How to Navigate Life
Description
An essential guide to tackling what students, families, and educators can do now to cut through stress and performance pressure, and find a path to purpose.
Today's college-bound kids are stressed, anxious, and navigating demands in their lives unimaginable to a previous generation. They're performance machines, hitting the benchmarks they're "supposed" to in order to reach the next tier of a relentless ladder. Then, their mental and physical exhaustion carries over right into first jobs. What have traditionally been considered the best years of life have become the beaten-down years of life.
Belle Liang and Timothy Klein devote their careers both to counseling individual students and to cutting through the daily pressures to show a better way, a framework, and set of questions to find kids' "true north": what really turns them on in life, and how to harness the core qualities that reveal, allowing them to choose a course of study, a college, and a career.
Even the gentlest parents and teachers tend to play into pervasive societal pressure for students to PERFORM. And when we take the foot off the gas, we beg the kids to just figure out what their PASSION is. Neither is a recipe for mental or physical health, or, ironically, for performance or passion. How to Navigate Life shows that successful human beings instead tap into their PURPOSE-the why behind the what and how. Best of all, purpose is a completely translatable quality to every aspect of life, from first jobs to last jobs and everything in between.
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Persons
Belle Liang is a professor of Counseling Psychology in the Lynch School of Education and Human Development at Boston College. She is Principal Investigator in the Purpose Lab; her research focuses on positive youth development, including mentoring and relational health in adolescence and young adulthood. She lives in Lexington, MA.
Timothy Klein is an award-winning urban educator, clinical therapist and school counselor. He has served as the director of strategic partnerships for Project Wayfinder, an organization that designs purpose education for secondary schools, was a Teaching Fellow at Harvard University, and Director of School and Community Engagement at Medford High School, where he implemented strategies that increased college matriculation by 30%. He lives in Jamaica Plain, MA.
Together, Liang and Klein developed True North, a curriculum and web-based application for creating purpose profiles to be used in schools, universities, and workplaces.