10 great things to do during this down time

Hey, Student Leader. Bored yet?

You've opened your gifts, and you've seen three movies at the theaters since you got home. Saturday night with your high school friends proved that one night with them is sufficient. What are you going to do this week other than watch Anderson Cooper and Kathy Griffin on CNN Thursday night?

Here are 10 useful ideas.

10. Connect with your mentors. You know... those people you always turn to when you're in the ditch but who get very little love from you when everything's going well? Yeah, those people. How about sending them a note, letting you know what's going on in your life and wishing them a happy new year. Maybe you could thank them for always being there for you.

9. Read something that isn't a text book. Get thyself to the library or to Barnes and Noble, and pick up something engrossing that you can spend a little time with this week. Maybe a biography of someone who's been successful in your chosen field? Or perhaps just a fun, trashy book. Just because you don't have to read, doesn't mean you shouldn't.

8. Set some goals for the second half of the academic year. This quiet time, away from the daily pressures, is a great time to evaluate the progress of your year and make some midstream adjustments.

7. Spend some time with a loved one. Take grandma out for breakfast. So sale shopping at Bass Pro Shops with your dad. Spend some time with the people in your life who willingly take a back seat 96-percent of the time. We'll be dead soon, and you'll wish you'd paid attention to us instead of texting 2,000 times with your college friends.

6. Brush up the resume. Before you know it, you'll be looking for that summer job or internship. Work on the resume now, while you have time to do it thoughtfully.

5. Choose three charities and send them each a tiny donation. This is something many of us out here in the real world with real world taxes do the last week of each year. Even if it's only $5 or $10 each, pick three charities that deserve your support, and write them a little check. It's a good habit to get into now, and charities are having a rough year. Every little bit helps. Here are three that I gave to this year, if you need some ideas: here, here, and here.

4. Make a dental appointment. Seriously, when's the last time you had those things cleaned? Your mom and dad will be impressed, too.

3. Clean your car. That thing is disgusting. You can go to the car wash to clean the exterior, but do the interior yourself. Change out the CD's in there. Clean out the junk in your glove box. Use some glass cleaner on those windows. Starting the new year with a clean car is good for the soul.

2. Box up high school. It's time to put the past where it belongs... in boxes in the basement or in the trash can. OK, you can save the pictures, but really... that stupid glass from 10th grade Homecoming? Time to go. If you carry more than 2 boxes of junk from high school with you past college graduation, you've got problems. Plus, Mom would probably really like to start using your room as a guest room anyway, and that Gnarls Barkley poster ain't helpin'.

1. Go to the gym, every day until you have to go back to school. Personal health is found in the establishment of routines. Maybe if you go every day between now and the drive back to school you'll be a bit more motivated to make time for the gym when the semester starts. The gym is a great escape from the stresses of daily life, and you could probably use more of those opportunities in the course of your hectic semester. Take this week to remind yourself of how good it feels to run for 30 minutes, swim a lap, or play basketball with strangers.

And yes, I know, I need to do #1 myself. Yes, I know.

Have a terrific new year.

Avoiding dump trucks

I am an answers guy. I like to solve problems. Like many of you, I'm the guy who steps up with solutions. I have gotten to where I am by being the guy who takes a challenge and meets it. When someone complains, my first instinct is to brainstorm possibilities.

No problem is unsolvable! Cue the Superman music.

The bad part of being that kind of person, however, is that people love to lay their problems at your feet. The complainers, the whiners, the helpless incompetents – you are their best friend. When their love life is a disaster, you provide good ideas for fixing things. When they haven't done an adequate job on a task, you pull a last-minute solution that saves their ass. When things are hard, you are willing to get in there and help them manage.

These "dump trucks" come to you to fix things. They come because you kick them into gear. They come to you because "you always know just what to do."

And, it's exhausting.

If you don't figure out a way to repel some of this problem dumping behavior, you're going to spend the rest of your life solving other people's issues, taking on their stress, and sharing responsibility for their failures. One of the toughest things I've had to learn to do is to simply hold back on the impulse to help the dump trucks in my life. The minute someone complains about something, my brain goes into turbo autopilot. Left to my natural devices, I would start developing an action plan with them before they finish their sentence.

It takes all of my willpower to keep my mouth shut and simply say...

Hmm. I don't know. What do you think you should do?

As an experiment, try it for a week (or a month!). When a dump truck complains, or is worried about something, or has her weekly crisis, ask her a bunch of questions.

What ideas have you thought of?
What solutions have you ruled out?
So, what choices does that leave you?
What do you think should be done first?
What's your best idea for how to move forward?

When you try this out, you will find that people fall into a couple of different categories.

There are those dump trucks who can keep control of their payload. These are the ones who actually have an idea they want to knock around and who probably just need validation. They have ideas, and they're just afraid to be wrong. Or, they are missing something, and they feel unsure. When you ask them "What do you think?" they will venture a tentative answer. We like these people because they actually have put some thought into a problem before dropping it at our toes. For these people, a little encouragement, validation, or a conversation to flush out a solution is all they need.

It's the second group of dump trucks you need to worry about – those who give you a blank stare. These people are dumping their payload at your feet before you even know what's in the truck. Their idea of searching for a solution is to simply dump it on you and make you a party to the problem. They throw their hands in the air and act like the whole world is hopeless.

Just say, "Hmm. I don't know. What do you think?"

And that's all you give them. No dumping here, damn it! The really persistent ones will reply with, "I don't know what to think. That's why I came to you."

Hold your ground, even though your problem-solving brain is throwing a million good ideas at the inside of your mouth. Hold back. Don't solve their problem. They won't love you more for solving their problem.

"I have no idea either. That's a tough one," you'll say. "I'll think about it. Let me know when you get some ideas and we'll bat them around."

The person will probably be annoyed, ask why you aren't being helpful, and then they'll drive their dump truck to someone else's house. Worst case scenario: they stop dumping their problems on you and dump them on others. Best case scenario: they take more responsibility for solving their own problems.

When people are asked to take responsibility for solving problems themselves (with you just offering some encouragement), then they stop making their problems your problems. When you can help people do that, you've truly achieved a student leadership milestone.

The wrong and right things to say when a friend suffers a loss

Grief is a perfectly natural and healthy emotion. All of us will suffer losses in our lives – deaths, loss of jobs, relationship breakups, ends of addictions, and more. Yet, we live in a culture that is profoundly uncomfortable with grief, and we Americans hate feeling uncomfortable. When we have someone near us devastated by a loss, most of us look for the exit. We don't know what to say, or what to do, so we retreat.

For Millennials that ends relationships by text messages, avoiding uncomfortable contact is a generational norm. The sad part is that a Tweet that says, "Sorry your father died. Let me know if I can help" just doesn't cut it when you have a friend in real emotional pain.

I want to give you some ideas of the wrong things to say. Then at the end, I'll tell you the right thing to do. As usual, the correct answer is quite simple.

When we see someone suffering from a loss, our impulse is to say something that will help make the pain go away. We try to say something to cheer them up, divert their attention to something more hopeful, turn them away from the acute pain they feel. We do everything but validate the fact that they are suffering, because suffering makes us uncomfortable. Some examples of wrong things to say when someone is grieving:

"He's in a better place now..."
A favorite of the religious, but not very helpful. Even if the grieving person believes in heaven, he or she can simultaneously believe that their loved one is in a better place and feel horrible about losing the person in this world.

"At least her pain has ended..."
That's like telling someone who lost a finger that they still have nine. Yeah, duh... but I still lost a finger! No one wants their loved one to suffer, but that doesn't mean that the death of that person is any less of a loss.

"Thank God you're both young and can have other children..."
The most hideous thing you can say to someone who has lost a child or suffered a miscarriage. The person is grieving what they lost, and the promise of some future opportunity doesn't change the fact that he/she just lost something incredibly important right now. What you're saying might be true, but it's not helpful.

"You'll bounce back..."
Optimism is wonderful, but when someone has lost a job or has watched their house burn down, they are feeling loss in the moment. Looking forward is a good strategy for later, but for now, they are feeling sad and defeated. You need to honor today's emotion.

"We'll go to the store and get you a new puppy this weekend..."
You don't address a person's loss by offering them an immediate replacement. You wouldn't tell someone whose grandmother just died that you're going to take them to a nursing home and find them a new old lady. Then why would you tell a friend who just broke up with her boyfriend that you're going to take her out to meet hot guys at the bar this weekend? Let the person mourn the loss they just suffered. Finding an immediate replacement for what was lost is not productive for anyone. In fact, it's actually detrimental. Thinking someone will bond with a new puppy when they are acutely missing the pet they just lost is counter-productive.

"I know how you feel..."
No, you don't. I don't care if you went through a similar loss a week ago – every person's loss is unique because it involves the loss of a unique emotional relationship. Two siblings who just lost their father can feel it in completely different ways, based on the emotional relationship each had with their father. How can you know how the person feels when they are struggling to understand how they feel?

So, what's the right thing to say?

The key to helping a friend who is suffering a loss is to simply give him a safe place to express how he feels, no matter how sad, ugly, angry, immature, or hopeless that emotion might be. Let the person feel whatever they need to feel at the moment, and just listen. Comfort them by being there and caring. Most of the time you don't need to say much at all.

When someone near me suffers a death of someone close, I usually just ask them to tell me about the person. Or, I'll simply ask, "What happened?" Then I shut up and let them talk. I let them feel sad and upset. That's the natural emotion to feel when you lose someone, so I let them feel it. I've had several friends in recent years lose their jobs, or get seriously bad medical diagnoses. I just ask them how they feel. I let them vent. I let them tell me what fears dominate their minds at the moment. I don't worry about turning their attention to job search techniques or advances in chemotherapy in that moment... I just let them be pissed, scared, or angry.

Shut up and listen. Don't try to do anything. Don't feel compelled to cheer them up. Just listen and be there for them. That's what you do in the short term.

In the long term, after the initial loss, you want to help your friend "recover." I strongly recommend a very small, easy read called The Grief Recovery Handbook by John W. James and Russell Friedman. It's an amazing book that I've read a dozen times and have given to friends suffering with unresolved grief many times over the years. They just came out with a 20th anniversary updated edition, and it's wonderful.

The "post risk management era" for fraternities and sororities, Part One

I entered the fraternity and sorority world about the time that the risk management mania began. I joined my fraternity in 1987, and I went to work at the fraternity headquarters in 1988. These were the years when kegs were banned, FIPG came about, and undergraduate members of fraternities and sororities began paying steep annual insurance premiums.

My second job out of college was as the national coordinator of GAMMA, Greeks Advocating Mature Management of Alcohol, and I was kept very busy helping Greek communities respond to risk management policies. Most Greek communities had speakers visit to promote risk management practices. For quite a while, most men's national fraternities hired lawyers as their executive directors. Publications like Fraternal Law became must reads for campus advisors.

The last 20 years of fraternity and sorority life can be aptly called "the risk management era." The emphasis was on rules and policy adherence. It dominated everything: chapter services strategies, fraternity education, volunteer training and duties, consultant training, board meetings, etc.

Someone a lot smarter than I will write a book about this, and I'm sure opinions will vary on whether or not it was a good, important era, or a harmful one. Was there any net benefit? Some will say that fraternities and sororities grew stronger during this time. The values congruence crowd will continue to crow about how risk management draws us closer to the values we were founded upon (a weak argument, I'd say). Others will say fraternities and sororities lost their fun, their innocence, and their relevance. One thing for sure, lawyers and insurance agents made a lot of money. Yet, students are still dying from alcohol poisoning and hazing on a regular basis.

In any case, I believe everyone is ready to move on. FIPG is now older than most of the student leaders taking the reins of our chapters. Most fraternity and sorority advising professionals have never known anything different – as professionals, or as students. Just about everything that can be said or created around the idea of risk management has been done.

Risk management isn't going away, for sure. As long as there are people falling out of windows at fraternity parties, risk management will be in the picture.

But, things are changing. I can feel it. I can see it as I visit campuses and attend leadership conferences. As I sat with some fraternity staff members at a luncheon last week, they asked me what I thought was on the horizon for the nation's fraternities and sororities. I told them that I wasn't sure, but that I thought that whatever is next is going to come from the students, not from the national organizations.

I believe that after nearly two decades of being told how fraternities and sororities should operate, should look, and what values they should seek to represent, students are ready to innovate.

To be continued...

Stop desecrating your composites

I was recently hosted by a very nice, very impressive sorority chapter. They were wonderful hosts. Prior to my presentation, I had dinner at their sorority house, and leaning against a living room wall was a fraternity composite.

The composite was from one of the local fraternities, dated 1993-1994. I got up to take a look at the old clothes and hairstyles. I noticed that the glass had a gigantic crack in it, and the frame was heavily scratched and banged up.

"What's this doing here," I asked?

"Oh, we steal theirs, they steal ours. They're all over the house," replied one woman. "I bet we have one from almost every fraternity on campus."

I noted that the sorority's current composite was enclosed in a very large, locked container lit by lights in their foyer. "Why is it that you take such great care of your current composite, but you could care less about the old ones?"

The woman looked at me strangely. "We need them for recruitment, I guess," was her best answer. "The guys don't care about their old composites, and we have so many of our own, we don't have anywhere to put them anyway."

For many students, they're a joke. Funny names, odd hair. Old. They break them, throw them in closets, steal them from other chapters. I am willing to bet that many find their way to the dumpster every year from damage caused by neglect.

Undergraduates at many campuses should be ashamed of the way they treat old composites.

First thing, these things are incredibly expensive. Thousands of dollars. Those who came before you paid a steep price for those, and they expected you to care for them. Second, they are incredibly sentimental to your alumni. I love walking into my fraternity house at Indiana and looking at the composites from my years, remembering the names, faces and bad haircuts. While they might seem ridiculous to you, they are awesome to me.

I was devastated a few years ago when I visited my own chapter and no one knew what had become of the composite my fellow founding fathers and I had made in 1987. That's right – the founding composite! Missing in action. Nothing but shrugged shoulders when I asked.

Councils across the country should immediately ban the desecration of composites, and the young men and women who are currently the stewards of their chapters should start acting with a bit more respect toward them. They are your history. Those faces mean something to those of us who made it possible for you to be in the chapter today.

I wish every alumni IFC or Panhellenic across the country would immediately rent a huge storage unit, confiscate all the old composites from the undergraduate chapters, and keep them under lock and key. Where alumni councils don't exist, the university should ask for them. There are services available for composite restoration, by the way. Then, when it was time for class reunions or significant anniversaries, we could pull them out and display them.

Perhaps then, undergraduates would respect them more.

Take the has-been high road

You finished your term in office. You passed the gavel, and the pressure is off. All those crazy problems are no longer yours. If you've done your job, you made sure the transition was an effective one with lots of inside advice and an offer to be available for questions. With a wink of good luck and a small dose of empathy, you handed over the monster to the new officer.

You're free! Congrats. You can now head home – or wherever – for some true down time. Less stress, no more complaints, more free time.

For some of you, you'll be moving on to another leadership position. Perhaps you've signed on to lead a council or another student organization that has nothing to do with your previous leadership position. New challenges await.

But for others, you'll come back in January with no specific student leadership responsibilities. You'll just be "Joe Member" of your organization. A has-been. That can either be really great, or it can be really confusing. A few bits of advice.

Please, please, please... do not be an obstructionist former officer. The last thing the new leaders need is your open criticism of everything they try to do. Keep your mouth shut and let them try their new ideas, make their mistakes, and face their struggles. It's tough being a student leader, and your meddling can make it worse. If you can't say anything nice, then just shut up. Yes, you might be right. Yes, you might have made a better choice. But, it's not your turn.

If you choose to hang around, then lend a hand on a project or area of the organization that desperately needs some attention. Raise some money, work with the alumni, do some public relations, paint the basement, clean up the constitution and bylaws. You're not in charge any longer, but you can still be useful. Make a contribution without getting in the way of the new leaders. Set an example for other members that membership means stewardship of the organization, whether or not you're in a leadership seat.

Show up to things. Your year as a leader doesn't give you a pass to skip everything from here forward. Take an interest in the youngest members of your organization, and help shape their experience in a positive way. Again, you're setting an example.

Support the new person even when it hurts. When people in your organization dislike something the new officer does, the first thing they will do is look at you. Don't roll the eyes, don't make clever criticisms. Even if you disagree, your most critical response should be something like, "If you guys don't like what he's doing, then go talk to him and work with him for a better solution." Don't add fuel to a fire by encouraging dissent. It doesn't make you look smarter or cooler to stir the pot – it just makes you look like a pain in the ass.

Go find another place to be useful. Join another student organization. Volunteer. Make some new friends. Sometimes, former officers become a negative, toxic presence in their organizations because they are bored, under-utilized, and are struggling with a lack of validation. When that happens, you start becoming the in-house critic of everything. Don't go down that path.

Former presidents of the United States are good role models for how you should act. They reserve criticism. They help if they are called upon, even if they aren't particularly fond of their replacement. They work on their own projects (their libraries, for instance) without getting in the way of the new leader. When encouraged to criticize by the press, they pinch their lips.

Like them, be classy about being a former leader. It's the has-been high road.

Don't just meet to meet

I'm headed to a very important professional conference next week. I am literally designing my own spreadsheet schedule because I have so many appointments. I might have to schedule pee breaks.

Needless to say that there will be a lot of meetings. Like many people, I am fine with meetings when there is a purpose and some progress, and I hate them when they are utterly useless. I am the king of excusing myself and leaving if there's not some progress after about 15 minutes.

If you can't get things moving in a valuable direction after 15 minutes, I'll excuse myself and find a better way to be productive. I know it sounds harsh, but ladies and gentlemen, time is money.

As a student leader, you probably attend a lot of meetings – some that you are responsible for and many others that you are simply expected to attend. Take an inventory of your current schedule of meetings and evaluate if they are worthy uses of your time.

I reject the idea that all meetings are necessary. They're not. If the person in charge of a meeting doesn't respect your time enough to make the meeting productive, you don't owe your attendance. Rather than make excuses for skipping the meetings, or sitting there in a haze wasting your time week after week, confront the person holding the meetings and make suggestions for how the meeting could be changed.

Be part of the solution.

Can the meeting be shorter? It's amazing how many people default to an hour meeting, because that just seems like the right amount of time. Let's make it 30 minutes and see what that does.

Can it be held less often or on a non-regular schedule? Why weekly? Let's change it to once a month, or maybe just twice in October. Schedule these meetings with purpose and justification.

Can fewer people be invited so that it's only key decision makers? Maybe we need two meetings: one for those who make decisions and one general meeting each month to just keep the membership in the loop.

If the meeting is mostly for political purposes (i.e., making the Dean of Students feel "in the loop"), can that be accomplished another way?

Can the agenda be restructured?

If the host of the meeting never starts on time, confront that also. Assist the host of the meeting by publicly making a request to participants that they show up on time, and then be a role model by making sure you're on time.

Suggest to the host that he/she sends out an email 48 hours prior to the meeting to focus participants on three key issues for the meeting.

I'm not a fan of meetings that try to be both social and business. Choose. If you want me to conduct business, then have a meeting and make it productive. If you want to serve a social purpose, then have a social event, advertise it that way, and I'll show up with bells on my toes. Meetings that try to blend the two usually end up being neither fun nor productive – they just feel disorganized and unfocused. Yes, meetings can be fun and light, and people can enjoy being around each other and interacting, but if you're calling a meeting it needs to yield something.

And, most of all, make sure that you never attend a meeting unless the host specifies an end time. Demand it. An end time allows you and the other participants to structure your day or evening more effectively.

I need to also suggest to you that you evaluate the meetings that YOU host. Are you wasting people's time? Are you starting and ending on time? Are you accomplishing anything, or just meeting to meet? Are your meetings interactive, or is it just people sitting and listening? Before you can ask others to improve their meetings, you need to step up and set the example.

If you haven't discovered it yet, time is one of your most valuable resources. When people waste your time, they hurt your morale, and that hurts your organization. Take charge.


For a good article on "Making Meetings Matter" go here.