What's Your Tricycle?

Inspiration

Iwas inspired to write this book by three seemingly uneventful, everyday things. Together these things got me thinking deeply about where I was in my life and gave me the confidence and momentum to make some big changes and even write this book.

Here is the list:

A conversation with a business student

An Interaction with my daughter’s teacher

Talking to my 2 year old

Foreword

When I wrote this book , I was working as a mentor, professionally. I mentored around 100 business students. Over the years, I had thousands of mentoring conversations. My goal was to provide support, coaching, feedback, and discuss strategies to overcome obstacles. I kept them moving and engaged even when things got tough and influenced them to make positive changes. Through working with them, I developed this process and it worked. What I didn’t anticipate was that this process would change me just as much as it changed them. This is how it all unfolded and what I learned.

The Tricycle

The week of Halloween was not really a special week other than the obvious holiday and my excitement to take my 2-year-old to her first trick-or-treating event, but it unfolded in really interesting and life-changing ways. I found myself going about my daily routine; taking my daughter to school, making my mentoring calls, talking to my business students about their progress, working through my long list of to-dos, and feeling exhausted the whole time. I worked at an online university mentoring business students. I would talk to each of my 80-100 students nearly every week. I had some top performers that I gave a little more freedom because with them, less contact was more. I was in the lives of 80-100 strangers, which was an odd thing to do for a living but I was really good at it and saw value in the job. I shouldn’t really call them strangers because I came to know most of them very well. I knew about their work, careers, families, habits, and personalities. Most of them were working professionals going to school for the first time or returning after a long absence. I was their support system, accountability partner, and sometimes pseudo-therapist. I had no counseling training, just an MBA and a 10-year sales career under my belt. I was just that extra person in their life that knew what they were going through. It was my job to get and keep them engaged in their courses and help them on their journey to graduation. I had to reach each one of them in a way to which they would respond and push them to be better, even if they didn’t believe in themselves. They had all reached a point in their lives where they needed change. Some of them of them felt that getting a degree was the only way to move forward and a must-do, while others considered it a life goal. A not have-to right now situation, but it was important to them. Every week I would call, and we would talk about their progress, challenges, life events, and I would help them set reasonable and attainable goals.

I noticed through my interactions with them that many of them, even if really successful in their professional lives, had low confidence in this personal endeavors. Sometimes the opposite would happen. A really great student would have low confidence in their professional abilities. It was my job to help them grow and become a successful business student no matter the challenge and help them harness their potential. There were different levels of acceptance of me by my students. Some were thankful to have the support and someone to talk to while others were not so thrilled to talk to me every week. I had a few students that totally resisted the idea of mentoring. They didn’t need me; I was an inconvenience. Now, many of these students did need mentoring, as they often were my lowest performers, but that was part my challenge. I had to reach all of them; I had to get