This is part of the transcript from a high school leadership workshop Dr. Lauber conducted in Indiana, PA in 2011.

I’ve just used this automatic driving example to show you that even complex behaviors, like getting from point A to point B that might take an hour and a half, can be on autopilot.  Well, if that can happen, how much of our life can be on autopilot?  How much of it can be, “I’m just kind of going through the motions.  I picked some goal a long time ago, and now I’m just kind of following along in the usual pattern of behaviors.  I’m not actually contemplating the decisions that I make.”  We’re just kind of going on autopilot for long stretches of time.

I’m afraid that can happen more often than we think. Unless we take control of our lives and stop it.  I, for example, wanted to be an astronaut.  Anybody else wanted to be an astronaut?  You want to volunteer that information?  Yeah?  Be an astronaut?  You know what happened?  I went to see the very first Star Wars movie – that’s how old I am – in junior high, in 7th grade.  I went and saw the very first one with Luke Skywalker.  I can still do, “Zoom, zoom, zoom” with my pretend light saber.  I got that down, the sound effect with the lifesaver.

I walked out of that film so jazzed up I decided, “I’m going to be an astronaut,” even though I found out later you don’t really get to fly around in the Millennium Falcon and save princesses, if you’re an astronaut.  But I was still psyched about it, and I followed that goal for eight straight years.

In fact, it was in the summer before my senior year that I finally got denied my last waiver to get into the astronaut program because I had bad eyesight.  And they won’t let you in the astronaut program if you have bad eyesight.  And I had applied and applied myself to that goal, studied physics – my first degree is in physics – to try to get in the astronaut program, and I finally got a big, big fat, “No, it’s not going to happen.”  I’m sure that contributed to my depression senior year.

Since then, I’ve learned how to accomplish and reevaluate goals on a consistent basis so that I’m always trying to think through what is it that I really want because I didn’t really think again about being an astronaut from 7th grade until I was 22.  That was just something that was the goal.  Let’s keep moving forward; let’s keep doing the things I think I should do.

You’re going to enter a period in your life – you’re going to start thinking about goals and college careers and majors and things.  I hope you start thinking about what it is you really want to do every step of the way.  “Is this something I still want to pursue as a goal?”