Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to the Blueprint brought to you by Brilliant Pathways. I'm your host, Manny Tejeda. In this Forward Thinking podcast, we explore the evolving challenges and opportunities in preparing students for college and career success, offering expert insights, actionable strategies, and real life stories to help listeners better support young people as they draw their future.
Today, we're talking about something that shows up in every part of life, but we rarely name it directly. Influencing. Whether you're a teacher, counselor, student leader, or a partner in the community, you are influencing young people every day.
How they think, what they believe is possible, and which path they choose to follow.
Joining me today we have Leroy Nesbith, former VP of Multicultural affairs at Middlebury College.
He's worked in the education space for 35 years, as a professor, as a teacher, as administrator, as a program leader. He's a graduate of Howard Law, where he taught before joining Brayling Pathways as a program director in 2002. Leroy, welcome to the Blueprint.
[00:01:17] Speaker B: Good to be here. Thank you, Manny.
[00:01:20] Speaker A: So, leroy, we started with the topic of influencing, but let's go back to the basics. What is influencing in your words?
[00:01:29] Speaker B: Influencing in the contemporary context sends us to think about what's going on with social media and quote, unquote, influencers. But the word influencing and the activity of influencing people goes back to hundreds of years.
Its Latin meaning literally is to flow. To flow.
And in about the 17th century, someone, a philosopher, kind of put a handle on what it was.
Hemi Moore described the word as someone who exerts a powerful effect.
Someone who exerts a powerful effect.
So influencing is something that, that affects behaviors.
And we're bringing influencing in the college
[00:02:19] Speaker A: career space as you think about, obviously in the college and career space.
So it sounds like it's moving from students saying college isn't for people like me to I can find a pathway that fits or the system is the way it is to we can build something better together. Is that correct?
[00:02:42] Speaker B: It is. And what we found at Brilliant Pathways is that we did a lot of advising and talking to students, and that's important work.
There is much information that young people need to be college and career ready.
But our biggest aim, our biggest goal is to have them adopt behaviors and practices that put them on the pathway to college and career success.
And what we realized was that in addition to advising, we needed to do influencing. Now, I'll admit that social media got us thinking about this, but this is not about social media.
This is a classic application of an idea to impact how young people behave. And let me give you an example, an easy example of how this is developing is, let's say, Know how to Go.
Know how to Go with a campaign in the 1990s sponsored by the Department of Education, was very successful. Its aim was to make sure that students knew the basics about moving from high school to college. The process, basics and information was presented by knowledgeable people and materials to teach students that.
That's wonderful. But what we realized with Know how to Go was that there were many students who were internalizing the information in ways that caused them to be college and career ready and do the things that the curriculum asked them to do.
So influencing approaches it a little bit different.
Instead of saying, in order to prepare for college, you need to take the satisfaction, you need to get good grades, you need to have certain academic requirements completed. Influence approaches it differently.
Influencing approaches it by exposing students to ideas, exposing students to people who have the knowledge, providing inspiration for them to adapt and learn on their own the behaviors we want them to emulate.
What we believe is that advising is cool, but influencing is going to be a key piece moving forward.
One of the things that influencing is affected by is the change in generation of Generation Alpha. And I want to talk about that for a moment.
Many of you know that Generation Alpha are young people born between 2010 and 2025.
They are a digital generation.
They are a generation that has seen historical shifts, and they're a generation that has learned to take in and evaluate information differently than other generations.
They are very much a generation to be influenced.
They're informed, they're inquisitive, and they've learned to develop instincts about what they believe they should do based upon how they learn.
So what we're finding in Brilliant Pathways is that for Generation Alpha, we may be much more effective in communicating and helping them develop college and career behaviors by empowering individuals within their communities as influencers, as people who have authority, as people who have gravitas, as people who young people trust for advice and direction.
And for those people, it is not that these conversations, these engagements are multifaceted.
Influencing can be as much informing students about resources and directing them to things that will help them develop these college and career pathways as it is about telling them how to do it.
[00:07:26] Speaker A: So I'm glad that you brought up the social media piece because this isn't about social media clout, right? It's about mission driven influence, moving hearts, minds in systems in service of students, which is very different from obviously the other definition of influencing, especially in social media, where we might use social media to exemplify how this work is happening. But we're not using it to influence our opinion specifically about anything rather than that doesn't connect to obviously student success or pathways to college and career in their future.
Can you talk a little bit about the skills of how we influence in the styles that might be needed for this?
[00:08:16] Speaker B: Surely, as you pointed out, social media demonstrates the power of influencing. What we're talking about is not a digital campaign.
What we're talking about is having influencers recognize the power, recognize the technique and recognize the approach.
Influencing is very much of an art.
And you asked about some of the skills that are involved in influencing.
The first big skill that's involved in influencing is active listening is being able to listen to and anticipate and recognize what's on the mind of the student that you want to influence in terms of college and career.
One of the things that influencing does and one of the things that good influencers do is they focus on the person to be influenced.
They're thinking about where that person is, what's going to impact that person.
So in addition to just giving advice, just listening, as I mentioned before, referencing is a big part of influencing.
Influencers take time to identify things that would be important to impact the thinking of others.
They use techniques and they have certain qualities.
One, influencers are people who are authentic in the mind of the influencee.
Influencers are people who are reliable.
Influencers are effective storytellers.
Influencers are trustworthy.
Influencers have certain qualities that make them reliable.
[00:10:11] Speaker A: So as you think about those, obviously I think that was a good mix between skills and kind of the style, being an active listener and focusing on the individual. Can we talk a little bit about how might we identify? So let's I'm a student who I want to create help influence a group of students to consider college or I am a teacher who is working with students who are might have the skills that you mentioned. Like they, they're good storytellers. They seem trustworthy, seem authentic. How would I identify a student like that and what would I do to have them be an influencer?
[00:10:56] Speaker B: For this kind of work, we can present and prop up influencers in a number of ways.
For example, at cfes, we're going to start an organization, we're going to start an effort called Influencer of the Month.
And at our schools, what we're going to do is we're going to have the schools identify people who are influencers.
Then we're going to give them some orientation and training on influencing and then we're going to let them go in their communities.
So we've talked about different styles of these people. Sometimes in schools, they're obviously teachers who other students go to and students go to on a regular basis to provide, to seek advice and guidance from. But influencers can be the guard at the door, the custodian. Influencers are the coaches.
Influencers are all those people who have engagements with young people and the young people see them as having authority, reliability.
With that authority and reliability, they can move forward. And in providing guidance and direction to students, what we're trying to do is to tell people, stop advising and start thinking about influencer.
[00:12:10] Speaker A: That's awesome.
So I really like this idea of moving into highlighting the influencers of the month because I think we work in many communities and many schools.
Sometimes they don't get to see the work that's happening at X school versus Y school. And this will give them an opportunity to be not identified but elevated in a platform that could be even more far reaching than just one individual student. And we know from the conversations we've had it's not obviously one student, but one student can have a very great impact. But we interviewed one of our alums a couple of episodes ago and Shamika had started the campaign at Wadley and it was very focused on getting students to consider college. So it shifted the dynamic from if I go to college to which college am I going to? Right. It doesn't even post the question post secondary plans that have to go with college. And this can be applied also to a career. Right. We know there's a lot of opportunities out there that college is not necessarily the path that they need to take right after high school. I really like that. And I think the more we can get it out, the better it is for our network and quite frankly, expand our network.
So we don't need to just be working with that school to have an impact in some of the students.
[00:13:46] Speaker B: Yeah, operationally, for a billion pathways, our influencing program will be multifaceted. We certainly will be doing and empowering people in schools to be influencers. And I've outlined some of the kind of people who would become influencers and how we will orient them to begin to influence more than advise.
But you're correct. In addition to what we will do in schools, we will create an effort at the national level of brilliant pathways and we will use some digital content to do this, to talk about and influence all of us, to develop the influencing skills.
One of the ways we're going to do this is to bring this in into our mentoring efforts, particularly peer mentoring.
Peer mentoring has a lot of the peer mentors have a lot of credibility, a lot of the authority, a lot of the fame, a lot of the popularity, a lot of the passion, a lot of the storytelling ability that we need for influencers.
But oftentimes, peer mentors do what adults do when they talk with young people.
They provide guidance and advice versus trying to influence.
And so one of the things we're going to do is to show our mentors, particularly our peer mentors, how they can leverage the relationship benefits of mentoring and enhance it by using influencing techniques. It sounds complicated, but it's not.
So let me give you an example.
We have a group of students at a community college who mentor students at the local high school.
These are first and second year students at the community college and they're mentoring 10th and 11th graders.
What we have developed with them is a different model for college visits.
Instead of the peer mentors at the college deciding what the students should see when they visit campus, they engaged in the following technique.
They worked. They described their lives to the students, their college lives, what they were studying, where they were living, et cetera. They then shared information about those aspects of their lives from the school website.
And they asked the students then to design efforts and programs to visit the campus. So the high school students learned some things about college and the college student's life. And then they were told, okay, when you visit campus, what do you want to see? Who do you want to talk to?
We have all the connections.
And so what they learned as they did these visits that were selected and determined and partially designed by the students, was that the students better incorporated the learning.
They remembered more, they were more deeply impacted than if they had just taken them on tours and talked about their campus. By taking them to see the places that the students wanted, there was more authority, there was more interest, and more students asked questions about the institution that demonstrated that they were now really thinking about could this be a place for them.
So these community college students used their connections on campus to. To influence how the students would think about things by exposing them to things.
The other powerful piece they found was that they took the high school students, that is the peer mentors, the community college students, they took them to places on campus and people on campus that they thought were important.
And because the students recognized that the mentors thought it was important to them.
So exposing these students to things, rather than telling them about them, and leveraging that exposure off of the reputations and activities and lives of the Students was a powerful piece for these visits, and it created a real interest among the students that might not have been there if they just simply took them on tours and did panel presentations for them, which are great things to do. And we do those things all the time. And those things have impact on people.
But we want to have a deeper impact. We want to have impact on students lives that put them on the path of behaviors for college and career readiness.
[00:18:59] Speaker A: That's awesome. So, leroy, we started talking about, obviously the word influencing. We talked about what it wasn't. We talked about skills that students need. And quite frankly, as you elaborated, it expands beyond students. It could be staff members in schools and things like that. Then we talked a little bit about kind of the styles. And then this new initiative of Influencer of the Month.
What else should we know? If I'm a counselor or a teacher in a school in New York City, how would I, how can I learn? Tap into this and highlight some of the students or some of the people in my building that are doing great work.
[00:19:46] Speaker B: First, we ask educators to take a mind shift.
That mind shift is a bit of a relaxation of your thinking about how you want to engage students.
And as I said before, the first step of an influencer is to take the time to learn how to recognize where the person is that you want to influence, what they will respond to, why they think you're authentic, why you have reliability.
So let me give you an example of that. In one of our schools in upstate New York, we asked the teachers who was. Who were they? Who was the influencer of the school? And as I mentioned before, they said the custodian, when we drilled down on that to find out what was it about this person?
It was that this person engaged the students in social settings at the school, if you can call a hallway a social setting, and acknowledged their worth, express interest in them.
We don't expect the custodian to give college and career advice.
As we drilled down, I said, how is this person influencing college and career readiness?
And they said, he is the one oftentimes that students will go to and ask questions about who they should talk to or expressing concerns about things that are going on in their life, and he's the one who lifts them.
It's not his job to advise.
But boy, if he says to those young people, you should go talk to Ms. Jones about what you're worried.
That reference, because they know that he cares about them and he's been watching them and he's aware of their feelings, is a powerful force to get them to talk to Mr. Jones about completing the satisfaction or about looking, searching for colleges or about completing the financial aid application or about learning about a career.
So his job is to direct.
His job is not to inform, but to direct and encourage.
And we all need that. We all need that inspiration. And we've learned also from social media that when you have people who have swayed people who are quote unquote insta famous people who are popular, they are centers of attention.
And from that attention they can direct people, they can inform people, they can encourage people.
Some of the skills that I want to see in all of our influencers. Oh boy.
Learning simple things.
Learning some key influencing words.
What are key influencing words?
You, you reminding that when you talk to young people and you're trying to influence them to think about things, to let them know that it's personal, you we, when we hear things, things around behaviors that are troubling or behaviors we want to address to influencers, know that people are also influenced by trends.
And if the trend in a community can be utilized, then influencers should tap those trends and cultures.
Let me give you an example of what that looks like.
For many years, CFES has encouraged teachers to tell young people about their college and career stories.
One of my favorite things is the door decorating, where teachers decorate their doors with information about their college and about their college experience.
And the simple idea is that over a period of time, students will see all the doors. That's influencing.
It's influencing because you're not advising, you're not telling students, you're providing them with pieces of insight into a college and a particular person's experience in a college that might motivate them to learn more about that college or another college.
So influencing can take lots of forms.
Other key things about influencing include how we engage young people with questions, open ended questions that allow them to share what they're thinking.
Because one of the things that an influencer does is influencers are very good at responding to things.
As they engage in active listening, they can give responding. We all know that person whom we were talking to and we said something and they said a question, they questioned what we said and the light bulb went off in our head. And once that light bulb went off, then you were tuned in to listen more to what they were trying to say and probably more receptive to it.
One of the things again about influencing is focusing on the influency.
[00:25:15] Speaker A: That's awesome.
So Leroy, so we can all agree influencing isn't just about getting your way.
It's about helping people see what's possible, about making others feel supported and helping them take the next step. When we influence with empathy, clarity, integrity, we expand what students and communities believe is within reach.
Would you add anything?
[00:25:43] Speaker B: I would definitely agree with that. And empathy is an important word. Empathy is part of that.
Empathy is part of that. Active listening. And active listening is a key skill when you're influencing and engaging. But influencing, if you think about the word and as I told you, the Latin root is to flow.
And again, Henry Moore in the 17th century described it as someone who exerts a powerful effect.
Influencing is very much an art and can take many styles in its form.
But what it really does is it is a different approach.
Thinking about where somebody is and what impacts their thinking and tapping into that, what the things that impact that thinking, using your authority and reputation with that person.
And again, it can be direct conversation, it can be referral conversation, it can be suggestive conversation, and sometimes it's tough conversation. We know that sometimes people are going to come forward and say, hey, I just, I didn't do my best.
And when they have that authority in relationship, maybe the influencer does need to give them a good kick of encouragement.
That's a forceful criticism.
But it's not about trying to implant knowledge in people's mind. It is about this skill of trying to affect the way they're thinking using a variety of techniques.
Influencing. One can learn about influencing from the scholars in the area who look at persuasion, the scholars who also look at what are the social factors and influencing. And Manny, I want to. It's important for us to recognize and look at what's going on with social media, not to utilize it in some of the ways that it's utilized. Now that's not applicable for us. We're not selling things or building trends.
But what we are doing is using the kinds of reputation, the kinds of information sharing examples of influencing and social media that cause people to want to follow somebody and as they're following them, to begin to adapt their behaviors and activities not to spend too much time on it, but to chat for a minute about social media influencing and products.
We know that when someone wants to produce a product and they are a social influencer, they lend their credibility to it.
So what we're saying with this is that bring your personal credibility to these conversations and engagements with young people and then instead of advising in these conversations, engagements with young people, provide them with inspiration, provide them with inspiration, provide them with examples, provide them with stories, provide them with content whatever that might be that helps direct them and open their minds to new thinking.
Influencing is a. It's a power.
It's not a science, it's a power. It's an art.
It's something that's practiced pragmatically, but something that is a powerful way for us to direct people. Now, in terms of Brilliant Pathways, we began to talk about this a while back, less than a year.
And so we're developing some things to help our community do that. I mentioned to you before that we're going to have Influencer of the Month. The Influencer of the Month has two purposes. First, to identify and to elevate people in our school communities who are doing this work so that they can do it better and they can teach others to do it.
Secondly, we're going to develop a Brilliant Pathways influencer toolkit.
The toolkit will explain what is this concept?
The toolkit will provide a list of qualities of an influencer. The toolkit will provide best practice influencing techniques.
The toolkit will provide other reward based systems so people can identify and elevate these people in their community.
If not, it's a toolkit.
We don't expect everyone to use every tool in it, nor do we want it to be a curriculum.
We what we want it to be is an enabling set of information and content that people can use to bring influencing into their school.
We are borrowing a bit from some of the digital social media concepts in that our hope is to plant this in our Billion Pathways community and watch it explode, watch it take a life of its own, watch it develop and incorporate into the 10 CFES practices and our principles and our long history of engagement. CFES began doing this work long time ago and now Brilliant Pathways has picked it up and going to expand it. It's always been there in what we do. We're just now being able to recognize it.
[00:31:19] Speaker A: Thank you so much, Leroy for joining us on the Blueprint and for our audience. Let's keep using our influence in every conversation, every classroom, every partnership to build more Berlin Pathways for every student. I'm Manny Tejeda and I'll see you next time. Support for this podcast comes from Brilliant Pathways, an organization that had spent over 30 years helping students make opportunities happen.
Connect with us wherever you get your podcasts and thank you for joining us on the Blueprint. I'm Manny Tejeda, your host and I'll see you next time.
