HOW ARE YOU FUELING YOUR STUDENT’S GROWTH IN ORDER TO MAXIMIZE THEIR OPPORTUNITIES?
IN THE SPARKS section, we looked at ways to kindle your child’s unique talents and interests. Now, we take those sparks and ignite a fire of vision and purpose and create clarity and momentum for the college selection and admissions process.
There are great challenges ahead, but when young people light the fire of their unique identity, they become driven, fueled by inspiration toward amazing possibilities.
The world puts people into categories. In high school, kids get typecast as jocks, preps, hippies, cheerleaders, nerds, thespians, and band geeks. Our goal is to help students realize that they determine their own lives, that by pursuing their talents and interests through unique paths and transformative experiences, they can build strengths and passions into identities they can develop in college and throughout their lives.
FINDING FIRE: life intentions
TO MAXIMIZE YOUR student’s opportunities moving forward, we want to look at the intentions that will fuel his or her growth. We dig into the hopes and dreams to find the wells of ambition that inspire the best your child has to offer. In the table below, examples of hopes and dreams are listed at the top, and below each one, the surface ambitions versus the deeper ambitions.
Table 4.1—Example Life Goals of Students
These are natural ambitions students often have, so let’s probe the underlying intentions:
Being a professional singer is appealing in many ways, such as for the pleasure of being sought after and famous. However, the desire for fame is hardly a good motivator (or nearly everyone would be famous). Looking more closely, we find that beneath fame there are heartfelt desires—to make people happy and to express creativity through performance. ese intentions can be lived out in many positive ways and can bring great satisfaction, whether on the stage or off.
Being a successful software developer would allow one to be rich and powerful; however, that desire hardly achieves anything, or else we’d all be billionaires. On the other hand, the ambition to improve people’s lives and to pursue an invention can spark a journey to success that can take many different forms and drive unique growth opportunities.
Being a Nobel Prize winner in science sounds appealing for the honor of being remembered and celebrated, but on a deeper and more meaningful level, this desire is rooted in the twin ambitions of helping the world in some major way and pursuing scientific discovery, both of which can be developed in many different ways.
Following the examples above, collaborate with your child to uncover the deep personal and service ambitions that underlie his or her hopes and dreams. these core ambitions are the intentions that we’ll use to drive the experiences to come.
Thank you for tuning in!
Next time – an exercise called ”Fueling the Sparks”