Dr. Tony Rivera

I hate waiting.

I don’t mean long lines or slow service. I mean the deep kind of waiting. The season between what just ended and what hasn’t started yet. The weeks after a big decision where nothing is confirmed and everything is possible and your nervous system does not know what to do with that combination.

I’ve been in a few of those seasons in my life.

After I aged out of the foster care system and before I figured out what the next five years looked like. After I submitted the dissertation and before the defense. After I made the decision to build Fostering Minds into something real and before anyone else could see what I was seeing.

Every one of those waiting rooms felt like failure dressed up as transition.

What I’ve learned, slowly and reluctantly, is that the waiting room is not empty. It only feels empty because you’re looking for external confirmation that the next thing is coming instead of paying attention to what the gap is asking of you right now.

The gap asks hard questions.

Do you actually believe in what you’re building or were you just running on momentum?

Who are you when there is nothing to perform and nobody to report to?

What would you do with this time if you stopped treating it like a problem to solve?

I did not answer those questions well the first few times. I filled the waiting rooms with busyness. I manufactured urgency. I treated stillness like a symptom instead of a tool.

When I finally started sitting in the gap honestly, the Power in the Pivot™ writing changed. The Fostering Minds work deepened. The things I was saying to rooms full of educators and counselors started to carry more weight because I had actually lived in the question instead of racing past it.

Here’s what I want you to hold onto as we enter August together.

August is going to be a waiting room for a lot of people. Teachers and counselors going back to buildings in a few weeks. Students in transition. Families bracing for what the new school year will bring. Youth with foster care experience (YFCE) potentially facing another enrollment in another school in another system that may or may not be ready for them.

The gap is not a delay. It is an invitation.

What is this waiting room asking of you right now?

Tell me. I want to know where you’re standing at the start of this month.

We spent this month underneath the surface. The story you actually believe. The version of yourself it is time to retire. The boundaries that let you stay. The person who will not leave. The slow math of a life that lasts.

Let me close by telling you why I keep writing this.

I write it for the kid I was. The one moving through instability, reading rooms for danger, certain he was on his own. The one who needed to hear, from someone who had made it through, that the story was not finished and the prediction could be wrong.

Nobody wrote that for him in time. So I write it now, partly for him, and partly for you.

Because somewhere in the reach of these words is a person standing where I once stood. Someone who needs to hear that they are not behind, that they can retire the version of themselves that no longer fits, that peace is something they carry rather than chase, that the small faithful inputs are compounding even when they look like nothing.

That is what Power in the Pivot™ is. Not a brand. A place where we do the honest inner work together, so that we become whole enough to build lives that last and to carry something forward for the next person standing where we started.

This is why I keep writing it. Not for applause. For the kid I was, and the person you are.

The month ends. The work does not. This is where it continues, every week.

Who are you doing your inner work for? Tell me in the conversation. And if this reached you, bring someone with you, because it grows when it is shared.

There was a mentor in my life who outlasted the program that introduced us.

We met through something official, a structured thing with a start date and an end date. Most of those connections end exactly when the structure does. The program concludes, everyone moves on, and the relationship quietly closes with the file.

This one did not.

When the official reason for our relationship ended, they kept showing up anyway. They kept checking in. They stayed interested in my life long after any form said they had to be. And that decision, to outlast the program, is one of the reasons I am who I am.

Here is what that taught me, and what I have built my work on. The relationships that actually change young people are usually the ones that refuse to end on schedule. The magic is not in the program. It is in the person who decides the connection matters more than the calendar.

For youth with foster care experience, whose lives are full of relationships that ended when the paperwork said so, an adult who stays past the expiration date is proof that they were worth more than an institutional timeline.

If you have ever mentored, taught, or supported a young person through some program, consider this. The most powerful thing you can do is refuse to let it end just because the program did.

Who outlasted a program for you? And who might need you to outlast one for them?

Honor them in the Power in the Pivot™ conversation.

In work with youth with foster care experience, we have a funding problem that is really a priorities problem.

We love the new. The fresh initiative, the innovative model, the program with a compelling name. These are fundable and announceable. They photograph well.

Meanwhile, the thing the evidence keeps pointing to is unglamorous. Continuity. Relationships that do not end. Adults who stay. A caseworker who remains through the transition. A mentor still present two years later.

None of that trends. You cannot brand a person who simply keeps showing up. So we underfund the boring thing that works and keep pouring money into the new thing that looks exciting.

This is backwards, and young people pay for it. We keep buying novelty when the research keeps recommending continuity.

If we let the evidence set the budget, we would fund retention, relationship preservation, and stability over the endless cycle of new programs.

The intervention is not new. It is faithful. And faithful is hard to fund precisely because it does not look like innovation.

What would your organization fund differently if the evidence, not the excitement, set the budget?

Bring it to the Power in the Pivot™ conversation.

We want the dramatic version of change. The transformation. The overnight result. The before and after with nothing in between.

But that is not how anything lasting gets built. Lasting things are built by slow math, and the slow math is almost boring.

A small input. Repeated. For longer than most people are willing to wait.

That is the whole formula. It is not exciting. It does not trend. And it is the only thing that actually works over time.

Let me show you the math, because seeing it changes how you hold your own progress.

Imagine you improve at something by just one percent a day. On any single day, that improvement is invisible. You cannot feel one percent. It looks like nothing. So most people conclude it is not working and stop.

But one percent, compounded daily, does not add up. It multiplies. Over a year, those invisible daily improvements stack into a transformation that looks, from the outside, like it happened suddenly. It did not. It happened one invisible percent at a time, by someone who kept going while it still looked like nothing.

This is the part almost everyone misses. Compounding is back loaded. The visible payoff comes at the end, which means you spend most of the journey putting in real work for results you cannot yet see. The gap between the effort and the evidence is where most people quit.

I have built everything meaningful in my life this way. Not in a burst. In a long series of small inputs that did not look like much on any given day. Fostering Minds was not a launch. It was years of unglamorous, repeated effort in the margins of a full life. There was no single moment it arrived. There was just the slow math, running quietly, until one day there was something real where there had been nothing.

The same is true for who you become as a person. You do not transform in a weekend seminar. You transform through small, repeated inputs. The daily practice. The kept promise. The consistent choice, made a thousand times, each one feeling insignificant.

Here is why this matters for how you live, and it connects to Prepare, the third move of the 3P Advantage™.

If you understand the slow math, you prepare differently. You stop expecting fast results and start protecting a sustainable pace. You build inputs so small you can maintain them on a bad day, because you understand that consistency beats intensity over any real timeline. You stop quitting during the invisible middle, because you know the middle is supposed to look like nothing.

And you extend grace to yourself. When it feels like you are working hard and getting nowhere, you remember that this is exactly what the early stage of compounding feels like. Not nowhere. Just early.

So let me leave you with the reframe that has carried me.

You are probably not behind. You are probably just early in the math. The inputs you are making that feel invisible right now are not wasted. They are compounding underneath the surface, in a way you will not see until later.

Keep feeding the small input. Keep showing up for the boring math. Refuse to quit during the invisible middle.

Because the people who build lives that last are not the ones with the most dramatic bursts. They are the ones who understood the slow math and were willing to wait longer than everyone else.

What is the one small input you could commit to repeating, long enough to let the math work?

Commit to it with us in the Power in the Pivot™ conversation.

I want to talk about discipline in a way that is not about harshness.

Because the cultural conversation around discipline in schools and in leadership and in personal development often carries a punitive undertone. The idea that if you just push yourself hard enough, hold the line firmly enough, demand enough of yourself and others, results will follow.

That’s not discipline. That’s force.

Real discipline, the kind that produces durable results in your own life and in the lives of the people you lead or serve, is rooted in care.

Let me tell you what I mean practically.

When I am disciplined about my writing practice, I am not punishing myself into showing up. I am honoring the people I’m writing for. I’m honoring the version of the student I once was who needed someone to put this language out there. I’m honoring the work that I believe matters.

The motivation is care. The discipline is how that care shows up consistently.

When I hold a young person accountable for showing up, for following through, for taking the next step even when it’s hard, I am not being harsh. I am refusing to let them off the hook because I believe in what they’re capable of.

That’s not the same as punishment. It’s the opposite.

Youth with foster care experience (YFCE) often have one of two experiences with discipline in their lives. Either it was punitive and unpredictable, tied to whoever’s household they were in and what that person’s tolerance was that day. Or it was largely absent because adults didn’t want to be the one who pushed too hard on a kid who already had it hard enough.

Both extremes fail them.

What they need is the disciplined care of an adult who will show up the same way tomorrow as today. Who will hold the expectation because they believe the young person can meet it. Who won’t move the bar down because the circumstances are hard.

That’s love with a plan.

And it is one of the most powerful things one human being can offer another.

Where in your life do you need more of this, from yourself or from someone else?

I’d love to know. Drop it in the comments.

We wait for the big days. The breakthrough, the launch, the moment it all changes.

But a life is not built on big days. It is built on the unremarkable ones.

The ordinary Tuesday you showed up anyway. The quiet rep no one saw. The small promise you kept when breaking it would have cost you nothing.

None of those days feel like they are building anything. That is exactly why most people quit. The work does not announce itself. It just accumulates, silently, until one day you look up and a life has been built out of a thousand days that each felt like nothing.

The unremarkable days are not the price you pay to get to the important ones. They are the important ones.

So do the small thing again today. Not because it feels significant. Because significance is made of exactly these.

What is the unremarkable thing you can do again today, trusting that it counts?

Keep going with us in the Power in the Pivot™ conversation.

Here is a test of anything you are building. What happens when you step back?

If it only works while you are forcing it, standing over it, pushing it, then you have not really built something. You have propped something up. And propped up things fall the moment you let go.

This is a hard truth for leaders, helpers, and anyone with a strong will. We can hold a lot up through sheer effort. But effort is not the same as design, and our energy is not infinite.

The mature move is to build things that do not depend on you. A team that functions without you in the room. Supports for young people that do not collapse when one heroic adult burns out. Habits that run without daily willpower.

This takes humility, because it means building something bigger than your own indispensability. The insecure part of us wants to be needed. The mature part wants to build what lasts.

Serve the thing you are building, not your own importance to it.

What are you holding up by force right now that you could build to stand on its own?

Think it through in the Power in the Pivot™ conversation.

Dr. Tony Rivera

For years, in my work and my research, I chased one question. What actually keeps a young person from falling through the cracks?

I expected the answer to be a program. The right curriculum. The proven model. Something I could name, replicate, and recommend.

That is not what I found.

When I looked closely at the young people who made it, and when I sat with the leaders of organizations that kept showing up for youth with foster care experience through every reason to give up, the same answer kept surfacing. It was almost never the program. It was a person who would not leave.

Let me be specific about what that means, because it is easy to turn into a slogan and lose the substance.

The young people who persisted could almost always point to at least one adult who stayed. Not an adult who was perfect. Not one who fixed everything. One who kept showing up, kept believing, and did not disappear when it got hard or when the official reason for the relationship ended.

That last part matters enormously. For youth with foster care experience, relationships usually come with expiration dates. The placement ends. The caseworker changes. The program funding runs out. The school year finishes. Adults rotate through their lives on institutional schedules, and the young person learns that connection is temporary by design.

So the adult who stays past the expiration date does something revolutionary. They break the pattern. They prove that at least one relationship does not have to end when the paperwork says it should.

That is the intervention. Not a curriculum. Continuity. A human being who decided this young person was worth staying for, and then actually stayed.

This has enormous implications for how we do this work, and most of them are inconvenient.

It means you cannot mass produce the thing that matters most. You cannot scale a bond. You cannot put faithfulness in a manual.

It means the metrics we love, the ones that are easy to measure and report, are often measuring the wrong thing. We count program completions and service hours.

We rarely measure whether a single adult stayed in a young person’s life for years, which is the thing that actually predicts the outcome.

It means the most important people in this work are often the least celebrated. The ones who quietly keep showing up, keep answering the phone, keep remembering the birthday, long after their official role has ended.

And it means, for those of us in schools and agencies and programs, that our job is bigger and simpler than we thought. Bigger, because being a person who stays is a real commitment, not a checkbox. Simpler, because you do not need a perfect program. You need to decide to be the one who does not leave.

There is a caution here too. If continuity is the intervention, then we have to stop building systems that constantly interrupt it. Every unnecessary transition, every relationship we sever for administrative convenience, every support we end because a young person hit an arbitrary age, we are breaking the exact thing that helps. We keep severing the root and then wondering why the tree struggles.

So if you take one thing from this, let it be this. In a young person’s life, be the adult who stays. And in the systems you touch, fight to protect the relationships that others are ready to interrupt.

The program is not the point. The person who will not leave is the point.

Who in your life needs you to be the one who does not leave? And what relationship, in the systems you touch, could you fight to protect.

This is the heart of the work. Bring your answer into the Power in the Pivot™ conversation.

There is a question we stop asking young people, and its absence shapes everything.

We are quick to ask what is wrong with a struggling young person. What is the diagnosis, the deficit, the behavior to correct.

We rarely ask two better questions. What happened to you? And what do you hope for?

The first reframes everything. A young person’s behavior almost always makes sense once you understand what they have lived through. What looks like defiance is often protection. What looks like not caring is often caring too much to risk it again.

The second question, what do you hope for, is even rarer, especially for youth with foster care experience. So many have never been asked what they actually want, because so few adults treated their wants as real.

When you ask a young person what happened and what they hope for, you do something powerful. You treat them as a person with a history and a future, not a problem with a behavior.

Try it this week with a young person who is struggling. Skip what is wrong with you. Ask what happened, and what do you hope for. Then get quiet and listen.

What might change if we led with those questions instead?

Bring your reflections to the Power in the Pivot™ conversation.

Early in my counseling work I thought caring meant never disappointing a young person.

A student who had already been let down too much taught me otherwise.

He did not need another adult who bent every rule to be liked. He needed one who could hold a line with warmth and not walk away. Every time I held that line calmly, without anger and without abandoning him, I watched something in him settle.

I came to understand that for a young person who has lived through chaos, a boundary held with love is not rejection. It is safety. It says here is an adult steady enough to be trusted. Strong enough to hold this with me. Not going anywhere, even when I push.

Endless yeses can feel like love in the moment. But a consistent, caring line often communicates something deeper. I am reliable. I will not disappear. I am strong enough for both of us right now.

If you work with young people, the boundary you are afraid will push them away might be the exact thing that lets them finally trust you.

Where might a young person in your life need a loving line more than another yes?

Talk it through in the Power in the Pivot™ conversation.

Pivot, the second move of the 3P Advantage™, includes a shift most people never make on purpose. The pivot from guilt to clarity.

Guilt is loud when you set a boundary. It floods you with what will they think, am I being selfish, what if they are upset. Guilt keeps the focus on other people’s reactions.

Clarity asks a different question. What is this no protecting? What yes am I keeping intact by saying this no?

When you can answer that, the guilt loses its grip. You are no longer just refusing someone. You are protecting something that matters. Your health. Your family. Your capacity to keep serving.

Here is the practice. Next time guilt shows up around a boundary, do not argue with the guilt. Just answer the clarity question. This no protects blank. Fill in the blank honestly.

The guilt does not always disappear. But clarity gives you something stronger to stand on than the guilt gives you to sink into.

What is one no whose purpose you could get clear on today?

Get clear with us in the Power in the Pivot™ conversation.

We live in a culture built around the spike. The viral moment. The overnight result. The thing that explodes and then, just as quickly, fades.

I am not interested in building anything that works that way. I am interested in building what lasts. And those two things are almost opposites.

Fostering Minds did not arrive in a spike. It was built in the margins of a full life. Early mornings before work. Late nights after. Years of slow, unglamorous progress that no algorithm rewarded and no one applauded in real time. There was no single moment it took off. There was just a long accumulation of showing up.

The Power in the Pivot™ work is the same. It is not a campaign. It is not a launch I am hoping goes viral. It is a practice I intend to keep for decades, because the people it serves do not need a moment. They need someone who stays.

Here is what I have learned about building things that outlast the hype.

Lasting things are boring on the daily level. The reps are repetitive. The progress is invisible up close. You only see the growth when you zoom out across years, and most people quit before they ever get the chance to zoom out.

Lasting things require a reason deeper than applause. If you build for attention, you will stop the moment attention moves on. You need a why that does not depend on anyone watching. Mine is simple. I am building the support I needed and did not have. That reason does not run out.

Lasting things are built on Prepare, the third move of the 3P Advantage™. Not the dramatic preparation of a big push, but the quiet preparation of daily reps that compound. You prepare not for one moment but for a long road, and you pace yourself to still be standing at the end of it.

This is the part that does not fit on a motivational graphic. The long game is not exciting. It is faithful. You show up on the day you feel like it and the day you do not. You water when nothing is growing. You keep your word to yourself when no one would know if you broke it.

And then, slowly, something real exists. Not a spike that fades, but a foundation that holds. Something other people can stand on. Something that was worth the decades.

I would rather build one thing that lasts than chase ten things that spike.

What are you building for the long game, and is your reason for it deep enough to survive the boring middle?

This is the heart of the Power in the Pivot™ conversation. Subscribe and build the long game with us.

For many young people with foster care experience, relationships have one shape. They begin, and then they end.

A placement starts. A bond forms, maybe. Then a move, a change, a goodbye that nobody chose. Over and over. The lesson sinks in early and deep. Connection leads to loss. Rupture is the end of the story.

So they protect themselves the only sensible way. They keep relationships shallow enough that the ending will not hurt. Or they cause the rupture themselves, on their own terms, because controlling the goodbye feels safer than waiting for it.

This is why ordinary relationship advice fails these young people. We tell adults to build trust, be warm, be consistent. All true. But it skips the most important part. The young person is not waiting to see if you are nice. They are waiting to see what happens when something goes wrong.

Because something will go wrong. You will set a limit they hate. You will have an off day. You will misunderstand them. The rupture will come. And in that moment, they already know the script. This is where the adult leaves. This is where it ends. They have seen it a hundred times.

The entire transformation lives in what you do next.

If you repair, you rewrite the script. You show them, with your actions, that a relationship can survive a hard moment. That rupture is not the end. That someone can be upset with them and still come back. For a young person who has never seen that, it is not a nice gesture. It is a new model of how the world can work.

Here is what repair with a young person actually sounds like.

You go back to them, after things have cooled, and you name it plainly. I think I came down too hard yesterday.

You own your part without making them manage your guilt. That is on me, not you.

You stay. You do not disappear into awkwardness. You let the next normal interaction happen, which proves the relationship is intact.

You do not demand instant trust in return. You let them watch you be reliable across the rupture, and you let that do the convincing.

This is preparation work, which is the third move of the 3P Advantage™. You prepare yourself ahead of time to handle the rupture well, because in the heat of it you will default to whatever you practiced. Adults who have not prepared default to defensiveness. Adults who have prepared default to repair.

I think about the adults who repaired with me. Not the ones who were never frustrated with me. The ones who got frustrated, and then came back. They taught me something no lecture could. That I was not disposable. That a hard moment did not erase me.

That is the work. Not avoiding the rupture. Refusing to let it be the end.

If you work with young people, what would it look like to get good at coming back?

Bring your reflections into the Power in the Pivot™ conversation. This is the work at the center of everything we do.

The mask I wore the longest was not sadness or struggle. It was self sufficiency.

I am fine. I have got it. I do not need anything. For most of my life that was my entire posture toward the world, and I wore it so well that people praised it. Look how independent he is. Look how strong.

What no one saw was where it came from. When you grow up unable to count on anyone consistently, needing people becomes dangerous. So you learn to need nothing. You become the kid who never asks, never leans, never lets the wall down, because the wall is the only thing that has never left.

That mask did its job when I was young. It kept me from the disappointment of relying on people who could not be relied on. The trouble is that masks do not come off just because the danger passes.

I carried hyper-independence into adulthood like a badge. I carried it into friendships, where I gave support freely and accepted almost none. I carried it into leadership, where I burned out quietly rather than admit I was overwhelmed. I carried it into my own home, where the people closest to me kept bumping into a wall they did not understand.

Here is what I had to face. The mask was no longer protecting me. It was isolating me. The very thing that once kept me safe was now keeping me alone.

Taking it off was not a single brave moment. It was a hundred small ones. Saying I am struggling out loud for the first time. Letting someone help without immediately repaying them. Admitting I did not know. Asking, plainly, for what I needed and tolerating how exposed that felt.

This connects directly to Prime in the 3P Advantage™. You cannot build honest relationships or sustainable leadership on top of a mask you refuse to examine. The priming work is noticing the mask, understanding why you need it, and thanking it before you set it down.

Because here is the truth I missed for years. The strength was never in not needing people. The strength was in being honest enough to.

If you are wearing a mask of self-sufficiency, I am not going to tell you to rip it off today. I will ask you one gentler question instead.

What did that mask protect you from, and is that danger still here?

Sit with that honestly. It is the beginning of the work.

Tell me what came up. The Power in the Pivot™ conversation is a safe place to set the mask down for a minute.

For a long stretch of my life, wanting things felt dangerous.

When you grow up moving through systems that decide your next move for you, desire becomes a setup for disappointment. So you stop wanting out loud. You learn to take what comes. You call it being easygoing. It was actually self protection.

The problem is that protection followed me into adulthood, where I finally had choices and no practice making them.

I could tell you everything I did not want. I did not want to feel small in rooms. I did not want to repeat the instability I grew up in. I did not want to waste the second chances people gave me.

But when someone asked what I did want, I went vague. More impact. More stability. The kind of soft answers that sound like goals and commit you to nothing.

Here is what I eventually understood. Vague wants produce vague lives. If you cannot name the target, every direction looks equally fine, and you drift. You stay busy. You stay reactive. You stay one more year in a situation you keep promising yourself you will leave.

This is why Prime is the first move in the 3P Advantage™. Before you build anything, you get specific about what you are building toward. Not the polished version for other people. The honest one.

So let me give you the exercise I had to do for myself.

Take the biggest area of your life that feels stuck. Write down three things you do not want about it. That part is easy.

Now, for each one, write the specific opposite. Not the vague opposite. The concrete one. If you wrote that you do not want to feel invisible at work, the vague opposite is to feel valued. The concrete opposite is to lead one project this year that carries my name and my judgment.

Feel the difference? One is a mood. The other is a target you can prepare for.

Do that for all three. What you will have at the end is not a vision board. It is a map.

Naming what you want will not make it appear. But it will end the drifting. And the end of drifting is where every real pivot begins.

What did you write down? I want to know.

Reply in the comments or restack this with your own answer. This is exactly the work the Power in the Pivot™ conversation is built for.