Jon is a single father of two young boys, ages 10 and 6. They live in the suburbs of a small Midwest town, where Jon works as a warehouse supervisor for a major online retailer. During high school, Jon excelled in math and wanted to be an accountant. After graduation, he married his high school sweetheart, and they were married for 6 years. To fulfill his life-long dream of earning a college degree, Jon enrolled at his local community college and started taking accounting classes online.

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Jon finds it challenging to participate in his online classes because he resents not having enough time to spend with his children. He always prided himself on keeping the warehouse running like a well-oiled machine, but he struggled to manage his online classes' workload. He always felt like he was rushing to meet his deadlines and felt exhausted after pulling all-nighters every weekend. Jon reached his breaking point when he failed an exam because he didn’t have enough time to study. He reached out to me to learn how to balance his responsibilities as a college student with being a dad.

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Jon knew that he didn’t want to quit school, but he wasn’t sure how to control his online classes. We met for several sessions to help him develop the mindset and tools to succeed in online learning. During our sessions, I helped Jon create a time management practice that allowed him to set aside time to focus on his coursework. He became an expert at using a digital calendar to keep his schoolwork organized, which allowed him to spend more time with his children. After working with me for a few months, Jon decreased his stress levels and became more confident about his ability to succeed in online learning. Now, Jon feels he has control over his online courses, and he only has four more classes to complete before he graduates. 

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Ms. Evelyn recently retired from a successful career managing a call center for a large telecommunications company in Atlanta, GA. A few years ago, Ms. Evelyn started a graduate program in social work but couldn’t balance work and school demands. As a result, she only completed the first semester of her program before withdrawing. Ms. Evelyn regretted not finishing her graduate degree and always wanted to finish her degree. Now that she’s retired, she decided to continue her studies, complete her degree and start her second career as a social worker.

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During her first week of classes, Ms. Evelyn realized that she was not as technologically savvy as her classmates, and she began to worry about how she would keep up. She’d worked with computers in the call center but wasn’t familiar with course platforms like Blackboard. Ms. Evelyn also had no idea how to conduct research for her writing assignments. She panicked when her grades started to slip. Ms. Evelyn decided that she needed additional support to learn the online learning tools that would help her reach her goal of becoming a social worker.

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Ms. Evelyn and I started retraining her brain to stay calm and focused on learning the technology and research skills. We drew upon her training experiences from her career in the call center. Additionally, I coached her on how to practice a mindset that focused on comparing her progress to herself and not her classmates. By the end of the term, Ms. Evelyn learned how to evaluate her progress by assessing what she had learned from starting her social work program to where she was currently. After completing her first course, Ms. Evelyn got the hang of using technology to conduct research and complete her assignments. She even purchased a new laptop so she can work on her classwork when she’s traveling. Now, Ms. Evelyn is taking an extra class each term to quickly finish her program and start her field internship.

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Tina is a married Army vet living in Southern California. She enrolled in the Army after graduating high school and trained to be a medic. After completing two tours in the Persian Gulf, Tina decided that she wanted to continue her medical career and become a nurse. Her goal was to become a nurse practitioner and open her own community clinic. Tina decided that getting her BNA was the first step and enrolled in a local university program. Like many students during the pandemic, Tina had to enroll in classes that were delivered entirely online. Tina excelled in a learning environment where she could engage directly with her peers, and she did not like taking classes online. Nevertheless, she knew that her goal of becoming a nurse was too important to let online classes stand in her way.

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A couple of weeks after starting her first online class, Tina quickly realized the difficulty of managing distance learning. She began resisting the online learning process because it lacked a clear structure. She didn’t understand when she needed to log on to participate in class, and she missed engaging with her classmates. The isolating nature of distance education was an obstacle that she had not experienced in the Army, and Tina knew she had to learn how to organize online learning if she wanted to get into her nursing program.

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When Tina contacted me, she was frustrated with her online learning experience. She didn’t know how to turn things around. We worked on developing her mindset to neutralize the negative thoughts she had about her learning process. I showed Tina how she could organize her own online learning structure, drawing upon her successful army career experiences. We started by breaking her weekly assignments down into smaller tasks to see how all the components worked together. By our second month of working together, Tina had developed an organizational process for the term. She felt proud of her accomplishments and found the structure she so desired. Now, Tina feels more prepared and confident about her ability to complete her online classes.

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