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The Power of Retreat

After a frenzied summer given over to clients and trainings and filming and writing, I’m tired and need some serious off-the-grid time, so I’ve come to my RI beach and my little cottage for my 2nd annual retreat.  One of my revered teachers, Dr. Monica, working with me through the darkest days of my life last year, suggested that I create a retreat for myself, spending as many weeks as I could alone at my beach house, asking questions and listening.  Uh, listening for what exactly, I’d asked her.  You’ll find out, she replied.  Go away with no plans, no script?  Are you kidding?  She told me that once I understood the power of the retreat and the questions I’d ask, I’d create one every year forever more.  I was highly doubtful, but agreed to the plan, reluctantly giving it a try.

The rules of this retreat, as laid out by Monica, were simple.  I was to do whatever I wanted in the moment for as long as I wanted.  Listen.  Have no plan, just desires in the moment.  Listen.  Wash, rinse, repeat.  Listen. For as long as I could arrange.

The only question I need ask, Monica suggested, was “what do I want to do now?”

I won’t lie, the first 2 days were excruciating, since I’m a planner who doesn’t know the meaning of ‘spontaneous’.

But as the days went by, I got into the pattern of no-pattern and soon began to seriously dig it.  I meditated with Deepak Chopra, weeded my beach roses listening to certain recordings of Coast to Coast AM (don’t scoff…this show does a huge service by discussing things the main stream media won’t touch, like their Lyme Disease show last week…and I love the quantum physics stuff), walked the beach for hours, drove to Rhody Joe’s for their chicken wings, drank martinis, communed in my neighbor’s hot tub, all spur of the moment, none of it planned.  I slept late sometimes, got up early other times, watched ‘on demand’ movies and went for days with no TV or music.  I wrote and cried…a lot. It was glorious.

Little by little, I started hearing myself again (albeit faintly) after a lifetime of internal deafness.  I settled down and took a few baby steps back to myself because I had truly lost my bearings and maybe even a bit of my mind in the previous few years and it was time for that to stop.  Fast forward to now…

All this month I found myself looking forward to retreat again

and now that I made it back here, I’m in that early what-was-I-thinking stage that I know will settle into the pattern of no-pattern.  I jump up to eat my favorite steak and eggs at Hungry Haven (where the wait staff knows me now and already knows what I want), then drive to Java Madness, my favorite place to write on the planet, where I know the owner now and have my choice of open tables inside since in the nice weather everyone sits out on the large deck overlooking a sleepy marina.  Although I love the water, I want to write tucked away in the corner inside, with live music drifting in from the deck.  It’s the end of the summer and people are still pretty relaxed. I’m settling in, doing what I want in the moment and listening.

Soon the academic year will start again, and I wonder which of my many ventures will take off this year.  At the moment, I have a new idea.  I’d like to write a book about fall from grace moments and form a group of others like me, publicly identified as flawed.  When I had my 15 minutes of fame, despite all of the loving support extended to me (THANK YOU!!), I felt very alone and so I isolated, as is my nature.  I’m thinking that my little group of kindreds would be willing and available to reach out to those who fall in the future, offering a spirit of camaraderie and an action plan based on our experiences.   Cool idea, huh?   And really needed, too, since mistakes no longer have a half-life thanks to the internet and its forever memory, and the fact that we’re talking about human beings.   People screwing up and making mistakes?  Yup.  Just as surely as the sun will rise tomorrow, humans will be flawed.  And that is what makes us all such miraculous creatures.

I screw up, therefore I create.

Love that mantra…

Our Newest Endangered Species: Leaders in Higher Ed

Everyday I read so many articles and blogs about higher ed that my eyes blur.  They generally cover just a few categories: innovation through MOOCs (massive open online courses) or the new skill sets needed by higher ed leaders (social media, business strategy, IT) or the bijillion websites that students can use to find the right match school.  There are blogs about  how to write an essay,  how to create the application timeline and even explaining the rules of the new Common App.  But nowhere – nowhere – can I find the Voice of Big Vision that we used to know as Leadership.

In short, folks, nobody is driving this bus.

We know that the human knowledge set – everything that humans have learned – doubles in less than a decade now because of the web (or the interwebs, as my hilarious friend calls it ), and technology innovations double every 8 months.  All of this change is not only hard to keep up with, it’s hard to place in context.

Because of this rapid change, more than 40 career fields were created in the past decade alone.  More than half of the employers surveyed in a recent survey say that college graduates are not prepared for the current work place.  New brain science is revealing how kids learn best even as private colleges charge upwards of $60K/year for educating in the old, less-effective way, for universities like all big systems are the last to change in the face of new information.  A small and disturbing trend is developing as trustees are offering college presidencies to MBAs instead of to academics, replacing education leaders with financial stewards.  These are mismatches if ever I’ve seen one.

When I first entered the field of college admissions, I was trained to believe that every decision we made would change the world and would affect the nation’s future 3 generations out.  I was taught that education is the quickest way into the middle class and that a robust middle class makes for a happy, safe and prosperous nation.  Since the 1980s I’ve watched us turn away from these beliefs and, not surprisingly, the gap between haves and have nots has grown wider now than its been since the 1930s.

Holy sh*t!  We’re going backwards.

So where are the leaders?  Where are the men and women who are willing to hold the Big Vision that education matters on so many levels and that it’s the best investment we can make as a country?  Where are the men and women who are willing to make the case to their Boards that are stocked with major donors and business people with sharp pencils who want that return on their investments?  Where are the ones with clear voices willing to jump into this mess and speak truth to us all?  Where are the leaders in education who truly think long term and care about the fate of children one hundred years from now, children they will never know?

We need a Transformational Leadership Council for Education made up of courageous educators willing to be the tip of the spear for the human race going forward, because make no mistake, our future is at stake.  The wider the gap between those with and those without, the more unstable America will become over time and maybe we’ll lose the whole thing, all because of fear and lack of vision now.

I’m in the arena.  Who else will join me?

We Have Babies!

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge aren’t the only ones to bring new life into the world this week (and welcome to you, George).  Life is coming in all the time, though it is rarely noticed by as many as have followed the Little Prince’s arrival.

Check out this healthy sparrow nest in the rafters at my beach house in RI.  This rafter area in my eaves has always been the perfect shelter for the little guys who live there year round. Many times when I’ve arrived late at night, turning the lights on as I carried in my bags, I’ve been glared at by one of the braver sparrows who would lean way out, shoot me with a hard and withering look that spoke volumes… there was no mistaking that look and the thought bubble over his little head that said, “WTF?  Turn that *&#* light off.  People are sleeping here!”

There are many different species of wildlife and I love them all.  I had a robin family build their home above the light fixture by my back door a few years ago, but the comings and goings, the ins and outs through that door, drove them away.  After so much effort building a solid nest in a seemingly safe place,  they abandoned the nest and I felt terrible because babies are welcome here.  The robin family never came back.

A robin family has created a nest in the rhododendron in front of my neighbors’ house next door.  From inside Sue and Greg’s picture window you can look down into the bush and the nest and see the little birds.  There is one more blue egg to hatch.  I run next door a lot and now I go to the back door so I don’t scare the robin mother into leaving.

There are baby bunnies everywhere and I wonder when the owls will move in. That circle of life thing…

In the meantime, yesterday I saw the weirdest bird ever looking all disoriented on my large lawn. I think it must be a green heron baby.  It looked like a large brownish, speckled football with an orange beak and long green legs with sharp talons.  I got my binocs out to get a good look because it was so unusual looking (is that an alien bird??).  My neighbor saw it too and we’ve been trying to figure out what it is and why it’s in our yards.  This area is on the flyway for migratory birds and sometimes birds, like people, get lost.  I wish that little guy the best.

Back to my nest.  There are baby sparrows all around the property, birds so tiny my heart just breaks to see them.  Mom and Dad are valiant in their protection of their little ones and I’m grateful to be counted as a neighbor to them all, grateful that we share the same space at the same time.

Now the chipmunks who live in my basement, however, are a different matter…

Getting Real About Getting That Leg-Up in the Ivy + Application Pool

Check out this article from Bloomberg this week on the high cost of high school summer enrichment programs at Ivy+ universities and the false hope they create regarding eventual admission to those universities. Parents are paying upwards from $7K ($10,490. at Harvard) to enroll their children in summer school courses on selective college campuses (including some Ivy League schools and others equally renown like Univ. of Chicago, Duke and Stanford) with the hopes/expectation that this will give their kids that important leg-up in the college selection process.

For the millionth time, parents, please hear me.  It won’t.  Going to Harvard Summer School will not get your kid into Harvard.  Not even a little.  It’s just a great way for the schools listed above to earn some serious cash by exploiting desperate parents and their own reputations.  Did you know that many of the people teaching those summer classes are local high school teachers augmenting their salaries for the summer, not professors from those universities?

The professors you think you’re paying for are way too busy and too esteemed to teach advantaged high school kids all summer.

So let’s get real about what it takes to get admitted to one of the top colleges in America, including some of the Ivy League schools.  I suspect this news might break the hearts of some, but I hope I can help you get real before it’s too late and you hold expectations that will never be met.  Forewarned is forearmed.

Want to know who gets that leg-up for admission to an Ivy school, for example?  Try Division 1 athletes who have SATs of 2200+ and who are in the top 10% of their high school class.  Know how many of those there are out there?  Not many… and they are applying to all the top tier schools and will probably get admitted to most.  Are you going to turn your kid into one?  Not likely unless your kid has that kind of athletic talent, the right aptitude to play the sport, is an excellent student in school and has had the benefit of top coaching for many years.  In other words, they would need that perfect storm of aspects that conjoin to create an Ivy League athlete.   No offense, but it’s probably not your child.

If you had the job of reading 35,000 applications to choose 2000, you would quickly see that being able to do the work at that college is so not good enough, nor is having top grades and scores, or being a wonderful person who ‘deserves’ that education.

You would quickly experience that there are many thousands of top students who fit those descriptions and frankly, they all resemble each other on paper since 99% of those applicants are the same age and live standard teen lives without a lot of variation to set them apart from each other.

If you had to pick 2000 of those candidates, you’d admit students who fit your institutional needs, the ones who are different: Div 1 athletes, children of wealthy donors, children of faculty and staff, valedictorians of local high schools to honor the ‘town/gown’ relationship, and whatever other needs your college has.  There is nothing inherently wrong with this.  No laws are broken because we’re talking about private colleges who can generally call their own shots except for anything that would violate the 14th Amendment or the Americans with Disabilities Act, meaning they can admit whomever they want for any reason except ones having to do with race, gender or a disability of any kind.

You’d have to move fast through all of those applications because you have so little time to process and make decisions and get those decisions out on time.  While you would read all of your cases, some you would only just scan because you could pretty much tell within 30 seconds if that candidate would be one of the lucky 2000 admitted.  You might feel guilty about that, but you’d realize that this is how life is, you’re paid to admit a class within that 12 week time window and you have 40 more to read before you quit for the day.

Think writing applications is grueling?  Try reading thousands of them,

one after the next, trying to keep them all straight, your eyes glazing over as you read the 12,000th essay about the lesson learned on the losing team or how the writer’s life was changed by feeding lunch to hungry children for a day in Africa or India or any 3rd world country they were visiting with their family last summer.

I don’t mean to be cynical.  But if you did what I did for a living, you’d understand the realities of the college admissions business and would see that spending $10K to send your child to a summer school program where they teach classes your child could take at a local high school summer school for free, just to give your child an advantage in the college admissions process, is not money well spent.  It’s dumb.

If you REALLY want your child to learn during the summer, encourage them to work a summer job for minimum wage.  There they will learn lessons in integrity and character-building.  They’ll learn not to quit and how to work with all kinds of people. They’ll be humbled and challenged much more in every way than they ever would be at Harvard Summer School or Oxford Summer Program which is just more of the same and won’t help them get into college.

If you were reading 35,000 applications to admit just 2000, wouldn’t you rather take a student who worked a hard construction job all summer instead of spending 2 weeks saving endangered sea turtles in Honduras (for $8K) or doing an unpaid internship cleaning test tubes in their parent’s biochemistry lab?

Yeah, me too.

The “I Didn’t Even Know You Had a Diagnosis” Kind of Teacher

I was talking with my beautiful friend and EFT instructor extraordinaire Jondi Whitis about education the other day.  We were talking about beloved teachers from back in the day when she said in her soft Southern way, “You know the kind.  The ‘I didn’t even know you had a diagnosis’ kind of teacher.“

My head about exploded with this concept and it reminded me that the last era was about stereotyping.  This era is about diagnosis.  Apples and apples.

When we judge books by their covers, we miss great works of art.  But when we do this with human beings, we don’t just miss them.  We can derail them.

Educators, Heads Up…

True story.  Years ago when I was Dean at MIT, a renown professor, well known for his grumpiness and temper, came roaring into my office demanding to know why I had admitted a particular student.   Pacing back and forth in front of me, Prof. X shouted how the student consistently walked into his class late, “shuffles slowly” to the front row and “slumps down” dramatically in his seat.  “And his pants are half way down his butt.  This is a disgrace.  Why are you admitting these affirmative action cases who can’t do the work?  It’s half-way through the semester and his grades are going down to a D.  I’m sure I’m going to fail him.  He’s insulting me and wasting my precious time.”

I pulled the case and we sat together at my desk, reviewing all the details of this student’s high school record.  This “affirmative action case” had scores above 750 in each section of the SAT, ‘5’s in all six of his AP exams and straight A+ grades in everything.  He had graduated from an unremarkable high school after being homeschooled through 10th grade.  This student held 2 patents and liked to build things.  Here was a natural engineer.

Prof. X stood up, all red-faced, and slammed the file down on the desk, shouting, “What the BLEEP is with this guy?  He’s SMART.  Why didn’t I know that?”

I went into family counselor mode and respectfully suggested that both parties were misunderstanding each other.  “Maybe this kid got intimidated by being at MIT and the-showing-up-late-in-your-face thing is his defense…maybe you scare him”, I told ScaryAss Professor.   “WHAAAT?  I don’t scare anybody.  I’m just a pussy cat at heart.”  Hmm, I said, “Maybe he thinks that you think he doesn’t belong here and feels ashamed.  He was homeschooled, after all, and might not have the classroom confidence you expect.”

We sat together that day and put together a plan to save this student, and Professor X (God love him) followed it to the letter.  The next time the student came in late, Prof. X gruffly asked to see him after class.  The student stayed and must’ve been stunned when Prof. X offered him a place in his lab starting that afternoon.  He told him that he wasn’t going to let him get away with bad behavior anymore, that he had seen his record and knew how good the student really was.   “No more crap.  Deal?”  “Deal.”

And this student delivered.  He blossomed under that faculty member’s critical eye and last I knew, he was excelling in a doctoral program.  All because that professor found the humility to drop his own diagnosis/stereotype of this amazing talent.

Prof. X brought me a great lesson that day too.  That’s the challenge – to see each person for who they actually are instead of as a perceived diagnosis or stereotype. I learned that people generally live up to your expectations of them.  How completely counter-culture in this age of “disabilities”.

Are You In the Rafters or Are You In The Arena?

Having always loved Theodore Roosevelt, I’m thrilled that this quote from his “Citizenship in a Republic” speech from 1910 has gotten so much air time lately, mostly thanks to my favorite mentor, Brene Brown.  It goes like this:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face in marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Don’t you just love that?  Doesn’t it make your heart pound with excitement and inspiration?  The first time I read this quote, I cried.  I’ve long known that I tear up in the presence of truth and the Sacred. To me, this paragraph carries both qualities because it’s a call for all of us to stop sitting on the sidelines saying witty and snarky things about the perceived failings of others when we wouldn’t dare expose our true selves in the world.  (Are you listening, my favorite Talk Show Host?)

In my opinion, this land of the free and home of the brave has become a nation of critics, too paralyzed with fear to risk failure.  We’re bringing our kids up this way too.  The price of failure is too great – college admissions is culpable here – so healthy risk-taking has all but dried up in schools everywhere.

We’re going in exactly the wrong direction.

Since the beginning, America’s #1 strength has been our ability to innovate and create, to build that better mousetrap.  We’ve always been a dissenting lot, choosing independence over the suffocation of convention.  (Just read the Bill of Rights again, written to “design a more perfect union”.)  But in the past 2.5 decades, first seduced by Big Wealth in the go-go ’90s and then paralyzed with fear of terrorism since Sept. 11, 2001, we have become something different… scared to show up and play.

We’re scared to let our kids fail.  We’re scared to challenge the crazy lies we’re getting from government, from both sides of the aisle.  Now we know that our own government is keeping copies of our every phone call, email and text with no explanation.  Google hands over our internet search data to the Feds and also probably sells it to companies so they can track our search patterns and sell us stuff, you know, for our ‘convenience’.  And we’re too scared or overwhelmed or asleep to jump into the arena and deal, to question what is going on.

If I were a primary or secondary teacher or principal, I would use this quote as a mantra for myself and my students.

I’d encourage risk taking and especially failure, in order to stoke up resilience, competence and the mother of all skills, confidence.  I’d encourage inquiry, not right answers.  I’d get my students down into the arena where they could go for it and get plenty dirty in the process.  It’s way more fun than mastering the one-trick-pony of the snarky insult of others who risk, or the paralysis of perfectionism.

Reading TR’s ‘Man in the Arena’ quote has inspired me to get real about who I am and what I am here to offer the world.  I’ve been criticized plenty – still am – and that had a suppressing effect on me until this paragraph lit me up inside.  I know many good people, people I love, who would rather sit up in the rafters and make fun of those in the arena.  I no longer join them.

For me, I’ll take my destiny standing up.  There’s plenty of room down here for us all and everyone is welcome.

Judgment or Discernment?

I’m hate to admit this, but I have always been harshly judgmental.  I was raised that way and had this skill finely honed through a career in college admissions (did you know that judgment is an occupational hazard of admissions?).  Mostly I was unconscious about its toxicity.  But in all honesty, it did serve me by keeping others who might hurt me at bay.  Ah, judgment is such a great defense…

Judgment seemed to be my friend and ally until I fell and was exposed publically to the judgment of others.  As you can imagine, it doesn’t feel good to have strangers judge you.  It feels so unfair.  Ah, karma…

Once I experienced the destructive power of judgment, I made a promise to change and I have.

I’m careful now to hold my tongue when I want to put others down.  I recognize that what I want to judge in others is what I hate in myself.

Discernment, however, is important.  It’s often mistaken for judgment but they are very different.  Judgment is mean and wants to lash out.  Discernment is seeing what you see with no story attached.  Judgment creates a one-upsmanship (“I would NEVER do such a thing because I’m a better person.”)  Discernment is an awareness of what is and offers the opportunity to make another decision.

So now we have the Paula Deen situation.  Judgment makes us want to lash out at her for being bad, wants us to write mean things about her and cancel all of her business contracts to punish her for things she said and did in her past.  Judgment spins a bigger story here (she’s Southern, she was a closet diabetic even as she was cooking up food to clog our arteries, she’s greedy, she’s evil, blahblahblah) and wants to see her humiliated.  Discernment watches with no opinion, knows Paula Deen is mortal like the rest of us and that all humans are imperfect.  We’ve all said and done things that society would not approve of.  Discernment knows that ‘imperfect’ does not mean ‘bad’.  Discernment offers compassion to Paula even as it reviews and maybe resets our inner compass around our own behavior.

College admissions provokes a lot of judgment.

Parents often judge their children for not being smart enough or ambitious enough or conscientious enough etc etc as they begin to compare their children to college admissions standards.  One parent I know literally burst into tears when she heard her daughter’s SAT scores, crying “I thought you were smart.”  As you can imagine, this didn’t help her daughter at all.  The daughter felt shame for “letting my Mom down and making her cry.”   I wanted to hunt her mother down and give her a good slap but that wouldn’t help her mother at all.

I appeal to parents now.  Drop the judgment and switch to discernment.  Discernment carries no story.  It sees what is.  If your child’s scores don’t fit a certain college’s profile, look for a college where they will fit instead of blaming your child.  SATs tell us nothing of value.  Truth.  If your child’s rank isn’t as high as you’d wished or if they didn’t end the year well, attend to the cause with no story attached.  It is what it is.  Judgment will choke off any encouragement for them to do their best.  Judgment is the death of confidence and confidence is the single most important attribute your child needs to go into the world every day.

Discernment is your real friend and ally.  Time to get to know it well.

The Shame Series Continues: What’s The Point of Confronting This? (Or, Can She Please Stop Writing About This Now?)

The reason I’m writing about shame so much recently is that I can see how common it is to the human experience and how it cripples us, creating more drama in our lives than in the typical soap opera on daytime TV.  I see how it stops us from being our brave selves.  I see it in clients and friends, in people all around me.  I see it in all of the haters on social media and in the self-righteous commentators on TV and radio.  I can see it is because I’ve come to know it so well myself.

Shame is that awful feeling we have when we feel like we aren’t worthy of being loved, when we feel that profound disconnection from others we need.  Shame is ubiquitous (only sociopaths feel none) and it’s easy to understand why.  Chalk it up to civilizing children.  Lord knows how many times as tiny children we heard “no”, “stop”, “that’s bad” as our parents did their best to keep us safe and under some measure of control.  (My father used to say that I got myself into so much trouble, it would be a miracle if I made it to 21.)  Then as older kids, we might have heard “what do you think you are doing?” or “shame on you” or “you know better than that” because adults wanted to keep our sexual curiosity in check due to the unintended consequences of that (pregnancy, STDs, big hurts), not to mention the iconic bad decision making of teenagers.  All of these phrases were meant to stop us and create a course correction of sorts, but because the sentiment was based in judgment, they also generated this awful feeling called shame.

You feel guilt when you think you’ve done something bad.  You feel shame when you think that you are bad.

It hurts to be judged, especially by the people who love us the best.  Afterall, if they think we’re bad, we must be bad.

If you or your child is a perfectionist, shame is at the root, hiding, stealthy, even sneaky.  Maybe your culture approves of this drive for absolute perfection.  Maybe you’ve won awards or have taken your personal value from the perceived admiration of others around you.  College admissions certainly stokes this up.  But make no mistake – hidden away, shame wreaks havoc in your life. It messes with your health since the fear of doing something wrong keeps you in a chronic state of fight-flight-or-freeze.

Does your child have physical issues like stomach pain or headaches or even repetitive sports injuries?  Yup.  There’s shame under there.

Shame also interferes with your relationships, because you are only as good as your last success and no one can be allowed to know what a screw-up you really are inside. You’ll always hold a piece of yourself apart, for fear of rejection.  Been there.  Done that.

So no intimacy or rest for you.  Ever.

Saddest and most important of all, there is little creativity being expressed because to do that is to risk rejection and the shame within you will not let that happen.  So over time you do what you’ve always done, except really really really well.  Over and over.  Deluding yourself into thinking you’re growing.  One-trick pony.  And all the wildly interesting stuff, the juice of life within you that thrives on risk and change, goes unexpressed… and we all lose.

So what’s the point of hanging on to shame?  Does it protect us in the long run and make our life worth living?  Nah.  It’s actually more like a silent and creepy cancer that chokes us off from our authentic self.

If you are not thriving the way you’d like, and you have always been a perfectionist, go immediately and read some Brene Brown, the shame researcher.  She’ll tell you all about it in the most hilarious way.  She’ll describe how shame thrives in secrecy and silence.  In fact, the less you talk about it, the more exponential its growth.  When you finally understand it, you’ll want to expose shame to oxygen and sunlight when it surfaces next.  Best of all, you’ll want to make a joke about it.  (Shame hates to be made fun of.)  You’ll laugh about it and share it with those who have earned the right to hear it.  You’ll swap shame stories…(Warning: don’t share shame stories with just anyone because shame-based people will only make you feel worse.  Share with friends that offer compassion and empathy.  Shame hates empathy.)

Soon, swapping shame stories will be the new black.

It won’t take long before you’ll feel more relaxed, more comfortable in your skin.  And best of all, that creation power that was waiting in the wings to be noticed and expressed will open up your life in ways you cannot imagine.  All good.

I still get paralyzed by shame a few times per day, but at least now I notice it for what it is and I laugh, saying out loud, “Oh, yeah.  Should HaveAlready Mastered Everything.  Hilarious.  Good try.”   The Shame Series Continues: Whats The Point of Confronting This? (Or, Can She Please Stop Writing About This Now?)

So here’s your homework assignment for the week:  tell someone who has earned the right to hear it your scariest shame secret.  Then give yourself lots and lots and lots of approval because you just took a giant step toward freedom.

Fear Nation

We’re bombarded 24/7 with scary news.

If we listen to the media, or even to our friends and community members, there is so much to fear that we must be hyper-vigilant to stay safe.  After all, the food we eat is killing us, the water we drink pollutes us, the air we breathe is toxic.  We could get the flu and die unless we get the flu shot.  We can’t trust anyone because they could snap and go crazy.  We could lose our jobs at any moment.  We can’t trust our elected officials because they are all corrupt and in some crazy way are united against us, the innocent general public.  The world is unstable and some crazy 3rdworld country leader somewhere is going to bomb and destroy us.  Can’t trust humans.  The weather is changing and will wreak havoc on us.  Can’t trust Nature.

Oh, and our kid will be rejected from colleges because they are not: White or Asian or Black or Hispanic or male or female or rich or poor or middle-class or an athlete or a non-athlete or from the right school or the right state… ad infinitum.

Can’t trust life.

Really?  I’m so fed up with this belief system that does nothing but wear us all down.

Recently I’ve become aware of a small conspiracy movement that believes the Newtown CT shooting was a hoax designed to marshal enough public sentiment to limit our access to guns and undermine the Second Amendment.   I’ve personally been working with people from Newtown CT as part of the Tapping Solution Newtown Stress and Trauma Relief Project and I assure all of you that the events of Dec. 14, 2012 were no hoax and no actors were involved.  This was one huge human tragedy because so many young children were involved.  As with so many tragedies, we’ll probably never know what was in the mind of Adam Lanza, the shooter, because he took the coward’s way out.  But how we respond to and interpret this challenge and others like it in everyday life is the whole point.

When we choose fear, fear wins.  We lose bigtime.

Folks, this is a fear-based planet which is why we’re all here – to conquer fear.  It’s no wonder we’re exposed to it again and again so we can confront and live through the fear. 

So when you get scared that your child will get rejected from his college choices, your cortisol levels go up (cortisol is the body’s stress hormone) and so does your blood pressure and heart rate.  You go into some version of fight or flight and over the long term, this elegant mechanism designed to save your life actually wears your health down and speeds its demise.

So turn off the news and the scary stuff.  Step away from any conversation that revs up your anxiety.  It’s all b.s. anyway.  Look to what is real and true and not there to sell you anything – look at the sky and the trees around you.  Watch the birds and wildlife if you are lucky enough to be around some.  Tune into your breath and your heart rate.  Smile at your children and spouse.  Relax.  In reality, there is beauty and wonder and innocence all around you at every moment.

Perception is everything.

I heard a recent interview with the iconic Louise Hay who, when prompted by the interviewer to discuss some plan or other, responded, “Why don’t we just trust life and see how things unfold?”

This is the perfect way to inoculate yourself from Fear Nation, even if it is heretical to our willful way of being in a world where we believe it’s all up to us.  Maybe it isn’t.  Maybe trusting life is the paradoxical key to happiness.

It’s what I choose.

Trying to Read the Tea Leaves – Early Decisions Are Out

It’s another one of those important life lessons playing itself out in real time all across the country.  Most Early decisions are out now and have made many wonderful young people very happy.  Congratulations to all of them.   It’s a magical moment for sure and one they will always remember.  For them, this is a launching point.  Yay!!

But for so many, many more, the decisions have left applicants on some spectrum of stunned, heartbroken, confused and deflated.  And I can see why, now that I’m on this side of the college admissions experience, where I actually know the individuals involved and have fallen in love with them and their families.  I see their beauty and promise and strengths.  I feel their talent and desire to serve.   And now I feel their grief.

There is the natural urge to read the tea leaves, to connect the dots and make assumptions about why the decision did not go their way.  While this is fruitless, there is a certain innocence to it that I do not have.

Because for nearly 30 years, I was one of those college admissions officers who turned so many top students down.

I know well that all decisions depend on who else is applying that year, what the institution’s needs are and the composition of the admissions staff.  I’ve seen how a newbie reader or a poor reader can affect a case negatively.

I know that a change in leadership at the college can affect the school’s goals and needs.  This is especially true if that school is looking to increase their USNWR ranking… I’ve seen how mistakes happen, and yes, how life happens because we’re all humans.

While I’m so happy for all of those who got admitted to college this month, my heart is heavy for all of those who did not.  I know that it doesn’t help, but I still have to say that this is not personal.  The application is being admitted, not the student – and therein lies the rub.

So I’m left with the wise words of Eric, one of my favorite friends who is also one of the best fathers I’ve ever met.  He’s what is known as a mensch, a good and loving man who speaks wisdom in a kind way.  He said, “Sh*t happens.  I think that should be the #1 thing that parents teach their children.”

And you know, he’s right.  Sh*t happens and life is a paradox.  The best things in life most often come disguised as the worst on this crazy planet. The key is to hold on and wait it out to see this truth.

I’m always saying that the college admissions process is really an initiation into the applicant’s adulthood.  If your child was deferred or rejected Early, love them all the more now and remind them who they really are.  Their self-confidence just took a major hit.  This is part of their maturity, part of their initiation.  It’s their firewalk, one we cannot share.  You can’t stop it.  You can’t deflect it.  We don’t know why it happened this way, but remind them that everything works for them and not against them.  They need to know that you have complete belief in them and in life itself.