From the YDP Facilitator's Guide for Mentors:
In the YDP, we aim to empower our mentees to change their lives for the better. “For the better” can mean changing from a negative to a positive life direction, or it can mean enhancing an already positive life direction. In either case, the main challenge we face is that we only work with these mentees for a brief time. How can we use our limited time with them to help them change their lives for the better?
In the YDP, we aim to empower our mentees to change their lives for the better. “For the better” can mean changing from a negative to a positive life direction, or it can mean enhancing an already positive life direction. In either case, the main challenge we face is that we only work with these mentees for a brief time. How can we use our limited time with them to help them change their lives for the better?
It is certainly possible to change lives for the better. Many of us can point to specific experiences that profoundly changed our own lives for the better, even if that impact was not apparent until later and even if the experience was challenging at the time. Many experiences that turn out to be life-changing lead us to see our lives differently than we did before we had the experience. These experiences can affect our sense of “who I am” and “what I want to do with my life” in ways that persist long after the experience.
Think about when in your life life-changing or life-defining experiences have happened. How many of these experiences happened during adolescence or young adulthood? The transition into adulthood is a sensitive period in development when people’s lives often become more open to the influence of new experiences, relationships, and ideas. For many people, during this time life has the potential to go in many different directions, and the impact of an experience—sometimes even of a single conversation—can have an outsized impact on what happens next.
The idea that life is particularly open to change during the transition to adulthood is an important starting point for our work to empower young people to change their lives for the better, and I will return to it. First, though, I want to introduce two ideas that will help us conceptualize what it means to empower our mentees: the life course and sense of identity.
The Life Course
The concept of the life course comes from sociological life course theory. Think of your life course as the path you take from your birth to your death as you navigate life events. Now think of all the factors that influence that path. The time and place in which you were born, your relationships with significant others, your unique abilities and skills, the life events themselves, and many other factors shape the opportunities available to you. In addition to factors outside of your control, you influence your path through life through your choices and actions. That is why no two people’s life courses will be identical even if they had similar starting points in life or grow up in similar social and historical circumstances affording similar opportunities and constraints. With your choices and actions, you are creating a life course that is yours and yours alone. The same is true for your mentees.
The concept of the life course comes from sociological life course theory. Think of your life course as the path you take from your birth to your death as you navigate life events. Now think of all the factors that influence that path. The time and place in which you were born, your relationships with significant others, your unique abilities and skills, the life events themselves, and many other factors shape the opportunities available to you. In addition to factors outside of your control, you influence your path through life through your choices and actions. That is why no two people’s life courses will be identical even if they had similar starting points in life or grow up in similar social and historical circumstances affording similar opportunities and constraints. With your choices and actions, you are creating a life course that is yours and yours alone. The same is true for your mentees.
Many of these ideas might seem like common sense. For example, you probably have already figured out that while your choices and actions matter, you also don’t have complete control over what happens in life. What makes life course theory valuable is that it gives us some tools for thinking and talking about people’s lives in a more scientific way. In particular, it gives us a theoretical vocabulary for thinking and talking about where our mentees’ lives can go in the future rather than just what is going on in the here-and-now. We can use this vocabulary to help our mentees think about the broad sweep of their lives and how they might want life to turn out, rather than just the difficulties and pleasures of the present—as important as they may be.
Let me outline some of this vocabulary. A life course is the path through life you create as you navigate life events. Life events are simply things that happen in your life. Some events—such as economic downturns, pandemics, or wars—affect everyone. Some events are more personal. By “navigating life events” I mean you make choices about what to do. For example, graduating high school is a life event, and you had to choose what to do next. The COVID-19 pandemic was a very different kind of life event, but you still had to choose what to do.
It might seem obvious, but it is worth emphasizing that when you make life choices you can only choose from the alternatives available to you. For example, your choice to go to college depended on the availability of college to you. What choices are available to you depends on the social and historical circumstances in which you live. College may not have been as available or available at all to your parents or grandparents. So, although life course theory emphasizes the importance of individual choices and actions, these choices and actions are always bounded by the opportunities and constraints of social and historical circumstances. When you make life choices, you are choosing from the array of pathways into the future available to you in your particular social and historical circumstances.
Let’s examine these “pathways into the future” a little more closely. Each available pathway includes trajectoriesand life transitions. A trajectory is a connected sequence of transitions over a substantial period of the life course. Life transitions entail changes in social roles and statuses and in the subjective meaning and significance of the transition experience. For example, think of your educational trajectory. Think of when you first enrolled in college and the meaning and significance of that experience. Think about how differently people treat you as a college student versus as a high school student. The same thinking can be applied to family and career trajectories. If you are a parent, you will remember the psychological and social changes that came with becoming one. Life transitions such as becoming a college student or becoming a parent are defined by the qualitative social and psychological changes that people experience during that time. And remember, these changes are embedded within stable trajectories. So, the concept of a trajectory is nuanced enough to account for the relation between change and stability in the life course.
A different kind of life change is a life course turning point. A turning point occurs when you stop moving along a previous trajectory and start moving along a qualitatively different trajectory and then continue in that new direction. Although both transitions and turning points entail change, transitions are predictable changes that occur withintrajectories, whereas turning points are less predictable changes of trajectories. For example, graduating from high school and going to college is often a life transition within a larger educational trajectory. But if you were to drop out of college to start a business, then that would potentially be a life course turning point. I say “potentially” because you will not know until much later whether from that point on your life went in a different direction. If so, then it would be a life course turning point. But the life course is open and fluid—sometimes life changes and then it changes back.
A different kind of life change is a life course turning point. A turning point occurs when you stop moving along a previous trajectory and start moving along a qualitatively different trajectory and then continue in that new direction. Although both transitions and turning points entail change, transitions are predictable changes that occur withintrajectories, whereas turning points are less predictable changes of trajectories. For example, graduating from high school and going to college is often a life transition within a larger educational trajectory. But if you were to drop out of college to start a business, then that would potentially be a life course turning point. I say “potentially” because you will not know until much later whether from that point on your life went in a different direction. If so, then it would be a life course turning point. But the life course is open and fluid—sometimes life changes and then it changes back.
The concept of a life course (or pathway) highlights the openness and fluidity of the individual’s movement through life (as in the course of a river as it meanders through a valley, sometimes circling back on itself, or a walking path through a park with many twists and turns, some of which may even reverse and “switch” back to match the terrain) (Kurtines et al., 2005).
So there you have it. Your life course is the path through life you create as you navigate life events. Your life course consists of multiple overlapping trajectories in the different areas of your life, and each of these trajectories consists of a sequence of life transitions. When you leave a trajectory to start a different one, this is a life course turning point.
I want you to use these life course concepts in mentoring because they will enable you to think of the mentoring relationship as a life event that takes place within the “big picture” of your mentees’ life courses as well as within your own. Zooming out like this makes it clear that while helping young people overcome the challenges and solve the problems of the moment is an important part of our work, our larger goal is to use our brief time with them to prepare them to create the path through life that they want. Think of it this way: by entering into mentoring relationships with these young people, we are intentionally introducing a life event into their life courses, and we hope this life event will help them take charge of their direction in life.
Sense of Identity
The flip-side of your life course is your sense of identity. Your sense of identity is how you make sense of your life course. It is how you turn the complexity, confusion, and conflict of life course experiences—the high points, low points, trajectories, transitions, and turning points of your life—into a sense of cohesion, coherence, and continuity that can give direction and purpose to your life. Identity is your sense of what makes you, you. This includes how you came to be you and who you will become in the future.
Though it might sound simple, your sense of what makes you, you is part of a complex and dynamic relation between society and you. Recall that from a sociological perspective, your life course is the co-product of your choices and actions and the opportunities and constraints of your social and historical circumstances. Similarly, from a psychosocial developmental perspective, identity is a process “‘located’ in the core of the individual yet also in the core of his communal culture, a process which establishes, in fact, the identity of those two identities” (Erikson, 1968, p. 22). In other words, your identity is a relation between society and you, and you experience this relation subjectively. This is why we refer to the “sense of” identity. A positive sense of identity is a sense of psycho-social wholeness: an inner sense of continuity and self-sameness matched by a sense of social continuity and sameness.
The flip-side of your life course is your sense of identity. Your sense of identity is how you make sense of your life course. It is how you turn the complexity, confusion, and conflict of life course experiences—the high points, low points, trajectories, transitions, and turning points of your life—into a sense of cohesion, coherence, and continuity that can give direction and purpose to your life. Identity is your sense of what makes you, you. This includes how you came to be you and who you will become in the future.
Though it might sound simple, your sense of what makes you, you is part of a complex and dynamic relation between society and you. Recall that from a sociological perspective, your life course is the co-product of your choices and actions and the opportunities and constraints of your social and historical circumstances. Similarly, from a psychosocial developmental perspective, identity is a process “‘located’ in the core of the individual yet also in the core of his communal culture, a process which establishes, in fact, the identity of those two identities” (Erikson, 1968, p. 22). In other words, your identity is a relation between society and you, and you experience this relation subjectively. This is why we refer to the “sense of” identity. A positive sense of identity is a sense of psycho-social wholeness: an inner sense of continuity and self-sameness matched by a sense of social continuity and sameness.
The process of maintaining this subjective sense of psychosocial continuity and self-sameness is called ego identity. Ego identity weaves together social roles, self-concepts, and life experiences. For example, though you have a different role at school than you do with your family or at work and likely present yourself somewhat differently in these social contexts, you integrate these experiences so that you remain the same you. Likewise, though you have different roles, see yourself differently, and interact with others differently in the present than you did in childhood and adolescence, you integrate your past and present so that you remain the same you. In other words, you are constantly weaving together diverse images of yourself in various past and present roles into an encompassing sense of who I am. And you are projecting this sense of who I am into a future that you bringing about with your choices and actions.
However, ego identity is not all there is to identity—it’s the aspect often emphasized in psychology. Whereas psychologists tend to think and talk about identity at the level of subjective experience, sociologists tend to think and talk about identity at the level of society. At that level, social identity refers to the recognized roles and statuses you have as a member of a community. Becoming an adult requires that you find a place for yourself in the social structure by acquiring adult roles. For many if not most college students, the choice of a major reflects not just personal interests and abilities but also what status they want in society.
Your subjective sense of identity (ego identity) and your place in society (social identity) meet in your interactions with other people. At the level of interactional behavior, the personal style with which you present yourself is called your personal identity. Your personal identity is influenced by both the social rules associated with your place in society and by your subjective sense of continuity and self-sameness. For example, as a student in a college classroom, there are conventions for interacting with professors and peers that you (hopefully) follow. At the same time, your choice of being in a college classroom to interact with professors and peers in the first place is (hopefully) guided by your sense of “who I want to become” that connects your present with your future. In other words, the way you interact with others is influenced by both the social structure and your own agency.
When we work with mentees, we are working most directly at the interactional level of identity. But it’s important to remember that the interactional level is a like a weigh station between the social and psychological levels, impacting and impacted by what happens at those levels. In fact, one of the take-away messages here is that interpersonal interactions—including those that take place in mentoring—are potentially relevant to identity development.
At this point, you should see the parallel between life course theory and identity theory. Both describe the dynamic relations between society and the individual. Both emphasize the role of human agency yet recognize that humans’ choices and actions are bounded by the social contextual opportunities and constraints. However, life course theory pays more attention to the big picture in terms of the individual’s path through life and the historical time and place in which this path through life is worked out. Identity theory pays more attention to the intrapersonal and interpersonal dynamics by which identity is synthesized and enacted.