College Counseling: Life transition

“He’s given more thought to mastering Call of Duty than which colleges interest him.”

That’s how Terry, a mother from Lyme-Old Lyme High School in Old Lyme, Connecticut, described her son Liam when she first reached out to The Learning Consultants.

She’s not alone. As the author of Motivate Your Son, I’ve become a trusted resource for parents — often mothers — who have tried everything to engage their teenage boys in the college planning process. Old Lyme and the surrounding shoreline communities are full of bright, capable young men who simply haven’t connected the dots between today’s choices and tomorrow’s opportunities.

College Counseling That Actually Reaches Teens

When Liam walked into my office, I knew the worst thing I could do was lecture him about college applications. My first job — as it always is — was to build genuine rapport. Once Liam felt comfortable, he said it himself: “My mom is really nagging me about college.”

That’s where my background as a former prosecutor and SEC enforcement attorney gave me an unexpected edge. Law school trained me in the power of the Socratic method — asking the right questions rather than delivering the right answers. So instead of telling Liam why college mattered, I asked him:

“Why do you think she’s nagging you about it?”

One question led to another. And within that conversation, Liam arrived at his own insight: college would be his first major life decision — one that would shape his path in profound ways.

He didn’t need a lecture. He needed the right questions.

Why Families Choose The Learning Consultants

Families throughout Old Lyme, Lyme, East Lyme, and the Connecticut shoreline region come to us because standard college counseling often falls short for unmotivated or unfocused students. Our approach combines:

• Deep motivational understanding rooted in 25 years of educational consulting experience
• Proven Socratic coaching that helps students discover their own reasons to engage
• Personalized college list development matched to each student’s strengths, interests, and goals
• Expert guidance from Connecticut’s most experienced private education consultancy

College isn’t just an application. It’s a crossroads — arguably the first major crossroads of a young person’s life. Students who arrive there with clarity and intention make dramatically better choices than those who stumble in unprepared.