An 8 Minute Read, By Anthony (Tony) J. D’Angelo, founder of Collegiate Empowerment Posted May 8, 2020
When adversity strikes, we have two options: grow up or shrink down. As Higher Education professionals, as our campus partners, our client members, and our coaching clients, you are growth-minded individuals. You won’t take the easy route because you are committed to playing this game for the long haul. You have ambition, yet like most people in American Higher Education today, you're scared senseless because you don't know what is going to happen.
We at Collegiate Empowerment are here to help you navigate these scary times with purpose. Only after you get clarity for yourself, can you help your students. We can't take our students to a place where we ourselves have not yet been. This is why we are offering our free community coaching program. It's a complimentary program that started back in April. We're going to continue through June and we have three ongoing sessions and you can enroll at any time. The purpose of this program is to provide you, the Higher Ed pro, with tools, accountability, and community.
Questions and Concerns
We are sharing those coaching tools here. In our previous article, we covered the CEC Conversation and the X-Factor question. In this article, we’re going to take that X-Factor question a little deeper, but first, we want to honor the real concerns that some of you are facing. The CEC conversation is all about addressing those core concerns and those doubts. All progress starts by sharing your truth. Get in touch with your truth and identify your worries and fears. When you get those out, they no longer paralyze you, but they catapult you into a bigger future.
The X Factor question is designed to help you to get clear about your vision for your life. As we examine the X Factor question, use it as a framework to support and eventually eliminate or reduce your individual fears. Additionally, there are two underlying concerns and questions that we all, either subconsciously or consciously, are asking: A) “Will I have a job in the future?” and B), “Am I doing enough right now to support my campus community?”
People today are feeling one of four energies or emotions: they feel confused, isolated, powerless, or overwhelmed. You yourself are feeling these at times as well. These energies are out there in your campus community as well. What you need to realize is that people are silently begging for the antidote to these four energies. They're silently begging for clarity, for confidence, for capability, and for commitment. The X-Factor Question will help guide you and others.
The X-Factor Question
Remember, The X Factor Question is all about your vision. It's about making a future that's bigger than your past and a future that's bigger than your present. Today is _______, 2020. Think about your life, four years from today. It'll be ______ 2024. We use the framework of four years because it’s a familiar cycle for us: we typically have four years of high school, four years of college, and an election every four years. We call this four-year time frame a quantum leap.
Here’s why the concept of the quantum leap is so powerful: You will totally overestimate what you can accomplish in one year. It’s May. Remember all those beautiful ambitions and dreams you wrote down back in January? How many of those are happening? Probably none if we’re honest. You'll overestimate what you can accomplish in one year, but you will radically underestimate how much your life can transform in four years.
Look back on your own experience. Look back before you look ahead. Think back four years ago to 2016. Who were you? What were you doing? Were you single? How much has changed for you? It’s incredibly powerful to look back and see how much we have transformed. When you allow yourself to acknowledge your progress, you can give conscious thought to what you want to see happen in the next four years. That's when things can really change and transform.
What needs to happen over the next four years for you to feel happy and successful about your progress? Don’t just think it; ink it. You can write down your vision like a seven-year-old kid writing out a birthday list! There are no restrictions here to your imagination and your ambition. Give yourself permission to take the time to write down what you want.
Taking Action on Your Vision
Here's another awesome element to the X-Factor Question. If you start to look at your life in four-year quantum leaps, you're also going to let go of the pervasive disease of perfectionism. One of our mantras at CE is, “We focus on progress, not perfection.” Many people in American Higher Education are not focused on progress. They're focused on perfection. They're focused on status. They're focused on looking good, but going nowhere. They're focused on having degree upon degree; all this knowledge, but no action and execution.
Let’s be very specific here: If you think about your life in the next four years, between now and 2024 there will be 90-day cycles. There are four seasons in a year and there are four quarters in the business cycle. Over four years, if you take four times four, you get the number 16. Here's the beautiful thing: I don't want you to try to achieve 100% of your goals, and not even 70% of your goals. What I do want you to do is to take action. Every 90 days, all I want you to do is get better by 6.25%. That's it, 6.25%. If you get better every 90 days by 6.25%, guess what, in four years, you’ll hit 100%.
This could be any area in your life. Maybe it’s your health. Maybe it’s relationships. Maybe it's in your personal finances. Maybe you want to decrease your debt by 6.25%. If you decrease your debt by 6.25% every 90 days over four years, you're going to get 100% of it cleared. Part of the community coaching program is to prepare you to make quantum leaps in your life through the process of a four-year framework.
The Empowering Impact
After you answer this X Factor Question for yourself, ask it to your students. Ask it to your staff. This is how you help combat those negative energies. You’ll give your others clarity on their own vision and goals and how they can move towards them, even now in the midst of COVID. You will help break their isolation by providing relationships and community. You will be giving them a new capability with this tool, which will empower them. And by helping them put their vision to paper, you will be giving them accountability.
By having the X-Factor Question conversation, you are empowering yourself to not only think about your future, but to think about your own thinking. That's one of the fundamental distinctions about what we do here at Collegiate Empowerment. We don't talk about other people. We don't talk about things. We're not the Kardashians. We're the CE squad. And that means we're going to first give ourselves the space and the community to grow. What we're going to do is we're going to think about our own thinking. In doing so, we transform. The Academy is really good at having you think about other people's thinking. You can become an expert on what other people thought about Shakespeare. And, you know, Bill was a good guy, but I want to know about you. I want to challenge you as a Higher Education Professional to think not about other people's thinking, but your own thinking, your own dreams, your own desires, your own ambition.
Think about those two concerns we raised earlier: “Will I have a job in the future?” and “Am I doing enough right now to support my campus community?” Firstly, know that you are doing enough. You're taking yourself to a place where others have yet to go. By being a part of a community, you're starting to break free of isolation. You're getting more clarity and letting go of the confusion.
Secondly, you’re being empowered with a new capability and a new approach: The X Factor question. When we answer that question for ourselves, we can then empower the people in our circles to take action on their vision as well. And when we take this learning beyond ourselves, we can have a real impact on this world. Creating impact and creating value is one of the most important things we can do to be really useful to the world. To make certain we have lifetime employability here in the 21st century, we must provide one of these four things: leadership, relationship, creativity, or management. And it all starts by asking yourself and others The X-Factor Question:
What Needs To Happen In Your Life Over The Next Four Years In Order For
You To Feel Happy & Successful About Your Progress? What Is Your Vision?
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Anthony (Tony) J. D’Angelo, is founder & Chief Visionary Officer of Collegiate Empowerment, a educational production company dedicated to serving the US Higher Education Industry. Since 1995, Tony has served as a coach and strategic consultant to thousands of Higher Education Professionals and University Executives from over 2,500 US colleges. Learn more @ www.Collegiate-Empowerment.org or Follow: @TonyDAngelo on Twitter.
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