Mila Buckland

Photo credit: William McKee Thome

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Sometimes, you need to slow down

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For Mila Buckland, the decision to become a coach was part of a full-circle moment that just felt right. She remembers how when she was a student, she was part of a lot of school success programs — specifically for students of color and first-generation immigrant children.

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“To me,” she says, “mentorship is something that I’ve received and it just naturally fits with what I want to do.”

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Having that firsthand experience has served her — and the learners she works with — well as an InsideTrack Success Coach. Take, for example, the time she was coaching first-generation nursing students who were mostly from the Latinx community. “Part of my role as a coach was to ask, ‘Why this university? Why now?’ And so many of the responses I received were stories about how nurses had cared for family members and how they had witnessed that support — it was a calling for them to serve the community in some way. For me, that really brought home how the conversations about academic goals and career pursuits can both be tied to a larger community purpose.”

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Outside of coaching, she takes care of a lot of plants, which encourages her to slow down and pay attention to what they really need to thrive. “I always say my plants are in the best health when I’m moving slow enough to remember to take care of them.” It’s a lesson, she says, that carries over to her work as a coach. “The art of taking care of plants relates to what I hope to also do with learners.”

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“When I work with learners, we focus on the things they can control. Questions like ‘what do you know, what don’t you know, who have you talked to and who do you need to talk to’ get the learner to focus so they can move forward.”