Hector Correa With After College

Intro: [00:00:02] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Coach the Coach radio brought to you by the Business RadioX Ambassador Program, the no cost business development strategy for coaches who want to spend more time serving local business clients and less time selling them. Go to brxambassador.com To learn more. Now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:33] Lee Kantor here, another episode of Coach the Coach Radio, and this is going to be a good one today on the show. We have Hector Correa with after college welcome Hector.

Hector Correa: [00:00:44] It’s a pleasure to be here, Lee, thank you so much.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:46] Well, I’m excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us a little bit about after college. How are you serving, folks?

Hector Correa: [00:00:52] Well, you know, After College is a organization that its its main purpose is to serve the students, high school students or tourists in the early college stages to really help them find an answer to a very important question, which is what do I want to do with my life in the future? What is it? What is the career, the professional path that I want to follow? And as you know, a lot of our young students, when they’re in high school or early years in college, they’re still trying to figure out a lot of these questions. So after college, we created after college to help students get an answer to that question through coaching, counseling and webinars and workshops that where we give them tools and a methodology we developed to help them find the right answer to that very important question.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:46] Now, as part of the mission, not only kind of giving that student some direction, but also giving them the tools to, you know, choose the right college or choose the right companies to work for or choose even the right profession to get into.

Hector Correa: [00:02:06] You know, we actually take two steps back from that question because, you know, let me tell you that I’m a father of three. Two of them already in college and little girl in high school. And what we what I found when my kids were going through that same process is there’s a lot of resources about finding the best college for you, finding the scholarship money, finding support, even guidance through the admission process and sats and all that. But our approach is actually taking two steps back from that point and really help the students ask the right questions about what they really want to do. And the reason for that is because my kids, at some point they were they were not really sure what they wanted to do. And I do have a lot of training as a coach, as an executive coach for companies. And I noticed that a lot of these questions had not so much to do about what school I want to go to, but really what I want to do through some research that I did with my first son that went to college. You know, there is a statistics from different universities that show 80 percent of college graduates still in their 20s. 80 percent. There are still in their 20s, they don’t like what the career path that they are in now. So these are kids that finish college and at most have maybe five six years in their professional lives and they realize they don’t like what they’re what they study. They don’t like what they’re working on and they’re trying to find something else so that that is a devastating statistic. So what and what is what we saw is that there is really not a lot of support for students to really answer the question first. What do I really want to do before I even think about, you know, I’m going to go to this school and I’m going to get these grants, or I can apply to this financial aid and my sats and of all those little things you have to do to get into college.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:24] So now what are some of the things this young person can do to kind of get a better handle on what is a good fit for them, personality wise, aspirational wise. You know, that’s going to be fulfilling and and make sure that they don’t make that mistake and fall into that, you know, kind of vast majority of people who seem to have chosen the right the wrong path.

Hector Correa: [00:04:51] That so, you know, the focus of our workshops and our methodology, like I said, I actually it came about because using all my coaching skills and all the knowledge that I acquired my coach in training, that I apply with entrepreneurs and business owners with the companies that I work with, I had to work with my son identified. Um, really, you know, the interests and needs that you need to fulfill in order to be happy, I mean, at the end of the day, no matter how much what you make in any profession, right, you’re not, you need to be satisfied and you need to be happy. So what I did with my son as I was guiding them is using a lot of the training that I learned from coaching courses on human psychology. And the human psychology is a branch of study in psychology very well documented that basically teach you, teaches you and teaches you how to apply with your clients. Some techniques so that they discover what are the most important human needs and what is missing from their life, whether it’s in business, whether it is in your personal life, relationships or at work. What is missing in their daily life that is not satisfying those needs. And therefore, you know, they either feel unhappy, they feel dissatisfied or they just simply don’t feel that they are in the right place. So that same approach I took with my kids and I started developing these workshops. So the workshop focuses on helping the kids be aware first, because for them is this is something completely new, completely foreign to them. Be aware of what are the the basic human needs. Help them understand what are the most important needs for them. How do they satisfy them? And what does what do they need to look for in a profession in the future so that they keep satisfying those needs and therefore keep them happy and satisfied and engaged in the long term? So that is the main core. The core topic of offer workshops.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:09] Now are the workshops geared only for the student, because sometimes the parent has their own opinion and sometimes has the influence that they are, kind of they think they’re helping their kid, but maybe they’re guiding them down, maybe not the optimal path.

Hector Correa: [00:07:27] Oh, absolutely, that is a very important topic. We have also workshops for parents as well where we actually help them understand. Through their or internalization of the human needs, we share with them the same knowledge we share with them, the same information about the six human needs. But then we also put parents in the context of all the pressures that their kids are going through, and this is a topic that we also discuss with the students, you know. It is a very stressful time for high school kids, especially the junior senior years. And even for some kids that are already in college, it’s a very stressful time because there is pressure from everywhere, right? Parents have expectations from their kids, siblings, family, the boyfriend or girlfriend. You know, they’re surrounded by all these expectations that they feel they need to meet. And it’s very easy for the kids to just, you know, give in or or put their their feelings aside in order to satisfy other people’s expectations. And as parents, you know, we get that all the time. So parents, we have a course workshop for parents. We have a workshop for students in which we teach them the same basic principles. But then for parents, we help them guide, give them the tools and a process to help them guide their own children through the process of selecting something that is great for them. That will be the best match, the best fit for their son’s interests and needs, and not so much their own. I think that most parents are well-intentioned parents. They do want to see their kids happy and satisfied the long run, even though sometimes that means they don’t have to follow the path that we have set in our minds for them.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:21] Now are you working also with, you know, guidance counselors and career coaches to give them the tools to better serve their clientele?

Hector Correa: [00:09:31] We usually work with schools and high schools in the U.S. and Mexico and Latin America. So we do have some schools that are open that and we include some of the counselors and guidance, people that are currently in the staff and we train them or we invite them to the workshops and the seminars. But in some cases, the parents or in most cases, actually, I will say more than half the time, more than 50 percent of the time parents approaches and students approach us directly, not through a school, because as a father? Ok. He’s a senior where in the beginning of the last semester and my son is still there, said, No, my son, my daughter is still don’t know what they want to do. And you know, we have college applications and deadlines in front of us and we need help. So more than half the time, it is parents and students that approach us directly. But when we do have some partnerships or some agreements with some high schools in the U.S. and Mexico. And in those cases, we do involve their counseling staff and they are very helpful in also doing follow up a little more detailed follow up after or workshops are complete.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:58] Now what is the kind of the the temperature in the minds of these young people? Are they optimistic about their future or are they excited or are they thinking they’re going to be entrepreneurs? Are they kind of thinking that jobs are just a means to an end? Like, what’s their feeling about a career?

Hector Correa: [00:11:19] You get a little bit of everything. There are kids that are really enthusiastic and, you know, also there are kids in very different levels of what I call the decision making process. There are kids that are already very well convinced and defined about what they want to do. And there are kids that are really in a very early stage and they don’t have any clue about what they want to do, right? They could do many things, but nothing seems to catch their interest. So we have kids in all the spectrum of what you just mentioned. We have kids that are very optimistic, kids that are very pessimistic, kids that are very down to earth and not have a very clear idea of what they want. And they just need confirmation or they want reassurance that they’re in the right path. And kids that don’t have any idea of what they would like to do. So. We have a wide variety of opinions, perspectives in these workshops, and that just makes it interesting. I think that it is very helpful for kids that are already very convinced or have done a lot of due diligence in defining a career path is very helpful. Is very gratifying to see them. Oh yeah, I I I knew this is what I wanted to do, but now I really feel 100 percent sure that this is what I want. And kids that they don’t have any idea at the end of the workshop say, You know, I, I know that this is what I need to do to keep me satisfied and keep me happy. And I have different options that I can follow. But all of these options, I know why I want to follow them. I know what they could give me, and I know now that this if I choose any of these options, this will be a good fit for me.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:16] Now, any advice for young people that they can do on their own, like right now, something in action they can take today that can help them, you know, make a better decision and then maybe also a piece of the device of something maybe they shouldn’t do.

Hector Correa: [00:13:32] Sure. You know, I would say something they shouldn’t do. Don’t jump too fast into the process of finding a school. Um, and I know this is hard, you know, when I went to college, I have the opportunity to go to a really good school, but when I went to college, the pressure, I don’t remember the pressure being such as it is today. Uh, today kids are starved. Well, parents, the schools, everybody around, and it started talking about college much earlier than I could remember. And then now colleges have all these early decision applications and they start recruiting kids almost a year and a half earlier. So. It is easy for a student to get carried away by all this noise, by all this pressure around them. I’ll say don’t jump so fast into the cycle of what? What are the schools that I can afford? Can I get money? Can I get grants? Where are my S.A.T. numbers and all that? Take a breather. Don. And before you even start talking about that. Take a good look at yourself and what are the things that make you feel happy and satisfied on a daily basis? One of the areas in workshops is that. We have activities with the students in which we really make them think what really makes you feel happy? What activities in your daily life make you feel happy? What activities in your life when you start doing those activities? You know, time flies and you are so engaged in that activity that you forget that you already spent five hours in the day, but you are so engaged that you lose track of time.

Hector Correa: [00:15:32] And that process of discovery. It’s one of the first steps that students need to do to understand what are those things that keep them engaged, satisfied and then try to find ask around. What you should do is ask people in different professions. If you think you want to be an architect, go and talk to an architect, go, you know, maybe you don’t know when directly, but I’m sure your mom or your dad do know someone in that profession. Why do you want to be a pharmacist? Go to your pharmacy, talk to your local pharmacist. You want to be, you know, an engineer. Try to find those figures with experience in those fields so they can tell you exactly what they do. You know, I had cases where kids say, Oh, no, I’m going to study, I want to be a doctor because I’m in love with Gray’s Anatomy and I can help but say internally, Oh boy, you’re in for really a real reality check because it is not professionals are not what you see on TV. But you know, it’s because kids don’t go and ask. So those will this will be the two things that I will recommend kids to do. Ask other people who are already professionals in the areas of interest to do. Take a look to think deeply. Think about what are the things that you really enjoy doing. And not to jump so fast into the circle of trying to find a school, trying to find grants and sat scores and all that.

Lee Kantor: [00:17:11] Well, Hector, if somebody wants to learn more about your programs and events, what is the website?

Hector Correa: [00:17:18] Well, our website is after that college dot com. You can find us there, you can also find us on Facebook. You can search for after college. We have a Facebook page and on your website after that Polish dot com.

Lee Kantor: [00:17:33] Well, Hector, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

Hector Correa: [00:17:39] I appreciate your time and the opportunity to share what I do with your audience, I think is a great opportunity to thank you for that.

Lee Kantor: [00:17:47] All right. This is Lee Kantor. We will see you all next time on Coach the Coach radio.