Students can be highly academically competant and still not have practice in choosing for themselves.

They know how to work hard, meet expectations, and make themselves legible to the people who will evaluate them. For eighteen years, school rewards that competence. It offers far less practice deciding what matters when no one else can supply the answer.

So students work enormously hard trying to control decisions that are not theirs to make. Big Idea Breakdown separates what a young person actually decides from what she can influence and what is out of her hands, then puts her effort where it can do something.

It runs on a single question, repeated until the student starts asking it herself:

Where are your hands?

The question travels. The same framework can help a family sort out who owns a decision, a counseling team decide where to put its effort, or a leadership team distinguish what it can decide from what it can influence. The context changes. The work is the same: getting clear about what belongs to whom and putting effort where it can do something.

Over four years, what belongs to whom moves, and much of the difficulty in a household during the college process is a disagreement about what has moved, and when.

Big Idea Breakdown is used in counselor training at Dipont Education, through UCLA Extension’s college counseling certificate program, and across the BASIS network.