My Life Lessons

By Carlos Palacios, Assistant Director of Advising

An experience I have had that taught me a life lesson was when I worked for the State of Nebraska as a Juvenile Probation Officer. I worked with many clients from various backgrounds, but given my coverage area or precinct was in South Omaha; I worked with a lot of individuals of Hispanic backgrounds. A situation that stood out to me was the amount of support parents would have for their children on probation. So much support that they would sometimes cover for their children when things went wrong or when we had to hold them accountable. As a Latino and father myself, I know how much our culture values family and keeping everyone together.

What I learned from this was that sometimes we need to let our children fail and develop their grit and resilience rather than enable them by covering up for them. As I grew in my career and my children started to grow, this has been something that I keep thinking about; to know where the line between support and enabling is.

Another situation that taught me a valuable lesson was when I had a client come into my office in the middle of a terrible situation and tell me “How am I supposed to trust you to help me get my life together when you can’t even keep your office clean?!” At the time, I was a year removed from undergrad and had just started my first ‘real job’ with the State of Nebraska. I had never had a job where I was in charge of handling a caseload or case files, and I had a bad habit of trying to sort things out on my desk and not file things away in a timely manner. Consequently, my office looked like it was hit by a tornado!

After this incident happened, I learned to reach out for help and started saying ‘no’ to additional projects that would build more clutter. Since then, I have worked hard to keep a clean area despite what sort of craziness might be happening around me.

The blog posts in Forward. Together. are intended to foster an inclusive community of empathy and curiosity at Doane University by providing a glimpse into various individual identities and worldviews. These are community members’ unique stories and should not be presumed to be the experience of all who share the same identity.