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

Nothing is wrong with this student, and they are not clueless about themselves. The question is just built wrong for them. "What are you good at?" asks an 18-to-22-year-old with almost no work history to summon evidence no one ever asked them to collect.

Recognition is far easier than recall. So stop asking them to produce the answer from a blank, and give them something to react to instead.

The audit is the wrong thing on the table. It is a fine map of requirements and a poor mirror. Slide it aside and open the one you both actually need.

They did their Career Discovery report before this slot, so their results are already on your screen. Go to Discovering Your Strengths, near the front. It lists their top ten strengths, ranked, each in plain language, with a line on what they likely do well.

Here is a shape that fits the half-hour you have. Hold it as a spine, not a script. When a step opens something up, follow the student there.

1. Open on them, not the audit. Turn the screen so they can see the ranked list, and ask them to read the ten slowly. Have them mark the three that sound most like them, not the three that sound impressive. The three that make them think, that is me.

2. Anchor each to one real moment. For each of the three, ask for one recent time it was true, not a resume line. A specific 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, each in the student's own language, on one page. That page is theirs to keep. It is the first thing you both pick up next time.

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

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