In this first of a two-part series on branding, I take a look at the Blue-Collar Counselor moniker, while also taking a trip down memory lane.

The Blue-Collar Counselor Goes to School:

It seems that I have always been interested in people and places. Maybe it goes back to elementary school, where, every year, I expeditiously leafed through my Social Studies books looking for all the colorful graphs, charts, maps, and pictures to study that could be contained within the glued bindings of each school year’s designated book (sometimes new and shiny editions; other years, marked up and vandalized older editions). I did this rather undeterred as the rest of class was, undoubtedly, concentrating their learning a different Subject Area. But I often couldn’t be bothered. It was far too exciting to learn a new fact about a particular place or people group. Maybe, someday, I would go on Jeopardy or Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and be rewarded for my near utility-less knowledge about facts and information that many other people find dry, boring, or practically useless. But in my elementary, and fast-forming INFJ, mind, I thought: “How in the world are people and places ever considered boring? For a few years, I even dreamed of going on the PBS kids show, ‘Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego’, but, alas, I never thought of myself as smart as any of the student-contestants on the show.

During the 3^rd Grade, I even managed to orally recited all 50 states and capitals from memory in front of my class. Not in any particular order, or alphabetically; I just sort of rapid-fired my way through them—in a mostly random cadence—as my teacher went through the list of states, checking off each correct pairing. Some nice students even cheered for me, but I am sure many others probably didn’t really care (and that was OK). My teacher automatically gave me an A+ for Social Studies for the semester. That was pretty great until somebody else decided to also attempt the feat (successfully) and it made my victory a little bit less sweet in my mind. But I eventually moved on from states and capitals and instead shifted my full focus towards sports. Which cities and states had existing sports teams; potentially exciting and new expansion teams on the radar; and even trying to create my own made-up teams in midwestern juggernauts such as Peoria or Kansas City.

But if I was sitting in classes, sketching out logo designs for expansion teams that did not exist (but only in my mind), I was happy. How do you beat a Kansas City King Cobras football expansion team, with a purple, red, black, silver, white, and teal green color scheme? C’mon–hello, 1995! I guess I was really inspired by the Canadian Football League deciding that the long, expansive Canadian borders–alone–were not enough to contain their quirky, fast, (and dare I say more fun) version of football that largely mirrored their cousins to the south (you know, the No Fun League), and they needed to expand to the American South–of all places–with ridiculously-amazing team names (and logos) such as the Mad Dogs and Barracudas. What a time to be alive.

Today, I suppose that I am just as influenced and intrigued by people groups and places. I love looking up demographic-type information on Wikipedia or studying different maps. (I guess the 11-year old version of me would probably be pretty pleased.) All of that is to say that I am proud of where I come from and am proud of my background. When the COVID-19 pandemic first broke out, I took some time to think about my identify as a school counselor and human being. What did I want to be known for? What was my identify? What was my brand?

I was born in Toledo, Ohio; the first-born son of a Union heat and frost insulator and registered nurse. Toledo is the Glass City: home of the Mud Hens and Jamie Farr, and also the birthplace of Katie Holmes, I guess. It’s your prototypical Midwestern industrial Rust Belt city, where people are anything but pretentious, and who punch a time clock every day in the morning for work. It’s a no-frills, gritty, and All-American city. But I wasn’t raised in Toledo: I was raised on the Michigan/Ohio border—a place where I found it hard to demonize Buckeyes (as a fairly casual Wolverine and Spartan fan). Southern Monroe Country (in Michigan) is mostly a mix of suburban and rural. Walk a few hundred feet and you will be in the middle of a corn field; drive five minutes south and you are in the City of Toledo; drive 45 minutes to the north and you’ll either head into the City of Detroit, or detour on your way to Windsor, Ontario, Canada (which reminds me that I still need to get my enhanced license for U.S.-Canadian travel…not that the borders are particularly porous right now anyway though).

So, it goes much without saying that my schooling growing up was both pretty humbling and unassuming. Kids from three local small towns all went to the same school (probably because the towns were too small on their own to have their own school)—and we even had the word Consolidated as an official part of the school name that was probably only important when branded upon the official school letterhead of memos, or faxes, that went out from the school, or on the business cards of the passing-through superintendents that seemed to only stay on for a couple, or few, years at a time. Kids never cared about that stuff though. We were too busy trying to determine who the toughest kid in school was or if the rumors were true about any of the brand new students in our school.

We really didn’t care about segregating ourselves by ethnic or racial groups, either. When you go to a smaller school, everyone knows everyone, and everyone pulls together somehow. We even had an impressive percentage  of Latinx and Native American students, and we all kind of treated each other about the same and mostly all had all the same classes together. A decent percentage of kids were on the poorer socio-economic side; a decent number were middle class; and few of us seemed to be anything close to rich (although a small handful kids here and there were “rumored” to have near-endless supplies of money, but who really knew? (unless, of course, their parents drove fancy, expensive cars or lived in huge houses, am I right?).

The Blue-Collar Counselor Goes to College:

Fast-forward from humbling elementary, junior high, and high school experiences, now it was time to enroll at the local community college. I had little to no idea of what to expect for college—it was just something that a number of us in school assumed we would do. I never even met with my high school counselor (OK, I did one time at the very end of my Senior year, in a last-ditch, failed effort to be selected for even one local scholarship).  So why the community college route?  I guess I would have been mostly petrified to go off to 4-year school somewhere; plus, I didn’t want to burden my parents with two more already-expensive years of college. The state-granted MEAP scholarship that I earned ensured that my first year of college was mostly payed for, so, as a family, we determined a plan, and that was just fine with me. No real college shopping to speak of—simple and straight-forward. I arrived on campus and had to try to re-invent myself, which included two hours of study for every hour of class (because I read somewhere that was the definitive ratio if you wanted to be successful in college). As I rather militaristically followed that formula, I was able to pass classes and generally learn quite a bit.

All the while, I was working at the national grocer chain, Kroger: stocking shelves; changes product prices in the hand-held Telxon machines; setting up displays and end-caps; printing sales signs; cleaning up messy spills; putting up price tags; taking down price tags; ringing up customers—a little bit of everything. For some periods of time, I would work in the grocery department; other times, in the dairy department; and for longer stretches, in the frozen foods department (which was really pretty great in the summer and equally really pretty bad in the winter, for rather obvious reasons). For a stretch, I was a back-up Dairy department manage, and, later on, was approached on a few occasions by the store managers to go into management (a person typically needed a Bachelor’s Degree or a couple years of experience managing an individual department, for instance). But I wasn’t done with pursuing a career in Education—just yet.

Meanwhile, after a couple years, I enrolled at Eastern Michigan University as a transfer student and continued to work at Kroger every weekend and full-time in the summer, during holidays, and during the breaks between semesters. Going to EMU felt like a step up from the community college, but I arrived on my first day—honest to God—scared to death that I was going to fail. I even managed to get completely lost on my first time visiting some friends—even before I started my first day on campus. I was walking around in circles and had to call said friends and describe to them the nearby landmarks on campus (in order to make it back to their off-campus apartment). I felt really embarrassed at myself. GPS and smart phones were only in their infancy at the time and couldn’t be counted on to save me from my own self-embarrassment.

Later on, when I successfully navigated my way around campus, I graduated in the Spring of 2009, after a really rocky, rough-and-tumble Student Teaching experience, and ran face-first into the headwinds of the Great Recession’s assault on the education world, writ large. Nobody in Michigan was hiring Social Studies teaching Majors, so I did quite a bit of writing; worked on some artistic stuff; and contemplated of my future. Would I try to stay in Education or move to Washington D.C. for a governmental position? I had no idea. So rather than make any hasty moves, I decided to get things set up to apply for Graduate School, and then began that endeavor at the beginning of 2011. Once again, on my first day of Grad School, you guessed it: I was scared to death. I locked-in on every word that my first professor said and took excruciatingly-detailed notes. I didn’t want to miss anything: Imposter syndrome. Could I even finish this grueling program? All the while, I wanted desperately to teach. I read history book after history book and borrowed every PBS and History Channel DVD from the library that was available in circulation. I wanted to be sharp and ready for when my time came.

But it never came.

I interviewed at more than a dozen different schools, for teaching positions, throughout graduate school. Rejection after rejection after rejection. I was the #2 candidate; I was the external candidate that was brought in to interview, when an internal candidate was earmarked; or I didn’t have any official-official experience, so the veteran teachers applying always got the jobs. Everything felt like a marathon-length walk down a quiet, lonely road that never somehow really seems to end. Ironically enough, my heart was still set on teaching, all the way up until my School Counseling Internship at the very tail-end of graduate school in 2015.

While going to graduate school and working at Kroger, I was also substitute teaching—a job that I really enjoyed. I enjoyed stepping in and trying to make sure that students hopefully learned something; that the lesson plan was delivered; and that the classroom was not turned upside down in disarray by the end of the day. If I had a bad day, or a bad class, I didn’t have to go back the next day, in most cases. Students were generally pretty good and I definitely learned—and developed—my own method and style of classroom management. As a substitute teacher, every teacher I ever met, or interacted with, treated me really well and were all typically pretty helpful and encouraging (probably part of the reason I have so much respect for our teachers–not to mention, for how hard most teachers work).

The Blue-Collar Kroger Moonlighter:

I worked at Kroger for fourteen years–yes, that’s not a typo, I assure you (well, thirteen years, plus one year when my location was originally a Food Town store that Kroger eventually bought out and  took over), starting from the summer going into my Senior year of high school, until I was formally hired to start at Pioneer High School in the summer of 2016. You are probably wondering why I stayed on for so long, right? Sometimes I wondered the same thing, but I suppose that I stayed so long because they worked with my college schedules each semester; my substitute teaching schedule; and provided solid health insurance benefits to me.

I saw—and heard—some pretty wild things—particularly at night when there was a full moon. I even had a co-worker tell me a story about apprehending a shop-lifter, only to have them slobber their way out of a headlock and escape across the busy road; or the customer who poured a shampoo bottle all over the ground and starting making snow angel motions as they laid themselves out on the sales floor (OK, maybe I made up the snow angel part) and caused a scene (pretending to have fallen on a wet floor, in order to try to sue the company–only problem was that another customer saw the entire thing and crushed any potentially-lucrative lawsuit dreams). Or, here’s another good one: the customers who would come in later at night and pull 24-packs of pop (yeah, we call it pop here in Michigan) off the shelf and run the full cans through the bottle return machines (in order to get the .10c deposit for each recycled can). When that happened, as it did, from time to time, it left sticky, sugary pop pooling everywhere in the bottle-room, even seeping its way often onto the back storage room floor where us workers broke down stock pallets, loaded up carts for each aisle, and escaped for a few moments of sanity, and peace and quiet, from swarms of customers on the sales floor. Despite the wild things that sometimes occured at work, I learned the value of teamwork; punching a time clock; being able to work during some pretty crazy hours of the day; providing customer service; and using laughter and jokes to make it through each work day.

Multiple days a week, I would wake up to take a substitute teaching job at 5:30 A.M., put on a button-up shirt and tie, teach during the day, then go into Kroger for a half-shift from, say, 5:00-9:00 P.M., usually. It was many brief naps in-between jobs—in my small truck—and empty Taco Bell bags strewn everywhere inside (the only remnants remaining from cheap, quick dinners). A few times, I even managed to eat at Taco Bell for over 60 days in a row—no lie at all. I visited the same Taco Bell location so many times that the store manager even offered me a job, through the drive-thru window! 

I remember really being inspired by Will Smith’s character, Chris Gardner, in the movie The Pursuit of Happyness (the autobiographical book–of the same title–is also really good, too, in my opinion). That’s what life felt like for a few years: Trusting in God and trying to look for minuscule victories each and every day. It was truly humbling to be finishing up a Master’s Degree while moonlighting at the grocery store and doing the filling-in for teachers gig, which felt like a long toil in the lowest level of the minor leagues, like Instructional League ball or Rookie-level ball (to borrow a baseball analogy, from this enthusiastic Minor League Baseball fan-geek). But that grind—that season of waiting—somehow managed to teach me a lot.

The Blue-Collar Counselor’s Reflections:

Looking back, I don’t know what I would change. I feel like I developed a drive to persevere; honed my overall time-management skills; and developing a heart and understanding of how hard it is for many American workers to get ahead with severely clipped local, state, and national safety nets and unstable work schedules. I worked with a lot of salt of the earth folks–many of whom never went to college, but who were smart in their own ways and who had a lot to teach others if only people were open to learning.

I look at my job now as a counselor-educator and feel it really isn’t all that different from working at the grocery store. At the heart of both jobs is customer service—being responsive; trying to be helpful; being dependable; and doing it all because you like to help people. Looking back, I don’t miss the holiday-rush seasons scattered throughout the year; or people regularly calling-off work, resulting in perpetual short-staffing; or ridiculously late-arriving semi-truck trailers of perishable food pallets, but I am thankful for the lessons learned and the cross-sections of people I met and worked with—that was truly good experience.

As I think about the lessons learned: the value of hard-work; that labor should be respected and compensated fairly; that public schools and community colleges are bastions of opportunity; that anybody—who wants to—can learn in life; and that a First-Generation kid from the far Southeast corner of Michigan could go on to earn a Master’s Degree and work with some pretty incredible high school students—I would say that’s a pretty good story.

So far. And, yet, there is still much more to write for me; for you–for all of us.

As you create your own brand, I would encourage you to do it your way. Be true to who you are and proud of where you come from. The world needs your blend of gifts; talents; abilities; strengths; experiences; and interests—a combination of which nobody else in the world possesses! What do you want to be known for? How does where you were born and/or raised shaped who you are today? How does your family background factor in your identity?

We are each continually writing our own legacy—one day at a time. There’s a world out there that needs you. Is now the time for an introduction (or reintroduction)? If so, make sure that you’re ready for us, world!

–The Blue-Collar Counselor