601: Roles and Identities Part 1 (for Students and Parents): A Framework for Exploring Who You’ve Been, Who You Are, and Who You’re Becoming

The College Essay Guy - Episod...s 1 of 2

(Students Parents) V2

Mon, Mar 03, 2025 11:29AM 28:48

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Roles and identities, self-discovery, college application, student focus, parent role, extracurricular activities, leadership, intellectual curiosity, service to others, collaboration, personal growth, narrative therapy, internal family systems, practical exercises, self-reflection.

SPEAKERS

Ethan Sawyer

Ethan Sawyer 00:08

E

Hi friends and welcome back to the podcast. It's a new year and a new season. Thanks for listening. So to kick off this year, which is season six, I wanted to share with you some practical resources based on a new framework that I've been exploring over the last year and a half. If you're a regular listener or you've been on webinars lately, you've seen me talk about the roles and identities list, which is basically a huge menu of roles with things like catalyst and change maker and party Bringer, and I've used it as sort of a GET TO KNOW you exercise with a number of guests on this podcast, including my friends, screenwriters, even Angel Perez, because I think it's a really great way to get to know somebody fast. But the more I've been exploring this list, the more uses for it I've been finding, and the more I've started to see that it's more than just a single exercise. It's actually a way of thinking about who we've been, who we are and who we're becoming, and by we, I'm talking about students and parents and counselors. But I believe roles and identities can be a useful framework for really, any human who's trying to well human in this episode, which is the first of two, I want to zero in on a few short practical exercises for students and parents that can help you figure out things like how you'd like to focus your time as you go through this process, and yes, I mean for students and parents. So I'll explain a little more about the philosophy behind the framework, but I'm going to keep that part really brief, because then I'm going to get into some hands on exercises that students can do, whether you're in ninth, 10th or 11th grade, that can help you, for example, plan your summer and extracurricular activities, or even think about how you want to map out your college application. Then I'm going to share a simple but powerful exercise for parents, helpful for thinking about who you want to be in this process. Since, let's be honest, it isn't just students who are learning about themselves here in part two, which is to say the next episode, I'm going to share some simple exercises for counselors, for you to begin recognizing maybe some patterns you might fall into if you're like me, and how you might be able to practice more self care, and yes, okay, eventually show up more fully for your students. But it's really about sort of looking inward, digging deep and hopefully making some discoveries. Why am I doing this? First of all, more colleges, particularly highly selective schools, are looking for differentiators among applicants. In particular, they're asking questions often about students' identities and how those identities have not only informed who they've been, but also how that informs what they'll bring to a college campus. Now there's a second reason, which is a little bit deeper, which is that I believe this process can be a great time of transformation and self discovery and growth for students, yes, but also for parents. And the third reason is that I believe that given what's going on in our world right now, socially, culturally, politically and even technologically. Given the rise of AI, use this work, this work of self reflection and critical thinking personal growth, is important now, arguably, maybe even more important than ever before. I know that's kind of extreme language, but I really do believe that this work is important. You'll find links to all the exercises that I mentioned in the show notes at college. Sa guy.com/podcast let's get into it. Okay. First, what is this? Roles and identities framework. Some of the principles underlying this framework are, first, that we contain multitudes. Now, that's Whitman, but the idea there is that we have many different roles and identities, and that these roles and identities, and I'm calling them roles, because these are things that can be summoned, in other words, things we have choice over, and that these identities are not monolithic. In other words, they're not just one thing. These identities are actually complex, nuanced parts of ourselves that they're constantly developing based on things we're learning, things we're discovering, and that they're socially constructed. Now I'll spend separate episodes getting into those a little bit more deeply now important side note this list and the exercise that I'm going to be talking about today are less about the identities that we are given. Now I'm talking there about race, class, gender. That's not what this is about. This is more about those identities that we choose. So that's why I put the word roles here at the start, but I put the word identities in the title, because oftentimes, when people use these different roles and they say, I'm a change maker or I'm an expert, they might say, I identify as a change maker or identify as a researcher. But separately, if you're interested in an exercise that helps students think about those given A. Identities, things like race, class, national origin, religion, birth order. You can check out the show notes for a separate exercise, it'll be clearly marked within this framework, the other roles and identities framework, I think of identity as something that's emergent, something that's developing. The inspirations for this come from narrative therapy and internal family systems and lots more, which, again, future podcast episodes. But you can kind of think of this college essay process, and the college essay itself as a snapshot of this emergent self, a record of a student's becoming. Now I've taken inspiration for this framework from a few different modalities, including narrative therapy, internal family systems, aka ifs and lots more, which I promise to get into in future podcasts. But for this one, I want to keep things to the basics and I want to get to the practical exercise. So let me just say this, within this framework, we're thinking about identity as something that's emergent. So when we think about the college essay, it's a snapshot of your emergent self, a record of a student's becoming. Given this, I'd love to share a few examples of some practical exercises that you as a student or parent can use to a, get to know yourself better, and B, move through this college admission process with more now, usually I say ease, purpose and joy, but here I'm going to say, I want to encourage you to move through this process with the potential for more growth, self discovery, and for those of you who value efficiency, efficiency, because I do believe these tools can help you go rather deep, rather quickly. All right, here's the first one. Now for this, you're going to need the roles and identities list. So in the show notes, go ahead and find it, and if you haven't found it already, I apologize. You can pause the episode, or if you need to, you can just Google roles and identities College Essay Guy. Now, once you've got this list, I want you to choose 10 roles that you identify with. Okay? Now you can pick more if you like, maybe, I don't know, set a timer for two or three minutes. You can pause the recording if you like. And I want you to pick about 10 roles that you identify with. I say about because some of you are going to look at this list and you're going to be like, Ah, I could pick so many. Do your best to whittle it down to about 10. Okay, pause the recording if you need to. Okay, I'm gonna assume you've done this next step. I want you to whittle this list down to your top five roles. In other words, which ones do you identify most with today? Okay, pause if you need to. Now the next step is, I want you to name two ways that each of these roles manifests in your life and just write them down. So for example, maybe you chose the role of, I don't know, catalyst. Let's say that one of the ways that it manifests in your life is when you're, let's say, in a group, and you're trying to come up with ideas of, where should we go for dinner. You're the one who's like, ooh, I've got this idea and this one. Or maybe you're the person who in that group is like, Hey, is anyone hungry? And you're the catalyst for everyone you know, choosing where to eat that day or night. So take a minute pause the recording and pick, let's say two ways, name two ways that each of these roles manifests in your life. And side note, if you're a parent listening to this, I want you to do this too. So this is a exercise, great exercise for students or for parents. Okay, that's sort of the basic 101. Foundational exercise. But there's so much you can do from this point, and I want to share with you three different applications of this work. So first of all, obviously, it's self discovery, but in terms of the practicality of it, one of the ways that you can use this as a student is, let's say you're a ninth, 10th or 11th grader, and you're trying to plan out your extracurricular activities, or let's say what you want to do this summer. So linked in the show notes, you'll find a whole guide that walks you through this. But the big picture, zoomed out version, is this, as you look at the different roles and identities that you want to step into a bit more. You might ask yourself, Okay, well, these are the roles and identities that I've already sort of been the ones you've already marked. But now you might go back to that list for a minute and go, Okay, what are three roles or identities that I want to call in, as it were? In other words, I want to express more. What. Say, for instance, you go, you see leadership there, and you go, you know what, I want to be more of a leader. So one of the things you could ask yourself is, okay, this summer or this fall, how could I step into the leadership role just a little bit more? And you don't necessarily have to do something new. You could think about your current activities, the current places where you have some, you know, Locus of Control. What are some ways you could be a leader there? But of course, this isn't just about leadership. It might be that you want to, I don't know, be a change maker. Maybe that's one of the roles or identities that you're interested in. Ask yourself, how could I be a change maker this summer? What's something that you could do there. So take a minute, maybe pause the recording, and then look at this and go, Okay, based on this roles and identities list, what are two specific ways for things that I could do, not things that I have done, but things that I could do to bring these roles more into my life. How could it become more like this part that I want to become more like. Let me give you a couple examples. Let's say, for instance, you want to be more of an advocate. Maybe you challenge yourself to have 10 conversations with people who disagree with you. So you develop your advocacy skills, and you're trying to maybe you're learning how to listen better and find common ground, and maybe you're trying to develop your persuasive argument skills. Okay, so that could be developing the advocate identity, for instance. So pause the recording if you need to, because I'm going to give you a part two. Okay, if you're finding this a bit challenging in the show notes, I'm going to link you to a values list. So another thing that you could do with this is go into this list pick, let's say five values that you want to bring into your life, either, you know, in the coming months or this summer, and ask yourself, Okay, for these values that are important to me, how could I call these into my life? What are say two things I could do to bring that value more into my life? So for example, let's say you look at the values list and you see creativity, and you're like, ooh, I'd love to explore and express my creativity. So how could you do that in the coming months? Maybe, for example, it's coming up with a new art project that you'd like to work on. And I don't know, maybe you're collaborating with others. Maybe you've identified personal development as a value, and you decide to spend a week doing the opposite of your usual habits. So maybe, for example, if you always sit down to work, maybe you decide to stand up to work. You know, if you're at school, maybe you can't do this. But hey, maybe if you're usually quiet in class, you decide to make this the week of speaking up. Maybe if you always listen to one type of music, you always listen to pop, maybe you try classical or jazz, just to see what that does another idea, let's say that you've highlighted personal development. What's, what's a specific way that you could bring that into your life. Maybe you pick a character from a book or a movie for a day, and you just choose to live like that character as much as you can for 24 hours. How does this change the way you think move about the world. Now, if you're stuck for ideas, link in the show notes. I'll share with you a whole big list of things that you can do, specific tangible things like the ones I'm suggesting, and they're organized in two ways. One list is organized based on roles and identities, and then a second list is organized based on your values. So if you want check out the show notes, and you'll see more on that. Okay, let's move to another exercise, and this one's a little more for students who are getting ready to start filling out or start thinking about their college application. So let's say you're in grade 11, or maybe you're in 10th grade, and you're starting to think about this a little bit. By the way, you do not need to write your college essay if you're in 10th grade. Side note, but it's not a bad idea to start thinking about how you might map out your different identities in your college application. So that's what this is doing here. So here's the exercise, which parts of yourself will you show in your college application? First, I want you to consider that you're not just showing one identity. So in other words, you're not just being like, I'm a leader, and you're being like boom leader all of my application. Or I'm an athlete, and it's just like boom athlete on the application. I want you to consider that we are all hyphenates, or if you like multi hyphenates. So for example, for me, I'm not just the College Essay Guy. I'm a content creator, teacher. I'm a voice actor, an athlete, a culture tender. I say that because I don't necessarily think I'm a culture creator at CEG at College Essay. Guy, I'm more of a culture tender, because that culture already exists. And Sarah Lawrence, by the way, is a school that agrees with me. Check out this essay prompt. They say. Sarah Lawrence students are often described as hyphenates, filmmaker, sociologist, historian, environmentalist, photographer, psychologist, novelist, economist, poet. In 250, to 500 words tell us about seemingly disparate interests you've brought together, or hope to bring together at Sarah Lawrence. Okay. Now I love this prompt, and I think it's a great way to think about how you want to map out your different cells, different parts of you in your college application. Okay, so the question I'm asking is, which roles do you want to manifest in your application? And a good thing to consider as you're thinking about this is what I call college admission nutrients. Now, what I mean by this is I spent last year combing through a whole bunch of college websites like hundreds, and I did an analysis, along with some help from my colleague Tom and shout out to Maya for helping with this as well. But we basically were able to come up with a set of qualities that colleges, on the whole, are looking for. Quick side note, these aren't meant to be like the Five College commandments or something like, you have to have these in your application, or you're not going to get into a good college. No, that's not what this is. But it's these five qualities that generally, if you can put them in your application, they're going to make for a more quote, unquote, healthy application. So these qualities are intellectual curiosity, service to others, leadership, slash initiative. That's one collaboration and consistent engagement. Now let me just say those again, real quick. Intellectual curiosity service to others, leadership, slash initiative, collaboration and consistent engagement. Now, as you're thinking about these different roles or identities that you want to put into the application, ask yourself, how could I weave in some of these different qualities? Or how is it that x role or identity manifests y or y and z qualities. So let me give you an example. Let's say you've got an advocate in you. You're like, I want to be a future lawyer. Okay? And my question for you would be like, Okay, well, what are the different college admission nutrients you could protect, potentially weave in maybe, for example, you could bring in service to others through a particular project or an internship or an article that you write. And this works, by the way, as you're planning your college admission process or as you're looking back on things that you've done. But then if you were planning something, I might ask, okay, well, great, you're going to do a project that's going to potentially show your intellectual curiosity and maybe your service to others. Could you actually work with some other folks on this, and then you could demonstrate collaboration, and then, I don't know, maybe find some opportunities for taking leadership or initiative. So you can see how one project could potentially bring in a lot of these different qualities. Let me just repeat what I've said, and then I want to give you a few seconds to process this, and I'll give you some like chill music so you can think about it. So again, I want you to go back and see if you can identify some different roles or identities that you want to put into your application, and then consider weaving in these different admission, nutrients, intellectual curiosity, service to others, leadership, slash initiative collaboration or consistent engagement. So I want to give you, let's say, 510, seconds to think about that while you listen to some chill music here. Okay, if you want more time to think about that, feel free to pause the recording, because I'm going to move on to the next exercise. Okay, parents, this one's for you. Who do you want to be in this process? That's the name of this exercise. That's a long name, I know, but hey, so I want you to look at this roles and identities list, and I want you to think about which role or roles would you like to play in your student's college admission process. Pick one, or you can pick one to three. Let's say, pause the recording if you need to. And then for each role that you picked one or three, I want you to name one way that you could manifest that role. So for example, maybe you picked the researcher identity because you're like, Oh, I could totally see myself researching. Well, then what's the specific way that you could do that? Well, maybe the specific way is helping your student research some potential best fit colleges, or maybe it's perspective Bringer or cheerleader. But again, I want you to get specific. So if you say cheerleader, what's the specific way that you hope to cheerlead? Because that could look like many different things. Maybe you're the cheerleader who's just gonna, like, let the student do the work, and you're going to come up and just knock on the door every night and be like, Hey, do you need anything? Are you eating? Are you going to are you going to get some sleep tonight? But what is the specific way that you hope to manifest that role? Okay, do. Now here's an important next step. What do you not want to do? And rather than picking a role that you don't want to play, since a lot of these roles are actually really positive, let's look at a simple way to think about how the roles and identities can sometimes fall into old patterns or show their what I like to think of shadow side, especially when they're under stress. So here's how you can explore some of those tendencies. So first, pick a role or identity that you know you tend to fall into, especially with your kid, and if you're like, What do you mean by that? Well, ask yourself, What's a role that I sometimes fall into, that my kid sometimes complains about, but they really don't get that. I'm just trying to help them and show how much I love them. So I'll give you an example for me, that role is anticipator. This is, this is true with my daughter. This is the part of me that has this, like, internal clock of when things should be getting done, usually in the morning, as we're getting ready, or when she's getting ready for bed, or, more likely, not getting ready for bed, and it's me like reminding my daughter again and again to do whatever the thing is, okay? And, oh, by the way, she should probably do it right now. She should probably stop whatever she's doing and do this thing that I really wanted to do. Okay? So whatever that role is for yourself, you know, the one that annoys your kid, find that role right now. Okay? So once you have it, I want to explore this role together using this series of stems. Okay, so here it is, sometimes my whatever the role is. So for example, my anticipator can be too blank, fill in the blank. So for instance, sometimes my anticipator can be too for me, it's like hurried or too anxious or too demanding. So what is that for you? Sometimes my x roll can be too y, whatever that is, which can lead to blank so what does it lead to? What are the potential negative impacts of this in your life or in your family's life? So sometimes my anticipator can be too demanding, hurried, rushed, which can lead to my daughter feeling frustrated, my daughter feeling sad, you know, tears, etc. So what is it for you in your house? Here's the next part. So it's important for me to remember too, what so how do you mitigate that? What are some good things to keep in mind for that role to keep in mind. So for me, for example, it's important for me to remember, to breathe, to remember that my daughter is doing her best. And here's the next part. So it's important for me to remember to blank and ask questions like, blank. So for me, it's important for me to remember to remember that my daughter is doing her best. Remember to breathe and ask questions like, Does this need to happen right now? The war, is my daughter doing something actually appropriate and useful? Oh, here's another question I need to ask myself, is, is my daughter feeling connected to me right now? Am I feeling connected to her right now? I So what are the questions that you feel like would be nutritional questions? I like to call them. And then here's the last part, doing this, like doing these things or asking these questions, might lead to what are the potential positive impacts? So for me, it would be like more positive, more understanding, fewer tears, more connection with her, more curiosity on my part. So what is it for you? Let me just repeat where we've been so far. Sometimes my blank role can be too blank to what, which can lead to these negative impacts. So it's important for me to remember too what. And ask questions like what. Doing this might lead to blank positive impacts, potential positive impacts. Okay, two last questions. I'm. If you had to distill it, what's the lesson that this role or identity needs to learn? And finally, what's a useful mantra or a calming motto that could help you anchor this you could remember in situations that are stressful. So for myself, the lesson that this role or identity needs to learn is that, above all, I want my daughter to feel connected to me. And the useful mantra or calming motto for myself is slow down. Okay, pause the recording if you need to. So what can we do with this? Some potential next steps. One thing to do potentially is just to share this with your partner, with your spouse, and if you feel it feel like it's appropriate, is to have a conversation as a family. It might lead to setting some agreements. So for example, if you're the type of family who talks about college all the time, or you're noticing that it's sort of taking up time, you know, in the car, at the dinner table, etc, one of the things you could do is just say, Okay, we're only going to talk about college on, you know, Sundays at dinner or, you know, whenever that is. Or another thing you could say is so I want you to know that you can count on me to do this particular thing, and I promise to do my best not to then name whatever the thing is. So an example of this, this is like from three days ago, is I realized that I was rushing my daughter when she was getting ready for bed, and I apologized to her, and I said to her, I'm really sorry. I realized that I probably could have done a better job letting her know that I wanted her in bed by 8pm and I could have been more gentle when I told her, it's time for bed. I was pretty firm with her, and she said to me, she softened, and she just kind of like cuddled up next to me. And she said, I like that you're apologizing, daddy. She said, I like that you're noticing when I'm sad. And I had I noticed that she'd been sad, which is what prompted the apology. And she said, Can I can I tell you? Is what she said. And I wasn't sure what she meant, but she said, you know, can I tell you when I'm sad? And I said, yeah, please let me know if you're feeling sad or if something that I've said has made you feel upset, because I really want to know, so that's what I've got. I hope these exercises are useful. I welcome your feedback. You can share them with us via social media, or if you or if you want, you can send us an email. You can send it to help at college sai.com and make sure it's forwarded along to me. And especially if you're a counselor, don't forget to check out our next episode where I'll walk through a few specific practical roles and identities based exercises for counselors. In particular, we're going to focus on how we as coaches slash mentors slash educators, and of course, so much more can develop specific questions and strategies to help us be more fully resourced in our lives and in our work, and able to really show up for our students, and, more importantly, show up for ourselves. Stay tuned and stay curious. You.