As graduation season reaches its height, the definition of the word has been swirling around in my head. Graduation. Typically thought of in terms of academic achievement, but at its core it’s tied to this notion of completing one chapter, looking toward the next… And leaving something behind.

Which makes me think about the many ways we experience unofficial “graduations” all throughout our adulthoods.

For some of us, we experienced a coming of age at 18 years old, or 21, or after college because we commuted back and forth to community college and we lived at home. Regardless of when it happened, most of our stories of reaching adulthood all have one thing in common: struggle. 

Struggle, hardship, trial and error, and figuring it out. 

Now for some, flourishing during those big changes comes naturally. They flourish in their academics. They flourish in their ways of learning. They flourish despite their obstacles. They seem to have a way of always coming out on top. As you read that description, some names are probably coming to mind, maybe it's your college bestie or the neighbor friend that you had growing up. 

An example of someone like that pops into my mind right away, someone who was a high achiever at a young age in the classic academic sense — but there was more underneath the surface of their story. A tutor from a local high school was fabulously successful in both academics and athletics, and we would read about their accomplishments regularly in the local newspaper. When they went on to college, lists of their achievements and highlights from their soccer games were reported routinely. They were what you might call a local phenom. 

What the local papers didn’t cover was that behind all of those trophies and certificates, all of those honors and accolades, this person had a father who was an absolute hard ass. Amongst family and friends this was a well known factor of this person’s life, and it was, of course, a bit disconcerting. 

This person’s father rode them hard about their grades, with extracurriculars and social outings kept to a minimum because academics always came first. And when it came to their athletics, their father rode them hard there, too, constantly working with them in the backyard or meeting them at the school soccer field. It was interesting to have a conversation one on one with this young person, because ultimately, despite the success their father’s demands had garnered them… They hated their dad. They despised what was being asked of them as a student and as an athlete, the pieces of their teenage years that they had to sacrifice. The standard of excellence came with a cost, and as you might imagine, their graduation meant more than leaving just high school behind. 

Sometimes flourishing in our seasons of life comes with a lot of push. It comes with a lot of hard nights alone with ourselves, whether it’s cramming for a test, journaling through grief, or preparing for a board meeting. And some of us, like this young person in my example, hate it all along the way. 

Now, let's recognize that they got an amazing scholarship that paid for a large portion of their schooling, they were able to play soccer in college, and their college years were rich as a result of working so hard. Sometimes, we know what we're working for is for a greater cause, and that all of those terrific test scores will take us somewhere great one day. We believe that we’ll graduate to the next level and leave that particular kind of struggle behind. 

Only to find a new one. If we go back to that notion of working really hard for a business presentation, in particular, we know there's not a guarantee of how the board will look at our proposal, or if we are creating the best business plan. Ultimately, we can only prepare through hard work and our best intentions — but it also takes a combination of luck and perseverance. Look at Emily Weiss, founder of the hugely successful beauty company Glossier, she had to pitch to investors not once, not twice, not three times, not even four, five, or six times. It was only after the 12th pitch that she got a yes. 

So in the aftermath, her success is applauded due to all that she’s accomplished since then. Meanwhile, we so quickly forget how hard she had to work for that; the amount of pitching and practicing that she had to do to finally launch her story. 

In both of these examples there’s a hidden struggle beneath the success. In order to graduate into their best new versions of themselves, both the founder of a major company and a young person going to college had to contend with people pushing them to improve. Hearing “not good enough” over and over again breaks some people, while others persevere, because they believe that graduating to the next level will be worth it. In my own words, you don’t get to the gold without getting down in the mud.

I talked about this concept at length in a podcast I participated in earlier this spring in Denver, that to get to those beautiful, successful times in life, to get to that gold, you have to sit in the mud. When I think of these graduation seasons of life, it could not be more true, we almost all experience this struggle, the hard work to underneath our dreams. 

And yet… When we look on social media, all we see is the gold. We don’t want to share the mud, the struggle, the hardships.

A trendy example can help illustrate this: sourdough. Ever since the pandemic, at least on my social media feeds, people have loved showcasing their beautiful breads that they make at home. Learning how to make sourdough bread at home can be confusing, intimidating, and overwhelming — but you wouldn’t know that, just from seeing a stunning picture of the finished product on someone’s Instagram page!

If after seeing someone else’s beautiful bread you were to then attempt to recreate what you saw online, you’d think: “wait a second, this is not as easy as I thought it was going to be!” We then find ourselves backtracking: “I don't know if I'm up to this. I don't know if I have the time for this. How many loaves of bread is it gonna take me to finally see success, to where my family will actually even eat a bread loaf I made?”

That’s the struggle, right there. That’s the mud. Even in our hobbies outside of school and work, it can creep in.

So if this concept of having to sit in the mud to get to the gold applies when graduating academically, in our careers, and in our hobbies… That’s right, we see it in our personal relationships, too.

Maybe it's with a best friend that we’ve lost touch with or had a falling out with, and we have to go through our understanding of the miscommunications along the way, and of what happened. The time inevitably comes when you have to decide how important that particular relationship is to you. You have to decide if you are willing to work on the things that you may have contributed to the downfall of that relationship you’re thinking of, whether it was platonic or romantic. All of that learning that happens along the way.

Again: that’s the mud.

Having to truly, honestly, authentically look in the mirror and get real with ourselves is not easy. Having to accept that we were part of the demise of any relationship is hard work. We don't want to have to do that. It’s not fun. It's uncomfortable. You might feel internally that “I don't know if I'm okay with being this vulnerable with myself.” 

And, man, working through that is painful. 

Let’s say you’re sitting at home on a Friday night, and while scrolling on social media you see that your best friends are all out on the town without you. Your stomach sinks. The hurt creeps in. It stings really, really badly, because you didn’t even know they were all getting together. In the hours that follow, you come to question everything that’s led to this point.  

That’s where the hard work begins. After the initial hurt subsides and the big tangled ball of confusion sits in front of you, that’s where self-reflection has to come in, when you determine if you’ve got the interpersonal skills to graduate to a better understanding of yourself.

Maybe you think to yourself that there were signs all along the way — you realize, “wow, I didn’t respond to their texts or emails or phone calls for weeks at a time.” You try to reason with yourself, “oh, but they know me, I'm just not a very good texter” or, “oh gosh, that's a funny meme they sent me a couple months back, talking about how I'm that friend who doesn't reply, or who never responds in time to an invitation.” 

What you thought was a funny quirk of your personality has turned into the reason your relationships are falling apart. 

I think there's a self protection mechanism that kicks in, right? In this hypothetical, you reason with yourself, “well, I'm just too busy with my family. I have responsibilities. I can't hang out with all those friends anymore anyway.” 

That’s part of the grieving process. 

The grief is in the mud. 

So then you have to decide if you’re going to search for the gold in this relationship, or if you need to take what you’ve learned, and try your best in another one. 

This hypothetical version of you, let’s say, has decided to grow up and out of this hard situation. You say to yourself, “I have to be brave and look at myself. Me not returning texts or phone calls isn't cute anymore. It's not funny anymore. And because I am willing to learn and relearn, I'm going to look a little bit deeper. When people communicate with me, it's for a reason, and when I don't communicate back, it's a sign of disrespect. It’s me showing them that they are not important to me. I have to be honest about the role that I play.”

Whether you try to patch things up with those particular friends, or if you simply move on, the fact of the matter is that you’ve learned too much to stay where you were before. And so, you graduate into a new era, with more understanding and with that hard chapter behind you. 

Whatever your graduation diplomas might be, or in other words, the proof of your achievements, there’s no denying it feels amazing to hold them in your hands. That evidence that you did it. Whether it’s a certain dollar amount, a benchmark number of followers or email subscribers, or a certain per hour rate at work. It’s a feeling like no other. You got it right. It's amazing, and it feels amazing. 

The thing with graduation, though, is that you leave people behind, as well. It's not just about all the learning and relearning and accomplishing and walking all of the hard roads to get to that final goal. I remember in an interview of Michelle Obama’s, and I might be paraphrasing, she said, “you can't carry everybody up to the top with you.” 

Sometimes you're gonna have to leave some people behind because they're not going in the same direction as you. Maybe it's the friend that you had while you were creating your family and having children, who you grew close to because you were raising kids at the same time, but suddenly you're finding yourself not aligned with her anymore. You're working more hours than you used to, and you can't relate as much because she’s continuing to be a stay at home mom. She has a more flexible schedule that always involves children and family, whereas your flex time is now spent on creating new proposals or products, or you're gunning for promotion — and while your motherhood is in a really beautiful place, you don't have the same availability that you used to. 

Deep down, you feel or know that this friend doesn’t understand you. You can't carry them with you to the top. Truthfully, some of those old friends that you leave behind may even be family. And they find you to be ego filled, self centered, whereas you're very focused on, let’s say for example, paying off your house. You don't have all of that time for those people that you once had. When you look at things decisively, you can't even ask them to be on that journey with you, because you have to make some tough decisions about who's going to be on the journey with you to graduation. 

Sometimes getting to the next level can be lonely and sometimes you do have to walk a different path. Often this falling away of certain relationships happens naturally, and people understand, but I think it's something that people don't talk about. I think of some of you that are super successful, although you may have hit a number of successful benchmarks, you might look back and think, “yeah, maybe those relationships did fall by the wayside.” Maybe it's with a sibling because they don't find you to be a cool person to hang out with anymore because you're on your phone, you're answering emails, or you simply don't have the time to just go hang out in the bar scene or night clubbing. 

That's one that I've noticed amongst some of my employees, that there's a transition that happens when you’re done with vocational school or college, and you are moving on to the next step. Some of those school friends stay in those old patterns of life. They don't move on. They don't graduate, interpersonally, at the same time that you do. 

It’s a revolving door, right? We seem to always be moving on and graduating from those seasons of life. You're not always going to be raising toddlers, suddenly you have high schoolers, and next they’re graduating from high school, soon to be possibly graduating from college. The graduations from different chapters of motherhood or parenting come faster and faster. 

Here’s something many of us already know: the learning never stops.

When my stylists at the salon are starting out after graduating from cosmetology school and are growing a clientele, which can be very daunting and difficult, they quickly realize “oh my gosh cosmetology school only taught me the basics! There really is so much more to learn!”

Yeah… not quite. Read that paragraph above again with a smidge of sarcasm.

To anyone who teaches out there thinking, “come on, I rarely hear my students say that” — you’re absolutely right. The students, for whatever reason, never seem to be fully aware that there is much much more to learn. But on the flip side of that coin, cosmetology instructors in particular are rarely completely honest that the learning will never stop. The fact of the matter is, when it comes to the beauty industry and so many other professions, you have to have a love of the craft, of the art, and of being moldable and flexible, if you want to have longevity. I think it's better to be up front and to give you my honest feedback. 

Trends change. New haircuts are in. But wait a second, I was perfect at cutting the A-Line! 

Everybody has their hair long now. I don't know how to cut and style long hair!

Life changes, so do you, and you have to keep learning. 

You have already graduated, over and over again, even if you haven’t realized it. Acknowledging the journey of sitting in the mud to get to the goal, to get to those graduation phases, to get to those diplomas is worthwhile. Celebrate the struggle that got you here, or that is currently pushing you toward your goals. 

Just think about seeing your children graduate from high school or college, we know they don't get there without sitting in the mud. In my view, 90% of us know that the road isn’t easy — and while we do know those people who flourish beautifully, and we can honor their journeys, those of us who have continued to trudge on, to work hard, refocus, recalibrate, graduate, and then start again… We get to savor the gold even more. 

It never stops, and I guess the question is, do we ever fully graduate? When do we get off the ride?

There are definitely those people that are very content and happy with their professional achievements, and who rest happily upon their graduations from chapters past. That's a beautiful thing. And then there are those of us that are constantly on to the next thing because we are endlessly curious. Ultimately, even if you believe you are done graduating professionally, moments of growth will find you elsewhere, and isn’t that beautiful?

Be patient with yourself. Sitting in the mud to get to the gold is the norm not the exception. Have the beautiful courage to look at your truth in the mirror, and do the hard work when you need to. The diploma you’ll earn yourself will be so worth it. 

Love,

🤍 Quinn