Create moments that matter.
Be the person you needed when you were younger.
—AYESHA SIDDIQI
Purpose is using your strengths and skills in a way that’s of value to you and the world. Let’s review the five purpose principles:
To commit them to memory, use this mnemonic device:
We know that it’s one thing to understand and remember these elements of purpose, but it’s another to apply them in the messiness of life. The second half of this book will make clear how we use the elements of purpose to help students navigate their lives.
We call this work Re:Purpose.
To repurpose is to adapt the old and reappropriate it in new and creative ways. Turning the old into something new. It’s transforming an old ladder into a chic bookcase, or a broken tennis racquet into a postmodern mirror. The next four chapters demonstrate how to repurpose the settings students live in. Just like the Apollo astronauts and scientists used the Hubble telescope to gain perspective on the bigger picture, we can use the five purpose principles to recast our settings. When we see the bigger picture, we have a clearer and wiser way to navigate each domain of life. We will take a deep dive into repurposing:
Purpose work is not for the faint of heart. It’s a long, slow game. It’s full of fits and starts and is done in dribs and drabs … not in one sitting. And there is prep work involved. We’ll talk about how to build a trusting relationship with your student that is primed for fruitful conversations. Our job is to cheer them toward discovering their own elements of purpose. We aren’t the leaders, we’re the followers in their journey. We trust that our students are going where they need to go. We are like tour guides on their bus. And we sort of point out, “On your left, there goes an example of you living your core values. Oh, look out to your right—it’s a fight you’re willing to fight.” We’re just pointing out what’s happening as we go along, rather than designing it for them. We don’t teach them their strengths, skills, core values, or service in the world. We whet their appetites for their self-discovery. Purpose can be learned, but it cannot be taught. We’re going to share deep intel into how to create relationships that are open to and ripe for this learning.
Two essential ingredients for discovering purpose are curiosity and space. Students need an attitude of inquisitiveness about life, and the space and time to explore big questions. In a twenty-year study of the Harvard Business School class of 1974, the most successful graduates had two qualities in common.1 One—they believed they could do well, and so they were driven and motivated. Two—they were always asking questions. Always wanting to learn more. The end of HBS wasn’t the end of their education; they kept reading, talking to people, and asking questions of all those around them—their friends, family, and supervisors, and later their supervisees, life partners, and children. They remained in a perpetual state of curiosity, always wondering about themselves, others, and the world around them.
We cultivate curiosity in our students by being curious about them. By skillfully asking the right questions at the right time. Asking ourselves and our people, what makes you your best self? When you retire one day, what do you want people to stand up and say about you? What do you want to be remembered for? The timing and meaningfulness of your questions will determine the quality of your students’ responses.
The stories we’ve shared about students’ “aha moments” didn’t come from our telling them what to think and believe. Their discoveries were theirs. We just asked the right questions at the right times. We learn to do this through close observation, by becoming students of our students. So while we offer you our flexible set of questions, it’s up to you to learn when and how to ask them.
Typically, the right time is when your student feels it’s the right time. They’re open, relaxed, and trusting. Ready to share and be heard.
We know, gentle readers, that you may have just snorted, “When hell freezes over!” Maybe you can’t recall more than three times a year when your monosyllabic, door-slamming, eye-rolling teenager was in this hypothetical “right space” to respond thoughtfully to your deep, meaningful questions about life. During elementary school, these times coincided with bedtime as a stalling tactic and, during high school, with softening you up to ask for money or the car keys. The rest of the time, your caring questions (like “How was your day?” and “Who drove you home?”) were viewed as the Spanish Inquisition. You explained to your kids that you just wanted to be in the trenches with them during the ups and downs of adolescence, but were treated like a CIA operative using outdated Cold War interrogation strategies. They responded to your beautiful questions with side-eye. And accusations like “You ask a lot of questions” and “You seem like you always want to know what’s going on with me.” Well … yes. Yes, I do want to know what’s going on with you.
How do you get beyond the suspicion, and the gulf between your turf and theirs … into the open, fertile fields for exploring life’s biggest questions together? We know it seems like a huge leap in most households. It’s time to bridge the gulf.
First, recognize that your students have finely tuned BS radars. Adults become desensitized to BS from years of exposure, but students are still allergic to it. And that’s a good thing. The beauty of young people is earnestness and authenticity. BS is anything disingenuous, misleading, or unfair. It’s the hidden agenda. Even when BS contains elements of truth, the slightest hint of a hidden agenda makes BS feel like “a greater enemy of truth than lies.”2
People learn early in life that their parents have hidden agendas. Even when they mean well, parents get sucked into manipulating their kids out of fear and protectiveness. Helicopter parents fear that danger lurks around every corner (“I trust my kids, but not the world they live in”). Snowplow parents fear that if they don’t beat down these threats, their kids will miss out (“I will blast away my kids’ obstacles”). Performance mindset parents are thinking, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em—inject kids with winning attitudes (“I’ll teach my kids to beat the system”). Self-protective parents cover their own assets more than their kids’ for fear of being judged (“I must help my kids get into such-and-such university, to prove what a competent parent I am”).
Students have a “fear detector,” similar to their BS radar. When we’re feeling anxious about their choices, they can smell it like sharks detect blood in the water. Questions that are veiled attempts to control or manipulate come across as exactly that. The result is instant tension and defensiveness. Not open, genuine curiosity that sparks self-discovery. This is why it’s generally a good idea to calm down, meditate, pray, and hit your reset button before launching into a conversation driven by fear. Each fear-provoked conversation drives a little wedge into the relationship. That’s why we coach parents to ask themselves one question before they intervene: “How would I parent right now if I weren’t scared, worried, or anxious?” In other words, if you knew with certainty that regardless of the current situation, everything would work out fine for your student, how would you respond in this moment? What would you say or do?
When fear is not driving us, our parenting and listening improve dramatically. Suddenly the stage is set for real purpose discovery. We are present. We genuinely want to hear what our students have to say, and so we encourage them to speak freely. We listen carefully. We understand. We validate them.
Authenticity isn’t just keeping it real with students, it’s being honest with ourselves. We won’t get too far if we don’t get this part right. We have to ask ourselves: What do I really want for my student? Why? Am I imposing any of my own fears and needs on my student? We have to decouple our goals from their goals.
Even if we’ve spent our child’s first fifteen years fearfully pushing our own agendas, it’s not too late to come clean. Healthy relationships are fairly resilient and recoverable. They can bounce back quickly and often. There’s still time for a fresh start.
So, what will it take for our students to trust us and want us on their team? In 2012, Project Aristotle explored the question: “What makes a Google team effective?”3 Google had teams that were super-productive and high-performing. They built high-quality products on time and under budget. But there were plenty more teams that weren’t doing as well. What made the difference? Was it team members’ talents, years of expertise, productivity, gender or ethnic identities?
Nope. It wasn’t the qualities of individual members. It was how they treated one another.4 The most successful teams meshed well and felt psychologically safe. Psychological safety is the sense that interpersonal risks are safe to take here.5 Success had more to do with safety than anything else. More even than individual talent, education, or experience.
When teams felt psychologically safe, they were more productive because people felt free to share ideas, admit and learn from mistakes, engage in learning, ask for help, speak up, and provide feedback to others.6 They felt comfortable to be their full selves. Bottom line: people and relationships thrive when they feel safe to open up … when they can express ideas without fear of criticism or judgment, even when they disagree.
Safety is paramount when doing purpose work, because it means taking risks—to be open, vulnerable, and genuinely curious. We have to be open to uncertainty. We have to be vulnerable by sharing deep parts of ourselves. We have to lower our defenses and let people in. We have to feel protected from judgment, criticism, or embarrassment. So creating space for purpose exploration means creating safe space.
Psychological safety relies on mutual trust and respect.7 Trust comes with a shared agenda—a sense that we’re on the same team. And respect comes from the ability to follow through on this agenda.
When deciding whether to trust people, we ask ourselves: Are they trying to help, hurt, or use me? There’s a reason commissioned salespeople have a bad rap—we don’t fully trust their intentions. We know it’s likely that their hearts are divided between helping us reach our dreams and lining their own pockets, even if it means selling us lemons. Our kids pick up on our hidden agendas, too. They know when our awesome intentions for them are clouded by our own values, anxieties, or beliefs that we know what’s best for them (because sometimes we do). To muddy the water further, often they think they know our misguided intentions and reject our earnest offers to support them.
In contrast, when people or organizations convince us that they’re for us, with no opposite agenda—we trust them. When companies express this through warmth and connection, we buy in.8 Think Amnesty International or Doctors Without Borders.
Conveying warmth is not necessarily about acting sweet, warm, and fuzzy with our students. It’s building a genuine relationship. Warmth is earned by demonstrating the trustworthy intentions behind our actions. Oftentimes, it’s the football coach who makes the team do hundreds of push-ups, the physics teacher who grades the hardest, the music teacher who won’t let you rest until you get it right—who are seen by their students as the warmest, most trustworthy people. They prove that they push us because they care … sans hugs, feelings, or other fuzziness.
Our research shows that parents’ high expectations make their students anxious only when they don’t match students’ own expectations.9 Expectations hurt students only when they feel out of sync with them. But when students feel like you share their best interests and aren’t driven by your ambitions or fears of failure—they can put up with a lot. They can tolerate honest feedback, being pushed out of their comfort zones, even firm correction. They’ll trust you when you support them in the ways they want to get better.
Getting that very message across to our students pays huge dividends. In one study, middle school students were asked to write an essay about a personal hero.10 Teachers gave them written feedback, and a chance to revise their essays to improve their grades. When handing back the essays, the teachers also attached a handwritten note. Half of the students received this neutral message: “I’m giving you these comments so that you’ll have feedback on your paper.” The other half received one that expressed personal intentions: “I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know that you can reach them.” The difference in outcomes was staggering. As a result of this simple handwritten message that conveyed a sense of personal connection, students were ten times more likely to revise their essay for a better grade.
Sadly, math motivation tends to drop as students get older. But not for those who felt their teachers cared for them.11 Students who had strong relationships with their teachers were much more willing to lean in to calculus, algebra, and geometry. In general, when students believe you care and that you’re in it with them, they’re more willing to go all in. To listen, to receive feedback, and to push themselves toward their full potential.
Do you push your students? Do you ask them to go beyond their comfort zones and do hard things? Do they know why you push them? Have you clearly communicated it to them? Do they know that you care to support their dreams … not yours?
Besides being attracted to warmth and trustworthiness, we’re also drawn to people, products, and companies that are highly competent.12 Do they have the know-how? Do they appear efficient, capable, skillful, clever, and knowledgeable? Do they have the confidence and ability to carry out their intentions? Know-how is more than just intelligence—it’s special resources, skills, and creativity. When people have the right abilities and skills to actually help us with something we can’t easily do on our own, our respect and appreciation for them grow.
Our students do the same unconscious analysis when deciding who to trust. They’re asking themselves: “Do I like working with this person?” (warmth and trust) and “Does this person know what they are doing?” (respect). So, to be let in, we have to show them a combination of why we want to help (we’re for them) and how we can help. That we’re approachable and able.
Students feel safe with adults they see as both warm and competent. Yes, we can outsource to others who can help guide our students. But this book is about putting tools in our own toolkits that will enable us to listen more skillfully and even join our students’ team of trusted mentors.
So how can you uniquely help your people? By “helping” we’re not talking about showing them you have strengths and skills in their fields of interest. What you have to offer is much more fundamental than knowing exactly how to guide them in becoming sports marketing managers, YouTubers, or ancient Egyptian art connoisseurs. Your competence is the ability to listen effectively when a young person reflects on a big life question. Your competence is the willingness to understand their perspective, to validate how they are feeling, and to do your best to help them based on what they are saying. We know there may be days when it’s easy to feel like dinosaurs. Young people don’t believe we can remember what it’s like to be their age. They think we were born old and that social media has completely changed the way the world works. But truth be told, the deep needs for belonging and purpose that characterize the high school and college years remain the same.
So what you have to offer is what young people need most: a foundational relationship that will set them up for true and long-term success. Of everything we’ve discussed, your relationship with your people is hands down the most important influence on their ability to discover purpose.13
In one of our studies, students described feeling pressured into a performance mindset to survive at school despite it hurting their self-esteem and well-being.14 But a follow-up study showed that those with good mentoring resisted the rat race and pursued purposeful goals.15
Relationships with parents and mentors are the blueprints for how students engage with the world and how they see themselves. It’s humbling to realize that through their relationship with you, they can gain the self-acceptance, inspiration, and support needed to resist toxic societal expectations.16
Research on adolescents across demographics, in and out of the United States, suggests a few universal characteristics of “good” mentoring. It’s a combination of “pushing,” “pulling,” and “partnering.” Sometimes we have to pull our people in close to build relationships and show them we care. We do this by affirming them. Other times, we have to push them to step outside their comfort zones to become their best selves. We do this by challenging them. Still other times, we have to go to bat for them. We have to partner with them in addressing systemic barriers or injustices. We do this by advocating for and with them. Good mentoring is knowing the balance of when to push, when to pull, and when to step in and partner with them in changing unjust systems they swim in. In multiple studies, purposeful students had mentor figures (like great teachers or parents) who did all three.
Affirming relationships are those in which students feel that they are valued and believed in and that their actions and decisions are understood. Affirmation is a lot like the parenting adage “catch them doing something right.” It’s not empty and general praise. It’s expressing something specific that you see in them that’s aligned with their elements of purpose. More often, parents are tempted to do the opposite—“catch them doing something wrong.” Catch the things that aren’t right, and critique and correct them (e.g., “I can understand what you did, but try doing X next time”). These are fear responses. We fear that our students might make mistakes, go off the rails, not be okay or good enough. We fear we will not have imparted all of our wisdom and warnings before they leave the nest. There’s little to be gained in finding fault and fear reactions. They don’t constructively help students grow and learn in the intended direction. (Think of the supervisor, friend, or family member who’s constantly finding fault with you—how’s that working out for you? For the relationship?) These comments instill fear, a sense of not being accepted or safe, because they’re born from fear.
We recommend checking our inner critics before they speak. It’s easy to overreact about what’s needed right now or about the ultimate outcome. Take a deep breath and tell yourself, “My student is learning. Making mistakes is par for the course.”
We always have a choice of how to react. We can mostly point out things that concern us, or we can tune in to things we admire about them. Students grow and change when they feel seen, accepted, appreciated, trusted, and respected. It inspires them to do more of the things that represent their best selves. So, if we want our students to be their best selves, and pursue their purpose, we have to catch them doing it. We’re all works in progress. Notice progress in the right direction. Embrace who your student is right now (“I love watching you care for your friends that way” or “I love hearing you debate medical ethics with Aunt May”) rather than constantly trying to improve them (“If you tweak this or that, it will go even better next time”). Say specifically what you appreciate about their efforts (“You worked so hard at linear equations, and now you’re seeing the fruits of your labor”) rather than evaluating their personhood (“You’re a good student”). Find ways to cheer them on when the going gets tough (“I’m so proud of how you bounced back after getting knocked down … I see you working hard out here!”).
Pro-Tips for Affirming Your People: Find creative ways of expressing to your people how much you value their purpose-related choices and actions. Notice whether there are ways they think, speak, do, act, believe, and so on that are in line with their purpose. Catch them in the act, and affirm what you see. Acknowledge sacrifices they may make for their core values, the strengths they’re bringing to the things they do, the skills they’re working at, and the positive impact they’re having on others.
Affirmation Toolkit
Embracing Who They Are
Acknowledging Their Efforts
Cheering Them On
The truth is, the search for purpose is often stressful because it’s hard to tolerate uncertainty.17 Parents and mentors can play a huge role in emboldening students to face this challenge. We do this by instilling confidence students need to explore different avenues and make difficult choices. We can also help them to do what they didn’t think was possible.
Another way to think about challenging students is to consider the expectations we place upon them. Students always rise or fall to the expectations we set for them. When we challenge them by setting high expectations, and articulate why we are setting them, it shows that we believe in them. If our students have high expectations of themselves, our high expectations can feel supportive, rather than stressful. Sometimes, challenging our students might feel in conflict with affirming them. Where affirmation is comforting, a challenge asks them to step outside their comfort zone. By definition, this doesn’t feel great, and our gut reaction is to not upset the applecart. We might be tempted to take the path of least resistance in mentoring our students to keep the peace. Yet when we don’t challenge young people, we inadvertently lower our expectations of them, denying them their full potential.
Challenging students is about inspiring them to take action toward their purpose—toward their agenda, not ours. It’s drawing out their strengths and abilities. The ones needed to accomplish the goals they’ve set for themselves.
Our role is to provide support in an uncertain world. To let them know that, yes, they should pursue that goal because it’s purposeful to them. We can help them to move beyond the doubt and uncertainty that may lead to inaction. We can instill in them the belief that they have the capacity to pursue their dreams and they are strong enough to bounce back from failure.
Challenging students is pushing them to pursue something that you know they are capable of but that they don’t think they are. It’s working toward something just outside their current skill set that is achievable with focus and determination. Education psychologists call this the zone of proximal development. To know when to challenge students, you have to realize when they are stuck, when they aren’t moving forward or are dragging their feet. The next step is to understand why. If they aren’t moving forward because they are scared of failure, that’s when you challenge them. You challenge them because you believe in them. Challenging them instills your confidence in them when they lack it themselves.
Ultimately, good mentoring is the art of balancing affirmation and expectations. We affirm students to show them they have our unconditional support—no matter what they do or don’t do, achieve or don’t achieve. We will support and value them, no matter what. At the same time, we challenge them not because they need to prove themselves, but because we believe in them. Some will need more affirmation, while others will need to be challenged. The balance of the two is unique to each person, relationship, and circumstance.
Pro-Tips for Challenging Your People: Find creative ways of challenging your people to do things that stretch them but are still within reach. Notice whether there are ways that they can grow or new opportunities to offer them that are in line with their purpose.
Challenge Toolkit
Where do you challenge your students by holding high expectations of them?
Now consider: Why do you set high expectations?
Why do you know that your students can meet these expectations?
Now, connect these three dots:
Good mentoring doesn’t exist in a vacuum. We have to recognize that we all coexist in larger systems that influence our ability to be successful. It’s critical to equip students to do what they have to do. But also ask, Are their settings designed to help or hold them back? Sometimes it’s not enough to affirm, challenge, and help students with their mindsets. It’s the system—be it a school or other organization—that needs changing. Sometimes we need to advocate for our students. Knowing when to step in on their behalf is a tricky needle to thread. There’s a fine line between being good advocates and being snowplow parents. How can we tell the difference between advocacy and snowplowing? Here are some key differences:
When our students face obstacles or rules they’re upset about, we can ask ourselves three questions to decide whether and how to step in:
We coach parents to do an honest heart-check on whether they’re prone to advocate or to snowplow. Ultimately, snowplowing undermines our ability to affirm and challenge our students. It sends the message that we know best, and it makes students feel unseen, unheard, and unaffirmed. It also sends the message that we don’t believe in them, lowering expectations and reinforcing self-limiting beliefs. Snowplow parenting, like the performance and passion mindsets, while well intentioned, is a strategy that ultimately backfires. Learning to handle obstacles, including frustrations and failures, is healthy for students. It teaches them skills needed to become competent adults. If we shield them from every little bump, they’ll be ill-equipped to navigate the bigger potholes down the road.
In contrast, advocacy helps students gain access to opportunities that they would otherwise be blocked from due to inequalities or injustices. Partnering with them to address social barriers teaches them an invaluable set of skills for meeting needs in the world. This kind of mentoring builds students’ sense of self-worth, vitality, validation, knowledge of self and others, and skills for branching out and building other such relationships.
Advocacy goes beyond equipping students for personal success; it equips them to serve as change agents who shape policies, cultural practices, and social norms that can benefit many others. Good advocacy and youth-led social change can go hand in hand. We help students build the capacity to do such important work through five mentoring practices: (1) sharing power, (2) amplifying voice, (3) mutual role-modeling, (4) collaborative doing, and (5) tackling system failures.18
By sharing power, we mean thinking of ourselves as co-leaders with our students. We encourage our students to get involved in organizations where they can lead or participate in democratic governance. If our students are getting exposure to this kind of governance, they’re learning how to participate in a democratic society where they can make a difference.
Let’s be clear, sharing power doesn’t mean giving up our authority as a wise elder. There are benefits to relinquishing some positional power as the parent or adult mentor so students can learn to co-lead. For example, collaborating with students to create the family’s rules for technology usage. This is different from giving up our authority that’s found in our experience and wisdom. Sitting silently while our students make all the decisions isn’t what we’re talking about. Students want to hear what we have to say, and what we have to teach them. They appreciate our contributions to their efforts and success.
Amplifying our students’ voices means getting the word out there about their views and values. Turning negative stereotypes of adolescents on their head. So while popular media refers to them as “immature,” “impulsive,” “self-centered,” “naïve,” “reckless,” or “troubled,” we can take opportunities to change that narrative. We can talk about their energy, enthusiasm, and the constructive aspects of youthful idealism and risk-taking. We can champion their expressions of identity, values, and needs that are often misunderstood or not heard by others. We can educate ourselves about the roots of many youth problems, including sociopolitical and historical forces, like racism, sexism, and adultism. And once we understand these facts well, we can share them with whoever will listen.
By respecting and amplifying students’ voices, we’re role-modeling the ways they themselves will communicate their ideas in the world. They’ll learn to voice who they are and what they think and care about in ways that effectively create social change. By example, we can sow seeds of interest in civic engagement, activism, and social change. We do this by doing it: we step up by role-modeling the attitude and skills needed to do the work. Oftentimes it’s a mentor who first introduces purpose and inspires students to take up a cause.
Mutual role-modeling is about seeing students as our role models, too. It’s a two-way street. Students are sometimes bold in raising social justice and equity issues that we might avoid, or not even see. Students are the ones who notice and point out structural and classroom procedures that lead to discrimination and inequality. They can call out the ways that school policies worsen achievement gaps. They can research ways that school conditions harm students’ well-being. When students see these problems, they also see solutions. They can play a key role in the strategic planning needed to transform organizations.
Together we can make some waves. Collaborative doing is also the best way to learn. Marching together for an important cause. Collecting food or toys and delivering them to a shelter. Reading books to patients in a children’s hospital. Meeting with legislators and educating them on a need. Raising awareness about what students can contribute to organizations. Serving, protesting, and changing policies together teaches both mentors and students new skills, and doing it together ignites a sense of the excitement and immediacy of this work. These become mentoring moments.
Pro-Tips for Partnering With Your People: Consider how your student’s interests and goals might intersect with an area of service that you also care about. Partnering with your people can be real (not forced) when you share some passion for the work. Encourage them to be the drivers in it through using their strengths and skills while you ride shotgun.
Advocacy Toolkit
Sharing Power and Amplifying Voice
Mutual Role-Modeling and Collaboration
Having covered what good mentoring looks like in the broader strokes, we now zero in on what this looks like more specifically. The idea of affirming, challenging, and advocating for our students is probably not a tough sell, in theory. The struggle is imagining how to squeeze any of that into the chaotic, busy mess of everyday life.
Building meaningful relationships with young people takes time, but the actual building takes place in individual moments. Inch by inch, minute by minute, we earn the right with students to talk with them about things that matter. Every positive interaction we have together is an investment; it’s money in the relationship bank. Negative interactions are a withdrawal from the bank. A removal of relational currency. The more we prioritize protecting our relationship with our students over sweating the small stuff, the more currency we acquire. Psychologists have evaluated the health of a relationship with the Gottman ratio—the number of positive to negative experiences. Stable and healthy relationships have a “magic ratio” of 5 to 1. Five positive feelings or interactions for every negative interaction or feeling.
The coin of the realm of purposeful mentoring is what we call “moments that matter.” Moments that matter are those times that our students feel seen, heard, and validated. These can be big moments (a graduation, championship game, birthday celebration) or small ones (a passing remark, well-timed shoulder squeeze, or silly joke during a stressful time). There are two characteristics that make up any moment that matters. One, it causes our students to feel like they matter, because their ideas and opinions have been taken seriously, and they’ve been treated with respect. Two, it involves talking about or doing something that matters to them. Playing a video game together. Asking about a relationship of interest. Sharing memes or GIFs. Discussing their purpose.
Moments that matter are times when students share what matters to them with someone who makes them feel like they matter. This highlights the underrated power of asking questions. The conversation may have started with the simplest of questions:
When we ask questions out of genuine curiosity, we’re sending the message to our students: “Your ideas and opinions matter.” Just as importantly, their answers give us clues to what matters to them. The timing of these conversations is the true art. There are moments you make and moments you catch.
The “moments we make” are those that we intentionally initiate and carve out time for. Easier said than done given our fast-paced lives, not to mention the shock to our students if we plopped down on the couch next to them and announced cheerily, “Here’s an idea—let’s have a conversation about your purpose!” Definitely not the way to go, unless you like when they look at you like you’re a kook, roll their eyes, and hastily return to their phones and video games.
We can make meaningful moments, but we have to ease into them. That means transforming the time we already spend with them into meaningful moments. Our hectic lives are often a drain on us, and take us in such different directions from our students. Yet there is one time during the week that we can steal some regular time together. Mealtimes.
Research examined a slew of family, school, and neighborhood factors to see which ones were most related to good life outcomes for adolescents. Eating dinner together as a family was at the top of the list.19 Even after accounting for the influences of family household income, race, and gender, students who did family dinner had the lowest rates of depression and risk/problem behaviors and highest levels of contribution and other positive youth development outcomes.
Research has also shown that eating together promotes psychological safety. It causes us to feel closer to one another, which makes us happier and more satisfied with our lives.20 It fosters “culinary diplomacy” that promotes cross-cultural understanding and increased cooperation.21 Sharing meals is a vulnerable act; we only break bread with people we trust. This is why holidays and socializing revolve around meals.
Setting the table is about creating rituals and attitudes toward dinner conversation through practice. It’s about facilitating a conversation that is inclusive and interesting for everyone involved. Pro-tip: Good topics for dinner conversation are non-divisive and yet they’re ones where (1) everyone has a strong opinion and (2) everyone feels their opinion has merit. These criteria make for the most engaging and safe conversations. So, for example, dinner conversation may begin with a playful prompt or icebreaker, inspired by Neil Pasricha’s Book of Awesome:
“What is better?”:
The idea here is to create a practice where coming to the table feels easy and fun—not awkward and stressful. Everyone present feels welcome and dialed into the time together. We want questions that aren’t about “winning” arguments. They’re low-stakes ways to engage in playful, sometimes passionate, dialogue. The best part is that even the silliest questions can serve as prompts for purpose discovery, without anyone noticing. They’re an opening salvo from which deeper meaningful conversations can emerge. Here are some different purpose prompts to try out:
The goal of these prompts is to build community, so don’t try to structure or formalize them too much. As long as people are having organic and engaging conversation, it’s a win, no matter what’s being talked about. Once a community and tradition of sharing is established, you can begin to incorporate more meaningful personalized prompts that get people to share about their sense of purpose. Think of the opening prompts as community-building appetizers. They whet your appetite for the collective meal. The main course prompts are personalizers; they are meant for everyone to share while each member of the family listens. Here are some questions that align with the elements of purpose. You could even choose a different personalized prompt for each day of the week, as below:
Adjust the questions as needed. These prompts work best when we role-model responses to them. To get the ball rolling, be prepared to answer first. So, if it was Monday, you might begin:
A word of encouragement: even if such conversations start off a bit stiff and awkward, keep hope alive. Rituals and traditions can take hold if we give them time. When we stay the course, these conversations become soul food.
Moments we make are proactive, and moments we catch are reactive. Some of the best conversations with our students are unplanned. They occur in the car on the way to school. Or on a longer road trip. They occur while shopping or making dinner together or after watching a Netflix episode. Or when someone in the family gets some bad news or suffers a loss.
There are two types of moments we catch. Something happens in the world, and we draw out its meaning. Or something happens to our student, and we draw out its meaning. The first entails filtering events in the world through the lens and language of purpose. Imagine a conversation after watching the Golden State Warriors together.
You: Why do you like the Warriors so much?
Student: I dunno, they’re good, they win a lot of championships.
[Beyond this no-brainer answer, they struggle to articulate why, so you use the language of purpose.]
You: Out of everything in the world, what do you think is most important to Steph Curry?
Student: Hmmm. Well, he does always talk about his family and faith a lot.
You: Draymond Green doesn’t seem very fast, and he’s a bad shooter—what makes him such a great player?
Student: Not sure … He seems really good at telling his teammates where to go on defense.
You: Yup, he seems to be a great facilitator and creator. He uses communication and critical thinking to his advantage.
You: What makes Steve Kerr such a great coach?
Student: He seems so calm and upbeat all the time, like a very Zen guy. Nothing ever seems to faze him.
You: Yup, and here’s a guy who’s seen a lot of trouble in his life. He lost his father to gun violence in Beirut, Lebanon, when he was just a college freshman. That tragedy inspired him to speak out on various issues, especially gun rights. [Adversity shapes the contribution/impact we are motivated to make in the world.]
As you can see, meaningful conversations don’t have to be forced. Some of the most spontaneous and playful moments are where the magic happens. When we look through the lens of purpose, we find traces of it everywhere. We can capture little moments by putting words to these experiences.
We end with a story that demonstrates what a regular practice of affirming, challenging, and advocating during moments that matter does for students and relationships.
Tim’s experiences as a school counselor in a large public high school often felt like barely contained chaos. School days were a constant stream of interruptions. Lockdown drills. Teachers who needed Tim’s support. Students in distress. Parents seeking guidance.
There was only one predictable part of Tim’s day. A senior we’ll call Ben would come to Tim’s office to “post up” during fourth period. Ben made himself at home, taking jump shots on the door-mounted basketball hoop, playing rap songs on his Bluetooth speaker, celebrating or lamenting the Boston Celtics’ performance the night before. Rain or shine, Ben never missed a visit.
In Tim’s office, Ben was charismatic, kind, with a wise and quick wit. Outside Tim’s office was a different story. Ben was always in trouble, cutting classes, arguing with teachers, and coming late to school. He failed the majority of his high school classes and attended summer school every year. Graduation seemed unlikely.
Tim’s colleagues wondered why he invested so much time in Ben. Why not focus his energies on the college-bound students who seemed more deserving of his attention?
Tim, however, recognized that this was no waste of time. He came to know a side of Ben that others had missed. Ben lived alone with his grandmother and worked thirty hours a week at a fast-food restaurant. He was remarkably independent, but didn’t have a strong support network. Sometimes, in between jump shots, he would open up about his past and current struggles and his uncertain future. These conversations provided critical context to Ben’s behavior at school.
Over time, Tim and Ben forged a rich and mutual relationship. While Ben had been defiant with most other adults out of distrust, he agreed to whatever Tim asked of him. In fact, Tim had a cadre of students like Ben—the ones not following school rules, serving detentions and suspensions, refusing to comply with assistant principals and deans. All of them were remarkably cooperative with Tim. All he had to do was ask, and it would be done.
These relationships demonstrated the power of trust and respect. These students could feel that Tim genuinely cared for and enjoyed them … and that he respected them. He saw in them their best selves. In return, they showed him mutual trust and respect.
Of all the things we could possibly talk about, your students’ relationship with you is their greatest asset in cultivating a purpose mindset. Deep down, we all know this, but the demands of everyday life, the academic and career pressures we experience, and the urgency of the to-do list can make our relationships fade to the background. We mistake the urgent for the important. We can focus so much on getting things done, to build for success, that we sacrifice our relational foundations to do so. We hope this chapter serves as a reminder of what’s truly important in life, your connection with your people. When we put that at the center of our work with students, the things we hope for them—success, happiness, fulfillment—emerge as by-products in the long run. Relationship first and the rest will follow.