The Power of Storytelling in Admissions: How to Stand Out with Your Personal Narrative

James Moffitt (00:01.272)
Hello and welcome to ABC's of Parenting Adult Children. My name is James Moffitt and I'll be your host. Today we have a guest speaker and his name is Hamada. Hey Hamada, how are you?

Hamada Zahawi (00:14.571)
I'm doing well, doing well. Thank you for having me, James.

James Moffitt (00:16.96)
Yeah, go ahead and introduce yourself to the listening audience, please.

Hamada Zahawi (00:21.145)
My name is Hamad Azhahawi. I'm an admissions expert at Right Track Admissions. I founded the company in 2008 and I've been focusing a lot in terms of like you can just kind of capture in the motto of the company, discover your story, get admitted. So we're all about storytelling and helping students with applications for colleges, law school, MBA programs, graduate schools and so forth.

James Moffitt (00:41.518)
Wonderful. Well, as I told you earlier, have have parents that have preteens teenagers 18 to 26 and you know 30 to 40 so I think your age group is probably right right in the middle of college admissions and you know, you have 17 18 year olds that are are getting a lot of the prerequisites done now I think in high school and getting prepared for college life and

I know that parents have their hands full with helping them with all that admission stuff, all the paperwork and financial aid and all of that stuff. So feel free to talk to the listening audience about all of that.

Hamada Zahawi (01:25.507)
Perfect.

All right, so in terms of James, do you want to kind of ask questions or do want to just kind of like talk through some of the stuff that we do and some of the issues we've seen? What would be the best approach that you would like to see?

James Moffitt (01:42.75)
I think I want to just kind of turn you loose and let you do your thing and talk about all the intricacies or complexities that parents, you know, it's like you're actually talking to the parents of these college-age children, right? And so kind of focus on that, I think.

Hamada Zahawi (02:04.002)
Okay.

You got it. You got it. there's, mean, first and foremost, being a parent for a kid who's going through this process is no joke. It's no easy feat. Personally, I'm not a parent, but we've worked with so, so many parents over the years on their call, to help their children through the college admissions process to the point, James, that folks are no longer coming to us as had been the case, I don't know, 10 years ago, we've been in business for over 17 years, but.

10 years ago, maybe 15 years ago even, were coming to us, students were coming to us, rising 12th graders, right? So they were in a scramble. They were just like, hey, listen, here's my kid. We need as much help as we can to get them across the goal line. We have about two, three months to submit the applications. They didn't know what schools they want to apply to. didn't know what major they were thinking about and so forth. Now we're seeing a trend and it's incredibly lucrative for people in this space because folks are coming at the ninth grade.

James Moffitt (02:51.299)
Right.

Hamada Zahawi (03:05.56)
even at a middle school, I don't know you've seen this trend, and telling us, my middle school child, we really want to get him to an Ivy League school or a top program and so forth. And they are trying to prepare their kids to be the best applicants possible at the youngest age possible. Now, there is a of a dialectic there because on the one hand, you don't want to over, how do I say, of oversubscribe the child.

James Moffitt (03:08.738)
Yeah.

Hamada Zahawi (03:34.901)
with experiences that are inauthentic, that are just what you think the colleges wanna see. And so you're driving the kid to a completely different direction than from where their love for some field is or passion for some field. On the other hand, you do wanna give them some guardrails to give them some kind of guidance because there are so many factors that are coming in. Whether it's the after school activities, extracurriculars, you're talking about volunteer experiences, tutoring.

James Moffitt (03:40.334)
All right.

James Moffitt (03:57.358)
you

Hamada Zahawi (04:04.557)
your classes, leadership. There's so many factors that schools are looking for that it just becomes incredibly overwhelming. So I think the ideal, if you're able to start thinking about it in middle school, but really starting to find what it is that the child really starts to kind of gravitate towards, then you kind of wanna support them in that direction. And then what you wanna do for those parents is start

to really kind of focus on certain key areas that the schools look for. And what are the schools looking for? I'm gonna throw some adjectives out there, you know, in no particular order, but they're looking for students that are compassionate. I kind of think about it in terms of compassion, having a sense of career oriented or like where they wanna go taking their life seriously, a sense of camaraderie and working well with others, right?

A sense of community being oriented towards the community, as you can imagine, all throughout the US, just being oriented towards community. Leadership, obviously, is mission critical. Someone who is focused towards something, which is why a lot of people ask me, like, well, should we take 10 different activities and see which one sticks over the period of high school, for example, or should we hyper-focus on one or two?

And we always tell people, a mile deep and an inch wide. Because if you can really dig deep, like in your freshman year, sophomore year, junior year, in a particular area and really make a change in an organization, they want to see that. Because it shows staying power, shows commitment, it shows ability to be a team player and a leader and make an impact on the broader society. Because you can't do that if you're doing 10 different activities and try to just superficially work on them. You've got to dig deeper.

And so that kind of really helps you get a better sense of what the schools are looking for. Somebody who's academically oriented, but also balances that with extracurricular activities and leadership and a team player. Someone who's community focused, also focused on themselves and personal growth. And again, I'm saying a lot, but these are the factors. And you've got James to reverse engineer it. If we're looking at someone who needs to show compassion, how do we do it?

James Moffitt (06:25.144)
Sure.

James Moffitt (06:32.142)
You

Hamada Zahawi (06:33.675)
If you over correct on education, but you lack compassion and strong EQ, the schools are going to ignore you. It's just going to, it's bound to happen.

James Moffitt (06:43.662)
So they're looking for a well-rounded person.

Hamada Zahawi (06:47.993)
in the absolute dictionary definition of well-rounded. And I use the word EQ, I'll just quickly elaborate it for the audience. If we know IQ is pure intelligence, EQ is emotional quantum, so it's emotional intelligence. And if your child can't even make eye contact with an adult or with each other because they're so hyper-focused on their computers and on their phones, then we've got a problem. We need these people because the only way... Shoot.

James Moffitt (06:58.21)
Right?

Hamada Zahawi (07:16.643)
future proof yourself. We'll talk a little bit more about this, James, if you want to kind of dive into that, because I kind of wrote a whole chapter about this in the Mastery Guide that we created, which is kind of future proofing. But if we want to somehow allow us to walk either side by side with or make yourself relevant over AI, EQ is the way to do it. Exactly what you're doing, James. I cannot imagine, and I hope to God we don't see a world

where you are overtaken by an AI. Where someone like you with your background and so forth starts producing podcasts and you're like, who is it? it's just a conglomerate of a bunch of different people's voices and ideas being produced on a podcast. No, you wanna make it authentic and real.

James Moffitt (07:59.854)
don't think AI could duplicate me.

Hamada Zahawi (08:02.649)
What's exactly the point and that's what we're trying to do and one reason for that is because you have obviously over indexed on EQ and trying to reach an audience and building that loyalty and camaraderie with people that listen to you and that's what you want your student your your your child to do is Develop those core EQ skills that allow them to be indispensable in the world

James Moffitt (08:15.618)
Right. Right.

James Moffitt (08:27.086)
All right, so let's stop right there, put a pin in it right there. And we're talking about emotional intelligence, right? That's a term that comes up a lot in my podcast episode. And we talk about how parents, as well as the children, as they're transitioning from one stage to the next, whether they're pre-teens, teenagers, or the 18 to 26 range, going to college or getting ready to go to college.

looking at the admissions stuff. You know as well as I do that most young people, I'll talk about my kids, my kids would rather text me or send me a message on Facebook message than get, God forbid, I want to get on the phone and talk to them. They don't want to talk to me on the phone, they just want to send me a quick 15 second message and they want me to give them a quick 15 second answer and they're on to the next thing, right? And so there's

Hamada Zahawi (09:13.273)
100%.

James Moffitt (09:23.906)
there's a problem with an attention span. And you talk about young people not having a hard time getting eye contact to either their age group or adults. You they're going to job interviews, you know, and you you don't, you don't want the interviewer, the employer doesn't want to be interviewing somebody that's shifty eyed or has a hard time.

They act like they're ADHD or OCD or they can't stay on topic or they can't focus long enough to answer the questions correctly. And so you know that there are young people that are, that's kind of like the foundation. that's, know, the parents, and of course, parents are supposed to be working on these skills, obviously, way before.

way before they get to the high school age, right? They're supposed to be working on that stuff, you know, when they're, like you said, middle school and on up. And so how do you equip parents or instruct parents to teach those skills before they even come see you, right?

Hamada Zahawi (10:33.461)
Great question. I'm glad that you make this a topic on your podcast. So I'm not surprised, to be honest. Given who you're targeting and the topic, it makes 100 % sense. I would say you've got to put your kid not just in team sports, but in things that really require action, excuse me, face-to-face interaction.

working on things together, not just in sports, because those are fleeting, right? They could be just 30 minutes, an hour of a game, and then you're training, but it's not the same. don't feel like sports are mission critical for your own mental and physical health. That's absolutely mission critical for me personally. I mean, I've been playing sports since I was a kid, and even till now, it's a very, very important part of my own health routine. But I mean, like things like quickly come to mind, and you're thinking about middle school and so forth. I think about

I know this is gonna sound weird, like boy scouts. Because you're working on things together, right? Or girl scouts, you're working on things together. Problem sets together, challenges together. Another one that comes to mind that I wish I had done, I went to an international school abroad and I didn't have this opportunity, but here in America we have this opportunity a ton. And that's like debate, speech and debate. Because you've gotta make eye contact with, right? You're thinking about making eye contact with the judge, with your adversary. You said your son is a lawyer.

James Moffitt (11:49.89)
Right, I was thinking of that too. Right.

Hamada Zahawi (11:59.629)
When I was in law school, I'm a lawyer myself, but when I was in law school, we had to do moot court. We had to interact. We had to face an adversary. We had to come to a conclusion. We had to mediate. And that's why when I talk to people, I lock eyes. It's super, super important because you read so much from an individual. And the reason I brought this up is because I have nieces and nephews and my sister has done a bang up job with them making eye contact and interacting with us. But I'm going to say this and you have children, I don't James, but.

I'm going to say kids up to the certain age of like six, seven, eight, if when the parents keep them away from electronics, which is typically the case with most people, that they are able to make eye contact with adults, with their parents, with other kids, they interact with them and so forth. But as the kid gets older and they become more codependent on electronics and they have that distance between them and the individual they're communicating with electronically, that skill disappears.

And so between the age of somewhere 10 to like 17, that skill of interaction has been pulled away from them. And what lies left is someone who's just unable to make that kind of interaction. And then it takes college, hopefully, to get them back on track. If ever.

James Moffitt (13:20.686)
Well, you hear stories about, it's not just teenagers, it's adults too. It's called etiquette. When you go out, whether you're dating or your husband, wife, or whatever, you go out to lunch, you go out to supper, you go out to dinner, whatever, go out in the public to have a social experience with another human being, it's bad etiquette for you to constantly be picking up your phone and looking at your messages. And families,

Hamada Zahawi (13:47.427)
But 100%.

James Moffitt (13:50.974)
Today, have to struggle with, okay, we're gonna have supper at the dining room table, not in front of the TV. And it may only be once a week. Their boundary or their guardrail may be, look, as a family, we're gonna sit down and we're gonna have supper or lunch, and we're gonna talk about our day. And the cell phones, stay in your room, or we're gonna have a basket at the table. Everybody, including mom, dad, brother, sister, whoever.

Put your cell phone on silent, put it in this basket at the end of our meeting and our dinner, and we've interacted person to person, then you can have your smartphone back. And my wife is a teacher and she's a special ed teacher and she struggles with that. She struggles with kids and their smartphones and she takes them up. She just walks around the room and says, me your smartphone. No, yes, no, go see the principal because you can't have your smartphone in here.

And in social media, in the age of electronics, instant gratification is just, you know, times 12. know, we talked earlier, we talked about TikTok and how people love to scroll those TikTok videos that are 15, 20, 30 seconds in length. And it's like, it's a dopamine rush that we just can't seem to tear ourselves away from. there's

There's time, there's a time and place for consuming social media, right? During college admissions, that's not it. You know, when you're interviewing for a job, you're on the debate team or you're playing football, basketball, baseball, whatever, whatever teams event that you're doing, you can't have your smartphone in your hand. You gotta put it down. You gotta learn how to interact away from that.

Hamada Zahawi (15:26.093)
No.

James Moffitt (15:44.8)
Right. And so it's all about finding balance. Right.

Hamada Zahawi (15:47.237)
Yeah, agreed agreed a hundred percent and I think and I think that that's exactly right. There's so many times I'm sure you've seen this too James when you go out to dinners and you just look at other people's tables and you watch like four of them engrossed in their phones and they're like well What is the point of going out if everybody's engrossed in their phones? And so for me I have the the habit of just taking my phone putting it backwards and putting it face down and then just completely ignoring it and on my watch Which is an Apple watch the only?

James Moffitt (15:51.118)
you

James Moffitt (16:00.12)
Right? Right.

Hamada Zahawi (16:14.371)
phone call that I will answer is it would be like my sister or my partner calling me to tell me, there's a disaster or a catastrophe. And that's pretty much it. So I fully subscribe to that notion. But I think you're right. I also say this as a corollary to that. Your social media is fair game when you're applying to schools. There is no reason a school cannot get involved and literally

James Moffitt (16:21.59)
Right. Right.

James Moffitt (16:39.149)
Right.

Hamada Zahawi (16:43.395)
take a look at your LinkedIn to see if it corroborates with your resume and the information you put in, or any of your social media handles, whether it's your ex, which we know now has haunted people and destroyed careers, or whether it's a TikTok or that, or whatever you've liked or whatever you've commented on, it's all fair game. And they tell you, and you pretty much, no, you don't have to opt into it. You have to opt out of it. And so most people don't even bother opting out of it. that's, your information's there for the taking.

James Moffitt (16:55.573)
sure.

Hamada Zahawi (17:12.547)
You've got to be so weary and so cautious. There's been so many people that we've seen, even clients that we've helped them say, listen, even if you scrub it, obviously if they dig deep, they're going to find it because it's all metadata. They can pull it back. It's archived. But you've got to scrub it. Do the best job you can before you start applying because they will go back and take a look at it. And so you have to be very weary of the brand. And that is a very important concept, James, that we constantly talk to people about. It's just what is your personal brand?

What are you projecting to your friends, to your family, to audiences, to admissions committees? What are you showing them? And your personal brand is very much founded in a lot of ways sadly by the social media you consume and especially the stuff you post proactively.

So.

James Moffitt (18:02.072)
Yeah, I have a friend of mine that's, I'm on a board of directors for a local nonprofit here in South Carolina. I'm a VP and one of the young attorneys that is on the board of directors with us now, he contacted, he was on my Liberty and Gun Rights podcast, I don't know, six months ago. Well, he was within Charleston School of Law.

And he was a third year law student and well now he's graduated. Now he's looking for a job as an attorney. So he wrote me an email and said, Hey, can we, can we like put push pause, unpublicize that podcast that I did with you because you know, I'm, applying for these law firms and they're going to be looking at all of my social media stuff. And he said, that's going to pop up. You know, I think he did a search and it was like the fourth thing on the list, you know,

So yeah, I went to the podcast, to the episodes, and I unpublished it for the time being until he finds a, you know, and he's a second amendment constitutional supporter like me, you know, that's a different podcast that I have and a very, very, you know, liberty and gun rights. It's, you know, we believe in people having the right to have liberty in their lives and less government.

Hamada Zahawi (18:55.128)
wow.

Hamada Zahawi (19:00.675)
Bro.

James Moffitt (19:22.422)
less government overreach, less taxation, yada yada yada, right? So being, I don't know what type of attorney he wants to, I if it's criminal, I don't know what it is, but he was very cognizant of the fact that that podcast episode probably would be better that it wasn't published while they were looking at his social media, right? And so.

Hamada Zahawi (19:46.957)
Yeah, the reality is you don't have an opportunity to explain yourself when you've already posted and it's already gone live on a number of fronts. And as I said, it's destroyed careers. It's really impacted a lot of people for good or for bad. So something to be very weary of in terms of the social media aspect of things. But let me kind of back up into kind of what I had spoken about. I think we were speaking about this kind of off top before we started.

One of the things I really kind of advocate for is something called living your story. And the living your story concept is if we know what schools are looking for, we just kind of mentioned a lot of those there. You know, compassion, being career oriented or at least focused on some kind of future. You know, having a sense of community oriented approach to things, leadership skills, teamwork, you know, these kind of things, these kind of factors.

If we know that these are the core things that schools look for, you aptly said being well-rounded, then what kind of extracurriculars, community-oriented services, things can you start to adopt in terms of your life so that you can start to create the brand that you can then use to apply to these schools? And the easiest litmus test that you can do, James and I'll say this to parents,

is let's just say hypothetically, one of your listeners has a son who really wants to go to, and I'm sorry, what state are you in? You said North Carolina, right? South Carolina, all right. So they want to go to that one, so it's called the University of Charleston. Is that one of the schools, yeah. Okay, so they want to go to the University of Charleston. One of the easiest things to do is go to the University of Charleston's application from last year, find out the essay questions that they asked.

James Moffitt (21:25.385)
South Carolina.

James Moffitt (21:30.574)
Yeah, that's one that's cool, yeah.

Hamada Zahawi (21:45.185)
and pretty much reverse engineer it. Can you answer this question today? And if you're applying in two to three years, supposing that the question isn't changed, but you get the general gist, you start to basically live those experiences. Now, one of the hardest experiences to live, which actually I have to say for folks out in South Carolina, I can imagine you guys are experiencing crazy weather conditions.

which constantly puts you guys on guard, which constantly requires that you guys are collaborating together to overcome these disasters. would imagine, again, I'm in California, so you can imagine from what I see. So there's gonna be a lot of folks, if they're really caring about the communities, volunteering for those kind of, in those events, fixing, repairing, undergoing, listening to people that have been through that. All of these challenges is what you wanna speak about. Those are the things you want to live, you wanna experience, you wanna embrace.

James Moffitt (22:18.904)
Yep. Yep.

Hamada Zahawi (22:39.341)
Because you will write about them in your applications. Because they want to find people who are resilient. People who have the ability to overcome hardships. Why? Because when you go into the real world, that's what you're gonna see. So they want students that have that ability. It won't break down in a puddle of tears when they receive a bad grade in school. Or when they have an altercation. You see what I'm saying? So these are all things that I think are very kind of important as they pertain.

to one's experiences and lived experiences. So that's an easy kind of hack. Go to the top five, 10 schools that you're really keen on. Figure out what are the top questions that they're asking and see if you can answer them. And if you can't, figuring out how you can have these lived experiences, these happenings, that'll allow you to be able to write more articulately, more authentically, and more comprehensively when you start applying to schools.

James Moffitt (23:36.942)
That's good stuff. having said all of that, we are looking for young adults who are well-rounded, that are not fighting huge battles with addiction or what other family complexities may be underlying, right?

So I would think that in order to do the things you're talking about, they need to be prepared for that mentally, emotionally, psychologically, right? And so a lot of, maybe not a lot of, but some parents that are in our private Facebook group, it used to be called failure.

A lot of people know it by failure to launch. had a guest on the other day, the day before last. She said she likes to call it lost in place instead. And I was like, well, that reminds me of lost in space. Danger, Will Robinson, danger. She laughed. But anyway, she said that failure to launch has a very negative connotation. And so she explained why she calls it lost in place. And so.

Hamada Zahawi (24:47.161)
Mmm.

Hamada Zahawi (24:54.19)
Hehehe.

James Moffitt (25:05.848)
talking about that, would think that young adults that are lost in place that are lacking direction or they don't have any immediate goals for their lives. know, employers like to ask you, where do you see yourself in five years from now? Right? Or give me a five minute elevator speech. You're riding the elevator up

Hamada Zahawi (25:31.097)
Hmm.

James Moffitt (25:32.334)
you know, the guy that's interviewing you to the floor you're going to. And he's like, okay, well, well, the doors are closed. Give me your best five minute interview, your elevator speech, right? Well, you can't be thinking of that up on the fly unless you're really super intelligent and you can do that sort of thing. So you really, you really kind of have to have something like that already developed, right? So I guess what I'm bringing to the surface is that

Hamada Zahawi (25:54.669)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

James Moffitt (26:02.034)
I think some of these parents have underlying issues that they're working through with their young adults that is going to make it a little more challenging to do these things. I'm not saying it's impossible. Anything's possible if you have the mindset, if you have a positive outlook on life, and you're willing to do the work, right?

Hamada Zahawi (26:26.252)
Yeah. So I'll tell you this. I say, you know, if you've gotten an addiction, you know, obviously you're not going to want to write about purely the addiction and leave it at that. There has to be a story arc. What do I mean by a story arc? James, I'm sure you're very familiar with this. Let's, let's go back to, let's use, let's use Star Wars. You start off with an action sequence, right?

James Moffitt (26:27.288)
So what do you?

James Moffitt (26:49.902)
Okay. Sure.

Hamada Zahawi (26:52.141)
Then you start developing the character, then you start developing the story once you fall in love with the character, then you reach a crescendo. In this case, know, Luke Skywalker's gotta make a decision. Does he continue being a citizen, Luke Skywalker? Does he become a Jedi? If he chooses to become a Jedi, the story continues and enter a guide. And who's the guide? Yoda. And what does Yoda do? Trains him to become a Jedi, and then at the end he defeats the evil empire. So that's a classic story arc. We love it. We've seen it in bazillions of movies, right?

James Moffitt (27:14.787)
So.

Hamada Zahawi (27:18.809)
Same thing here, somebody has a traumatic event. could have started small. It could have been like you said, parents are not prepared and so some, maybe the parent is addicted and so the child becomes addicted. Then you start learning more about the child's experience, lived experiences, than about their story and where they ended up into this crescendo. They've got to make a decision. The schools want to see that decision go one way the other. If they say, I've maintained my addiction with no way out and they ended on a sour note, well then.

James Moffitt (27:18.958)
Sure.

Hamada Zahawi (27:44.749)
why would the school take a gamble on that person? But if that person says, listen, I am still addicted, but I've tried so hard and I've mentored other people and I'm trying to do this and I'm working at that and I found Jesus or I found some other mechanism that allows me to somehow some way find salvation that gets me over this difficulty. Then the schools wanna see that because that shows the resilience, that shows facing challenges. So that's kind of how you even wanna approach your essays. You start off talking about an action to grab them in.

then talk about yourself, talk about your life, then talk about what decision you're making to go to that school, and then talk about why that school makes sense, but infusing it with your own life story. And that's what we call at Right Track, the ABCs of the personal statement. Attention grabber, background, career, Direction, educational institution, finale, A, B, E, F. And when you follow that trajectory, that track,

you're gonna be able to write a very compelling story, which is really how the schools are gonna meet you. Then if you're fortunate enough, they may call you in for an interview. And then at that point, we go back to what we talked about, you know, locking eyes, staying focused, not looking like you're kind of scrambled eggs and you have no idea what's going on in there, then that definitely helps. You also spoke about kind of like, how do the parents kind of get a little bit more involved to try to kind of reel their kid back, especially when they don't know the trajectory. Ask me right now.

James, what do I see myself in five years? I couldn't tell you. In fact, if you asked me five years ago where I would see myself today, I wouldn't have never guessed. And five years prior to that. And you're talking to a guy who's studied at Harvard, Cambridge, Berkeley Law, UCLA, you name it, I went there, worked with the US government doing international development law at some point. The point is, it all doesn't seem to make sense as you go forward, but as Steve Jobs says, the dots connect when look back.

But you've got to really believe in yourself and what you're doing and it starts to guide you. Much like this podcast. I would have never thought about it. I would land on a podcast with you in South Carolina. We've seen from disparately different worlds, but we can talk about something that's very common because we believe in something core, which is helping people along the path. And that's got to what you have to kind of believe in. One of the things, and I'm sure you're familiar with this, James's exposure therapy. Right? And I think a lot of

Hamada Zahawi (30:04.953)
Attic's deal with that right because I think I think one of the easiest ways to think about it I think somebody was telling me I don't smoke but somebody was like if you take an ashtray or a cup and you keep smoking in it and inhaling the smoke you're gonna get so disgusted by it over time at least this was back in the day they were doing this at some point to the point that when you smoke you just get grossed out from it and you stop or Those people that don't like to travel on the on flights, but you've got to put them in those situations So that exposure therapy gets them to acclimate the same kind of thing

If parents want their child to go to be more involved in their career, to have a better career path or a more clear career path, then the parent has to be more proactive to show them different careers. And that's where you start coming into like internships, shadowing experiences, exposure and so forth. So they can see it. Similar to you, you like having a person, if one of the parents came to you and says, I really want my kid or my kid's been showing interest in media.

They could sit there look at your podcast. They could participate. They could volunteer, helping you with sound, editing, and so forth for your podcast. That would introduce them to something that they didn't experience before. It could potentially lead them down the road to sound engineering or media or what have you.

James Moffitt (31:21.742)
That's good stuff. so what I'm, what I'm gathering from all of this, from our discussion, it's okay if your young adult is struggling in areas or whatever, right? As long as, as long as it's not a defining moment for them, as long as it's not, overwhelmingly, labeling them of, so you're struggling with addiction and right at this, at this point in your life, you may be, have been an addict.

But you're struggling and you are doing what you can to overcome that addiction. that's what people want to hear. In other words, are you going to get knocked down by that addiction and just lay there and grovel in it? Or are you going to fight and get up and take some baby steps to overcome that adversity, right? And that's what people want to hear is that. Okay, so you.

Who amongst us is perfect? None of us are perfect. We've all got issues. We've all got things that we have to overcome. Whatever, right? It's not.

Hamada Zahawi (32:24.406)
Good.

James Moffitt (32:33.134)
We'll see an analogy. One of the things that I tell people that are interviewing me for a position, I'm an IT specialist by trade. And I tell them, said, you're not looking for somebody that says, I know everything about technology. I know it all. You don't need to hire anybody else. Just hire me. And I tell them, I'm like, look, you just need to smile and thank them for coming in for the interview. And when they walk out the door, you

take that resume and you rip it up and you throw it in the trash because it's impossible for an IT person. Information technology is wide spectrum of specialties within it, right? Nobody can know everything. So what are employers looking for? They're looking for somebody that can think on their feet, that knows how to find the answer if they don't have it. Talk to your teammates, Google, chat DBT, being resourceful.

Hamada Zahawi (33:14.467)
Mm-hmm. Right.

Right. Mm-hmm. 100%.

being resourceful.

James Moffitt (33:30.53)
Right? And that's what you're looking for. You're not, you're not looking for somebody that's going to have a problem and go, well, I don't know how to solve that. So you just have to call somebody else, you know.

Hamada Zahawi (33:40.193)
And to that point, it's exactly why James, think people who have had life struggles, addictions and so forth, are probably gonna, I mean, especially if they've been able to overcome it effectively, are probably gonna make better employees than those that haven't. Because they've had to be resourceful, they've had to be strong, they've endured hell, right? And so I think they make for better people, employees, or people leading companies. I mean, you see them, you constantly see those things, like I went through hell to get to heaven.

James Moffitt (33:52.909)
Right.

James Moffitt (33:56.899)
Right.

James Moffitt (34:06.195)
All right.

Hamada Zahawi (34:06.551)
Right? And so that just makes for a much better narrative. And the reality too is I always tell students there's a mnemonic that we use for at Right Track. It's called slash for how to really succeed in college. The first one by, and by no design is social S because you really got to work on it. We talked about EQ, we talked about social skills because when you go to class, 10 bucks says,

James Moffitt (34:30.03)
you

Hamada Zahawi (34:35.853)
You're going to forget every class and everything you studied within about a year or two or three years out. You just will, inevitably. But you won't forget the friends you've made, the community that you've built. So be social is super, super important. L, leadership. Take on, like we talked about, a mile deep and an inch wide. Take on one or two organizations in college and really, really lean into them so that you can show an impact and a change because it will give you the confidence to pursue leadership in the future.

James Moffitt (34:41.24)
Right. Right.

Hamada Zahawi (35:04.825)
A for academics, that's obviously, and that's more to teach you the ability to be consistent and to take accountability and ownership towards finishing something. Starting a class, finishing a class, getting a good grade, right? S for me at least, which is very important, and I think really for a lot of people, especially in America where about 20, 25 % I think of Americans have passports, is study abroad. It's so important because it allows you to interact with people. How do people see Americans?

How do you see yourself abroad? And that also teaches you core skills of adaptability. Goes back to resourcefulness, right? And then finally, H-Health, which really lands squarely in terms of what your podcast is about in many ways, which is about mental health and physical health. And when you're in college, if you neglect that, you know, people say, oh, you have the freshman 15. That's a cop out. No, you don't need to get freshman 15 if you really believe in yourself and you love yourself and you're willing to really invest in your body as a temple.

So you really work out, you make it into a habit. When I was in college, I think I took Jitsu, golf, salsa dancing, I mean, you name it, I did it just to kind of try different things, because it was available for us, right? So these are just kind of some things to think about, it kind of really brings a lot of what we talked about into one way of kind of thinking about it to maximize the college experience and really kind of what you should be preparing yourself for.

James Moffitt (36:28.674)
Good.

So.

talking to parents of young adults that are gearing up to their thinking about college. They may have some aspirations. They may have a career track in mind. I want to be a doctor. I want to be a lawyer. I want to be a police officer. I want to be a neurosurgeon, you know, whatever, whatever that might be, whatever's kind of fancy gotten their fancy. So in five minutes or less, in a summary, what would you tell parents?

Hamada Zahawi (37:04.025)
So one of the things that we do, let's just say the parents came to us and said, hey, we need help following that exact guidance. We have something called SEED, Secondary Education Extracurricular Development. The first thing we do, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't work for everybody, is we start with a psychometric test. And I think you can do these, again, there's off the shelf psychometric tests for your kids that you can do. And I say kids loosely as in like teenagers. So you give that to them and they suddenly, as you go through the psychometric testing, they start to start.

gravitating towards certain areas that start to make more sense. Like I was a history and policy minor. That's why I went to law school. That's why I went to policy school. So I gravitated more towards the humanities, more towards communication, as you can tell something I very much lean into and I love. And so that's where my quote unquote zone of genius is, is really in communication, understanding policy and politics and so forth. And so that's what the psychometric test can do. So that could start you off on that track. Then you want to kind of sit back and start dividing up

what makes for the whole high school experience, whether again, it's about the activities you're taking, the groups of students you're involved in, the community activities you're involved in, how to find the right recommenders, and start building that up. So it's not overwhelming, but you're building it up in sequence, which is kind of what we do again with Seed for our clients and Compass, which again is about orientation and mentorship for college. And so what we do is we just kind of build their

their trajectory up in modules, in stages that can really help them out in terms of figuring out how to design and create the best profile. That to me is really what parents can start doing early on. Then, the easy low-hanging fruit, you're gonna be like, come on, but that's still a little bit confusing. Well, obviously, James, that's why we exist, right? Our company and other companies out there that guide students, that's why college counselors exist, because they're meant to do that lifting, not just the parent. But where the parent shines,

James Moffitt (38:53.486)
All

Hamada Zahawi (39:00.153)
is taking their kids out of their status quo and exposing them. And one easy way of doing that, James, is obviously road trips. That was the best part of COVID. If I could say there was the best part of COVID is doing those trips to all those incredible national parks and those beautiful cities. I drove literally from New York down to South Carolina and then cut across to Georgia, then into Tennessee. I did a road trip there so I can see the beautiful Charleston and so forth.

But exposing them and getting them to be outside of their status quo and increase their life happenings is what you want to do as a parent. And take them on school trips, like what do they call those college tours. So you take them to all the different universities so they start socializing and seeing other students. They start socializing and experiencing, maybe auditing a class and so on and so forth. So those are the kind of things I would really ask parents to do.

James Moffitt (39:45.838)
Right?

Hamada Zahawi (39:58.369)
is don't be shy from doing that for your kids, is really go out there. Take them on those national parks, take them on those adventure trips, take them on college tours, and you're gonna start seeing your kid hopefully less and less focused on their phone and the status quo and their comfort, and more and more on seeing their future kind of mapped out before them.

James Moffitt (40:03.566)
Sure.

James Moffitt (40:18.446)
Good, that's wonderful. Let me ask you a couple of questions. How does a strong personal narrative impact critical life transitions?

Hamada Zahawi (40:29.849)
And that really comes down to how first of all the way we designed that storytelling chart That will help you because if you have a strong narrative that you're able to kind of flesh out to surface You can take that and put it onto that map to create that kind of application material that you're gonna need to get into those top schools, so by Thinking through your life experiences and one way to do that

And I wrote, as I said, I think I said earlier, I wrote a book called The College Admissions Mastery Guide. A good chunk of that really devotes itself to the brainstorming, thought creation, story crafting process of how do you take a strong, how do you develop a strong narrative? And I think that's important. And I definitely encourage your listeners to check out that guide. can send you the link to it because it starts to help you take all your life happenings, piecing it together.

Finding a thread amongst and making that into remember that five minute elevator speech actually It's probably mostly like 60 seconds really that all you get that's the only attention you're gonna get so you start to develop it until you that narrative becomes your personal brand to become so strong that then you're able to then Map it out over that story arc and now you've taken designed a narrative Built it out put into a story arc and applied it to an application. So that's how you do it

James Moffitt (41:34.2)
Right, right.

James Moffitt (41:52.558)
Okay. How can parents help adult children select education paths in shifting job markets?

Hamada Zahawi (42:03.053)
And that goes back to the future plan, the future proofing, which again, I wrote a chapter last year on it because I just started seeing so much more of it. let's, you know, example, again, your son's a lawyer that, you know, and I'm a lawyer that is cause for concern because there's so much disruption to the legal field. So you've got to sit back and say, okay, what are my zones of genius? My superpowers are those superpowers in a way that are going to become so repetitive that they'll be overtaken by AI. If they are, how can I overcome? And the way

One of the ways that we've spoken about quite a few times on this podcast is the EQ is the idea of developing that. So parents should be talking to their adult children about how they can develop at their core, at their foundation, strong EQ. Because even if their career shifts, if they have strong EQ, people will rely on them. They'll be loyal to them. They'll recommend them. And they can always upskill, right? And they can always...

What do call it? What's the other term? There's upscaling and there's also like retooling themselves to as long as they have core materials like you have you're an IT specialist what you did 10 years ago or 20 years ago is completely different what you did now, but you have at your core a basis and you're able to build on that so you can constantly adapt and be resourceful and You're pursuing this passion project of doing these podcasts which leans into your EQ So you've effectively done what people should be doing at our age, you know hedge Pursue passion project on the side

build up, let those muscles build up certain skills like public speaking, like communication, so forth, while also building skills that are not so, so, so, so niche that they could be overtaken by AI, especially if that niche that they pursued is repeatable and something that's automatable.

James Moffitt (43:52.815)
What insights from your own struggles can reassure parents of adult children today?

Hamada Zahawi (43:58.595)
I think one of the biggest things I had to overcome was a, what do they call that? It's called a, it's like an inferiority complex. It's an inferiority complex, think what they would call imposter syndrome. Because when I was applying to colleges, I had a really poor SAT score. When I was applying to law school, I had a really poor LSAT score. When I applied to grad school, I had a poor GRE score. And those things really made me feel like, wow, I'm not gonna be able to get into these top universities.

and I had to find a way of doing it. Thankfully, I was able to do well in school, in college, because I fell in love with my major, history and political science, so I was able to do well. But also, I really focused on the story. And because I was very fortunate to have life happenings that allowed me to weave together a story that allowed me to stand out to get into one of the top 10 law schools in America, Berkeley. So that, I think, is my own struggle and how I overcame it is I didn't let that struggle define me. We've heard that said many times.

And instead I said, okay, I know I could not defeat these standardized tests. So what else can I do? And that's really when I leaned into the story crafting process and really designing my life experiences and my extracurriculars to really shine and allow myself to be attractive to those schools.

James Moffitt (45:18.158)
That's wonderful. Amada, I appreciate you being on the podcast today. I think you've shared some very important information that are going to, that's going to be very usable to parents of adult children. And as they get ready for the transition from, you know, high school, middle school, high school into, into hopefully college, if that's the way they want to go. and, and, do you have a copy of that book that you can show us?

Hamada Zahawi (45:46.423)
Yeah, so I will send you the link. The link basically is collegeadmissionsmasterycourse.com. So all word, nothing changed there, collegeadmissionsmasterycourse.com. You can also find it if you go to our website, which is righttrackadmissions, W-R-I-T-T-R-A-C-K, admissions.com. And in that book, what I really love about it is I just took 17 years of insights and put it together. And it's not just made for 12th graders, it's made for even those who are in ninth grade, 10th grade.

trying to figure out their life path. If college is right for them, you mentioned that, not everybody is gonna go to college. Some people wanna go to trade school, vocational school, become experts. You could become an IT specialist and focus on vocational training. You can go to the military and focus on being an IT specialist and then graduate and have the GI bill to take you wherever. So college is not the only way, but our goal in life, James, you and I, and that's why we kind of connected over this podcast, is about giving people a purpose. Just have a purpose.

If you have a purpose in whatever you do, and if the purpose is good and gives back to people, honestly, that's all God and that's all we can ask for. So that's it. Amen to that.

James Moffitt (46:52.471)
Amen.

That's wonderful. All right, so the listening audience, I'm going to say thank you for the privilege of your time. Thank you for listening to this podcast episode. You can listen to the podcast episode on Amazon Music, iHeartRadio, Public Radio, Apple Podcasts. Most of, I think 80 % of my listening audience comes from Apple. So if you listen to one of the podcast episodes and you like it, you can write there on your smartphone, you can click on the podcast and leave a review. And some people have done that and I appreciate that.

Leaving a review will encourage others to listen and share the podcast with others as well. I upload a video podcast episode on Rumble. That's R-U-M-B-L-E. That's a conservative alternative to YouTube. Our website is parentingadultchildren.org. website provides contact information, upcoming show

schedules. You can also leave a review. There's a review tab at the top. You can click on there and you can leave a review for whatever podcast episode you liked. You can write me an email, leave me a voicemail, and I'll get back with you. And I release a new episode every Friday morning at eight o'clock. So thank you for listening and everybody have a wonderful day. And thank you for being on the podcast. Okay.

Hamada Zahawi (48:17.369)
Thank you, James.