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How My Harvard Peers Face Challenges

Try something for me: think of your favorite movie. Next time you watch it, pause the movie 3-4 times and ask yourself ”is the hero enjoying themselves right now?” And also ask “are they learning or growing?”


You will quickly discover that throughout much of the movie, the hero is not actually enjoying himself or herself. 

But the important thing is that they grow through their challenges, Watching them grow makes the story compelling to the audience. 

This podcast is about how you can also shift your mindset to help you grow through your challenges and become the hero of your own story. Here’s what you’ll discover in today’s episode:

  Discover:

    • An eye-opening exercise you can apply next time watch your favorite movie
    • Why complaining about your challenges will make your life more difficult
    • The greatest benefit of challenges (that will shift your mindset)
    • Why asking questions is key to your success, and how to do it effectively 
    • How my peers at Harvard dealt with their challenges, and what you can learn from it
    • Top 5 questio

 

     And so much more.

 

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Too many people are overwhelmed, stressed out, and frustrated about college admissions prep. I created this podcast to help you build a standout college profile and boost your confidence. Enjoy!

– Steve Gardner, Founder

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Transcript

I want you to do an experiment with me. The next time you watch your favorite movie, posit 3 or 4 times throughout the movie and ask yourself this question, just randomly pause it and ask the question, is the hero enjoying herself or himself right now? Is she learning or growing right now? This will be a really interesting exercise for you to do because if you think about it, maybe just take a second right now to think of your favorite movie, whether it's an action or a thriller, a comedy or a drama, some kind of romance, whatever. If you think about your favorite movie right now, what makes it such a great movie?


When all is said and done, it's watching the hero of the story overcome those challenges, right? It's watching that hero figure out that they are good enough that even though they had self-doubt and they were frustrated and discouraged, they had amazing challenges, right? They really had the world stacked against them. Somehow, they not only overcame the external problem and solved the mystery or stopped the villain, or saved the victims or whatever it was. They solved the external problem. But they also had an internal victory. They realize at some point that they are good enough that they can do it, that the world depends on them, that they have responsibility or whatever it is that they learned.


And that process of discovering who you are and discovering the fact that these challenges that you face are just roadblocks on the road to becoming your best self. That is a winning mindset. Movies are great because the hero tends to have an experience and learn those key lessons pretty quickly. Right? Sometimes they have to get beaten down over and over again until they hit rock bottom. And then they start to come out of it. But still over the course of 90 minutes to maybe up to 3 hours. Over a relatively short period of time, the hero experiences frustration, struggle, get beaten down, and then faces fears and grows. They're able to work through those fears and become amazing. They become the hero. Often in our own lives, it might feel like that timeframe that movie timeframe is not realistic. Most people don't really grow from their experiences. If you look around or maybe even consider your own life, your own upbringing. How many times have you made a choice and faced a consequence that you didn't like?


But rather than learning that you didn't like the consequence, and so you should change the choice, you just complained about the consequence, or you listened to other people complain, and it made you feel like this choice was normal. This is what everyone does. And why should I be any different? Pretty soon, you fall into this mediocrity as a social human being. As social creatures, humans do gain our cues from those who are around us. If you're surrounded by people who complain and people who make mistakes over and over again, without being reflective, without being thoughtful, without learning from those mistakes. If you live in a community or with a group of friends, they make the same mistakes over and over again and complain about the same things over and over.


Over again, then you're probably not taking those common-sense actions that make the biggest difference in the world. You're probably not focusing on the little things that should be the big things, right? I'm referencing previous podcasts here so those who have been listening know what I'm talking about. So if you're in that situation, then you have not done those common sense practices, a common practice for you. That's why life is difficult. But life gives us consequences that are a great gift. The gift is those consequences can be painful, and we can learn and be reflective and change accordingly. So let's be like the heroes in the movies. These people have experiences that could be very valuable. And they face reality, they face those experiences, they face the challenge, they face the pain and choose to grow. We can do the same thing. If you look back at your past, maybe most of these valuable experiences ended up being thrown away, and you didn't learn from them, and you didn't grow. But you can you should can use our painful and joyful experiences as catalysts for growth.


How do we do that? We learn to ask questions. I love module two and module five in the ivy league challenge because that's where we learn how to train our brains.


One of those little things that I mentioned in a podcast a very short time ago, the little things are the big things podcast. One of those little things is your self-talk. One of the things that have a compound effect on your growth and your ability to succeed is just the little things. How do you talk to yourself? When you're talking to yourself, when you're just sitting there, when you're reflecting, what are the kinds of words that you use? How do you talk to yourself? We can guide that process. We can guide ourselves and talk towards self-talk. That's more healthy and more growth-oriented. And we learn to do that by asking the right questions and guiding the subconscious mind. We do that a lot in the ivy league challenge. I just want to give those who are not participants in that challenge. I want to give you some of the tools that we use. I do believe that these tools are a little bit more effective when you're guided through them.


However, anyone and everyone, even you listening right now, can absolutely pause the podcast, write down these questions and choose to be disciplined over the course of the next 4 or 5 days.


And ask yourself these questions at regular intervals a couple of times a day. I'm just gonna start with five questions. You pick the one or two or all five that really resonate with you and begin asking yourself these questions twice, maybe three times a day. Number one, if this were my hero's journey story, how would the director tie this experience to my heroic ending, all right? So in the middle of your pain, someone's just broken up with you. You did poorly on a test. You had problems at school or at home. Something frustrating has happened. You made a bad choice, or someone else made a bad choice, and you're suffering because of it. If this were your hero's journey story, how would the director tie this experience to your heroic ending? Question number two, what value will this experience have at the end of my movie?


How is this going to tie in? What's the value at the end of the movie? What am I going to see? What is the audience going to understand? When they say, that experience is what caused him to think in this new way, that new thinking led to this action, which led to this growth, which led to this result. Right? How is this going to come out at the end of the movie? Number three, if I had to choose something useful I can take from this experience, would be number four. How will I approach the future differently because of this experience? And my personal favorite? If you choose just one of these five questions to memorize and to just have at your disposal, a tool that you can use anytime, your heart is just breaking. Anytime you feel despair, you feel frustration, you feel anger, just feel total sadness. There is one question that can really help to reframe your mindset even in that moment of extreme emotion.


And that is this write it down. What's right about this experience that I'm not getting? What is right about this experience that I'm not getting? And just ask your subconscious mind to dig a little deeper and figure out where the value is in all the pain. I have a very good friend, one of my mentors years ago, who taught me how to get on the stage and enabled me to do a successful international speaking tour. It was an amazing experience. I loved speaking from the stage, and we'll be doing it again, post covert. But this was my friend and mentor. Her name was Kathy loveless. And Kathy lost her lung to cancer. She was an avid bicycle and a very, very active person, but she got cancer and had to have one of her lungs removed. Later, she lost her husband to cancer, a different kind of cancer, but she became a widow. I remember a very, very personal conversation with her.


At one point, I was so touched. I was so moved. Because after describing how painful all of this was, and it wasn't just losing her lung and losing her husband, she had other issues with children and grandchildren, and she had some painful experiences. What she said, she said, what if you gave me a choice right now? If you told me I could have my lung back, I could have my husband back, and I could have all of these problems, all of this pain removed from my life.


However, in exchange for getting all those things repaired and replaced, I would have to give you back the wisdom and the growth that I experienced because of that pain. I would not make the trade. I would choose to keep the pain and the growth. It's that valuable to me. That conversation as a young man had a big influence on me. To this day, I still think back on that amazing advice. And when I face a challenge, I face a hardship that feels overwhelming at the moment, like the death of a loved one, which has happened since then, or heartbreak or pain in some other way. When I face or when I experience that in the middle of the pain, I choose to think back on my friend Kathy's loveless and her wise words of wisdom. She believes that those painful experiences were so valuable that she learned, and she grew so much through them that she would not take them back. I think so often when we're in the middle of the pain, and we want to tell ourselves, let's just get through the pain and push it off, push it aside.


And later on, when it doesn't sting quite so badly, then we'll start to process it, will start to reframe it. Oftentimes, this mindset causes people to suppress their actual emotions, to just push them down and out of the way so that they're not facing those experiences. They're not feeling the full pain. I'm not a psychologist, and I don't have professional advice on this. But my experience is that the opportunity for the greatest learning is while I'm experiencing or while I feel that intense emotion; I think a lot of people want to delay that reflection until those intense emotions have passed. But that's because they don't have the tools to make use of that extra energy. In the middle of that emotion, you can really activate the learning centers in your brain. You can learn things at a deeper level than is otherwise possible without the emotion accompanying it.


So for me, I like to experience the pain and feel the sadness, allowing it to run its course. I allow the ebbs and flows, so you go down into the sadness, but when you come out just a little bit while you're still feeling the intense emotion, ask the question, how is this part going to tie into the hero's journey? Where am I in the movie? What's right about the situation that I'm not getting? When all is said and done, how is this going to tie into my victory? How is this going to be tied to my growth and my development? Now, Gordon Livingston is an MD, and he's a psychiatrist. He said the stories of our lives, far from being fixed narratives are under constant revision. We are able to color our past, either happy or sad. And related to the idea that in the middle of our emotions, we can leverage that extra emotion to learn things at a deeper level.


Related to that is the idea that the stories we've been telling ourselves about our past are also malleable. Your past is just a story. Once you realize this, it has no power over you. In fact, it can empower you, the stories you tell, the experiences you had, even the really, really difficult times that you've experienced. They can give you power, and they do not have to hold you back. Your past is just a story. And your life is the hero's journey; here you are at some point in your own movie. Just like you can pause your favorite movie at any time and ask yourself, is the hero enjoying themselves right now? Are they learning? Are they growing? I want you to press pause at regular intervals in your own life, especially when you're down and frustrated and sad and you've hit setbacks. I want you to hit pause and ask yourself, is the hero enjoying their story right now? Am I enjoying my story? Just like in my favorite movie, there are lots of times when the hero is not enjoying the moment. It's okay that I'm not enjoying this moment right now.


But how is this going to tie into the ending? How is this going to tie into my victory? What stage am I at in the hero's journey, in my own journey towards overcoming the challenges that I've had in my life? What's right about the situation that I'm not getting? In my online course, the ivy league challenge, I challenge my students to begin training their subconscious minds, to begin training their self-talk so that they can experience the compound effect, the incredible exponential growth that occurs when you have healthy self-talk. And when you can guide your subconscious towards healthy thoughts, in order to do that, we begin in the morning with questions that guide our subconscious. These are some of those questions that can help make a huge difference for you.


What I want you to do is begin to see yourself as the hero in your own story. Yes, you might be at a stage in this hero's journey that isn't fun for you, but just like any hero's journey, you can pause at different moments of the movie and realize that those moments are not fun for that hero either. That's okay. As we're learning and growing, we're going to experience Challenges, and we're going to experience setbacks. That is okay. Those setbacks can be the catalyst for the greatest growth in our lives.


So what do I want you to do? Choose to be like Kathy loveless, choose to be like your favorite hero in your favorite movie, choose to take full advantage of even the pain and the frustration and the disappointment and the challenges that you face, take advantage of those strong emotions and learn and grow through them. You can also learn and grow through the highs. What about the joy? What about the wins? The victories, the times when you just feel like you're on Top of the world? Yes, you can be reflective then as well. Where am I in my hero's journey? What part of the story is this? What am I learning? How is this going to tie into the end of my story? All of those questions are valuable resources, and there are tools that you can use to guide your subconscious, to Guide yourself through this journey of life, learning to ask these questions on a regular basis and ask them with sincerity and with reflection and with thoughtfulness. It's a little thing. But the little things are the big things. This is exactly the sort of thing that can change absolutely everything for you.


So begin today, and start training yourself to ask the right questions at regular times during the day. Begin just as part of your morning routine after you do your breathing and gratitude, and stretching in the morning. Start asking these questions, what am I learning? How is today going to fit into the end of my movie? How am I growing? What's right that I'm not getting, etcetera? Ask the right questions. When you ask better questions, you're going to get better answers, you're going to get better Information, and you can grow and learn from that. This is a tool that I'm really happy to share with you. You go and make as much use of it as possible.