An 10 Minute Read, By Anthony (Tony) J. D’Angelo, founder of Collegiate Empowerment Posted June 5, 2020
Your time is your most important asset and it’s your most important resource. As you invest your time learning more about yourself, you are equipping yourself to play this great game called American Higher Education. At Collegiate Empowerment, we are continuing to offer our complimentary Coaching Program. If you’re engaging with that program, if you’ve been engaging with these articles, then you know what we do is for you, the American Higher Education professional, not the American Higher Education amateur. If you're committed to playing the game for the long haul, and committed to grow and to make an educational impact on your students, in your community, and in the world, then you're at the right place at the right time. Our job at CE is to inspire you in this never-ending search for the best within yourself so that you can increase your clarity, your confidence, your capability, and your commitment to the work you do.
One of the roots of Collegiate Empowerment is to take higher education, not only higher and further, but also deeper. There’s a reality we have to face: It’s 2020; The world we live in today is less than 40 years old. In 1989, the Berlin Wall came down, and that was the signifying moment in history of going from The Industrial Age to The Information Age. By 1995, the World Wide Web went up and empowered us to create a whole new world. Now, we are only 25 years into that new world. If you are future-focused, this can be a great blessing. If you are stuck in the past, it can be a great curse.
In The Industrial Age, you could go to school, get good grades, get a secure job and live happily ever after, retired at age 65. Sounds like a fairy tale, right? Yet, we continue to recycle that story. It’s not only a fairy tale, it’s a LIE. It’s not the story that most people see unfolding in their lives. To combat that lie, we need to take a look at how we initially educate ourselves. But in the rules of the 21st century, there are five types of education you need to give yourself the grace to learn to succeed.
Type 1: Academic Education
Of course, we do need to have a baseline academic education. We need to know about the world around us and how to thrive in it. In the old days, it used to be all about academic education. That’s all you needed for success. We are part of an industry that centers around the Academy. We at CE acknowledge that academic education is important, but we can’t stop there. While academic education is foundational, we need more to build our bigger future.
Type 2: Professional Education
The next step is professional education. What profession are you looking to work in? Do you want to be a doctor, a lawyer, an accountant, or an attorney? Then you need to get that advanced degree in training. Do you want to be a plumber or an electrician? Then you need to learn that trade. To every occupation, there is a professional skill set. It's the next step. It's the next building block to your bigger future.
Type 3: Entrepreneurial Education
You also need to embrace entrepreneurial education, which we call Trep Ed. In the 21st century, more and more people are going to be entrepreneurs. As a Higher Education professional, you need to adopt an entrepreneurial mindset. How do you adapt to the challenges you face? How do you create value in new ways? Adaptability and value-creation are the tools of the entrepreneur.
Type 4: Financial Education
The rules of financial education have radically changed. In 1971, when President Nixon took us off the gold standard, he promised we were going to go back. Of course, like most politicians, that promise never came to fruition. We now live, not in a gold-standard economy, but an interest-rate, standard economy. We're making some completely illogical financial decisions since we have negative interest rates. Never in the history of the world have we had negative interest rates. You need to get a financial education. You have to understand what the impact of negative interest rates is going to be. How will this economy impact your personal finances? It will impact where you work, what you do, what you eat, the clothes your kids wear, the healthcare you have, and the significance of your church and charities that you give to.
Type 5: Empowerment Education
Last but not least, at the center of all these types of education for the 21st century, is Empowerment Education. You could call it personal development, you could call it personal growth, but we call it Empowerment Education. Empowerment Education is about helping people get what they want and need so that they can get to where they want to go. When you empower someone, you give them the ability to act, to change, to make a difference.
Now, why is this so important? To go back to my original thesis, the world that you and I live in is less than 40 years old. In The Industrial Age, you were expected to either be managed or to manage others. And a lot of our institutions of Higher Education were created by affluent, successful businessmen. The robber-barons of the time. Not so that they could go out and better humanity, but so they could create employees to work for their factories in their companies, in their corporations. This idea of management is an industrial-age idea. We now live in an economy that is not top down, but it's a networked economy. And so what people are silently begging for is not management. They're silently begging for Empowerment Education through coaching. If we look at management, management was to the 20th century what coaching is and will be to the 21st century. At Collegiate Empowerment, we're growing our coaching program so that we can empower educators like yourself. You can’t be a manager because we know management doesn't work. You can't manage people. You can only manage processes. But you can inspire, empower, and coach people.
What do you want? What do you need? Where do you want to go? That's the dynamic that’s happening in the 21st century. This idea of seeing each individual as an aspirant, not as a consumer, not even as a student, but as an aspirant. Each individual is the creator of their bigger future. You don't create in a vacuum; you create in collaboration with a coach. So as a creator, as an individual, think about what you truly want and need. Your wants are typically at the tip of the iceberg and are easily identifiable. Your needs, on the other hand, are some theories that you need to dig a little deeper to find and take time to process and think through.
Use assessments and tools to identify the next step. Where do you want to go in your life? What are those moments, those experiences, those emotions that you want to experience? That's what you're responsible for. As the creator of your bigger future, you want to give yourself the grace to identify: What do I want? Then, what does a coach do? A coach helps you focus on the who, the why, the how, and the when. You're responsible for all these elements, but a coach is there to support you.
Empower Yourselves, then Others
Your life is too short to do the things you suck at. There are three to five things that you are ridiculously responsible for in this world. And then you need to entrust all those other things to somebody else. And what we do in the coaching program is we go through and we use diagnostic tools just like a doctor. Our “CAT scan” and “MRI” tools are things like, The X-Factor Question, Print Survey, Kolbe, and Real GPA. We use these powerful tools to help us assess how we can be our best self and our Empowered Self.
If this idea of Empowerment Education interests you, then reach out to us. Understand this fundamental idea: if you want to play this great game of American Higher Education, know that the next 20 years are going to be radically different than the last 20 years. And that’s good news for you, good news for us, and good news for the students we serve. We're moving away from an outdated management mindset to a coaching culture to empower people to boldly create their own futures. Empowerment is about giving power to others, but we can only give power if we first have it ourselves.
Commit to be an Empowerment Educator, first for yourself, then for your students, then for the world.
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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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