A Middle Schooler's Guide to Time Travel with Mike Iskandar

Subscribe To The Podcast

Today on the show we have Mike Iskandar. Mike is an educational consultant and he particularly works with middle school-aged children and helps them create emotional resilience. He gives them a lot of the exercises and tools that I am only just now in these last few years of my life discovering and using to heal some of the wounds, traumas, and baggage that comes from growing up as a kid in middle school.

We have a really interesting conversation today about how to get kids opened up to these ideas that aren’t commonly taught in schools and there are a ton of parallels for all of you entrepreneurs, coaches, and marketers out there who are trying to get your message out and have an audience with a very tight attention span and if there is anybody with tight attention spans it has to be middle schools. If Mike can get them open to this, you can do anything.

We discuss:

[02:33] Mike shares his defining moment. He realized he had been holding on to insecurities since middle school.
[04:45] The magic of early childhood and the abundance of beautiful qualities we have often fade away as we age.
[07:44] Schools are looking for ways to engage students. These pandemic years have taken a toll on us that we are still healing from.
[10:04] He created a program around past reflection and future visioning. The power of the past and future can uplift who you are today.
[11:51] Mike shares about the time-traveling program he created. They start by creating their own time machines. It is a really fun start to the process of exploring their past and future on the time travel journey.
[13:36] Middle school is a heavy and hard time. This gives them a break from that time by going back through the past and looking at the future.
[15:56] Middle school is when they start to feel that sense of nostalgia and they adore the younger versions of themselves.
[17:50] They get very excited about their future selves and start thinking about what they have to do now to become that future version of themselves later.
[20:06] Mike enjoyed interviewing people of each age and asking them their favorite thing to do.
[22:52] When his middle schoolers interview college students or adults they often become even more excited about their future selves. This excitement leads to confidence.
[24:47] We can learn to connect to the younger parts of ourselves to make life more enjoyable and to have fun. These childhood qualities are the ones we need especially as entrepreneurs.
[26:50] We are experiencing as a society an epidemic of anxiety, depression, burnout, and suicide.
[30:55] Everybody has had something that defined them that they have carried with them and a vast majority of us have not had the tools.
[32:06] It is really about giving these kids and teachers the tools they need. They can take those tools with them into the future.
[34:29] Now is the time to start small and take action on this stuff. Give students every opportunity to feel great about who they are and to learn to love themselves. We need to give kids all the tools possible.