The Challenge Mindset helps students find what sparks their interest using a different method to think through how to consider college and career path options that is different from our traditional approach. When I heard JP speak about this at a recent conference, I had to ask him to come talk to us about it! Don’t miss this insightful conversation about JP’s own journey in I/O Psychology, and how he has invested years in helping others to discover their strengths, become better leaders, and help students not only find their path, but be excited by the challenges ahead.
You can find JP’s TedEx talk here: https://www.ted.com/talks/jp_michel_the_challenge_mindset_helping_youth_find_purpose_and_impact
The book JP refers to in our conversation is Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein
For more information about The Challenge Cards, go to https://mysparkpath.com/.
The Challenge Mindset helps students find what sparks their interest using a different method to think through how to consider college and career path options that is different from our traditional approach. When I heard JP speak about this at a recent conference, I had to ask him to come talk to us about it! Don’t miss this insightful conversation about JP’s own journey in I/O Psychology, and how he has invested years in helping others to discover their strengths, become better leaders, and help students not only find their path, but be excited by the challenges ahead.
You can find JP’s TedEx talk here: https://www.ted.com/talks/jp_michel_the_challenge_mindset_helping_youth_find_purpose_and_impact
The book JP refers to in our conversation is Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein
For more information about The Challenge Cards, go to https://mysparkpath.com/.
Thank you for joining us today on Paths in Progress. I'm your host, Carrie Young. On this podcast, people in a variety of career fields, talk about their journey from choosing their college, deciding which majors and minors to pursue, their first jobs out of college, and all of the hurdles, detours and victories along their path through today. Our goal is to help students hear about a variety of exciting opportunities out there and understand what day-to-day life is like in these careers. I hope you enjoy and learn from our story today. Thanks for listening. Hi everyone. Thanks for joining us today. We are here today with JP Michel, who is the founder of Spark Path. He has his undergraduate degree in psychology and his master's degree in organizational psychology. JP, thanks so much for joining us today.
JP:It's my pleasure, Carrie. Thanks for inviting me.
Carrie:I am very happy to have you here. I will tell the listeners that I met you recently at a conference that we both attended, and I was just blown away by your presentation and your Challenge Mindset. So I can't wait to dig into that. But first, I want you to start with your story. If we could start there. So can you take us back to your high school years? A little bit about how you approached your college search and what you were thinking about regarding your own path.
JP:Great. I'm happy to, I don't know how well I did, but when I picked up a brochure for the local university, I flipped through all the different pages of the program and psychology spoke to me. And at the time, my life revolved around basketball. So the connection to me between basketball and psychology was sports psychology. You know what I mean, carrie? It this is about, yeah. Yeah. Giving athletes mental skills, so they could perform better. So to me, that got me excited about going to school. There was some purpose to it, yet I was really challenged by the fact that I wasn't sure if I should study psychology or something else called human kinetics, in order for me to get to sports psychology. So I feel like I entered university with a lot of indecision about which route to take.
Carrie:Yeah. Which I think is very normal, right?
JP:Yeah. So my experience with that indecision is that I went into the academic office, and I shared my plight with, you know, this very kind academic advisor, and, she listened to my question and immediately sign me out out of all my psychology classes and sign me into all human kinetic classes. and uh
Carrie:Really?
JP:I I was appalled because I wasn't asking for that. I was asking what should I do? So I feel like that was my first experience with the limits of advising and career exploration. That's when I knew officially that things needed to change. But it's not till much later in my career that I had an opportunity to impact that change.
Carrie:Wow. So she signed you out of all your psychology classes, but as we just mentioned, your degree is in psychology. So can you tell us what happened moving?
JP:Yeah, I said please, no, no, no. Get me back in. I stayed in psychology and, I did get to take different human kinetic classes while I was in psychology, but I, I serendipitously discovered a completely new and different psychology: industrial organizational psychology. This, yeah. Carrie is, as you might know, the psychology about the workplace. How does work, work? And I like this because I was doing all sorts of student politics works on campus, working in different student organizations, and I was fascinated by why is it that some teams perform really well and some perform really poorly? Industrial organizational psychology or IO psychology for short, it studied this. I met a professional that I played basketball with, that was an industrial organizational psychology consultant. He was a PhD. And he got to tell me all about the field and it sounded really exciting. So I changed my mind. I let go of the sports psychology idea and I focused on IO psychology, instead.
Carrie:That's so interesting, and I think that's an important note to make too, is when you're going into a field, even if you feel fairly certain about the major you're going into or the field that you're interested in, you still wanna be open, right? To all of the different opportunities within that. Or even just anything that you hear about or a person you meet or something that you're introduced to that changes your interest a bit. Like be open to that and listen to that. Right?
JP:Exactly. I had a positive undergraduate experience, which not everyone can share. But I just wanna double down on something you just said. Actually, I'm gonna ask you to tell me again. Okay. You noticed something in what I said that was important. What would you call it? is it paying attention to serendipity? Is it being open to change? How would you put it in your words?
Carrie:Well, I think it's both, right? I think a lot of things happen that we need to be open to, to changing are serendipitous, right? Mm-hmm. Sometimes it is somebody proactively going out there and looking at other options, but sometimes something just lands on our path, whether that's a person or a lecture that we hear, a book that we read, a job posting that we see for an internship, a class that we take. You know, there's all of these different things that can just even mention something that we haven't heard about before, or give us a little introduction to something that we haven't heard about before. And if you're too laser focused on a particular path that you're not open to hearing that or even considering it. I think a lot of people miss out on things, just because they're not receiving that.
JP:Yeah. I, I really like what you just said and to double down on it, this is not you saying that people who are listening should be open to what ifs or other possibilities. What if serendipity and being open to discovering was 80% of your career strategy? I'm not saying that's the right ratio for everyone, right? But I'm just inviting folks to consider that if you are going to work for 40, 50, or 60 years, which is a possibility for many people, What are the chances you can predict what those 50 or 60 years will look like? They're very low. In that kind of career, being open to new possibilities, chance meetings can actually become embedded in your strategy and an important part of your strategy, and you can prepare yourself for luck. There are career theories that also believe in this approach, the chaos theory of careers, planned happenstance theory of careers, which I try to underscore this importance of being open to new possibilities. These are very different than some other prevailing career theories that are about the opposite, about being focused, about linear, about having a narrow goal, about matching yourself to one job title, for example. So it's important for people to know that there are different ways to approach your career.
Carrie:Absolutely. So did you decide to go straight into graduate school from your undergraduate degree or did you have some things happen in between?
JP:Two things happened in between. Number one, I wanted to be president of the student Federation at my university. I ran a campaign for six weeks. I had 20 volunteers. There were 27,000 undergraduates that I would represent and there was an election, a vote I lost by six votes. So Carrie, had no plans for the next year and I was crushed on top of that.
Carrie:Six votes. Yeah, it was hard for, and that just shows you again, every vote counts. Everybody. Every vote counts. Six votes.
JP:One of my best friends from my gosh from school told me, oh, I'm sorry, I forgot to vote the next day.
Carrie:Oh no.
JP:And I said, I wish you hadn't told me. Oh. So there's a few things that happened. Good things happened out of that. First of all, the young woman who beat me, she was really great at building a platform. Like the issues she spoke to were so much better than mine. You know what? She understood, like she understood what the students needed. She had figured out, what are the problems we need to solve on this campus? I wasn't as good as her, you know, I was more focused on the title being president. What does it mean to be president, not even in a shallow way, with the prestige. I just mean like the competencies required to be successful in how they fit with me. You know how I fit with the role, right? Well, it turns out that how you contribute is more important than how you fit. It turns out that the problem to solve is more important than the job title. This is when I got my first taste of the challenge mindset, the benefits of being focused on a challenge. We'll come back to that, Carrie. But to go back to my story, I had no plans, didn't apply to grad school. That was gonna be a full-time job. I needed something else to do. So what did I do? I went to Cameroon in Africa for six months in a remote village with no running water and no electricity.
Carrie:So that's a drastic jump. That's not what I was expecting you to say. You'll have to tell us how that happened.
JP:It was different. I did an internship with the International Relations Department of our government here in Canada. It was an education project working with primary schools. And what I was doing was I was a facilitator building development plans for the schools. And my role was to get all the different actors in the community, the religious leaders, the teachers, the principals, the politicians involved in building this plan. And then someone else came in after me and helped execute the plan. And I wanted to do something very different. It was a really positive, like growth experience. Very challenging in terms of adaptability, as you can imagine. But it was great. And then when I came back, I got a job working as an administrative assistant in the office for that fellow who I mentioned earlier who was working in industrial organizational psychology. It was a part-time job where I got exposure to the world I was interested in, which grew to a full-time job, which grew, doing research for them, which grew to a longer contract, which was being a junior consultant for them, and eventually spent two and a half years with this small IO psychology company before I went to do my master's in organizational psychology.
Carrie:Well, can we jump back just briefly to your time out of the country, because I feel like that's a huge thing that we just kind of glazed over a little bit there. Mm-hmm. can you talk about just how that impacted you as a person and how that impacted your life? On this podcast, we've talked to a lot of people about their experiences abroad, whether it's like a formal study abroad program or it's an internship abroad, or perhaps it's a job abroad. Obviously an experience like that changes people in a lot of different ways. So can you just talk a little bit about how that impacted you and perhaps how it maybe made you look at things a little bit differently moving forward?
JP:Yeah. M y first instinct goes to how I personally changed and I, I can also add how I professionally changed, but I worked alongside several Peace Corps volunteers, so that would maybe be an equivalent program. I think Peace Corps is a little bit longer than what I did. Peace Corps for probably two years. But what happens personally is your threshold for change increases your confidence in your capability to adapt increases. And if I had to choose one skill, you know, to prepare for your career in the future of work, I would pick adaptability. So this was a very useful skill for me to work on very practically to become more adaptable to my environment. You certainly feel like you are in a different universe than your own. The people in my community, they have different values than I did, and it was very eye-opening to see how people put relationships before goals and other priorities. So that helped me grow as a person. The other part as a person, Carrie, is I feel like I'll never be poor again in my life no matter what happens. You know? That's because we have so much opportunity here in the West that some other folks might not have. And, in terms of material possessions, you know, my outlook on wealth, is completely changed because of that. And I'm lucky I still keep in touch with a friend in the village through, WhatsApp. So, I feel like I haven't lost that part of myself. And maybe I'll finish with professionally. You do get some professional skills, that come out of an experience like that, that you can leverage in your career. Sometimes we think, oh, it's a different environment. It might not apply. But of course, as you know, Carrie, transferable skills are what you develop and what you use in one context can be useful in another.
Carrie:Absolutely. So, jumping back to where you left off there with the position that you had with the IO psych organization and deciding to go get your master's degree. Can you talk about what went into that decision, first of all to get your master's degree and then also to do it at that point in your life?
JP:Yep. I thought I wanted to do an MBA. and I prepared. I took the GMATs twice and what I realized at that stage was what I wanted, and that's the most complicated part. What do you want? An MBA would've helped to broaden my skillset and a master's in organizational psychology would've narrowed it and focused in, and that's what I needed at that stage. You know, I read a great book called, Range. For me it wasn't about generalizing, was us specializing. What's uniquely insightful about David's book is that in a world where we have overspecialized, we've overvalued specializing as young and early as possible. I mean, if, if you're 17 and you're listening to this podcast and you haven't figured out the exact job you want for the rest of your life, it might feel like you're way behind. That's wrong. You know, we've over, yes, we've over emphasized the value of specialization and there's a lot of value in breadth. But you don't need to choose if you're a generalist or a specialist for life. I think those labels take away from what's really needed. Instead, you'll need to make 100, 1,000 generalist versus specialist decisions. For me, in 2010, it was about specializing. So once I knew I wanted to go to An organizational psychology program. I got to pick and research everything that was out there, and I wanted to live a very international experience. So I studied at Manchester Business School at the University of Manchester in the UK, and a lot of my colleagues in class were from China and India. My roommates were from. Hong Kong, Iran. And I got that really international experience. My IO program was offered to the business school instead of a social science school, which I really enjoyed. Oh. So, yeah, it was a one year program instead of a two year program. I got a full-time job in IO psychology while I was studying. So as soon as I finished, I was able to start working in the field.
Carrie:We had a kind of brief comments about IO psychology earlier, but for people who are like, this sounds really interesting, but I'm not really sure what we're talking about here. can you talk a little bit about kind of the types of courses that you took in that degree and the types of roles that you've seen that people pursue coming out of a program like that or the types of challenges that people get to deal with, when they have that kind of background and that experience. What are kind of the overall objectives for people who study IO psychology and work in that field?
JP:I like to describe it as a psychology of work. So figuring out how workplaces function and how we can improve them, that could be about helping teams reach their full potential. It could be about improving hiring practices. There are so many ways to optimize the workplace, and if you wanna research more opportunities, there's a SIOP: the Society for Industrial Organizational Psychology is a great resource for that. The part that interested me the most, Carrie, was training, assessment and coaching. And I got to work for a company that did that called D D I Development Dimensions International. Those were the pieces that they specialized in. So I had experience working as a consultant. What that means was I didn't do training for D D I, I did it for DDI i's clients. So I got to work with all sorts of different clients from different industries to help them with their training, coaching and assessment of leaders. Anyone who's studied psychology or organizational behavior, You might be interested in this world of IO psychology is growing quickly. It pays fairly well, and you can add a lot of value to people's working lives.
Carrie:Do you have a favorite project or a favorite organization that you worked with because of the impact that you saw you were able to make or the types of people that you worked with? Do you have an example for us to give students an idea of what you would do when you would meet with somebody in these organizations or meet with a team?
JP:I do. I worked with a paint store. National Paint Store with a huge footprint print, and they were the best students I've ever had. Consistently. I got to meet so many of them, and if you put yourself in their shoes, these are folks that were so good working in the paint store that they were promoted to being leader of the paint store, managing the budget, hiring folks, really fun positions. They were usually young-ish. What our company did to help them is we helped them realize what are their strengths and weaknesses as leaders. We put them through a leadership simulation where they had to answer fake emails, solve fake problems, and, at the end of it, we created a report with what they did well and what they could do differently. Carrie, when they saw their results, it hurt their feelings. Oh no. Some folks had never gotten that type of feedback before to say, you know, with things that they struggle with. But, For most of them it was a gift. And what's important in a situation like that is to have a growth mindset. Your first score is not important, your second score is important. That's what I would explain to them. Yeah. What's your second score? Your second score is how much you improve your first score. Because this sets off a cycle of improvement that you can continue throughout your lives. And I would do a two day in-person training where we debrief their results and I would train them on leadership 1 0 1, communication skills, coaching skills, so that they could level up all the things that, you know, they could do better to improve and better run their stores. And this paint company had the most attentive, ambitious leaders, so they really made the most outta the course. And then I get to stay in touch with a lot of folks who still are connected with me on LinkedIn and see their progress and as they keep growing as leaders in their companies.
Carrie:So what was the progression from working in that position to starting Spark Path and naming The Challenge Mindset? I'm making assumptions here, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but you know, watching your TED talk and hearing you speak about the challenge mindset, I'm assuming that this was percolating for a long time and perhaps you had terminology for it, or maybe you didn't or it took time to name this, in the way that you wanted to and present it in the way that you wanted to. So how did that process develop over time?
JP:When I started working in IO psychology, I met career coaches who were entrepreneurs. I thought I can be an entrepreneur, too. And I started doing career coaching one-on-one, helping students figure out what they wanted to study. And I did this part-time throughout my career, and eventually I liked it so much, I quit my job to do it full-time. I ran into a problem though. All of the students I was working with were obsessed with job title. They thought they needed to pick one thing for the rest of their lives. Yeah. And I thought this was inaccurate based on all the work I was doing with leaders who were all changing jobs, they were all working on a new problem to solve continuously over the course of their careers. So I built a tool called the Challenge Cards to help students think about problems they wanna solve instead of job titles they want to fit into. So I named the company Spark Path because the idea is that we wanted to generate a spark, a powerful, memorable experience for them to transform the way they look at themselves. And the impact they want to have on the world, and that will lead them to a new path. So that's where the spark and the path come from. And that journey from career coaching to, you know, product developer brought me to develop software that helped schools and nonprofits and universities use the challenge cards in a digital format with their students. And that's what I'm focused on now, doing everything I can to empower schools for them to make this idea come to life and better prepare their students for the future of work.
Carrie:Yeah, absolutely. So when we're talking about the challenge cards, there's a whole stack of them for people that know, but can you give them a few examples of what you're talking about when you have cards that have a challenge on them? Like, what types of challenges are we talking about?
JP:So, imagine you have a deck of cards in your hands right now, Carrie. There's 50 cards. They're big, they're colorful, they have an image on the front, and maybe a short phrase. like end extreme poverty, increase sustainable energy. On another card, you might have improve mental health or you might have reverse engineer the brain. And what students do is they shuffle through the cards and they pick what they don't like, what they like and what they really like, and eventually they get clarity on the impact they want to have on the world. From there, they think about, well, why do I want to have that? What made me choose that card? And then that's meaningful to them. They talk about their motivation, their strengths, their interests, their way of looking at the world, their opinions, their belief, all the raw material that they need to craft their career story. This is particularly useful for people who feel lost. Some people who feel lost might have lost touch of the fact that the world needs them. Some people even feel like the world doesn't need them. What the challenge cards do is they help people remember there's so many problems, challenges, and opportunities to work on, and the world needs you to help.
Carrie:Absolutely. So can you talk a little bit about Spark Path, because there's a lot of people out there who are coaching in a lot of different ways, right? You've mentioned that you've worked with individuals and you've also worked with colleges and universities. So how do these relationships start and what exactly do those different types of clients look like as you're working with them?
JP:Well, I used to do one-on-one, and I mean, I have all this leadership development experience working with leaders. But when I started Spark Path, it was about helping students. So that's how I focused my energy and my efforts. And now I don't do any of the one-on-one work directly. I support others who do. And a lot of that looks like individual career coaches, schools, nonprofits, a lot of higher ed, for example, some K-12 as well. And what they're doing is they're doing workshops. They're doing their one-on-one work. They're doing events where they use the challenge cards to give students a powerful career exploration experience.
Carrie:I know when I heard you speak, you had some examples of students who walked through this process and walked away with some information or some ideas that they didn't have at the beginning of the conversation. So can you give us an example of somebody who you've worked with, that you know changed the way they approached their path after going through this mindset coaching?
JP:Sure. One of the first students that I worked with, her name is Anna, and she was stuck with a job title mindset. I met her when she was in high school, and people were asking her, what do you want to be when you grow up? And it felt like she needed to pick one thing forever. Which is too bad because she only knew about 20, or 30 job titles. So my job as her career coach or career catalyst was to help her think about problems to solve in the world. What she wanted to do is she wanted to clean polluted waterways with a specialized algae that was being developed to do specifically that. So to her, that was a really cool problem to solve. So, after she picked that challenge and we worked backwards. We looked at which companies are working on the challenge, who works there, what do they need to learn to be able to do that? And then she discovered material science and engineering, and that's what she decided to do for her undergrad because it spoke to her. She knew practically some applications she could use it for and long term, she had a new way of looking at the world. Like she doesn't have to necessarily develop that algae for her entire career. She can find other problems to work on, so that's why it was useful to her. It helped her make a better short-term decision on what to study, but it also gave her a new way of thinking about her career moving forward. So if you put yourself in the shoes of Anna, when we reversed engineered and looked at who's developing the algi, we had to find who that company was. So we looked them up online. We found their website. On LinkedIn, we saw who worked there, and that's when we discovered material science and engineering. I had never heard about. Anna had never heard about that. Yeah, but this is the world that we live in. There are over 20,000 job titles available. We can't pretend, Carrie, like you and I will know or memorize all the available options. They're changing every day. When Anna did more research, she discovered that this would be a great fit for her and what she was looking to do. In fact, she's still in that world. She's now studying for her PhD at Stanford in material science and engineering. and, oh wow. Not everybody needs to do a, a PhD at Stanford to be successful in their careers, but it gives you a sense of discovering and creating a path that's unique to you. It's not enough to just, you know, pick one job title, lawyer, doctor, engineer, and stick to it. You really want to find something that speaks to you and that allows you to have the impact you want to have on the world. And for Anna, she has that power. She has that feeling, that she'll carry with her throughout her life.
Carrie:Absolutely. And what a great way to illustrate how it is not servicing a lot of people to pick that college major first. Because with Anna, she knew this problem she wanted to solve or this effort she wanted to participate in. But it tracked back to a degree she hadn't heard of before. And if she hadn't have used the challenge mindset and worked backwards like you described, she may never have discovered that and known that that was a really helpful path. I don't wanna say it's the only path, right? Cuz there's a lot of paths to different things that we wanna do. But by working backwards like that you can discover things you didn't know existed that help you at that start point that A lot of times if you're showing up at a university, particularly if they don't have that degree, it's really difficult to find your way.
JP:Yeah. You had a great description. When you flip the model and you start with challenges first you're gonna discover new possibilities you hadn't considered before. And that's a big part of the career exploration process. Because when you start in, you know, when I first thought about sports psychology, when I first thought about Iowa psychology, I have a very naive basic understanding of, you know, what the opportunities are. So before choosing and committing to, you know, one job, I want to get some breadth, I want to see what's possible, what's out there, and flipping the model helps you do that.
Carrie:Absolutely. So can I ask you, now that you're focused exclusively on helping students, in a variety of ways, where was your spark where you discovered that that was what you wanted to do?
JP:I've had several. One spark that speaks to me is training people. The feeling I get when I'm in front of the room, all eyes on me. It very possible that I fail or screw up. I like that thrill, which is very weird, you know? It's very strange, right? But it's probably one of my greater skills. There was one person at DDI that, you know, pointed that out to me. Like, do you understand the level of weird it takes to want to put yourself in front of a group? And at the time I was always younger, you know, 10, 20 years younger than the leaders I was training. And I, I like that, that type of tension. And what I learned later in my career is normal is hard, weird is useful. And this was really counterintuitive. Mm-hmm. And can I share a story, Carrie, that brings that to light?
Carrie:Yeah, please do. I love this. Please do.
JP:I was randomly in Costa Rica, at one point and I met someone at a youth hostel and I asked her what she did and she said, I have no idea what I want to do. And she asked me what I did, and I said, I help people who have no idea what they want to do, figure it out. And she said, great. Perfect. I need perfect match. So we walked and talked, and I started by asking her about her favorite movie. And this is a career coaching technique by Mark Savickas, who built a career construction interview with a lot of evidence behind it. So it sounds trivial to ask about your favorite movie, but it's a great technique. So she told me about the Titanic. Carrie and she had seen it 20 or 30 times. So I asked her why, like, what about the movie? Like, tell me about it. And the more I listened, the more I heard about the fact that she associated with Jack, the main character, not Rose. And if you remember in the Titanic, you know, Jack wins a hand at poker that gives him a spot at the last minute on the Titanic. He wasn't even supposed to be there. Yeah. On the ship, he goes to the area of the ship that's for first class, not third class. He's not supposed to be there, you know, and then Rose at one point goes down to, you know, the bottom of the ship. She's not supposed to be there. One of the most memorable scenes, Jack is at a table of very rich folks, and he's clearly out of place. He doesn't belong. And this is a big theme in Titanic and was a huge theme for this person I was talking to. It turns out she loves being in places where she doesn't belong. Carrie, does that sound weird?
Carrie:Huh. Well, it's just so interesting how you got that out of her favorite movie. I mean, I get it, but.
JP:Just by listening.
Carrie:Wow.
JP:And playing back what she said.
Carrie:Yeah.
JP:That's what can happen when people tell you about their favorite movies. This is what Mark Savickas discovered. So now this sounded weird to her and she had some shame. Like, I sound really weird. I wanna be in places where I don't belong. And I told her about how weird is useful. So we played out a scenario. She was really interested in fashion and art. Okay? So I'm like, listen, you design an incredible dress. You pitch it at a top brand in Manhattan. Imagine yourself, you're taking an elevator in a skyscraper. You're going into a boardroom. There's 10 people there. They're looking at you, they're judging you. You are somewhere you don't belong. yet, that's where you thrive Okay. This was a person that had just came from the Netherlands, learning English in Costa Rica, learning Spanish at the same time. She told me she had a boyfriend at the time who's like this dangerous character driving their motorcycle super fast. And now next she was going to the United States to be a nanny in a small town. And she loved being in places where she didn't belong. So, why don't you use that as a useful theme or pattern in your career instead of something that holds you back? So for her, it turns out that this was gonna be an asset for her career. Now she was gonna start looking for places where she doesn't belong and she could thrive. And there were companies that were desperate and hungry for people that thrive in places where they don't belong. So that's an example of her weird. I gave you an example of my weird, but I'd like to invite everyone who's listening to this to find their weird. where are the places that you thrive or other people don't? What are the skills that you have? What are your strange interests? Because this unique information gives you a unique contribution that you can make that others can't make. So what we said earlier in this call is that the labor market's not driven by job titles, the labor market's driven by problems to solve. So figure out a problem you wanna solve. Next, find your weird, so you can have a unique contribution to solving that problem. This is a very practical, useful career formula that a lot of folks who maybe lost or unsure of where they want to go next that they can use to get some clarity. I know I took this a very different direction than your question. I'd love it if you bring me back to your original.
Carrie:No, I love it. Question. Well, I was asking about your spark and how you moved along your path to know that students were the population that you wanted to serve with the work that you did.
JP:Gotcha. I gave you one for training. Mm-hmm. the big one for students versus leaders. Is that what I was coaching, it was always in a very strict context, like those leaders, for them to reach their potential, they have to help the company reach their goals, what are their financial goals, et cetera, et cetera. Right? And that was exciting. But there's something unique about a person, like a student shaping who they are, creating an aspirational identity. The sky's the limit. Anything is possible. There's just so many possibilities, and I find that particularly exciting. That's true that maybe for some mid-career changers, they'll have a blue sky approach too when it comes to their careers, but maybe not. Maybe they're limited by their experiences. So I find working with students is particularly exciting for that.
Carrie:Yeah. When along the line did you discover that you needed to flip the model for how a lot of institutions approach this kind of guidance? Because you said yourself at the very beginning of this call, you picked up a brochure, right? And you were looking through the majors. Because that's what we do, right? That's what a lot of students do. They're looking at the website. What do these schools have? What am I connecting with? Things that I'm familiar with that sound interesting to me. So where along the line did you step back and say, we've gotta change how we're approaching this?
JP:So there are a few ways where I discovered this, and they're all tied back to some failure that I've had. And, you know, there's growth through failure. There's learning through failure. The first one is losing that election. how come? Mm, that other person was better set up to succeed in this environment while they were focused on the challenge, while I was focused on the title. When I started consulting, I quickly saw that these leaders were not locked into one job title forever. The best leaders that thrived in their change in their promotion, they all looked at what's the new problem to solve. A lot of the leaders that I worked with were engineers. They were the best engineer on the team. So if you put yourself in their shoes, the best engineer comes up with the best technical solution. that's it. When you're the leader of a team of engineers, if you come up with the best technical solution, you are a bad leader. You're supposed to empower your team to come up with their own solutions. Now, I can say that with confidence because I saw so many leaders fail in that circumstance. They were still coming up with the best technical solution. They did not adapt, they did not adjust. They didn't see the bigger picture, the new problem to solve. And I had a unique window to do this through leadership simulations. So I mentioned this earlier, but I'll break down how it works, Carrie. You've got a company that's thinking about investing a certain amount of money into a group of leaders. They wanna find out which one should we invest in. They put them through a one hour, four hour, or eight hour simulation where they play the role of that higher level leader in the company. They have a business plan to make. They have to read emails, they have to solve problems, they have meetings with actors. The actors are their peers. They're their clients. They're their subordinates, they're their leaders. And this generates a lot of data. You know, this can be done virtually, this can be done in person. And I played all of the different roles. Carrie, I was the actor. I was the scorer of these interactions. I was the report writer at one point, and then eventually I was the coach. The coach is the person that comes in at the end to say, Hey, nice job with the, with the assessment day. Here's what you did well, here's what you could do differently. And now let's think about developing development plan for how you can improve. And through all these interactions and all these moments, I saw what worked and what didn't work. I saw the leaders that thrive and didn't thrive, and that's the number one component that I pulled out as the ones who thrive, they adapted to the new problem to solve. And once I realized that, I saw this is the opposite of the message we're sending kids in school. In school, yeah. We give them a job title matching test. Almost everyone on this call has taken it. Put in some of your interests and it matches you with a job title. This supposes that you'll do one job for the rest of your life. And it's really the opposite of the advice that we need. And that's when I figured I, I really need to propose something different. I need to open students minds to a different way of looking at things, to looking at the challenge to solve instead. So I built the challenge cards for the students I was working with at a time, and then I decided to present about them at a conference. The attendees at the conference told me they wanted the challenge cards as well, so I made more copies, gave it to them. I put it on a website to sell it, and then my life changed. It turns out that equipping career coaches and advisors with these challenge cards was even more important to me than doing the actual career coaching. Since I launched them in 2017, there are now 30,000 decks of challenge cards in use a little bit all over the world. We built a digital version, which 50,000 students have used so far, and we're growing all the time with more and more schools subscribing to our subscription. And more career coaches using it in their practice.
Carrie:I love that. You know, honestly, part of what blew me away with your presentation on the Challenge Mindset and talking about the challenge cards and how to go about having these conversations with students is that. You know, a lot of times when you hear people's presentations about their idea, it's really complicated, or there's a whole book that goes with it, or, you know, and yours it's so simple and it's common sense, and yet, it's not what we're doing in higher education. So I think it just blew me away that, you know, it doesn't have to be a big, complicated thousand point presentation to change what we're doing and to have a huge impact with how we can approach something and how students can find what they love to do and find it in a more effective way.
JP:Yeah. I like your description. I think this word simple is very important and the experience for students of choosing challenges needs to be simple. We're talking about a big transformation. We're talking about flipping the model. But it's done in a way that's so intuitive, engaging Yes and fast that you do not explain it to a student. You help them live it. So you do not explain the theory of the challenge mindset or challenge cards necessarily. You just give a bunch of challenges to someone and you ask them to tell you what they like and don't like. And through that experience, they'll understand 50% or 80% of these messages about the theory just by having lived it themselves..
Carrie:Yeah. And this may seem obvious, but maybe it's not. Can you just talk briefly about the big problem if people kind of stick with the old way of doing things and don't consider the challenge mindset. What in your view is problematic about that, ultimately?
JP:What's most exciting for me about all the partners I've met from colleges and universities is that they care about equity. they finally are thinking that, you know what, maybe we should focus our efforts on marginalized students. Some of the schools that are subscribed to the digital challenge cards, they have a job title like the Person and Career Services. Their title is Diversity, equity, and Inclusion. You know, for example. Now, why are they using the challenge cards? Well, they are working with some groups that come from marginalized. Maybe some folks that come from generational trauma, maybe from broken homes, any type of oppression. These students in the past, we've asked them, tell me what you like based on what you already know. This is a red flag. Yeah, this is a red flag, Carrie, because we have to acknowledge that these students have an exposure gap. They may not been Yes, may not have been exposed to career opportunities. So if you start with an interest inventory that says, do you like to sell stocks and bonds? And you've never heard of a stock or a bond, you're not gonna say yes. You're not gonna say you're interested. So now what we've done is we've doubled down on your past. Instead of expanding your future, what we've done is we're reinforcing the status quo instead of focusing on creating new opportunities. The whole point of education is making sure that where you come from does not determine where you go. But if we misuse the interest inventory, we're doing the exact opposite. And this is an issue, issue of equity, and I think that educators who care about. Will care about broadening students' horizons instead of limiting them. It's about creating exposure to new opportunities, not doubling down on a very narrow list of job titles.
Carrie:Yeah, absolutely. So I did wanna ask you about being an entrepreneur. You had mentioned that, you know, for quite a while you liked the idea of being an entrepreneur and you were kind of dabbling in it on the side. For students who have the similar interests, I think that's just kind of in some people, right? There's some people that just know, they wanna do their own thing and they have an entrepreneurial spirit and perhaps they're searching for how to use it, or they're not quite sure what that's gonna look like yet. Is there like a big lesson or two that you learned along the way that you would wanna share with students who have that same itch to be an entrepreneur?
JP:There's so many ways to be an entrepreneur. One of the helpful things today is that you can really start on the side while you have a full-time job. That's the recipe I took. That's why it took me so long. There are benefits and disadvantages to that for some other folks, they'll want to quit their full-time jobs and just dive in right away. I think there's pros and cons to each approach. Carrie, I can't make a recommendation, on one or the other. That being said, I've learned a lot from helpful books, along the way. I think that the Business Model Canvas is an excellent tool that any aspiring entrepreneur should aim to complete. I'm a huge fan of mentorship. I'm lucky that I have a lot of folks that are way smarter than me that are guiding me and talking me through the mistakes that I'm making along the way. I make a lot of time for mentorship and learning to help me reach my entrepreneurial goals. And that's something I'd recommend to everybody else who's thinking about being an entrepreneur.
Carrie:That's great advice. So, as you look back over your journey, do you have some life advice for students? I know it's kind of embedded in the challenge mindset, but as you've gone along your journey, in your own experience, but also in the experience that you have turning around and helping so many other students as students, whether they're approaching college or they're in college, or even if they're just leaving college and going out into the world, do you have some big picture life advice for them as they embark on their journey, wherever that is?
JP:Yeah. The biggest one would be to write your story. A lot of folks take their current and past identity very seriously, and they dramatically underestimate how much they're gonna change in the future. The future you is going to go through unexpected outlier events that will completely change the game for yourself, and you can actually optimize that and grow that, as we said earlier in this call. Once you realize you're the author of your own story, what you're able to do is write your next chapters, and that gives you distance and objectivity and it allows you to dream. And what you can do is you can create an aspirational self, not based in a, you know, some absent, unrealistic dream, but based on something that is true inside you and about your potential and who you could become. I'm still writing my story and I'm excited about the person I could become. That's my number one piece of advice for students that are thinking about their future.
Carrie:That's great. So can we talk to both professionals who may be listening, who work with students who work at a high school, who work at a college, who work at a university, and then also students themselves if they have been listening to you and think, I really want to explore the challenge mindset. I wanna sit down and go through this process, or I want to take my students through this process. Where does each population find you and how do they go about doing this?
JP:The best place to start is with our TEDx talk. So if a listener wants to find out more, I would Google Challenge Mindset, TEDx, and then you'll see a very short 15 minute presentation on the challenge mindset and how it can help. Now. Advisors and counselors who would like to get started, you can go get a deck of challenge cards on our website at mysparkpath.com. That's the easiest way to start. For those who wanna take the next step, and they're trying to scale career services across their school or across the campus. Then what you'll want to think about is using the digital challenge cards and embedding the challenge mindset in your curriculum with faculty partners throughout student clubs on campus. And we've partnered with a lot of different schools who are doing that right now. I'd love to continue the conversation with anyone who's interested in this topic. You can follow me on LinkedIn. My name is JP Michel, and feel free to give me a follow and let's keep the conversation going there.
Carrie:Great. And I just wanna say, I just wanna thank you for all of this. I just think that the more people hear about this and the more that they incorporate it into their own life and into the lives of the students that they're working with, this is such a huge change in mindset as far as how we're guiding students, but also it can really help. I mean, literally this can help form the next generation and the way that they approach their life and approach their career path. So I just wanna thank you for the work that you're doing with this.
JP:You're welcome. Thank you for making a podcast that brings all these important messages to life and for creating an audience. I think what you're doing is very important. We're definitely not talking about career exploration enough or in the right way, and I think you're trying to cut through the noise with some clear messages and I really appreciate you inviting me.
Carrie:Thank you so much.
JP:Thank you.
Carrie:Do you know someone I should interview? Please DM me on Instagram@pathsinprogresspodcast and let me know who I should talk to. I would love to hear about how these stories are impacting your journey. Please follow Paths in Progress wherever you download your podcasts and leave a review to let me know what you think. You can also follow us on Facebook and LinkedIn at Paths in Progress Podcast. Our music is by John Grimmett and the artwork is by Edgar Alanis. Thanks again for joining me today.