Adulting is Hard

If you haven't seen the coffee mugs, social media tiles, throw pillows and notebooks sporting the phrase "adulting is hard" or "coffee first, then adulting" well ... you have not been on social media! After the term "adulting" entered our lexicon it quickly became a funny joke, but let's pause and reflect on our own early adulthood experience. To all the twentysomethings out there: I see you and yes, adulting IS hard. Launching a career, deciding where to live, how to structure your life, where you want to be financially in ten years: those are big decisions. When we are 19 or 22 or even 35, some of these decisions seem permanent and life-altering. Then we learn they are not: we get promotions and then pink-slipped. We get married and divorced. We get in really great shape then lose it because we get too busy for the gym.

Along the way something happens. Those adulting milestones, those successes and failures, those fits and starts begin to shape us into the resilient, confident and creative people we are today. To me, that's the real spirit of adjuncting: we have learned, grown, pivoted, adapted and maybe even started over several times. Adjuncting is that space in which we can generously share our experiences because we've already climbed the rungs of the ladder or navigated through the jungle gym of our own career path but we're also still very much in it.

It's where we have a unique opportunity to shape the next generation: to excite them about our industries, to help them be creative problem-solvers and quite possibly change the world!

I have been teaching public relations in addition to my day job for more than a decade now. As a result I cross paths with some amazing public relations practitioners who once took my class. But I also count among my former students a brand manager for a global food company; a district attorney; a human resources leader for a global medical device company. While I've had a lot of great moments in my own professional life, nothing gives me more satisfaction than watching these professionals go out and do great things in the world, knowing I played a small part in making it happen.