Ready for the Ivy League Challenge?

Transcript of this podcast

Let me ask you a question when you get home from school, and your parents ask the proverbial how school is today, do you answer with a real answer?

Or are you like most teenagers who just shrug their shoulders and keep walking?

Any parents listening in can easily relate to this because for most teenagers, that's the response.

It's either a shrug of the shoulders and not even an answer or a very quick and very ambiguous fine or okay or even a good.

But with no real information there, in 2004 gallop did a poll to try to ask students to be more specific and gave them a list of words that they could choose from.

That they would use to describe school. It may not come as a surprise to any of you, but by far, the most common words chosen by teenagers to describe how they feel at school were number one, bored, and number two tired.

There were some positive words that came after that, things like happy and challenged.

But it's really important to note that the words changed with age, so that 13-year-olds, it was 13 through 17-year-olds who answered this research, who did the study.

And 13-year-olds were far more likely to choose positive words like challenged or happy or engaged.

As they got older, more towards 16 and 17 years old, overwhelmingly, the students chose bored, tired, confused, lonely, and pressured.

This comes as no surprise to those of us who work in the field from teachers to guidance counselors. Parents who have had teens come through this before if.

This isn't your first rodeo. You've seen this before because we even talk about it in education circles.

We talk about the 5th-grade slide where students begin to dip in their performance, in their effort, in their engagement in school.

And then it's called the 8th-grade cliff, where some students just fall off the cliff and completely abandon their previous engagement in school.

And educators have been talking about this for decades. It's not like this is a new phenomenon, but does it have to be just because school has been frustrating and lonely and boring and tiresome for a really long time?

Does that mean that it has to continue to be that way?

Arthur C. Brooks is a professor at Harvard University who teaches leadership and happiness among other classes.

On the first day of class, he often invites his students to join him to define happiness.

They come up with all kinds of ideas, but we often think that happiness is a feeling that he says is wrong.

Happiness has a lot of feelings attached to it, and feelings are really important.

But it is not a feeling per se. Instead, he invites us to think of happiness as taking apart a meal.

He says to consider a grand meal or a banquet. And you can define that meal in many different ways in terms of dishes and ingredients.

But at its core, we can define any meal in terms of macronutrients.

There are three major macronutrients in any given meal, no matter how big or how extravagant it is, they're going to be protein, carbohydrates, and fat.

In the same way, he says there are three key components to happiness. And when we can combine those three ingredients in sufficient amounts, then we achieve lasting happiness.

So he says that those three macronutrients or the three key components to happiness, our enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose.

And if we can just dive a little bit into these three keys to happiness, I think we can understand why there's such disengagement with teenagers currently in high school and what we can do about it.

So the first one is enjoyment, which he defines as just pleasure or an elevated state of positivity.

The first idea that doctor brooks emphasize is the fact that it's not selfish to seek out enjoyment.

In fact, seeking enjoyment is natural and completely healthy.

What's great is when we realize that identifying our core values and increasing our level of self-awareness is actually the key to increasing the amount of pleasure or the amount of enjoyment that we can experience.

Recently, Doctor Brooks talked about a 16-year-old young woman who is preparing for college and is extremely stressed out.

She has removed enjoyment from her life, which is actually really common.

Unfortunately, it's extremely common.

So many people believe that the key to getting into their dream college is to do more, do it all, do it big, do it fast, do it now, and do it better than anyone else.

When he spoke to the 16-year-old, he talked to her about the importance of enjoyment in her life.

When she was experiencing it, how she was experiencing it, where and she said she doesn't and neither do any of her friends.

They're too busy.

She wasn't willing actually to schedule enjoyment into her day or into her week, because she was afraid that she was going to fall behind.

At his encouragement, she decided that she would schedule some enjoyment, schedule it into her week, literally put it into her planner, and then come back and report on how things went.

And it doesn't surprise those of us who have read the science around positive psychology and the benefits that we get from fun in our lives.

But she discovered that not only did she not lose ground with her peers who did not take time to have fun.

She found that because she spent time enjoying something for a short period of time.

She was able to focus better on the rest of the activities that she was doing that day.

In fact, she got more done that week than she normally would do.

In other words, indeed, it was beneficial for her to prioritize play.

If you're someone who has compressed your schedule so much, that you don't even have time to figure out how you're going to slow down and how you're going to make more time for yourself, then this needs to become a priority of yours as well.

The second key ingredient to happiness, according to doctor brooks is satisfaction.

The idea of satisfaction is that we can have satisfaction. The trouble is keeping it.

You may be familiar with the term, the hedonic treadmill. And this is the concept that you achieve something.

You achieve a goal. You work really, really hard. You achieve that goal.

You feel satisfied because you achieve the goal.

But that satisfaction doesn't last very long. And so you find yourself needing to achieve bigger and bigger goals.

It's like you're running on a treadmill. You're not really getting anywhere, but you're afraid to stop running because the treadmill is moving underneath you.

You need to run just to keep up. And so it doesn't feel very satisfying. At all.

There are a number of different things we could talk about here to improve your level of satisfaction in life, things as gratitude and refraining from your perspective to be more long-term or to be more loving or empathetic.

There are a number of different things that we can do to increase your level of satisfaction.

There's one tool that I want to introduce to you today that can really change everything. And it's a tool that I want you to use immediately and continue using on a regular basis.

The tool is easy. It's completely free. And it takes about 1 second, but it is life-changing.

The tool is three magic words.

You have to put them together.

And here's how it works.

After you explain the goal that is really, really big and really ambitious for you, the thing that kind of scares you a little bit, but you really want it.

It's really important to you. You're willing to sacrifice a lot so you can accomplish it.

For many of you listening to this podcast. That goal is some university for many of you. It is if I could only get into x university, I know I'd be happy.

I know I'm going to be successful.

Here's what I want you to do.

I just want you to add three little words to the end of that. Instead of saying my goal is to get into x university,

I want you to say my goal is to get into x university or something better, add the words or something better to the end of every ambitious statement that you make.

It's okay to have amazing ambitions, and you should have those ambitions. They're healthy, they're wonderful.

And if you hold on to those ambitions and work hard for them, and you maintain the perspective that you don't always know what is best for you at this stage of your life.

And so it's possible that there's something even better than what you're dreaming for yourself, just holding that possibility in your mental awareness, in your conscious awareness, is enough to remove the desperation from your goal and remove that feeling of desperation immediately makes you more likely to achieve the goal.

It puts you on a better track for satisfaction. It allows you to recognize gratitude in the journey that you're taking and not be so caught up in the desperation of one particular outcome.

Instead, I want x or something better. Give it a try the last key component to happiness according to doctor Brooks is purpose.

Boy, if you have been listening to my podcast or you've participated in my training, my master classes, my web, and arts, you've been a part of the ivy league challenge that I am all about creating, meaning, having purpose or meaning in your life, means that you step up and you choose to self identify as the hero instead of the victim.

Because nothing in this world is more compelling than a hero on a mission.

And as we've talked about before on this podcast, it is the mission that makes you great.

When we talked about the mindset of ivy league scholars, all the people that I met at Harvard, who had done amazing things in high school, what made them different?

It wasn't that they were exceptionally intelligent or even more hardworking than other people.

For the most part. They had two things that set them apart.

They had a healthy mindset about who they are and how they could contribute to the world.

And secondly, they had a mission. They were on a mission to make some difference in the world because they were on that mission because they cared deeply about solving a problem that was important to them, a problem that violated their core values.

They woke up thinking about it. They were aligned with those core values and look what happens.

Immediately, enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose. All three of those things become front and center in their lives.

That's amazing. That's magical.

And that is the power of an impact project.

The reason I see so much personal growth and such a difference in the level of confidence in my students, in the ivy league challenge, is because they're actually authentically achieving all three of these ingredients.

They're not looking around at their peers, like almost everyone in the world is doing in high school.

Everyone, even the ambitious people, is looking around to see how they should behave, but not my students.

They're looking inside.

They're looking at their own core values to determine how they're going to align their daily choices with those core values. 

How they're going to show courage in their daily choices by aligning those choices with their core values, and how they're going to make an impact on their community by solving a problem that violates one of those core values.

When you arrive at that level, you begin solving a problem that really matters to you. You.

Guess what?

You have all three of those, you have enjoyment.

You have satisfaction, you have outstanding levels of purpose or meaning. 

In addition to building self-efficacy, emotional intelligence, the problem, solving leadership, the communication skills, all of those amazing attributes are so valuable when.

When you apply to college, they also happen to be so valuable when you build your business, or when you want to move up and be promoted in a company when you want to achieve success at any stage in your life, whether you're in middle school or whether you're middle-aged, these are the skills that allow you to really solve problems and really become valuable in an open market.

That's why people who have these skills are so attractive to these highly selective universities.

If you demonstrate self-awareness and you demonstrate the ability to go solve problems that violate your core values, you're going to be extremely happy, but guess what?

You're also going to be really attracted to the most selective schools in the world.

So from my perspective, why are so many teens using words like boring and tired to describe their day at school?

Part of that, at least for the ambitious students, is that they believe the only track to success is to do it all, do it now and do it big, and do everything better than everyone else.

That leads to a tremendous amount of stress and overwhelm and frustration.

It leads to schedules that do not allow the child to have any kind of enjoyment to have any kind of satisfaction in life. Instead, we're told to just sacrifice because the payoff is going to be so great.

When in reality, this is the same strategy that tens of thousands of other people are following.

And so we're actually not going to stand out by working so hard to do everything, just the way that everyone else is doing.

We're sacrificing our happiness, we're sacrificing our satisfaction, we're sacrificing, in a way, our mental health and our souls along with our sleep.

I might be a little bit dramatic, but for some people, it really does feel that way.

It's a price that we shouldn't be paying number one because it's too high and number two because we think we're paying the price to get something in return.

We're not getting that thing to really get the return to get into the college that you dream to get into.

The best case of action is to look inward to let go of many of those activities and instead focus on the things that bring you to life.

Remember your creativity and your curiosity, find your core values and hold on to them.

They are precious and those are the keys to helping you stand out and helping you get admitted to your dream university.

So for parents and teens, and teachers alike who are listening in today, my message is simple for too many of our teenagers, we have lost track of what it means to be happy.

And sometimes the simple solution is the right one. This is one of those times.

Let's schedule fun back into our day.

Let's remove some of those activities that are draining us that are robbing us of our satisfaction and enjoyment in life and replace those activities with enough sleep.

First of all, so you can catch up and you don't have to be sleep deprived all the time.

And then once you have enough sleep, replace those dropped activities with the things that you are passionate about, and find a way to align your life with your core values.

You'll be glad you did.