Young Adults and Turbulence: No Big Deal - Until it Is....

Let’s talk turbulence.

I recently spoke to a commercial pilot friend about turbulence. Given that I fly a lot to work with clients, I experience quite a bit of turbulence. I hate it. The bumps start coming and I’m gripping my armrests and reaching forward to put a palm on the seat in front of me, somehow believing doing so will right the plane and steady my nerves. My heart rate increases. My eyes widen. Depending upon how bumpy it gets, I might throw in a few prayers, as well. The turbulence passes, we return to calm flying, and I blow out a sigh of relief, give thanks, and get back to my inflight pursuits – usually reading or listening to a recent podcast.??(I’m an exciting guy.)

My friend, a fellow West Point graduate and retired Air Force fighter pilot – yes – a few graduates of our service academies occasionally commission in a sister service – explained how turbulence “works” – what it is, how the airlines track and prepare for it, and how the aircraft is designed specifically to get through turbulence much rougher than we normally experience in flight.??

“Hey,” he said, “turbulence happens. We’re ready for it. It’s no big deal.”

In other words, while we (I know I’m not alone in this. Many of my fellow passengers share similar turbulence response routines…) sit in the back with concern and fear, the pilots calmly go about continuing to fly the aircraft, aware of the turbulence but confident.?

They have a team of experts to talk to when they encounter severe turbulence, including other pilots in the air, air traffic controllers, and their own airline control centers.

They have been?trained?to respond to turbulence.

They?know?the atmospheric conditions that lead to turbulence.

They?plan?their routes to avoid the worst of turbulence.

They know the aircraft is?designed?to get through turbulence.

They are?prepared?for turbulence.

In other words, while I’m in the back of the aircraft?reacting?to the turbulence, the experts are up front calmly?responding?to it.

We can all learn a lesson from this.??

In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a lot of turbulence out there in the lives of our young adults. I see it every day. Now, some might say there’s always been turbulence – that those of us truly rocking adulthood dealt with our own turbulence like a champ – that nothing today is any different than the challenges we faced decades ago.

This simply is not true. It is not even close.

I graduated from a top tier undergraduate institution, one with a very low acceptance rate, extraordinarily rigorous academics, and demanding physical requirements that expected me somehow to cram 25 hours of work into a 24-hour day.??The physical, mental, and emotional stress was, at times, close to overwhelming – at least for me. Some of my peers – well, a few of them – made it look easy. I did not. That I managed, somehow, to grasp the fundamentals of chemistry, physics, probability and statistics, systems engineering, multi-variable calculus, differential equations, difference equations (I mean – come on!), two and a half years of foreign language instruction that began (on Day 1) exclusively in that language, advanced computer science programming (those who know me still chuckle at this one), microeconomics, macroeconomics, and a host of other STEM coursework (as an ENGLISH major!) continues to astound me.

Today, I literally have no idea how I made it through.

And the truth is, today, I would not even have the chance to try.

I wouldn’t get in. I wouldn’t make it past the admissions gatekeepers.

The same applies to other extraordinarily talented young adults today. I had a client who earned acceptance to the University of Chicago. She’s entering her senior year and doing very well. Her sister, just four years behind her, attending the same elite-level independent high school in the Northeast, also wanted to attend Chicago. She had much better credentials than her sister. Higher GPA, better standardized test scores, more extracurricular and service activities and athletics. In every measurable, calculable way, she was a better candidate for admissions.

And, just as I told her, she had no chance of earning admission. None. And she did not. Summarily rejected. (Don’t cry for her, Argentina… She’s quite happy, content, and thriving at an institution that deserves her. Chicago does not.)

Much as I could not earn admission to my alma mater today and my client could not, only four years later, gain admission to her sister’s, contemporary admission policies block admission for a vast majority of even the nation’s brightest young adults. And this hurts. A lot.?

I cannot tell you how many times I have had to listen to a client ask: “why am I not good enough?” or “what could I have done differently?” or “what are they looking for?” And lest you want to call them “snowflakes” – just know – they are far, far more qualified than you likely ever were for these schools. I am talking about young adults who have taken every AP course offered by their district while sustaining an unweighted (yes – they have that now – but did not when we were in school – look it up) GPA of 4.0, earned an SAT in excess of 1540 and an ACT of 35+, have multiple varsity letters, hundreds of hours of community service, have served as captains of teams and other leadership activities. They are superstars who work hard.??

Today, more than ever, our young adults face rejection.?

And this only scratches the surface of their turbulence.

Adults like to mock the “woke” culture our young adults must navigate as they grow up. Let me be as plain as possible here. When I was growing up, I could make a mistake, learn from it, and be fine.

That doesn’t work anymore.?

Mistakes today can destroy a future, or worse, end a young adult’s life.?

We did not face that.?

They do.

Now, because I have to, I coach my clients about how to act at a party, always to bring their own cup (with a lid) wherever they go, never to accept an open drink from anyone, never, even, to allow a person to open a drink in front of them (google how to drop a roofie while opening a can of soda), how to protect themselves physically against rape, sexual assault, and unwanted touching, how to respond to online bullying and stalking, how to use all of their phone’s emergency features, how to extricate themselves from a place with drugs (including cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine), and a seemingly ever-growing list of things we simply did not face two decades ago, like always leaving with exactly the same people you arrive with, verifying Uber and Lyft drivers, changing their voicemail every time they go out alone to identify where they are going, why they are going, and their expected return time.??

Oh. And anything I coach my clients on … I do so because I have had another client experience it.?

I recently had a client call me, hushed, whispering, and in a panic because her roommate had just been raped in her dorm room at a major state university and would not call the police. There was blood everywhere. The girl was shivering and going into shock. My client did not know what to do. We had covered, in great detail, how to respond to herself being assaulted – but never her roommate being raped while she was in the same room, asleep.?

Rest assured, I cover it now.?

I had another whose best friend got roofied at a fraternity party at a very popular private college in the South and didn’t know what to do or how to get her home safely.

I had another whose roommate always had drugs – serious drugs like cocaine and heroin – in their dorm and would not listen to pleas to stop – and even threatened my client with physical violence from “dangerous people” if she ever told anyone. And this at an ostensibly “elite” private college.

And this says nothing about the fraternity presidents at UNC-Chapel Hill, Duke, and Appalachian State recently arrested in one of the largest drug ring busts in North Carolina state history.

Or the rash of high-profile suicides on campuses from Stanford to Wisconsin to Chapel Hill.?

Or the fact that our educational and social systems utterly failed our young adults during COVID, insufficiently preparing them for success in college.?

Yes – our young adults face rather significant turbulence, indeed.

We haven’t even begun to discuss the depths of this turbulence. Try understanding dating norms today – or gender norms – or the potential minefields posed by even a simple social interaction between young adults from differing social, cultural, and ethnic demographic backgrounds.

Guess who made these minefields? Not our young adults; that’s for sure.?

But they nevertheless have to overcome these obstacles, all while striving to earn academic, athletic, extracurricular, service, and leadership achievements we never even considered as young adults.

And they can.?

With our help.

We need to?train?them to respond to turbulence.

We need to?teach?them the “atmospheric” conditions that lead to turbulence.

We need to help them?plan?their routes to avoid the worst of turbulence.

We need to show them how they, too, are?designed?to get through turbulence.

We need to?prepare?them for turbulence.

In other words, instead of expecting them simply to?react?to the turbulence, as experts, we must teach them how to?respond?calmly and confidently to it.

How? I certainly have my processes; other experts and professions have theirs.

What we cannot do, however, is sit idly by as our young adults bounce to and fro, drop precipitously, and struggle with over-correction or burying their collective heads in the sand.

Right now, entirely too many otherwise well-intentioned parents send their young adults to college thinking (or hoping) they will deal with the turbulence they will undoubtedly face without any preparation for how to do so.?

Too many are not ready. They have never faced real academic struggle. They have never dealt with failure. They have never faced social or romantic rejection. They have never had to engage meaningfully with people who don’t act, look, think, believe, vote, or worship like they do. They see no reason to adapt…because for entirely too many of them, their environment has adapted to them – not the other way around.

And that’s not how college (or life) works.

Post-secondary life is, almost by definition, turbulent.?

Plan. Prepare. Achieve. Reflect. Respond.

Thrive.