Do they know you?

The saying goes, "It is not what you know, but who you know." (In my experience, this saying is a little too sly, for both who you know and what you know matters.) You must ask yourself the question: do they know you?

As a college student, "they" includes fellow students, instructors, support staff, facilities staff, administrators (such as Directors, Deans, and the President), prospective employers, civic leaders...the list goes on and on.

I will be the first to admit that I have long despised the high praise assigned to the concept of networking. As a person that tends toward introversion, I am perfectly content not knowing tons and tons of people; it is exhausting and - to be honest - not always that interesting. As a rationalist, it is frustrating to think that  "It is not what you know, but who you know." How are you supposed to be effective if you don't know what you are doing?

Nevertheless, I have undergone a change of heart - of sorts - through some of my personal and career experiences of late (read more on my post Helmets). Like it or not, it does matter who you know and networking is important.

If it helps, think of it as friendraising. We all like having friends. Friends share with us. They provide honest feedback. They introduce us to other friends.They make even the most unexciting of activities enjoyable. Friends go out of their way to help us.

For example, does each of your instructors know your name? Do they know your career goals? Do they know a little bit about your day to day life? Because if they do, they can guide your learning better and point you in the direction of good opportunities. And if "life happens," you will have someone in your corner that wants to see you succeed in class nevertheless.

So go introduce yourself to your instructors after class during the first week of school. Stop by during office hours to ask questions about an assignment. Ask them advice for how to be successful in the course. Ask them why they choose the career of teaching. Say "Hi Mr. So and So" when you see them in the hallway. Shoot the breeze.

If you are like me and not necessarily a born chit-chatterer and tend to run out of things to talk about fairly quickly, remember this: people universally appreciate the chance to tell someone about their passions and interests and experiences. Most people also like to give advice and share their perspectives.

What do you think about that?

Growing through Failure - and How

"Failing is just a part of the journey and a step toward figuring things out," writes Mike Maddock, a blog contributor at Forbes. "Do you fear failure or have you made it a part of your everyday practice?"

History documents well case after case of individuals that have failed at something - often repeatedly - before achieving success. Common examples range for Michael Jordan to Steve Jobs to the Wright brothers. In the lingo of human development and innovation, they have "failed forward."

The key tenets of failing forward include: 1) the courage to take risks in the first place that may well lead to failure; 2) the maturity to not let failure beat you down; 3) the wisdom to honestly assess your failures in order to learn from them; and 4) the strength to persist with dogged determination until you reach your success.

Mason Jennings sings, "How long you are down depends on how you rise." The psychologist Carol Dweck encourages us to adapt a "growth mindset." The philosopher Hegel wrote that history moved forward through a dialectic of thesis, antithesis and synthesis.

I can tell you a personal story about the day that I knelt hunched over, sweaty and exhausted, atop a garbage dump (literally). I was in North Dakota at a city park (that was built over said dump as a reclamation project), having just failed miserably at the regional championship of cross-country running. I was a junior in college. According to the script, I eventually picked myself up, dusted myself off, and diligently went to the hard work required to take my running to the next level. A year later, I triumphantly ran the best race of my life.

So yes, consider deeply the tenets of failing forward, and incorporate this growth mindset to your academic and professional career. Put yourself out there; pick yourself up and learn from your failures; never stop until you reach your success.

And How
The narrative of failing forward can be seductive. You fail; you make a heroic comeback; you succeed. It is the American Dream. It is Hollywood. It can be deceptive.

So let me add this: how you fail, and how you learn from it matters. Because failure in itself does not always lead to success. And failure is not necessarily a good thing all the time. So allow me to add three qualifiers to the tenets of failing forward.

1. Not all failure is equal. Failing a History class despite long hours studying and tutoring provides a noble learning experience with a chance of future success. Failing a History class because you were too lazy to study and too unmotivated to attend class is not noble and should not be celebrated.

2. Quitting is not always a bad thing. Let's be real: if you put forth a strong effort yet fail College Algebra three semesters in a row, it might be best to quit your dream of being an Engineer. Sometimes the lessons of failure can be hard to hear.

3. Pursue your strengths. You may not fail as much at a task that aligns with your talents and passions. This is not necessarily a bad thing.

Now, with those caveats noted, go out and push your limits! You very well may fail. Learn from it and grow!

Working with Emotions

Someone "flipped me the bird" last week. As I rolled up to a red light in the left turn lane, they drove by me with an empathetic middle finger out the window. I had not cut them off. I had not tailgaited. The worse I could come up with is that I drove the speed limit while they were behind me. In any case, nothing to justify mean-spirited aggression, in my opinion.

Up until that moment, I was enjoying a peaceful Sunday drive with my wife, taking in a warm sunrise and conversation. But now, now I was angry. I felt the injustice of being assaulted for no apparent reason. I felt indignation toward impatience and egoism. I stared at him, sarcastically wondering how I ruined his day by adding 30 seconds to his commute. My mind was white hot. For the next few hours, my mood sullen, my mind just kept coming back and stoking the flames.

Can you relate to a similar experience in your life?

This morning, I rushed to the bus stop, literally ran. Earlier, my 39 week pregnant wife was having a rough morning, so I took time out of my routine to be with her. Then, a breakfast wolfed down, brushing my teeth while tying my shoes, and the sprint out the door. As I stood waiting for the walk signal to cross the road to my stop, the bus rolled past me,three minutes early. "Ughh...really?!?" Now I was going to be late for work. "Why was the bus early?" I asked the question aloud numerous times - to no one in particular - as impatiently waited for the next bus, my sense of stress building.

Emotions - especially negative ones - have an intense gravity drawing the focus of our mind.

Perhaps you have experienced strong negative emotions at times in college. You may have stood in line for an hour only to be told that you need to go online to complete a form first. You may have studied hard for a test only to fail. You may have dropped your courses because your employer changed your schedule, or you did not have financial aid to buy textbooks, or were advised to take the wrong courses.

At the striking of the iron, emotions are authentic. That is, we do not choose to be upset by a perceived injustice, we just are. We do not choose to feel stressed by a bad grade, that is just how we feel. We do not choose to smile when we see a good friend, we just do. At its origin, an emotion simply is.

However, emotions often take on a life all their own, do they not? When I chose to hold on to my anger after being flipped off, that feeling took over, leaving me short with my wife, unappreciative of the rising sun, and drawing my energy away from other things that I had planned that morning. All of those negative repercussions were my responsibility. The irritating driver had long since driven away and surely had long forgotten the morning's altercation.

The practice of mindfulness involves intentionally choosing what to focus on. When we cultivate a moment to pause and take a deep breath, we create a small gap in our stream of consciousness. This gap is an opportunity regain control over the mind's focus. It is an opportunity to intentionally choose how to respond to the original circumstance that sparked our emotions.

It is called practice, because it does indeed take time to assert intention upon the focus of our active minds. It takes sustained effort to build up the ability to pause and take a deep breath. It takes consistent skill development to train our mind to remain focused on the immediate situation, as it is.

Long story short, the next time you feel a strong upswelling of emotion, pause and take a deep breath. Recognize the emotion as authentic. At the same time, recognize your power to choose how to respond. Pause and take another deep breath. Look deeper at the situation, including what brought it about. Pay attention to what thoughts and feelings give rise within you. You are now prepared to take intentional mindful action.

Yin and Yang

In Chinese philosophy, the concept of yin and yang describes how seemingly opposing forces act in a complementary and interrelated way.

Many of the students that I work with are actively overcoming obstacles to higher education. These obstacles range from poverty to difficult work-school-life balance to English as a second language to challenges with math, and so on. What obstacles must you overcome to be successful in college?

The important point that I continually make with my students is that obstacles are assets. This may sound strange at first, because obstacles and assets seem to be opposing forces, but they are in fact complementary and interrelated. That is, to be overcoming obstacles is to be strong, resourceful, creative, driven, intelligent, hard working, and so on.

This realization does not make the obstacles any less formidable, but it should give you a boost of self-confidence. You are stronger than you realize. Let go of limiting thoughts and recognize how powerful you are to reach these heights through the process of overcoming obstacles.

Now channel that strength toward bigger and bigger goals - onward and upward!

Don't Eat the Marshmallow!

In a famous study, researchers provided children with a dilemma. "Here is a marshmallow," the researchers tell the child. "You can eat it now, or you can wait 15 minutes before eating the marshmallow, then you get two!"

You can imagine the agonizing choice for these pre-schoolers. "I could wait and get two, but this marshmallow looks so good!" Two-thirds of the children ate the marshmallow. Who could blame them?

The fancy word psychologists use here is delayed gratification. Sometimes we need to choose between a smaller immediate benefit or a larger delayed benefit.

Do you go to work right out of high school to earn $12 an hour, or do you wait 4-6 years to get a Bachelor's degree and a job that pays $20 an hour?

Do you have fun tonight with your friends, or do you study tonight to get good grades?

Do you take out a high interest loan to buy a fancy new car, or do you save up your money for a significant down payment?

Joachim de Posada has a message for you: don't eat the marshmallow! You will be much more successful in the long run.

The Reverse Oreo Effect

My niece meticulously deconstructs her Oreo cookies into three separate pieces - two chocolate cookies and one slice of frosting. The idea is to eat the chocolate cookies first, leaving the best for last, the frosting. In the case of an Oreo, the stuff in the middle is the best part!

College tends to be the opposite. The beginning of college, while a little nerve-wracking, is overall quite exciting! Everything is new and full of possibility. Dreams are fresh on the mind. This excitement is only exceeded by the end of college - graduation! The day of graduation is a true high point in life. In the middle of these highlights, however, is where the real battle is won or lost.

For, in the middle, students run into extremely challenging coursework, long hours slogging through homework, limited funds trying to make ends meet, and many other bumps in the road. Suddenly, college does not seem as glamorous. Rather, it is a lot of hard work, with difficult choices, and plenty of confusion and self-debt. Sure, there are many high points along the journey as well. But in the middle, the rubber meets the road, and students either pick themselves up and dust themselves off, or they quit.

There is no way to magically transport yourself from the first day of class to your commencement ceremony. In the long run, you would not want to do this anyway. The whole point of college is to push you to grow, to challenge your fortitude, to expand the limits of your mind, and to allow you to fail (and get back up) in a relatively safe environment. You come out stronger, wiser, skilled, knowledgeable, and prepared for the next stages of life. Iron sharpens iron. The college degree you receive at graduation is a testimony to your power.

To make it through the middle, you must commit to your success. Create a plan by setting goals and then utilizing all the tools available to reach them. Revisit your motivators often. Practice delayed gratification, which is to do what you ought to do, even when it is not what you want to do. See failure as a learning process, not a dead end. When the going gets tough, the tough get going. Commit!

Working with Others

Whether collaborating on a group project, working with an instructor, or participating in an internship, the importance of being attentive to relationships and emotions cannot be understated. As long as we are interacting with humans, and not robots, this will remain imperative to the work we do.

It is plain to say that some people we more naturally relate with and understand, and others less so. This comes about through varying personalities, shared and divergent experiences, similar and different emotional profiles, and so on. For example, as an advisor, I often times work with a student older and more experienced than myself, or a student with eight times the street cred, or a student with a chip on their shoulder, or a student coming from a very different place. Yet it is contingent upon me to establish trusting relationships and a genuine emotional connection with each individual, regardless of the ease or difficulty of doing so.

Growing up, I remember my dad reading the newspaper every night. However, he only had one book in his library: How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. From a young age, I was captivated by this book: I loved all the books in my own burgeoning library, and thus was very curious about the singular tome in my father's; even more so, the title of the book always struck me as odd. Out of serendipity, I recently cross paths with this book again, 20 years later. Out of sheer curiosity, I decided to give it a go.

A classic text first penned in the 1930's, How to Win Friends and Influence People had sold 15 million copies by 1981, while being translated into nearly every written language in the world. So the jacket informed me, as I turned the book over in my hands. Still, I could not see the title as anything other than a euphemism for How to Manipulate People and Get Your Way. Just as before, it seemed a strange topic.

To my surprise, though, there are many interesting and good strategies outlined in the book (sprinkled between plenty of cultural anachronisms - interesting in themselves). Certainly, one could use these strategies to manipulate people and get your way. But just the same, one could use these strategies to show genuine interest in others and expand your circle of concern. The underlying objective depends on the current status of your ego. The Jedi Force is used for both good and evil.

The grand strategy outlined by Carnegie - translated into contemporary language - is to value people and honor their contributions. When we escape our own narrow concerns, and go out of our way to truly listen to what others say and feel, then we can establish a strong foundation for partnering toward shared outcomes.

For example, when working with a colleague, I always start by asking questions, listening, and learning as much as I can about the other person's contributions. I make it a point to affirm the strengths that I hear in their ideas. I tune in to the their emotions, and attempt to put myself in their shoes. I am mindful of checking my own judgments, and open myself to the vibrancy and perspective of the person sitting across from me.

Consequently, the foundation of our working relationship is built on trust and understanding. In a strategic sense, this certainly makes our collaboration all the more effective.

In my view, though, it is more than just influencing another person.  By being true to the process, and allowing for it to reciprocate, then you too are being influenced by another person. And through such a process, we too grow - in our role as collaborators, in our role as people. When we open to this process, then we truly are genuine.