For everything you spend your time doing, you pay a price. The currency is your time, attention, and depending on the level of physical activity, energy.

Nobody has unlimited amounts of that currency. The best ways to stay within your budget and get most bang for your buck:

1. Choose things that actually pay you back with learning, enjoyment, time with people you love, self-improvement, rest and relaxation, etc.

2. Don’t overspend, and say “no” when you have to.

There are times when you might feel like you and your counselor are not on the same team. Why would a counselor discourage you from applying to a long list of particular schools you love, or warn you against submitting an essay you’re sure will help you get in, or discourage your parents from sending multiple letters of recommendation from their influential friends?

In almost every instance, families feel this way because your counselor is giving you an answer that you don’t like, and doing so for your own good. Teens don’t like it when parents pull the “It’s for your own good—you’ll thank me later” card.   And many parents don’t respond well when a counselor takes a similar approach. It’s natural. Nobody likes to hear information or advice that upsets them (I know I don’t).

This is a delicate balancing act for many counselors. How do they serve and support your family while occasionally telling you things you don’t want to hear? Most counselors walk that line very well. But for even the best of us, sometimes it’s easier just to relent and not have the debate. This is, after all, the student’s process. If a student insists on submitting a particular essay, we can’t and shouldn’t stop her from submitting it. We can discuss, express concern, and maybe even make an impassioned plea. But we have to respect a student’s right to conduct his or her own college process. That’s what colleges want.  And it’s the right thing to do.

As yet another crop of high school seniors (and by association, many parents) enters the throes of the college admissions process, I’d make two suggestions.

First, remember just like lawyers who want all their clients to win cases and doctors who want all their patients to be healthy, nothing would make your counselor happier than for everything to work out just as you hope it will. They want you to get admitted to your dream schools with all the financial aid you need to attend. That outcome would be a nice feather in their counseling cap, too, as they would then get to share in your success. When it feels like they’re not on your team, remember that they’re likely trying to protect you from making mistakes they’ve seen happen over and over. I’m not suggesting you shouldn’t ask questions or seek clarification. But if you approach this with the assumption that they have your best interest in mind, you’ll be more likely to understand the reasoning behind the advice. And you’ll probably have a less stressful, more successful admissions process.

Second, please read this newsletter that Patrick O’Connor essentially dared high school counselors to send to their families. I promise you that the advice within it is sound (every item in here is something we preach to our Collegewise families). The fact that, as the title indicates, most counselors will hesitate to share it is indicative of just how stressful this process has become, and to what degree that stress can make some families resistant to—or even resentful of—hearing what they don’t want to hear.

Finally, please remember that the process doesn’t have to be this way. Much of the stress is either self-induced or exacerbated by the conversations that take place at dinner parties (usually with people who don’t work in counseling or admissions). The more responsibility students take for their process, the more open they are to finding the right colleges whether or not those schools are prestigious, the more willing they are to seek advice from people who know both them and college admissions well, the more likely the entire family will look back on this process with fond memories—and do so with a list of wonderful college acceptances to celebrate.

I probably wouldn’t have taken Richard J. Light’s course, “Reflecting on Your Life,” when I was an immature 18-year-old college kid. In fact, based on the five exercises from his course described in this article, a more apt title might be “How College Can Help You Get What You Want Out of Life.” But given that over 100 Harvard students enrolled this past year, it’s clear he doesn’t need my titling advice.

Light is a professor at Harvard and the author of Making the Most of College: Students Speak Their Minds, a book I profiled in a past post. But I think the first exercise in the previous article is a good one for high school students, too.

Put simply, make a list of how you spend your time, then see whether or not the items on the list align with your goals.

Here’s an example. Students often tell us they’re interested in studying engineering. But that stated goal doesn’t always match how they’re currently spending their time.

A student who’s on the Science Olympiad team, who takes a college level math course over the summer, who spends her lunch hours working through complex problem sets with her similarly math-obsessed friends–her goals clearly align with the way she’s choosing to spend her time. But the student who hasn’t stretched himself in the available math curriculum, who has no math or science related activities—there’s a disconnect in place. We don’t just worry whether or not he’s qualified for engineering programs; we also have to question whether or not he would actually be happy if he were in one.

I don’t think a 17-year-old needs a life plan. There’s nothing wrong with a teenager just being a teenager, choosing things she enjoys today, and leaving her future to be determined once she moves into a dorm on a college campus. In fact, the right college can be a wonderful place to discover your life path.

But a sure path towards stress and uncertainty—in both college admissions and life—is to spend your time in a way that doesn’t align with your goal. Rather than change what you do to match the goal, you might consider changing the goal to match what you do.

More on this, including a link to Mark Cuban’s post on the same topic, can be found in this past post.