College Success; What do you really want to be when you grow up and how to make it happen, with Special Guest Janet Reeves-Wilson

Welcome to the No Problem Parenting Podcast. Turn behavior problems into no problem with Jackie Fineman. Are you ready to become the confident leader your kids crave you to be? Do you want to learn how to make parenting easier and more fulfilling?

Whether you are at your wit's end or you want to have more fun as a parent, you're definitely in the right place. Now, here's your host, Jackie Finneman. Well, welcome back to the No Problem Parenting Podcast. Hey, parents, I have a very special guest on today who's going to help you and actually your college-bound kids or already in college students save some time and money.

So, Janet, you're a woman that wears many hats. Let's just start off with that right away. You're the owner of Divine Metamorphosis Coaching, LLC. You're an executive coach for the Better Up Company and an adjunct professor.

You're also a former health care professional. And after spending 30 years in health care, you went from being in a career that you love to one that kind of no longer brought you joy. We have a similar story with with me and my mental health career. You met a life coach. And after your experience of being coached, you knew that this work was what was on your heart to do.

You currently work with colleges and universities to bring your executive level coaching to students, and you bridge the gap between the classroom and the boardroom. So I'm super excited to get into this today. Welcome to the show, Janet. Thank you so much, Jackie, for that wonderful introduction and welcome. Thank you. I'm excited to be here today.

Well, I think anybody that can help provide clarity, clarity helps with confidence. And when we can provide some clarity to our college bound or in college students, that can just be a game changer, not only for their confidence, but also for their pocketbook and or mom and dad's pocketbook, whoever is supporting them through college. So today I really want to talk about what is it that we can do? First of all, what is your coaching?

We're going to talk a little bit about your style of coaching and what you do. And then what kinds of tools that you use in your coaching that can help your clients, in other words, your students? Well, first of all, coaching is a professional relationship that helps people produce extraordinary results in their lives, careers, businesses or organizations. And it helps them bridge the gap between where they are now and where they want to be.

Because a lot of the times we have these goals that we want to achieve, but we may not have a clear path to how to get there. And then when we run up against something that coaches call resistance, we might give up on the goal. And it might just be a slight tweak in our mindset that will give us the incentive to keep going and to keep that goal in sight and to really connect yourself with how you're going to feel when you achieve that goal.

I give my clients an exercise where they imagine that they've already achieved the goal. They're drinking some coffee. They smell the coffee. They buy a special perfume or cologne.

And just to connect their five senses to the goals that they want to achieve. And the tools that I use are really listening to my clients, listening to what they are saying and what they're not saying and asking them questions to reflect back what I heard them say. And also I use behavioral assessments to create a better level of self-awareness because when we're self-aware, we can be much more successful because we're aware of strengths that will help us and aware of areas that we need to work on that might be a stopping point.

Yeah, for sure. And so we have a son that is 17. He's finishing up his high school. He's, you know, been thinking about college.

He definitely wants to play hockey. So, you know, he knows he's got to find a college where that's an option. But he's also looking at being an engineer and still trying to figure out what industry does he want to go into. So, so often I think, and because I'm surrounded with a 17-year-old, I'm surrounded with friends of his that are 17-year-olds and people that are talking about what are you going to do when you grow up?

what are you going to do when you get to college? And I think in the last few years with nieces and nephews that I've had, asking that question, a lot of times we get, I'm not sure. I kind of, I think I want to do this, but I'm not really sure. I'm just going to take some generals.

I'm going to figure it out as I go. But really, Janet, what you're doing is helping college students find a career path. They don't always make the end decision, but finding the career path that is going to bring them joy, that is going to feed them and keep them interested. And you do that not just by having a conversation with them about what do they want to be, but actually these assessments are going to help them figure out if what they're thinking they want to do really aligns with their strengths and their interests. Right. Yes. Because the assessment that I give, it's kind of divided into four parts. One of them is understanding yourself. What are your general characteristics? What are your strengths? What are your motivations? What do you need in a work environment? What's your ideal work environment? How do you behave under stress?

Your communication skills and your communication preferences. Everybody doesn't like to communicate in the same way. Some people don't mind you just being blunt, short, sweet. Some people would find that so off-putting that they would shut down. What are your potential areas for improvement?

How do you like to relate to people? But you have a natural style and you have an adapted style. And if those two are close together, then you will suffer from much less stress than someone that would have to be one way outside of the workplace and another way in the workplace. You might have to exhibit two different types of behavior in these areas.

and your natural behavior is your default. That's how you are when you don't feel like you have to change your behavior. And so say for instance, just a student just talking to their career counselor, they're only gonna be talking about the job, not how your natural strengths align with this job that you want. What if you really like working with people and you get energy from working with people, then you want to choose a career where you work with people, either work in a large office setting or work in some sort of customer service type of job, like being a doctor or a nurse or owning a restaurant even. But if you are the type of person where working with a lot of people kind of takes energy away from you and you feel, you start to feel anxious, then you don't need to be in a profession where there are, you have to have a lot of interaction with people. And your career counselor might not make that connection for you. We look at what motivates you. And there's a section that is called planning your career path. And this is, we take your disk styles and look at different career options. And you go on a website called O-Net and it has,

okay, to be an engineer, for instance, do you like mathematics? You could be, do you like chemistry better? You could be a chemical engineer. You could be the type of engineer that helps to plan cities or plan neighborhoods or plan communities depends on what your natural skills are. If you're not that great in math or analytics, then that might not be an area that you would be happy in the long run. The first physics class you take, you're like, oh yeah because that was my thing and when I was going to school wanting to be a doctor and I had to take a lot of physics and and things like that and I was like eh not so much right so fortunately I was able to kind of figure that out on my own but nowadays you're hit with so much and there's so many choices, you might want to try to design a job that completely aligns with your strengths and skills. So you just take, you know, you kind of design a job of your own or a career of your own and you take different classes and you say, oh, and O-Net will help you to expose you to thousands of different kind of careers and you can kind of tailor make the career that you want. And along with coaching and asking you what kind of environments do you feel more comfortable in? What do you like to do for fun? Sometimes that's an indication of the type of career that you would want to be in. Yeah. I think sometimes, especially after getting through high

school, you're all excited that, that you graduated from high school or that you're graduating. And then maybe you're excited to go off to college. Maybe you have this idea that, you know, you know what you want to go for, or maybe you're feeling overwhelmed with I'm supposed to know what I want to do. And I don't, and we're taking the feedback and the information from maybe our teachers or our family, your coaching provides so much clarity. And then I think, like I said, confidence, that it makes it exciting. Yeah. And that's what you want to be excited. Yeah. I mean, especially with how much money it costs to go to college. It's like, we better be excited about pursuing our passion when we're spending that kind of money. Give us a couple of examples where the, your clients that have come to you have said, you know, I want to be in the medical field and then they start pursuing that. And then it's like, Oh, I guess I don't, or not in that way.

Right. I had a student that she was a graduate student and she was a week out from graduation. She's taken, she was about to start taking her finals and she had been working as a dental assistant. So she was thinking, oh, I want to be a dentist. And a week before graduation, she decides she does not want to be a dentist. Now, this is a graduate student that spent another couple of years getting her master's, and now she doesn't want to pursue the profession that she thought she did when she entered graduate school.

So then she says, then I was working with her. I was coaching her because she was just a student in my course. But I really wanted to help set her on solid ground for her to find something that she would love to do and not do something that she thought she was supposed to do or something that she was familiar with by working in the dental office. So I started asking her some questions.

And she said, you know, I've always wanted to be a nurse. And I was like, okay, it's too bad you didn't know that before you entered this graduate program or you could actually be a nurse right now. Because the time that you spent in graduate school, you could have spent that training to be a nurse and at least be like an RN right now. And if you wanted to go a little further in the nursing, then you would be advancing your nursing career.

I also just got done coaching a cohort that there were seven of them Gen Z's and they were accountants. And only two of them were really satisfied and really loved the career of being an accountant. The other five were being coached because they wanted to change their careers. And I was like, oh, my goodness.

And they chose the career not because they loved accounting or they were passionate about being an accountant. It was because they thought that that career would have longevity. They needed to start working right away. and now they were dragging themselves to work every day.

And that's not gonna have you show up and provide your clients, your customers, even the people that you work with. You're not gonna show up at your best when you're doing something that you don't like. And that is one of the things that drives me to doing this work. I want people to love what they do.

There is such a difference in doing work that you love than occupations where you're like, oh, I got to get up tomorrow and go to this job. And it's just sucking them. It actually is sucking the life out of you. Yeah, exactly.

I think we were talking too, as we were getting to know each other, well, the last couple of times we've spoken, but I was at a job that I loved the agency I worked for. I was there for 20 years. I was so grateful to get that position when I was younger, you know, and, and I learned so much from that. And so sometimes we can get into the very thing we love, but some, even for me, I think I settled because I was so excited to get the position that, and then I became comfortable in that, but there was always this thing that like, oh, this isn't exactly right, but I should be grateful. And I was grateful. I am still to this day, grateful that I got that job, but it wasn't exactly what I wanted. Right. But it's like, okay, well, it's going to pay the bills. It's going to get me health insurance. It's going to, you know, and I shouldn't be asking for more than that. I love what you're doing, Janet, because it is truly helping these college students,

whether they're a freshman or they're like you said, already working on their masters. And they're like, Oh, I don't know that this is the right thing. I think sometimes we just go through the emotions. Many of us, the 50 and ups were like, oh, if we only had somebody like a Janet back then, you know, things could have been so much different. And I think you're absolutely right.

When you wake up in the morning, most days you should be like, I can't wait to get to work. Yes. Or I can't wait to finish. I can't wait to get to class because I'm so excited to learn about this particular subject. Right. And that's the way I was at my job when I first got it.

Oh, I could not wait to get to work. And people would come in. I worked in a lab and I worked with two women. We got along really well. We had a lot of work, but we had a lot of fun too.

And I couldn't wait to get to work. And then it started to become someplace that wasn't as great. and I was like okay and in the back of my mind I always felt like there was something else that I could do and so I got the opportunity to retire and see the work of a coach to say oh my god and you could actually see the light bulb moment that they had it actually seemed like there was a light shining on them when they got connected with, oh my God, this is the thing that I've been searching for, or this is the thing that's holding me back from going to the next level.

It was phenomenal. And I said, oh my God, I want to be able to do that for people. I just absolutely love that. And in the intro, people heard me talk about Kelly Ratty and her book out to see, I think parents, number one, get the book out to see it's a parent's survival guide to the freshman voyage for helping us kind of launch our kiddos off. And then I'm gonna say, get a career success coach like Janet. That's what you call yourself, right? A career success coach.

Not just career services. They have those at colleges. Some do, some are cutting those, those programs from the college because of funding and whatever. But really reach out to Janet and you, you will help them. First of all, you're going to explain how your coaching works to them, tailor it to meet their needs. You're going to do things like the disc assessment and the motive, you know, identify motivators with them. But guys, this is going to save you so much time and money.

College students, if you're listening, parents, send this to your college student and say, hey, check this Janet out, reach out, make a phone call and say, I need to get back on track or I've been two years in and I still don't know what I want to do when I grow up. And Janet's going to help me get there. Right. And even if you're a senior and you like, oh my gosh, I've changed my mind about this. That's okay. And that's one of the things that I want people to know is wherever you are, it's okay. Because we can always get you to where you want to be. I like to find out, you know, some just background about people. What do you like? Just regular people things, stuff.

And I, and listening to people is one of the major things that my clients thank me for. I work with executives that want to, they don't feel confident sometimes in their, because they just got promoted and they don't really feel like they're executive enough. I help them to increase their level of executive presence so that they can develop a leadership style that their direct reports can feel confident working with, and they can be authentic in their leadership, whatever style it is.

And they, it's up to them to develop their leadership style in the way that they feel will best support the people that they're working with. You don't have to, one thing I really urge them not to do is compare themselves to others. That is such a, that is such a confidence killer, is comparing yourselves to others. And it's so easy now because we see social media and this person's doing this and this person's doing that.

And you really don't know what is if that's really real. My son was telling me that some of the celebrities pay people to follow them. So they got a million followers, but they might pay half a million of them to follow them. Yeah. So it's really always what they seem. Right.

Yes, yes. It's so easy to get caught up in comparing. And unfortunately, our kids are exposed to so much. They're being hit from every direction with, oh, you should do this, you should do that. Well, we're not going to talk about should, because that's a context. And also, we talk about context, like where are you making this decision from? Are you making this decision with your head or with your heart?

or because your parents have kind of guided and directed you to say, well, you don't know what you're going to do, so go do this. At least you're going to get, it's going to increase the odds of you getting a job after college or something. But again, we should be feeling fed while we're going to college. Like we're being filled up and it should be producing more and more excitement, not just, oh, it's the next thing I'm supposed to do.

So you're really going to help them figure out what is best for them. What is best for you? You know, what do you need? Yeah, this is so great, Janet.

I am thrilled to have you on the show, to partner with you on, you know, some other ventures and to stay in connection with you because No Problem Parenting helps parents from infancy all the way up to the 25-year-old still living on your couch that is not sure what they want to do. And if you are a college student and you dropped out of college because you went a couple of years and you're like, this just isn't for me, Janet's another resource for you to give a call and say, hey, what's my next step?

you help me figure out what my true desires, interests, my natural abilities are, my natural style that is going to help me increase the odds of getting into a career path that I absolutely love. So how can people reach out to you, Janet? What is the best way for them to connect? My website is dm56coaching.com. You'll get a discovery coaching session.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Janet, for all these resources and for being on the show today. You're welcome, Jackie. Thank you for having me.

Thank you for tuning in to the No Problem Parenting Podcast. Join Jackie next time for more tips, tools, and resources that will help you become the confident leader your kids crave you to be. Who do you know that we could support on their parenting journey? Like this podcast, subscribe, share, or leave a review of the show.

Your support of the No Problem Parenting Podcast pays it forward and helps us help more families. Thank you.