The "I don't know what I'm good at" appointment

Nothing is wrong with this student. The question is built wrong for them. "What are you good at?" asks a young person with almost no work history to summon evidence no one asked them to collect.

Recognition is easier than recall. Stop asking them to produce an answer from a blank; give them something to react to instead.

Slide the audit aside and open the one you both need. They did their Career Discovery report before the slot, so their results are already open. Go to Discovering Your Strengths, near the front. It lists their top ten strengths, ranked, each with a line on what they likely do well.

Here is a shape for your half-hour. Hold it as a spine, not a script; when a step opens something, follow the student there.

1. Open on them, not the audit. Turn the screen to the ranked list and have them read the ten. Ask them to mark the three that sound most like them, not the three that sound impressive. The ones that make them think, that is me.

2. Anchor each to one real moment. For each, ask for one recent time it was true, not a resume line. A scene counts: a class project, a shift at work, a night they got a stuck group moving. Small still counts.

3. Write it down in their words. Three strengths, three scenes, in the student's own language, on one page. That page is theirs to keep, the first thing you both pick up next time.

A strength with a real moment behind it stops being a word on a screen and becomes something the student owns. They carry it into a major, an application, a hard interview question.

You did not hand them an answer. You put a mirror where the audit had been, and stayed while they looked.