Don't Force It: How to Get into College without Losing Yourself in the Process

Jay Bacrania: Skills for Sailing thru High School

• Sheila Akbar, PhD

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In today’s insightful episode, I sit down with Jay Bacrania, who explores the role of desire in building a meaningful life. Jay discusses how desire fuels motivation, helps students overcome obstacles, and provides practical advice for addressing challenges like learning disabilities and mental health issues. Tune in to discover how to harness the power of desire for personal and academic success.

Bio
Jay has taken a broad academic path that encompasses both the sciences and the humanities. Jay is values-driven in his approach to both tutoring and running Signet. He believes that education and career are twin pillars vital to building a meaningful life. Jay continually experiments with how best to promote deeper learning and personal growth for himself, his staff, and the students who work with Signet. When he’s not at the office, Jay can be found at his home in Somerville, finding new and better ways to make a cup of coffee and spending time with his family. Follow Jay at https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaybacrania/

Access free resources and learn more about Sheila and her team at Signet Education at signeteducation.com or on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/sheilaakbar/.

Jay Bacrania:

Life, and in an ideal world, we get to build a life that is mostly exists in that overlap. That's That's amazing, right? That's what I think a great education can lead us towards. And that's kind of the purpose of all this.

Sheila Akbar:

Hi everybody, welcome back to the podcast. It is officially the end of August, and most people are starting school. So today I am happy to have Jay, my business partner, back in the podcasting studio to talk about skills that every student should be working on in high school. He calls it skills to sail through high school, and you'll see why there's a whole sailing metaphor in here. But I think it's really important to focus on this at the beginning of the year, of course, throughout the year, but at the beginning of the year, especially for those of you who have kids who are just about to start high school, these are important mindsets and frameworks and actual skills to really be working on. So I'm not going to say too much more now. I'll let you guys listen to the interview, and then I'll see you on the other side. Jay, thanks so much for coming back to the podcast.

Jay Bacrania:

It's my pleasure.

Sheila Akbar:

It's funny, because you and I have conversations about these topics and, you know, issues and current events all the time, and I do often think after we finish, oh, we should have just done that on a recording. So it's great to have you back where we get to do this for everybody else.

Jay Bacrania:

Yeah, I love talking about this stuff. So excited to explore some of it with you today.

Sheila Akbar:

Yeah. So what I was hoping we could focus our discussion on is the topic of a talk that you've given many times, typically to families who are who have students who are finishing Middle School and about to make the transition to high school. And you know, we know that these families are concerned about a lot of things. This feels like a very pivotal moment before we go into our discussion, paint the picture for us what's happening when a parent has, you know, an eighth grader, we're heading into the summer. We're looking ahead to high school. What's their mindset?

Jay Bacrania:

I think there's a lot of unknowns at that point, if you think about a school, you know, let's assume school is ending in eighth grade and they're going to start another school the next year. At that point, a student in a family have gotten really familiar with the school. They've hopefully found their place, their identity, their teachers, that they love, their relationships and all that is coming to a close, and they're about to start a brand new school adventure. And most families know by this point that the what they're about to start, quote, unquote, now starts to count. And you know that's in reference to the fact that colleges are looking at your transcripts and information, typically from ninth grade onwards. And so I think you put those two things together, and you have a mix of nervousness, apprehension, sometimes excitement, concern, a sense of, oh my, we have to actually, you know, know what we're doing at this point. And then that gets really complicated when you have complicated students, students who have some challenges, maybe neurodiverse, students that are struggling in certain areas. So generally speaking, I think it's a time of, you know, hope and anticipation for the future and especially for the parents, I think there's a lot of sense of concern and anxiety and trepidation,

Sheila Akbar:

Yeah, and to put a finer point on it, there's also an interesting kind of parallel sets of awarenesses, maybe right, that the student is definitely aware that they're maybe joining A new school community. Have to make some new friends, learn the ropes. You know, everybody's getting older, and then there's, of course, you know, adolescence and puberty and all of that stuff that's going on for them. But that level of awareness around, okay, now everything counts. We're staring down the college process. Maybe the parents are more aware of that than the students are. And I think parents are also worried about, how do I bridge that gap? How do I get my student to now care about those things or share those concerns so that they can be successful in the college process? Wouldn't you say?

Jay Bacrania:

Yeah, absolutely. And I think sometimes both parties are not thinking about it, though it's sort of lurking the background, but very often, exactly what you said is happening. And I think a thoughtful parent, which most of the parents that we meet tend to be quite thoughtful. A thoughtful parent is thinking to themselves, how do I bring this into conversation without it causing extra stress. I don't want to be that parent who's only talking and thinking about college, but at the same time, you know that is what's on their mind. So I think there is a bit of inner kind of turmoil around even thinking about how to start the conversation about that future that quote, unquote counts.

Sheila Akbar:

Yeah, you're so right. You know, for some families, it does feel like it's the culminating function of parenthood is to get my kid through the college process.

Jay Bacrania:

Yeah, and in fact, we see that when we we see that in the celebrations, which are totally warranted, but the celebrations once a child is into college, especially if it's a college that everybody's excited about, it's almost like, gosh, our job is done. And you and I both know, hey, that's, you know, the end of one job, and then the start of another job, hopefully more for the student than for the parent. But certainly, nothing at that point is done, only just begun.

Sheila Akbar:

Right. Well, you know, it's interesting, because I think a lot of the times when people think about the college process or embarking on this journey, they think about all the things that the student has to do. But what I really love about this talk that you give, and the way you kind of set it up set it up, is that it really does show parents that they have a very important role in all of this, and it may not be what they think. Can you talk to us a little bit about that?

Jay Bacrania:

Yeah, so I think I don't know where I saw this visual first, but I use a visual. It's very simple, and you can imagine from left to right is time horizontally in the age of the child. And as the child progresses from left to right in age, their independence goes up, or should go up, as kind of demonstrated by like, a line straight up to the right. And for that to happen as over that same period of time, a parent's support needs to go down from left to right, and there's a crossover in the middle. And the ideal is that stay at, you know, 20 or at some point, whatever we deem reasonable or whatever is reasonable at that at that child's that time, that number seems to keep moving in our society, but around that age, a child should ideally be independent and be able to manage their lives on their own with consultative input from the parents, or maybe support In certain ways from the parents, but the child is functionally independent, and I think it's a beautiful ideal. It sometimes happens, sometimes doesn't. But I think what is underlying this, or what the lead up to this gets, gets sort of lost or masked. And so I think I'll actually illustrate this by a much more stark example. So we work with students that come to the US for college from abroad, and from time to time, those students come from families that are extremely wealthy, and it's such that we worked with students who have been supported in every way imaginable, to the point where they really didn't have to do much to tend to their own you know, well being, they didn't have to cook, they didn't have to do any cleaning or any laundry. And then, you know, they get into college in the US, they come here, they get an apartment, they start college, and lo and behold, they have massive struggles with some of the basic just activities of even getting to class, let alone class activities. And I think there's a very stark example of if a student is over supported, then you can't just flick a switch and have them become independent. And so in what we tend to see here with with a lot of the families that we work with, is that well meaning parents provide so much support for their students and for their kids. And look, I have two kids, and I probably over support them all the time. It's just what we want to do, because we think that's the recipe for their success. But ultimately, there's actually some kind of thoughtful titration of that support that needs to happen over the course of a child's development, so that by the end of high school, before they go to college, they're actually totally independent. So another way of thinking, another little analogy here, is, in high school, I played soccer, and our soccer coach would always tell us, hey, you should be sweating when you get on the field for you know, at kickoff, and at first it's like, why would we want to be like? Sweating like we, you know, we want to be fresh. And he said, No, you have to warm up to the point where you're like, completely warm in the game, ready to go, physically, mentally at kickoff. And so that means you've got to actually warm up relatively hard. And so in a way, it's a similar kind of thing. Our kids need to be, like, completely independent by the time they are at the end of high school, they should be able to tend to their own needs, fend for themselves. And of course, parents are still going to be involved, hopefully, but they should be at that point, and that takes a lot of thoughtful effort, or lack of effort, frankly, over the course of a long time, up to that.

Sheila Akbar:

Right, right. Because, I mean, what we're really talking about is failure to launch right there. We're expecting them to graduate high school, leave for college, live an independent life maybe two months later, and you can't just start preparing them for independence the week before they leave for college. That's actually something that needs to be, I like that. You said, titrated in over, you know, many years, and they need to be allowed to build skills and practice making decisions for themselves, and even practice asking their parents for help, instead of just expecting their parents to do everything for them.

Jay Bacrania:

Yeah, in on the graph, like, like, we sort of have these dotted lines that show that if parental support is not reduced, a child's independence can't actually increase it, sort of blocks it. Or the flip of this can sometimes happen where a child, for whatever reason developmentally, cannot be independent by a certain point in a certain domain, and the parent then jumps in and supports and gets really accustomed to supporting, and then doesn't actually withdraw that support as appropriate. And so what we often see, more often than we'd like, is a student who is perhaps academically capable has had been afforded all sorts of wonderful opportunities and benefits and skills, and then they get to college, and everything else sort of swallows them up and overwhelms them, and in many cases, can lead them right back home into The basement, and that everything else are things like a student being able to think for themselves what they want to accomplish in a particular time span, a year, a month, a day, frankly, a student who is capable of balancing work but also recharging and understanding how they replenish themselves and socialize in a way that is restorative, not in a way that, you know, sends them on a weekend Bender and unable to go to class the next day. And so there's so many different factors that can be overwhelming if a student is not accustomed to dealing with them, that eventually just lead to sort of a sense of kind of shutdown, and is it pretty stark picture on painting this certainly doesn't happen to all, perhaps even most students, but some version of it, I think, happens to a lot of students, and I think our job as parents and families, and then counselors to parents and families is to help kind of think and talk about, like, what is the right way of understanding and looking at this journey, what is the right framework or mental model to use that actually substitutes for, I think, what I would call the default model, which is, you know, great college at all costs, that can work sometimes, and certainly does work wonders sometimes, but but very often that can lead to this. Even though a student has a great college acceptance and is capable academically, they can still be very much likely to fail to launch without some kind of different way of looking at things.

Sheila Akbar:

Right. And, you know, I think in a lot of ways, that describes sort of my story, though, you know, my I don't think anyone would describe it as a failure to launch, you know, I left high school and I went to Harvard, but and I did find academically, and I was able to manage my time, and all of these things about what I didn't have practice doing was really making decisions for myself about what I wanted my life to be, and I really felt behind the curve on that I had, I had peers who had very clear ideas about that, or at least had very clear ideas about how they were going to figure it out, and I had none of it. So I really floundered.

Jay Bacrania:

Yeah, if you don't mind, let me jump jump in on this. Sheila, I think that's, that's a incredible self kind of insight that you're, you're able to actually look back and see that. And what's interesting is, like, I don't think there's any, like, you know, YouTube series that we could just pull up and watch that's like, how make your own. Life decisions, because it's something that's way more multifactorial than that, and I think it's a culmination of students or kids being able to just constantly exercise their will in ways that allow them to make choices that then allow them to pursue those choices and reap the benefits or consequences of those choices. And doing that from things very small to things pretty consequential, I think that's the pathway to being able to kind of have that skill or that muscle later on in life that then you can apply to such massive decisions as like, what am I doing with with my life, with with some level of confidence.

Sheila Akbar:

Right. Right. Well, we're off here talking in, you know, very lofty terms. Let's break it down into maybe something our audience can wrap their minds around a little more easily. And I know you've got a really great set of metaphors for this so, so talk us through this framework.

Jay Bacrania:

Yeah. So I, I like the framework that I'm about to share here, because I think it presents in a sort of alternative way of thinking about moving through the high school process. But also, you know, I use this myself, I think it's like an alternative way of looking at moving through and building a meaningful life. And so I call it life's journey. And I think it has three components, or at least three, that I've figured out so far. So you have a ship, you have a compass, and you have the wind. And so to explain this metaphor, I'll start with the ship. And so the ship is what I would call the vessel, or the container. It's the thing that we're going on. In order to go on this journey, I start with the vessel, because I think that we don't give enough attention in our narrative, in our conversation, to just the pure, the vessel that we need to build to be able to navigate through and have a happy life. And so the components of the ship are basics, in my mind, like sleep, relationships, movement or exercise, nutrition, having a broad and strong academic base, having a relationship, a good relationship, to technology, having ways of managing one's own stress. To me, you could have a great academic career, but if you don't have these things in some kind of reasonable order, you're really putting the cart before the horse, and probably going to run into some issues at some point, relatively in the in the relatively near future.

Sheila Akbar:

Right. We're going to have a leaky or sinking ship if we don't, if we don't have all of the planks.

Jay Bacrania:

So when we think about like a life's journey, and we think about parenting and think about helping kids, I think we definitely need to be putting attention on this container. Because, honestly, I would rather a, you know, a student who has a okay time academically, but understands how to take care of their body, build relationships, you know, nurture themselves. They have a reasonable relationship to Tech, I think they're probably going to have a better time building a more meaningful and, quote, unquote more successful life than a student who maybe is academically a rock star, but, you know, has disordered sleep, doesn't understand how to make and maintain relationships, doesn't know how to nurture their body, so on and so forth. And so I think as parents, as we're thinking about that sort of, you know, the support, and then withdrawing support, ideally, we're thinking about, you know, on this dimension first, like, let's help our students build the vessel that they can sail into their future. And the challenging part here, and you and I have talked about this a lot. Sheila is like, it's really hard to do that for your child if you're not doing that for yourself. Let me show you. Let me try to lead by example, even if it's not perfect. Let me lead by example and show you how I care for my vessel and build my vessel and continue renew and replace the planks that are bad and make sure my don't sink in the middle of the ocean, and in the process, I'm going to also support and help you.

Sheila Akbar:

Or what can be really powerful, because I noticed this. I don't know if you've seen this with your students, that they think they there's some shame in learning how to do things or struggling with things. And I think it's really powerful when a parent can be like, Look, I realize I got to figure out how to have better relationships, or I need more movement in my life, or I need better sleep. I'm going to try to improve this part of my life. Do you want to learn how to do it with me?

Jay Bacrania:

Yeah, even just sort of making it transparent. Hey, you know, I feel like things are not great with my friend. And I need to spend some more time, so I'm gonna be out once a week. And what are you doing? Well, I'm going to hang out with my friends, because hanging out with my friends is important, and play is important, right? Just just sort of communicating it, even if it's not, it lovely, if it's a shared activity, but if it's not even just communicating that. Because you and I both know kids watch us. Kids watch their parents very closely, even if they don't, you know, do or say what their parents want, they're certainly studying them and watching them for clues and on how to live.

Sheila Akbar:

Right. Okay, so we've got our vessel with all of these really important elements that we need to kind of shore up and get ready for our journey. What? What's the next piece of this? I think you meant, you called it the compass.

Jay Bacrania:

Yeah, the next piece is the compass. So now we have to figure out, where is it that we're trying to go in this vessel? This is where we start to talk about, how do you find the direction that you actually should be going in. And there's this wonderful framework model concept called ikigai. It proposes that we find film and happiness and meaning, all those good things when we are building a life at the overlap of what we love, what the world needs, what we're good at, and if it's for a career, what we can be paid for. And so we think about that as like, in my mind, that's what we're trying to navigate towards. That's our north. If we can move in that direction, and we kind of zigzag until we get closer and closer and closer. And in an ideal world, we get to build a life that is mostly exists in that overlap. That's That's amazing, right? That's what I think a great education can lead us towards. And that's kind of the purpose of all this. And so one of the things that I think people bring up, it's like, well, how do I find that like? What is like? How do I even get there? And I think this is where things get a little bit messy, right? Because if we knew that, we would just immediately go there. You have to enter into things and experience them, and then get the feedback from that to say, I'm actually better at that than I thought. Or, you know what? I'm really good at that, and I do not want to do that ever again. And that's the process with our kids and their youth. They also have a longer runway on which to experiment, to figure out, you know what, what it is that they really want to do. And so when we think about high school. I think about this as a beautiful time for students to practice navigating towards this place. And so, you know, I live in Somerville, right near Boston, pretty close to the Charles River. There's this iconic view right outside of MIT, between MIT and Boston, where there's this place in the river, where there's always these little sailboats for many of the colleges will sail in there, and there's even a sailing club. And so you'll see people out there, sometimes, young kids just going back and forth, practicing catching the wind, turning, you know, getting a feel for theirs, for their vessel. And in this way, I think high school is a way for us to start to help kids understand that this is the journey that they should be trying to pursue. This is how they're going to end up in a place that feels really sustainable and really fulfilling over a lifetime. And this is the time to take experiments on that.

Sheila Akbar:

Yeah, and the thing I really like about it is that, just like a compass, it's not pointing you which way to go, it's giving you a reference point by which you can understand if you're going in the right direction for wherever it is you want to go. And you know, it's not like we're saying, Just go wander around, but thinking of these larger categories. You know, what what you're good at, where your strengths are, what skills you have, what you actually enjoy doing, what you love doing, and what you feel will have the kind of impact that you care about in the world. Thinking along, you know, those three categories, when you're deciding, I'm going to try this thing and then reflecting on it. Okay, am I good at this? Do I enjoy it? Is this something that has the kind of impact, or will it lead me towards being able to have this impact? Is a great way to understand where to go next. Do I do more of this thing? Do I do something similar to it? Do I do something that's the complete opposite of this so that I can get closer to this intersection of those three things.

Jay Bacrania:

Yeah, and great point, Sheila. We're not out just wandering around, although sometimes that's great too. And we're also not saying that this is an excuse to say, well, you know, I don't really love math or biology. See, and I'm not really good at it, so I'm just gonna ignore it, no, because one of the planks in the vessel is actually a strong academic base. So I think it's important to distinguish, like, what should be subject to, you know, this sort of exploration, and what's kind of part of the vessel, what's kind of part of part of the foundation that just needs to be done as a matter of discipline. And you've got to do the work. You got to do the basics. You got to do the discipline effort. But if you just take whatever default story is given to you, and you don't actually use your own compass internally to navigate your own story, you're going to end up as you and I both have ended up in challenging places because of this. We know that, and we've seen many students who end up in really challenging places. And you and I both have friends who have ended up in really challenging places because they didn't tune in soon enough. It doesn't lead to good things if you are just kind of taking somebody else's story and running with it.

Sheila Akbar:

Right, okay. Let's transition to the third part of this framework, which is the wind, the propulsion. Tell us about that.

Jay Bacrania:

Yeah. So this one, I think, is really, really important. So we've got the vessel, we've got kind of where we're going. The thing that powers all of this is a sense of desire. The things that come easiest, often are the things where they have the most desire. You might be facing down something that's a very challenging task or endeavor, but if you have enough fuel in your tank, enough desire, then then those things can sometimes just, you know, kind of unfold in front of you, and you pursue them with intensity. And this is one of those things where, if we don't help our students and our kids start to tune into their own desire and listen to what it is and use that desire to propel themselves forward, then we're setting somebody up for a potentially very challenging life, or at least very arduous life, and you know, which, perhaps in contrast, might have been much more joyful or felt much lighter if it were fueled by desire. Sometimes parents will try to substitute in fear for desire or coercion for desire. And look, I'm as guilty of it as every single parent on this planet. Is like, that's a natural thing that we sometimes go to when we want our kids to do something that we think is good for them. And sometimes there's a place for that, but somewhere in the week, in the day, the week, the month, a student should be practicing tuning into desire and doing something with that desire, turning that desire into action. And that could be something as simple and trivial, so to speak, as video games with friends and like really tuning into that and pursuing that, or trying to solve a particular type of puzzle that they're really interested in, or build something or make something. It kind of doesn't matter if it has a practical purpose or not. It's just we're trying to look for opportunities for for kids to find desire, tune into it, kind of fan the flames of it, and hopefully then turn it into some kind of action.

Sheila Akbar:

Great. And I know we're coming up on time here, but I want to ask you one more question, because, of course, this model that you've given us is somewhat idealized, and we know that there are a lot of things that can kind of complicate this framework, particularly learning disabilities or mental health challenges or even relationship dynamics. So how can families who may be dealing with one or maybe more of those factors adapt this to their situation?

Jay Bacrania:

Yeah, so I think the principles generally, as far as I've seen generally hold but there often can be blockers. So to put it in terms of the metaphor, you know, the student might not have the capacity to build the ship they're part of their ship and maintain part of their ship in a certain way. They might not have the stillness to be able to tune into that internal compass and listen to or try to divine what direction it's pointing in for whatever reason they might not have any desire that they can tap into. And so I think about, as we're thinking about this as parents, we want to try to understand what if there is something that's standing in our child's way. Obviously the right answer is not to just remove it, but it's to think about like for the long term. So I'd say it's really kind of trying to reflect on what might be blocking a student and then thoughtfully trying to empower the student to be able to actually address. Stat themselves with the appropriate tools.

Sheila Akbar:

Well, thanks, Jay. I know there's so much more we could go into here, but I think we've, we've got to cut the conversation short at some point. So thank you for joining me. And yeah, I'm sure we'll have you back, because I know the next piece of this is sort of practical advice for parents on adopting a coaching posture, so I think maybe we'll get you back in a couple of weeks to talk about that.

Jay Bacrania:

That sounds great.

Sheila Akbar:

All right, thanks again.

Jay Bacrania:

All right, thanks. Bye. Bye.

Sheila Akbar:

Hey folks. I hope you found that really enjoyable and helpful and maybe a little bit enlightening and inspiring. As we were editing this episode, I had to cut probably half of what Jay said out, just to keep this at a reasonable length. But you can tell this is something he's really thought a lot about and is really passionate about. He reads so many books on these topics of motivation in and discipline and organization. He really is my go to whenever I have a question or a challenge around any of this. So he's got a lot of really powerful stories that I wish we had time for him to share on the episode, but like I said, they ended up on the cutting room floor. But if you have questions about this, if you want to hear more from Jay, reach out, and we'd be happy to see what we can arrange for you. This is a talk that he often gives to rising eighth graders, or the parents of rising eighth graders, so that they have something that they can hold on to. As you know, their kid is about to transition into high school, and has proved very valuable for all of them. So thank you for listening, and I hope you enjoyed it. I'll have more along these lines in the coming weeks, and we'll really dig into some of those executive functions that can complicate that high school journey or really propel it. So stay tuned, and as always, thank you for listening, and I will see you next week. Thanks.