Mentoring Adolescents: Remembering the Need for Delicate Balance and the Lessons of Failure

"I'm gonna go to Harvard." It is almost every day that I come across a student with such ambitions in this job. Replace the name "Harvard" with some other top-ranked, well-known university in the US and the UK, and the sentiment practically describes every student I speak with. There are different reasons that students aspire to a spot in one of the world's elite educational institutions. Some are grounded in the cold, hard logic of high financial returns, while others are bound by the emotional belief of pride and prestige. Whatever the reason, the goal remains noble, motivating, and worthy of encouragement.

Encouragement, however, occasionally borders on the stroking of an inflated ego just to sustain the motivation. Youngsters of just age 16 or 17 have plenty of doubts about their own capabilities, as they compare themselves to peers, both real and imagined, and become sensitive to their shortcomings. Adult mentors who are oblivious to the sensitivity of teenagers can easily douse out those fragile flames of educational ambition. Today's belief in heading to Harvard can easily be forgotten when tomorrow only fills the mind with broken hopes and dreams.

It is a delicate balance for the mentors to tread, especially considering that the journey to those elite educational institutions is not counted in terms of days and weeks, but months and years. In such a long period, daily life brings together so many different events outside the mentors' knowledge and control, making conversations a minefield of known goals but unknown shifts in every student's current status quo. With the mentors also occupied with the situations of multiple students, each with different backgrounds and concerns, keeping track of each's unique mental state is next to impossible.

The result, unfortunately, can be a few self-fulfilling prophecies in the most negative of circumstances. Busy with other elements of life, some adolescents go "off-track" in their journey to Harvard. Life goals become different, or plainly muddled, causing them to lose so much motivation that infrequent mentor meetings just cannot bring them back to their initial excitement. And when motivation is lost, the result is broken hopes and dreams. Maybe a few more hours of studying and extracurricular activities could have made a difference in university applications, but the demotivated do not think in that way.

That need to prevent demotivation will be key in the next phase of my journey in educational consulting. I've made a switch from sales, where hyping up the initial excitement is key to success, to service delivery, where keeping the flames alive and burning, is what gets the results. Customer service is always about rapport building, but in a role as a mentor to an adolescent, filled with occasional self-doubt, the word "rapport" takes on a whole new level of meaning and significance. Only through years of sharing concerns but still keep moving toward an unchanging ultimate goal, can a partnership lead to a place at Harvard. 

Of course, sometimes broken hopes and dreams become a reality no matter how much rapport is built and how high motivations remain after years. The likes of Harvard do not tell the world how they admit students. The rest of us can only guess. The motivated can try multiple ways to stand out, but even then, they can guess wrong. In such cases, mentors should not be just there to celebrate the efforts and success, but console and provide guidance on the next steps in the face of failure. Everyone, not least the students, should understand that in life, trying one's best is often not good enough. That is not limited to college applications.

No educational consultancy can guarantee admission to a top university. After all, they do not directly work with universities and have no insider connection on how final decisions on who to accept are made. But education should not be simply equated with the most obvious results of which schools sent out acceptance letters. For each student, how to receive feedback, how to manage projects, how to think about and talk about their own lives...these are all education in themselves. Even if not a single university picked a student for their roster, the student did learn plenty about who they are in the process. 

A mentor, as such, should not forget that "process" aspect of education. It is a noble sentiment that mentorship should be goal- and results-oriented, but the sole focus on the end game creates a misconception that an unsuitable result is equated with complete failure. No one in life can get the desired result in everything in life. That is true for college applications, job searches, finding a romantic partner, or even just grocery shopping. Education should not just be about lessons on how effort can lead to success, but also about the need to accept failure gracefully and still be strong enough to move on.