How to Become an Adult With Julie Lytcott-Haims
How do you know that you have officially reached the age of majority? When can you quit your job and when should you continue? Why the hell do you know what you want to do in your life?
This week we tackle all of these questions and more with the help of the always-wise Julie Lytcott-Haims, author of the New York Times bestselling How to Raise an Adult: Break Out of the Parenting Trap and Prepare Your Child for It. Success and your turn: how to become an adult .
As a former dean of Stanford University and a mother of two herself, Julie has a long history of advising young people on how to behave in adulthood. Hear Julie’s advice on how to understand who you are when you are young, how to choose your career path when you’re not even sure what you want to do in your life, and how to help the young people in your life make it difficult. transition into adulthood.
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Highlights from this week’s series
From an interview with Julie Lytcott-Haims
How to start a career, even if you don’t know what you want to do in life:
[A] dulting doesn’t have a clear plan, unlike childhood, which was from K to 12, and then for many of us college, which really felt like a ladder and every rung was laid out. Adult life does not have such a ladder. If so, it probably seems tedious and often seems like a ladder that you don’t want to walk down, but you get it in hindsight. So what we want to try to convey is this: listen, this is a wide open landscape of opportunity, and it’s all about trying to understand yourself. So dig deeper and ask yourself, what would I really like to do? What interests me? What environment do I thrive in? What topics keep me awake at night? Are you curious about yourself and how you want to appear in the world? Yes. Dig deep and start anywhere too … Why? Because any job you do gives you data about you in the workplace, in that particular industry or type of job. And you are going to collect this data and it will allow you to dive deeper into what you want. So, it’s an iterative process back and forth: work, find out about yourself, find out more about yourself, choose another job. And this is how we find ourselves between the ages of 20 and 30, maybe even up to 40 years old, finally, we are in place, well, that’s why, this is what I want to do in my life. And that takes a lot of trial and error. And this is completely normal.
How to know when to leave and when to stop at a job you don’t like:
So if you are harmed, persecuted, if you are really scared, sincere in your workplace, quit your job. If you find that you have dropped out of your last three jobs for this reason, take therapy and find out why you feel so insulted and intimidated in the workplace. Okay, this is constant self-awareness. Generally speaking, you shouldn’t change more often than every 18 months because your resume looks like you can’t hold onto your job. So you really want to try and stick with that, that’s my point. With a word of caution, if the environment is truly toxic, horrible, and so on, you must leave.
How to best help the young people in your life make the transition to adulthood:
How to help – do not do for them. Stand aside with a smile and say, “I love you.” I know it’s difficult, but you do hard things, smile, leave … We have to show: “I know it’s difficult, but I love you and I think you can.” This “I think you can” is missing from modern parenting, because when we intervene and deal with it, we basically say to our child, “I think you can’t.” So I’ll do it. ” So, as parents, and trust me, I have a 22 year old and a 19 year old boyfriend and I am constantly trying to turn my over-parenting into a healthy parenting. And it’s excruciating because we know we can do it. We know that we can talk to this difficult person to whom we tried to return this thing in the store, and we have to go talk to this person. “Oh, I’ll take care of this for my child.” No no no. Your child should have this experience because life will become more difficult, not less. So this is: smile, love, show confidence, and walk away.
For more advice from Julie on how to grow up in hell, we recommend listening to the entire episode. It costs 30 minutes.