Setting Intention

During the recent fall semester at CSU Monterey Bay, I assigned 22 students in my "Speaking and Listening" communications class, all of them freshmen and sophomores, to craft and deliver their college graduation speech to the class. After spending 16 weeks learning how to develop a thesis around something that matters to them, as well as how to structure a coherent speech, craft it dynamically, and present it confidently to an audience of their peers, my students, armed with their own convictions, spoke.

On their own, in front of God and their peers, plus me. About something they haven't yet experienced.

Yet they spoke as if they had. As if they had persevered through four or five years of college. As if they knew, already, who they are and where they're headed. As if they had the wisdom earned through experience, to offer to other students. Because, it seems, they do.

My students spoke of the alchemy of the identity inherent in their own cultures and the culture of college life. They spoke of the essential pairing of failure and success along the way, acknowledging that rejections are a "flight of stairs," bringing us to our next opportunity.

One student quoted Winston Churchill, who left his final post as British Prime Minister 50 years before she was born: "Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm." I hope she will remember this when she doesn't get her desired grade on an exam, the job she'd hoped for, a second date.

Another student wove the wisdom of Thomas Edison into her speech—His light went out 74 years before hers ignited—“I have not failed 10,000 times. I have not failed even once. I have succeeded in proving that those 10,000 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.” Our young speaker said learning this had enabled her to persevere in college.

Yet another had turned to the Toltec wisdom of Don Miguel Ruiz, gleaned from his text, "The Four Agreements," which we read during the semester. She invited her audience to remember the importance of "learning, of living, of loving—and of creating this kind of community legacy.

I who had been teaching the class for the past 16 weeks, was learning from my students.

We also heard from a student who shifted the traditional structure of a graduation speech from referring to the privilege of going to college and the inherent opportunities to learn and grow and mature into a productive adulthood, to focus on the mistakes she made during her maturing years and their takeaway lessons. She learned that stealing Suzette's boyfriend in seventh grade was a mistake, mostly because Suzette came out ahead of that deal. She learned that TP-ing her best girlfriend's two-story house during high school was tons of fun in a secret-spy kind of way, until it started raining. She also learned that pulling an all-nighter before finals week nearly caused her to sleep through the whole event.

And she learned that, despite all the mistakes she's made during her school years, she could still see her way to accepting her diploma, flipping her tassel, and tossing her mortarboard into the air. Way to set intention.