please adults.

They burn out and phase out and disengage.

Instead, let's be wiser about this. Let's help our teens realize what does engage them at their core by identifying their core values.

Once we've done that, then phase two, we move into this really exciting time where we begin making an impact in the community around us.

But how do we make that impact?

Again, just like the core values are easier said than done.

It's easier to say, let's find your core values than it is to actually do the deep thinking work to discover those core values.

Similarly, let's go make an impact in your community.

Let's find a problem and solve it. It. Sounds pretty simple on the surface.

But just like so many other things, the devil is in the details here. And unless that impact project is aligned with your core values, it's not going to be authentic, and it's not going to turn out to be as impressive.

It's probably just going to look like a project that you did to stand out in college admissions, and it's probably not going to help you. If, instead, we do things correctly and we align that impact project with your core values, then what are we doing?

We're throwing out college preparation at that point.

We're saying college preparation was the impetus to get started. But right now, I'm about making my community a better place.

I'm about solving this real problem that exists in my community that violates my core values.

College admissions feel like such an afterthought at that point, and guess what?

That's exactly the mindset where you want your teenager to be not desperate around college admissions and using willpower and self-discipline to try to keep up with the joneses, to keep up with the people that they think are going to be getting into their dream schools.

Now, you want college admissions to be an afterthought as they throw themselves into their core values.

They learn all of the skills that they're going to learn as they begin taking action based on those core values.

The leadership, the communication, the problem solving, all of that happens naturally when they truly want to solve a problem that actually violates their core values.

It's a beautiful thing to watch. And that's why we're creating this Facebook group.

Phase three is the ivy league challenge, and if this is the first time you've ever heard a podcast of mine, then you're probably not aware that I'm describing phase one, phase two, and now phase three.

These are the three phases in my 12-week training, The Ivy League Challenge.

I teach my students in a very intimate setting how to go through that process.

Phase three is this idea that we can be very strategic in how we align our core values, our awareness, our self-awareness, about those core values, and our impact project in a cohesive and very strategic way to make sure that it stands out, that we get the right letters of recommendation. 

That we get the right essays, that we get everything buttoned up correctly, so that we present the best possible persona, and the best possible narrative to the admissions officers and ensure the best possible chances of getting admitted to those schools.

There are a lot of questions along the way. I support students inside the Ivy League Challenge.

But how am I going to show up for the parents?

This Facebook group is my answer to that.

I want to help you and help you answer those questions that you have about how to empower your teenager, how to make sure that they're not wasting their time, and they're not spinning.

Their wheels are not going crazy pursuing some strategy that's only going to leave them disappointed.

Instead, let's choose a better way.

There is a better way.

There is a way for you to give your child an incredible advantage in college admissions.

Even if there are 6 or 7 years into the future, there's a way to give them an incredible advantage without burning them out.

And this Facebook group is about given giving you the tools and giving you the understanding that you need to help those teenagers.

So to join the Facebook group, go ahead and look it up on Facebook, parents of ambitious teens, personal growth, and healthy college prep.

Or you can go to tilc dot to forward slash FB, that's TILC that stands for The Ivy League Challenge dot to forward slash FB b FB stands for Facebook.

I'll also link to this group in the show notes.

And so those of you who can access the show notes can just click on the link as well.

I am really excited to see you in the group to give you the support that you're looking for and to get your feedback, to get your answers, to get your concerns so that I can help you who is this Facebook group for?

To be clear, I believe that college preparation happens long before college application time.

If your son or daughter is in 5th grade, 6th grade, 7th grade, or 8th grade, and no one else seems to want to admit that college preparation has already begun, because preparing for college is just preparing for life, right?

It's becoming the best version of yourself and using the natural energy and excitement that teenagers feel, and pre-teens feel around college admissions to inspire these teenagers to make better choices.

If you believe that college preparation begins before college application begins, then please contribute your voice and your energy, and your time to this Facebook group.

I can't wait to see you in the group. I'm excited to give you the support that I can and to have your voice and your support inside the group as well, join at tilc dot to forward slash FB will see you inside the group, and don't delay, because we're actually going to do our first master class very, very soon.

If you're listening to this, right?

When it came out, you've probably got a few days before we will start the first master class, which is all about how you can decide which activities are helping you prepare for college, which activities are a great use of time, and which activities are wasting your time. You might be surprised by what you learn.

See you in the Facebook group.