Scott Schimmel (00:05.31)
Everybody gets asked this question. Uh, and there's different parts of life, different moments in time when you are asked this question, but the question is this, what do you want? What do you want to do with your life? What do you, what do you want next? And, and I'm not talking about, uh, people who are living in a situation that's about survival or trauma. That's, uh, understand that I understand that what I'm talking about is the people who have choice, have freedom, have some version of choice.
with the path that their lives go down. And the question is, what do you want? And that's a more difficult, more complicated question than what options are there? Or what am I supposed to do? That's a different issue than where are the jobs or how do I make money? Those are actually simpler problems, simpler questions. But the question that we ask young people,
is what do you want? And that's where the problems are. How do you figure out what you want? Now for the past 20 years I've been nerdy now. Like some people get really nerdy on Star Wars, I kind of do. Some people get really nerdy into their Swift songs, my daughter does. I get nerdy in research. Research about human transformation and growth and I've found this recently.
this guy named Dr. Kenan Shelton at a University of Missouri. Doesn't know me, but I know him. I know how he thinks, because I've been reading all of his academic research papers, lots of them. I got this all marked up. This one's called Becoming One Self, the Central Role of Self-Concordant Goal Selection. Man, that's sweet pillow talk right there. What he's talking about in his research, and we're gonna get into this in future weeks, because I'm just thrilled about it. And I think it's the content that I'm...
uh, reading and learning from him is helping me connect dots that I've been trying to, I've been working on for, again, two decades. How do you help young people figure out who they are and how to design meaningful lives? I mean, I, I wrote a book about it. There it is. Shout out critical foundations available on Amazon. Uh, Dr. Sheldon's theory is based on this, uh, bigger concept of the self-determination theory, which says.
Scott Schimmel (02:31.09)
Human beings will not be happy or have a sense of fulfillment until they have a good, healthy measure of three things. Autonomy, freedom, being able to choose what I want and getting what I want. The second thing would be competence, being good at what I'm trying to do. And third would be relatedness, connecting to people that I'd like to connect to. The terms I use are identity, purpose, and belonging. We mean the exact same things.
And if those are the three pillars of a happy, fulfilling, meaningful life, the question that we're going to zero in on, like really zoom in on is how do you figure out what you want? Again, not what are you capable of or what should you do or where are the jobs or what will make money, what makes the most sense, but what do I want? And it gets complicated because what you want is a different answer than what are you good at oftentimes. So it's a different answer than where are the jobs?
What do you want is not really a question that we've been asking young people. We haven't been developing that as a muscle as a as a capacity for them. And they need to it's why I believe there's so many people who are in their 20s 30s 50s 80s, who lead lives of quiet desperation to use the quote, they're leading someone else's life. They're listening to other people's goals for them or expectations for them. They're living lives that they think they're supposed to not that they're
truly called for. How do you then figure it out? That's what I'm devoting my life to. And that's what I'm going to be sharing with you in future weeks. Here's the quick, quick episode. Let me ask you, how have you figured out what you want? How do you even describe what you want? What are the handles, the hooks, the framework? What's the process? What were the insight moments? What led you there?
And if you're not there yet, where you know what you want in this season of life or the next five years, 10 years, what are the signposts? What are the clues that you're paying attention to that will help you get there? And then what we'll do in the next few weeks is talk to you piece by piece. How do you look into the layers through different lenses to help a young person come up with a real answer to that question? What do you want? So.
Scott Schimmel (04:58.526)
Welcome to YouSchool Podcast is what we're getting into. You can follow along on YouTube. Uh, you can subscribe there. You can subscribe wherever you get your audio podcast. We've got blog articles coming out each week. Got downloads you can get for free in the website, tons of courses on the website for young people and for parents and for teachers. But here's the central question. What do you want? What do you want to do with your life? And how do you know that? See you next week.
