“Happiness grows less from the passive experience of desirable circumstances than from involvement in valued activities and progress towards one’s goals.” -David Myers and Ed Diener

Nothing beats the surge of energy that comes from accomplishing a major goal or outcome in life. There are countless research studies that support this experience too.

But how do you know when you’ve simply checked off a goal versus knocked it out of the park? I derive the greatest source of energy from the goals where I stretch beyond what I previously knew to be true and challenge myself to grow, learn, develop, and achieve at new levels I never imagined.

Described below is a practice that I have emulated from various organizational approaches in my own life with great success. In short, break your goals or objectives into three separate categories: entry, target, and stretch. Let me give you an example.

For the last quarter of 2011, I wanted to make sure I stayed motivated to be fit and feeling great leading into the holidays. Like many others out there, my activity level wanes with the colder weather. The abundance of sugary treats during the holidays doesn’t help either. Earlier in the year I had successfully accomplished my weight loss and fitness goals; now I wanted to finish the year strong and in great shape without relapsing.

To facilitate this, I set some fitness and exercise goals for the final three months of the year. I figured that if I stayed active with these, I would stay on target for the year and not trash all the hard work I put in during the first nine months to get trim and fit for the year.

Using this three-pronged approach, this is what that goal looks like:

• Entry: Average 2 total workout days/week prior 1/1 with a weight of 169.9 or less
• Target: Average 3 workout days/week prior to 1/1 with a weight of 169.9 or less and a waist circumference of 36 or less
• Stretch: Average 4 total workout days/week including 2 total weight days at the gym prior to 1/1 (including 10 weight days overall) with a weight of 168 or less, a belly circumference of 36 or less; complete a 5K race

Each week I update my progress and create an average to measure and track my success. To date, I’m coming in right at my stretch goal for the quarter despite battling a cold and some lower back soreness as a result of the weight training. I’m also excited about running my first 5K this New Year’s Day with my wife in Phoenix during our visit with family for the holidays.

In addition to the three categories, there are a few other success strategies embedded here worth mentioning. The first is that this is a measurable goal. I know exactly what success looks like at the various levels because of the metrics. Second, there is an end date. My goal ends on 1/1 and doesn’t have some ambiguous date with which I can later renegotiate. Lastly, I interact with the goal each week by updating my progress and tracking my results. All together, these three strategies have led to greater overall success and completion, especially on those days when I just want to get back in bed and nurse my cold or sore back.

I can think of a number of applications for this approach in other areas too. Examples include weight loss goals, smoking cessation, skill building, learning and development, race training, healthier eating, financial planning, and relationship improvement. I’d love to hear from you regarding your strategies for goal completion and whether or not you find this approach useful.

Photo courtesy of phantomswife

Summer has long since come and gone and I wanted to write a quick update on my summer reading list and let you know how I did.

I started off pretty close to my list, knocking out the first four books with relative ease. I thoroughly enjoyed all four, especially Stacy Schiff’s great retelling of Cleopatra’s life. It reminded me of Erik Larsons’ books, all of which I thoroughly enjoy. Freedom was also extremely enjoyable with its towering and heady themes. Not an easy read, but a rewarding one doubt. In between those two I caught Tina Fey’s Bossypants, which was a perfect book to read after Freedom. As a new parent, I found it very timely if not utterly hilarious. It prompted a number of laugh out loud moments. Casino Royale too was enjoyable for different reasons of course. I was a bit turned off by the misogyny despite my love of the movies.

After this it was tough to find another book to latch on to. I started Room by Emma Donahue and found the story interesting, but ultimately hit the pause button because the narrator shift was too dramatic. Same for In the Garden of the Beasts by Erik Larson, which I also found fascinating but too dark for my interest at the time. Both are ones I’d love to come back to and do plan on at some point including the others on my list.

Here is where I found myself renegotiating my commitment to the list and finding other books instead to finish. This is the beauty of the 50 page rule, which I’ve adhered to ever since I read Steve Leveen’s essential book for readers, The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life. In the past, I would have held steadfast to list, and a great one it was, and would therefore have become quickly disinterested in reading out of the pressure to keep my commitment. Instead, by giving myself the freedom to quit on books (or pause them as I like to say), I got into other books I wouldn’t have normally gotten started.

This is also where the beauty of a reading management tool like Shelfari comes in too. By keeping a current and up to date list of reading candidates, I can easily toggle between books and not rely on the books themselves as reminders for what to read. I highly recommend using a site like this to manage your list of candidates. You can see my shelf online and can even view the books I started and plan to finish someday neatly organized and managed within Shelfari.

Instead of the other books on the list, I completed State of Wonder by Anne Patchett, The Long Run by Matt Long, and The Judgement of Paris by Ross King; all of which I thoroughly enjoyed. I didn’t quite make it to 10, but 7 ain’t bad either, especially for a kid who dreaded summer reading growing up.

I’d love to hear your summer reading stories and strategies in the comments below and whether or not you’ve found any value in hitting the pause button on books.

Whether it is the ritual of summer reading as a kid or trips to the beach as an adult, I love the abundance of down time in the summer and eagerly look to fill it with great reads. Working in higher education, the pace of time literally slows down, allowing for the addition of many adventurous and challenging books that would otherwise be difficult to get to. For me, summer is also a great time for me to depart from my traditional list of candidates and read some contemporary fiction and timely best-sellers.

To that end, here is my ambitious list of candidates for summer. I’d love to hear about yours in the comments below and as always, please share your suggestions!

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
I’m starting summer off with a big one that’s been on my list for the last year. This towering work of fiction from Jonathan Franzen for me epitomizes the unique reading opportunity that summer presents: to get deep into a great American novel that explores heady themes of freedom, happiness, and the nature of life.

Bossypants by Tina Fey
I know I’m going to need a break after Freedom and I can’t think of a better change of pace than Tina Fey’s memoir Bossypants. I’m a fan of improv comedy, SNL, and Fey’s 30 Rock and can’t wait to learn more about her dramatic rise to the upper echelon of the comedy ranks. A good laugh never hurts either.

Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff
Ever since reading Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City, I’ve fallen in love with historical fiction as a vehicle for history and biography books. I’m also a huge fan of Egyptology, which makes Stacy Schiff’s Cleopatra: A Life a perfect fit. Although I’ve never seen Elizabeth Taylor’s 1963 interpretation of the iconic figure, I know enough to assume that we’ve gotten her wrong over the years, which is why I’m looking forward to Schiff’s extensive research and powerful storytelling to help dispel some of the propaganda and present Cleopatra in her true light.

Casino Royale by Ian Fleming
For as much as I love spy movies (James Bond, Jason Bourne, Jack Ryan), I’ve never read one of the original paperbacks. I’m starting off with Ian Fleming’s original Bond story, Casino Royale. It’s one of my favorite Bond movies and I love Daniel Craig’s portrayal of the iconic spy.

The Greater Journey by David McCullough
Two of my favorites in life (Paris & David McCullough) collide with McCullough’s latest book about the American artists and scientists who studied in Paris in the 19th century. I devoured 1776 and The Path Between the Seas and can’t wait to get to this one. What a fun way to travel through the historic streets of Paris as well as some of history’s best scientists and artists.

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
I turned 30 this week and I’m already learning that getting older and growing up isn’t as easy as it I thought it would be. Egan’s newest novel uses some creative storytelling and multiple narratives to drive this message home in what I think will be a timely and engaging read for me.

In the Garden of the Beasts by Erik Larson
Speaking of Larson, he’s at it again, this time with the story of  William Dodd, the first ambassador to Hitler’s Germany. Dodd and his family bear witness to Hitler’s dramatic rise to power in the 1930s in what will no doubt be an intriguing read.

Sh*t My Dad Says by Justin Halpern
Oh why not. After that much Hitler, you’d need a break too.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
Rebecca Skloot’s latest is being distributed to all incoming Tulane freshman this year and I thought I would join in on the fun. I first heard about Henrietta Lacks, a poor African-American woman with cervical cancer whose cells were used without her knowledge for research on NPR last month. The book explores some great themes that I know will interest our students and I’m excited to participate in the discussions that will be happening on campus this upcoming fall semester.

Room by Emma Donoghue
This one was recently recommended to me by a friend and based on what I’ve read about it, I’m looking forward to it. As you can see by now, I like to bounce between fiction and non-fiction in the summer. It keeps things fresh and keeps me reading.

The Social Animal by David Brooks
As I have mentioned throughout this blog, I love the exploration of ideas. While I don’t often agree with Brooks, I find his writing inviting and intriguing at times. As a fellow lover of ideas, I’m looking forward to finishing the summer off with this engaging read (if I have the staying power to get through all of this!).

In my last job advising working professional students, I met with an adult student who was completing his bachelors degree at the University of Denver’s college of professional and continuing studies (University College) after a 15 year hiatus. He wanted to  continue his education at the graduate level and was in the process of applying to our masters program in leadership.

Right off the bat, I noticed he had a real thirst for learning and education. After exploring his interest in the program, he shared with me the obstacles he had overcome to be where he is today. He started his undergraduate education in the mid-1990s only to be lured away to a lucrative career like so many of his peers at the time. During the time he spent away from the University, he experienced many successes and failures in his personal and professional life. Now, some 15 years later, he was confronting his fears around his schooling and was overcoming his resistance to education to follow through on a major life goal.

After all this adversity, I wanted to know how he did it all. How, I wondered, did he stay motivated to continue learning after all these years? He responded that from an early age, he dreamed of driving around town sporting the university-sponsored license plate reserved for alumni. Growing up in Denver, there was something very special in his mind about what this symbol represented.

I was immediately fascinated by this. It reminded me of the importance of inspiration and visualization in my own life and the role it’s had in my successes. When I set out to plan and capture goals and outcomes for myself and my work for the year, I often focus solely on information gathering at the cost of the emotional process, which involves both seeing and feeling how to do a particular task or function that you can’t do today.

As an example, one of my 3-5 year visions is to complete a sprint triathlon. Gathering the necessary information for this would involve researching the best bikes to purchase, training programs to join, coaches to hire, races to participate in, and so on. It would also involve seeing myself going through the motions on race day: showing up early, getting my gear adjusted, interacting with other racers, etc. This important phase gets me moving forward and helps me see how to do something, but by looking at my boldest accomplishments I know it isn’t enough. To follow through on the truly elevating goals and visions in my life, I need the important emotional quality that inspiration provides.

If I were to embrace the emotional side of the equation with this particular vision, I would ask myself what conditions need to be in place so that I cannot stand not accomplishing this goal or outcome? Currently I’m working on a related smaller goal of increasing my runs up to a 5K distance. To help me get out the door in the intense heat and humidity of the New Orleans summer afternoons, I have set a standard for myself where I can’t stand not being sore. If I don’t have some soreness in my body, then I know I need to be out exercising or training. The soreness reminds me that I’m making progress and is a tangible feeling I can experience on a regular basis.

For this particular student, his vision of success involved him driving around town proudly displaying his DU license plate. After our conversation, I knew that he would stop at no cost to make this a reality. This mental image embodied the very essence of success for him and kept him moving forward despite the obstacles life had thrown at him.

Next time you put a stake in the ground and set out to accomplish something truly remarkable in your life, don’t forget to feel yourself doing it. And while you’re at it, think of a particular image that personifies the joy of successful completion for you, whether it’s fitting into that particular pair of jeans, taking that trip you’ve always dreamed of, doing the meaningful work you’ve always wanted to do, and on. The more specific the image the better. This little bit of inspiration can powerfully fuel our performance and can even be the difference between wild success and failure.

Recently I watched the fascinating and inspiring documentary Man on Wire, the story of Philippe Petit, a tightrope walker, and his amazing high-wire routine performed in 1974 between the World Trade Center’s twin towers.

The story of Petit and his colleagues pulling off the ambitious routine is almost too good to be true and keeps you on the edge of your seat despite the fact that you know what happens. This is no doubt in large part why it was awarded the Oscar for Best Documentary in 2009.

There is a particular scene that I think is a beautiful metaphor for goals and visioning. Petit set out from a young age to dazzle the world with his high-wire routines and scaled monuments such as Notre Dame and the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Petit was however unsettled with theses accomplishments. When word came of the building of the twin towers in New York City, Petit set the ambitious and elevating goal to walk between them before ground had ever been broken on the buildings. Director James Marsh delightfully chronicles Petit and his friends’ journey to secretly plan and scale the two towers.

When Petit finally gets up there in spite of all the obstacles, he does something truly remarkable that is worthy of our attention: he smiles. There are police on either side of him waiting to arrest him, throngs of onlookers witnessing from down below, a stiff wind that could easily knock Petit one or two inches off; and yet despite all of this, Petit knows that he is accomplishing a major life goal. He even takes his time and makes eight crossings between the towers that lasted nearly an hour!

It’s a beautiful reminder for us all to literally stop and smell the roses; to enjoy ourselves when we follow through on the intentions we set for ourselves. As someone who constantly aims to grow and learn, it’s a good reminder for me to mark occasions when I complete a goal or task and pause before I continue setting more goals and outcomes. This can have the positive effect of building up a well of positive emotions and memories, which can provide more inspiration for scaling taller towers and more ambitious visions in the future.

Photo courtesy of JMEllwood

I love to learn. I feel in many ways as if we’re in the golden age of learning. We have at our fingertips a wealth of resources to provide a truly dynamic and rich learning process. From e-books to blogs and social networks to open libraries, it has never been more easy to access information. When it comes to learning and information retention, however, this wealth of information can have its downsides. At least that’s what a few researchers discovered when they attempted to copy the effects on the brain of learning without time for reflection.

Researchers at Yale and the University of Texas recently attempted to mimic the brain by creating a digital neural network or “computer brain” and discovered something they’re calling “hyper-learning.” They were recently interviewed on APM’s Marketplace Tech Report about the model they created to simulate the way the brain learns and takes information in:

“What the model suggests is if this process is accelerated unduly, that bad things happen and that stuff going into memory gets intermingled, corrupted, kind of like a bad sector in a hard drive,” says Dr. Ralph Hoffman, a psychiatrist at the Yale School of Medicine. The brain takes in too much information, too quickly, “can’t organize it and sift it. And somehow something to do with that process may be running amok.”

The purpose of the study, which is published in the latest edition of the journal of Biological Psychiatry, was to explore the role of data input and processing on the brain. They found that too much data input or hyper-learning without time for reflection can even lead to disorders like schizophrenia.

Here at Tulane, students recently concluded their finals for spring semester. I can remember distinctly the sense of relief I had when I completed each academic term. I was happy to be doing anything but learning. However, if you asked me to recall much of what I learned in those classes today, I probably couldn’t do it with any clarity, which is disappointing. This troubling fact has drawn the attention of two sociology professors who have criticized institutions of higher learning for not meeting important learning outcomes in their recent book, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses.

In a recent and popular Op-Ed from the New York Times, the authors, Richard Arum of New York University and Josipa Roksa of the University of Viriginia, describe that while measures such as student satisfaction are at record highs, the quality and depth of student learning remains shallow and superficial. I can verify this in my own work with undergraduate students as I am often surprised at their subpar writing and communication skills.

These problematic outcomes don’t exist in a vacuum though. The students I work with report high levels of academic related stress, which is substantiated in the recent edition of the annual survey on American freshmen (National Norms Survey), which found that stress is at an all time high for male and female college students. When the time comes to reflect on what they learned during the semester, most students are like I was and want to get as far away as possible from the material they just consumed for the last 16+ weeks. However, this resistance is in many ways leading to the poor results that Arum and Roksa rail against in their book and op-ed.

For many people, installing simple rituals to reflect and review can provide dramatic effects on their long-term retention. Incorporating important rituals and habits can also provide significant benefits when it comes to stress management as well. To that end, here a few rituals you can implement to help maximize your learning retention and overcome the stress associated with the learning experience:

• Review books and course notes when finished. This is often the last thing on a somone’s mind as it was in my case. Steve Leveen (@SteveLeveen) first turned me on to this ritual in his book, The Little Guide to Your Well Read Life. Steve encourages readers to leave “footprints” in their books and to process those notes after reading the book instead of putting it down right away. It’s a great way to re-engage with the material and synthesize your learning. When you scale this up to a class or even a series of classes, it can have even more profound effect.
• Encourage regular renewal breaks. In his book, Be Excellent at Anything, author and Energy Project CEO Tony Schwartz (@tonyschwartz) brilliantly describes the need for intermittent rest and renewal to remain maximally productive and effective. I often encourage this practice with my own students, especially when finals and exam periods come around. I advise a lot of high-ability students who feel pressured to be learning all the time. I encourage them to use breaks, whether they are 15 minute study breaks or spring breaks to step away from learning and read a work of fiction, take long walks, exercise, socialize with friends, and anything else to depart from the energy they traditionally put into their studies. They often report an increased sense of peace and calm as a result of this practice.
• Install a weekly operational review. If anyone has learned anything from me, it’s that the brain is a terrible place to store reminders of projects and next actions. I force encourage my students to externalize their thinking and write things they are committed to doing down on paper then dispatch those results into a trusted system (paper planner, digital file, list management software). After we’ve completed a core dump and collected everything that has their attention, we’ll then begin work on the other five phases of workflow (process, organize, review, do) as described by author and productivity guru David Allen (@GTDGuy) in his masterful book, Getting Things Done. The capture phase alone is invigorating and freeing for many of my students and clients, but it’s not enough to go the distance and create the “mind like water” experience that Allen extols in his writings and work with his company, The David Allen Company. Lists of projects and commitments go stale rather quickly in this fast paced world, so I encourage students to spend an hour a week to review their lists and renegotiate their commitments with themselves and others. This simple habit can have a profound and long lasting effect on learning organization and information retention.

These are just a few of the rituals that I find useful in my own practice as well as with students. Now I turn the floor over to you and ask: what are some ways you synthesize your learning and make sense of all the input and information in your world? What are some rituals and habits you’ve installed to maximize your learning and engagement? I welcome your comments and feedback in the comments section below!

I’ve already heard from a number of NACADA association members who read my blog post 6 Things Disney Can Teach Us About Academic Advising, which is a review of what I learned from the recent 2010 conference in Orlando and ways we can emulate Disney’s renowned customer service approach in our advising centers around the nation.

The post was originally published in January and was subsequently picked up by Disney Dispatch and featured for fans of Disney across the world (“What Academic Advisors Can Learn from Disney”). This week it was featured in NACADA’s Monthly Association Highlights for May, 2011.

If this is your first visit here, I invite you to browse through the site and learn more about my passion for learning and higher education. Currently, I work as an administrator with Tulane University’s Academic Advising Center and passionately serve students by giving them permission to learn just as much about themselves as they do about the classes they take.

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact me via this blog or send me an email at bje at elizardi dot com. You can also join the discussion on Twitter (@belizardi) and connect with me on LinkedIn. I hope you find my writing intriguing and useful for your work with students and learners alike.

You listen to people explain it, but it’s difficult to fully appreciate the transformational affect fatherhood has until you hold your little one in your arms for the first time. The thought of cuddling, holding, changing, dressing, burping, and swaddling my child was daunting to me before her birth, especially since I never rarely got to practice these things growing up. When she arrived, all my fears and anxieties melted away as I held her against my chest for the first time.

While the mechanics of caring for an infant are somewhat easy to master, a positive attitude and approach to caring for your child in ways that align with your values and goals is not.

To fill this gap, I often found myself reverting back to the frameworks and principles I’ve practiced over the years as an academic advisor and higher education administrator. Even though my daughter is only eight weeks old, I often think of these four principles when interacting with her and find them very applicable in my new role as a new father.

1. Reach Students Where They’re At and Not Where You Want Them To Be
There was a point in my career as an administrator where I began to move beyond advising as sharing my own experience to advising as using principles and paradigms to help students grow and learn. This maturity came with time and is an experience that many advisors I speak with have gone through in some form or fashion. When I was able to take myself, in particular my successful career as a student out of the picture I started being able to reach each student where they were in their own development and not where I thought they should be based on my own expectations. This can be made especially difficult by students who seem to repeat the same mistakes again and again, but be mindful to disembed yourself from the equation, be patient, and learn where they truly are in their process to provide the best support possible.

2. Challenge +1
Sanford famously gave us the Challenge and Support model that allows advisors to challenge students in their thinking and behaving and then support them in making decisions to overcome maladaptive behaviors to replace them with positive ones that empower them to achieve their goals and desired outcomes. Some have extended this to theory into the more contemporary version of Challenge +1, which involves taking smaller steps to get there. Each advising session can be used to offer a simple challenge to encourage the student to be better in one particular way than they were before. Each session can also build off of the previous one assuming you take good notes and leave bread crumb trails to help you remember where you last left off.

3. See In Students What They Don’t Already See in Themselves
One of the leadership precepts I subscribe to that applies to my work with students as well as any colleague I come into contact with is to see capacities in others they don’t fully yet recognize in themselves. Through truly listening to people and getting to know them, their strengths, their wants and desires in life, I can use my advising and coaching skills to bring out the best in them and empower them to grow into the person they may not know they’re capable of being.

4. Engage with Students to Problem Solve
This last one is actually an idea I got years ago from one of my favorite parenting blogs (Parent Hacks) on problem solving with a child that I have found very applicable in my work with students. A reader wrote in and offered this brilliant advice on how to use teaching to be a better parent:

When I have a problem that concerns one of my kids (meaning: When I want them to do something that they refuse to do), I see that I have a choice. I could visualize my child standing on the other side of a line, next to “The Problem”, with me yelling across the line, “Hey, you better solve “The Problem.” Instead, I get myself to stand next to my child, with “The Problem” alone on the other side of the line, with me putting an arm around my child, saying “Hey, you and me, we’re gonna defeat “The Problem” together.” I find that this attitude seems to make my kids feel better about themselves. It minimizes/eliminates shame.

As an advisor, I seek to partner with the students I advise to help them problem solve and learn from experiences in their lives. I have purposely configured my office workspace and removed my desk as a barrier in between me and my students to allow for a collaborative approach to best meet their needs. This approach has been elegantly captured in the contemporary Appreciative Advising model and extends this idea of partnering to problem solve.

What are some ways you’re using your role as an advisor to inform your role as a parent and vice versa? I’d love to hear your feedback in the comments below as I seek to continuously improve my skills and approach in both of these important areas.

UPDATE: This article struck a chord with the folks over at the Disney Dispatch network and they subsequently picked it up for their subscribers. Here is a link to the post on their blog: What Academic Advisors Can Learn from Disney.

UPDATE 2: This article was also was featured in NACADA’s Monthly Association Highlights for May, 2011.

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We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we’re curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths. -Walt Disney

Recently I attended the annual conference for academic advising professionals (NACADA) in Orlando, FL. During our stay, our advising team made particular notice to observe the renowned Disney service experience to gather ideas to replicate with our advising center at Tulane University. To that end, here are some reflections from our visit that are worth considering for your advising center.

1. Walk Them There

Whenever I asked a Disney cast member about a particular location, they would first use the trademark two finger Disney point and would then offer to walk me there if it wasn’t too far. College campuses are becoming increasingly larger and more decentralized. The days of the one stop student center have long since passed. As an academic advisor, I often refer students to various other departments including the Registrar, Financial Aid, Counseling Center, Health Center, and more. When time permits, why not walk them there? This can be especially useful if the student you’re working with is a freshman and is new on campus. I utilized this recently when I began my new job at Tulane because it gave me the opportunity to get to know the campus and meet different staff members in different departments. It also gives the student a strong sense of confidence and leaves them feeling positive about the service experience in your department, which cultivates loyalty.

2. Don’t Create False Realities

I’ve been to a number of Disney Institute trainings and have stayed at various resorts as a guest. I love their model of customer satisfaction and generally find it applicable, except when it comes to the whole happy ending thing. I witnessed a number of individuals get too caught up in their role or the role of Disney to come back to reality and address me where I was. The same goes for students. It’s important that we encourage them to dream and focus on the positive, but also address the reality of their situation, especially when times get tough. We’re not cheerleaders but coaches who can have a profound impact on their success in and out of the classroom. That often requires tough and challenging conversations. Using structured theories like Sanford’s challenge (+1) and support will cultivate a trusting relationship and will allow you to support the student when it matters most.

3. Take Advantage of “In Between” Opportunities

When it comes to the customer experience, Disney has clearly thought this one out extensively. My favorite example of this was the bus rides to and from various locations around Disney. For example, when you take the Magical Express from the airport to your resort or your hotel, Disney has created a video detailing all of the wonderful and exciting things you can do during your stay. This would normally be a time when everyone would be staring out the window or lost on their smartphones (many still were), but it’s a great passive promotional opportunity to get some extra content in and begin framing the type of experience you want your customers or students to have.

One example of this would be to take advantage of the reception area where many students wait for appointments. Try to think of ways you can provide passive and active content to further educate your students on your center’s services and help students learn about all the things they can do with an advisor in your department.

4. Think About the Whole Student Experience

Whole student development is deeply understood in many higher education and advising circles, but what about the whole student experience? For the last few places I’ve worked I’ve led a customer experience mapping exercise in an effort to capture and design positive interactions at every touch point. Here is an example of a student experience map I created while working for University College at the University of Denver to help us better understand our students (PDF Download: University College Student Experience, 16.5 kb) Disney has long been a leader in this field of experience design; many others such as Starbucks and Apple have picked up on Disney’s lead here and you can too.

Take a day to step outside your daily routine and act as if you were a student. What is the appointment scheduling experience like? How easy is it to gain access to an advisor? What does the waiting space look and feel like? What are simple transactions like? Taking a step back to think holistically about the entire student experience can pay huge dividends as it has for Disney. If you’ve ever experienced a Disney vacation, you’ll know and more importantly feel this value and attention to every detail, from the dining experience to the way your bed is turned down.

5. Be Inclusive When Brainstorming Solutions to Problems

One of my favorite Disney stories about customer service has to do with the team that designed the resort at the Animal Kingdom Lodge. The lodge features a beautiful indoor waterfall that generates quite a bit of noise. Because the hallways leading to the guest rooms all opened up to the lobby, they installed an extra thick plush carpet to soften the noise as it traveled to the guest rooms. This however presented a challenge for the custodial staff who are responsible for pushing carts to replenish supplies for guest rooms.

To resolve this, the designers brought in members of the custodial staff and included them in brainstorming solutions to the problem. It would have certainly been easier for the engineers of the building to create a solution that worked for them and then disseminate the results downwards to this traditionally oppressed staff group. However, they took the more energy intensive approach to include the staff and as a result ended up with a better solution. This also had the byproduct of empowering this staff group and including them in the decision making process. This no doubt has a profound impact on this group since many of them directly interact with guests on a regular basis. As Disney learned, it’s much easier to get buy in and participation when you’ve included the group that stands to be affected by your decision.

The solution revolutionized the entire company as well. Together they created a motorized cart that easily maneuvers along the thick carpet to make it easier for the custodial staff to move from room to room. Incidentally, other departments caught on to this innovation and decided to copy it. Now whenever you visit any Disney theme park you’ll see motorized carts carrying supplies all over the place.

Next time you’re dealing with an issue, consider taking the tough road to be inclusive as it may generate more effective solutions to the problem you’re dealing with that benefit students in ways you hadn’t originally thought of.

6. Engage Everyone in Your Pursuit of Loyalty and Excellence

The previous approach can also pay dividends when it comes to cultivating student loyalty. I don’t know if this is true or not but I’ve heard that Disney pays custodial workers extra because their international guests often feel more comfortable asking them questions.

When it comes to your advising center, think about all the people who interact with your students, especially the ones who are not on the org chart. How can you include them in your decision making process to better empower them to deliver excellent care and attention to your students? When was the last time you invited them to your staff meeting or planning retreat? Think beyond your org chart to determine who you can include in your pursuit for student service excellence.

I know many of you have experienced Disney at one point in your life. The Disney experience is far and wide, so what are some things you’ve seen that could be copied to higher education and academic advising? I’d love to hear your thoughts and stories in the comments below.