About Belle Liang PhD
Belle Liang is Professor & Chair of the Department of Counseling, Developmental, & Educational Psychology in the Lynch School of Education and Human Development at Boston College. She is Principal Investigator in the Purpose Lab and her research focuses on positive youth development, including mentoring and relational health.
In particular, her work involves the development of purpose interventions, including those that are technologically mediated.
She is currently developing True North, a curriculum and web-based application for creating purpose profiles for individuals and data analytics for organizations. She leads research-practice collaborations in and out of the U.S., and has authored ~100 scientific journal articles and book chapters. To translate research to practice, she co-authored How to Navigate Life: The New Science of Finding Your Way in School, Career, & Beyond.
Where to find Belle Liang PhD
Boston College website
Purpose Lab website
How to Navigate Life Website
Twitter
LinkedIn
About Tim Klein
Tim Klein, LCSW is an award-winning urban educator, clinical therapist, former teaching fellow at Harvard University and lecturer at Boston College. Throughout his career, he’s worked intensively with marginalized students to empower them to pursue meaningful and fulfilling lives.
Prior to his work at Boston College, he helped launch Stanford University’s Project Wayfinder, where he trained educators from over 30 states and 12 different countries.
As the Director of School and Community Engagement at Medford High School he implemented strategies that increased college matriculation by 30%. Prior to that, he spent five years as the Outreach Director for Summer Search, a national youth development non-profit serving historically underrepresented student populations. His work has been featured in EdSurge, Greater Good Magazine, The Los Angeles Times and KCRW.
Where to find Tim Klein
Twitter
How to Navigate Life Website
Purpose Lab website
How to Navigate Life: The New Science of Finding Your Way in School, Career, and Beyond
An essential guide to tackling what students, families, and educators can do now to cut through stress and performance pressure, and find a path to purpose.
Today’s college-bound kids are stressed, anxious, and navigating demands in their lives unimaginable to a previous generation. They’re performance machines, hitting the benchmarks they’re “supposed” to in order to reach the next tier of a relentless ladder. Then, their mental and physical exhaustion carries over right into first jobs. What have traditionally been considered the best years of life have become the beaten-down years of life.
Belle Liang and Timothy Klein devote their careers both to counseling individual students and to cutting through the daily pressures to show a better way, a framework, and set of questions to find kids’ “true north”: what really turns them on in life, and how to harness the core qualities that reveal, allowing them to choose a course of study, a college, and a career.
Even the gentlest parents and teachers tend to play into pervasive societal pressure for students to PERFORM. And when we take the foot off the gas, we beg the kids to just figure out what their PASSION is. Neither is a recipe for mental or physical health, or, ironically, for performance or passion. How to Navigate Life shows that successful human beings instead tap into their PURPOSE―the why behind the what and how. Best of all, purpose is a completely translatable quality to every aspect of life, from first jobs to last jobs and everything in between.