After IV

Enjoy a revisit of a favorite conversation about best practices for your 20s! Paul Tokunaga, an expert in leadership through the decades, shares his insights on trying, failing, and trying again as the recipe for success after graduation.

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Creators & Guests

Host
Jon Steele
Jon Steele, a 2011 InterVarsity alumnus from Minnesota State Mankato, lives in Mankato, MN with his wife Kaitlynn and their two daughters. He’s been on staff with InterVarsity since 2012 and has been hosting After IV since its debut in 2020. He is also the producer and primary editor for the podcast. Jon enjoys gaming, reading, and leading worship at his church.
Guest
Paul Tokunaga
Paul is an alumnus of Cal Polytech, retired InterVartsity staff, and is the founder and president of MELD.

What is After IV?

Hey, InterVarsity alumni! This is After IV, your podcast for navigating life after graduation. This is both an exciting and potentially tricky transition you’re making and you might feel a little unsure about the coming weeks and months. We’re here to provide you with expert advice, practical skills, and plenty of encouragement as you learn how to keep saying "Yes!" to Jesus in your new context. This is After IV, and this podcast is for you, alumni.

Jon Steele:

Hey, InterVarsity alumni. This is After IV, your podcast for navigating life after graduation. This is both an exciting and potentially tricky transition that you're making, and you might feel a little unsure about the coming weeks months. We're here to provide you with expert advice, practical skills, and plenty of encouragement as you learn how to keep saying yes to Jesus in your new context. This is After IV, and this podcast is for you, alumni.

Jon Steele:

What's up, alumni? Welcome to After IV, your podcast for navigating life after graduation. I'm your host and guide, Jon Steele. For the next couple of weeks, we're gonna be taking a short break from any full series. And this week, we're gonna enjoy a little revisit of a previous episode.

Jon Steele:

Today, we're revisiting a conversation that I had back in May of 2022 with former staff and Cal Poly alum, Paul Tokunaga. And Paul is going to share some deep wisdom about how to make the most of the decade of the twenties. Every decade of life is just like math class. What you do in the next one is built on what you're learning and doing in this one. And Paul has some solid advice on what to do right now in your twenties to make the most of this time and to set yourself up well for your thirties.

Jon Steele:

So here's Paul, and this one's for you alumni. Paul, welcome to the podcast.

Paul Tokunaga:

Oh, Oh, thanks, Jon. Good to be here with you.

Jon Steele:

I'm excited to have you. Paul, can you give us just a quick introduction? Tell us a little bit about yourself, who you are, what you've done, what you do now.

Paul Tokunaga:

Well, probably most important, I'm the husband of Margaret. We've been married for 45 years, and we have one child, the son Sam, and we all live in Atlanta. We are die hard Braves fans, and so this is a good time to be a Braves fan. I retired last June from InterVarsity where I served my first 48 years out of college. I'm currently the founder and president of MELD, which stands for Multi-Ethnic Leadership Development.

Paul Tokunaga:

We collaborate with senior leaders of organizations to drive change in the diversity of their organizations. We do this by providing clear, personalized expertise to identify the causes of each organization's diversity issues. And we do this primarily through three means: executive coaching, strategic planning, and impactful training. And our website is meldnow.com, if anyone wants to check us out.

Jon Steele:

When did you start MELD?

Paul Tokunaga:

Started it in 2017. So actually, next month, we'll celebrate our 5th anniversary as a LLC.

Jon Steele:

Well, that's exciting. Congratulations.

Paul Tokunaga:

Thank you.

Jon Steele:

As you said, you spent your first 48 years out of college with InterVarsity. You've gotten to operate in a few different places, and there's many different things that you've developed along the way. The one that I invited you here to help us walk through is this framework for leadership through the decades. So, Paul, can you just give us a little bit of an overview? What is the purpose of this framework and what prompted you to develop it?

Paul Tokunaga:

Since my undergraduate days, I went to college at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo. Since those days, I've wanted to become a better leader. And in the process, I also wanted to help my fellow students to grow in their abilities to lead well. And since then, I think I've viewed life as a leadership development laboratory. And in this lifetime lab, I continually ask myself, what kinds of things do I do well?

Paul Tokunaga:

How can I get better at those things? What things am I just mediocre at? Instead of investing a lot of time and energy improving those things, I step aside because I know there are others who are better at it than me and my job is simply to affirm them. So, somewhere in my forties, I started thinking, what did I work on in my twenties that seemed to accelerate my growth as a leader? And at the same time, I reflected on what things did I not work on that I wish I had worked on in my twenties and what black holes did I fall into or rabbit trails I pursued that sidetracked my development as a leader.

Paul Tokunaga:

And then I started asking the same kind of questions of my thirties. And somewhere along the way, I was asked to do a workshop on leadership development. And I decided to use each decade as a framework for that workshop, starting with the decade of the twenties. And as I got older, I kept adding decades on. And the one I lead now actually addresses the decade of the seventies of which I am a new member of.

Paul Tokunaga:

You know, there's nothing magical or mystical about this framework. Not everyone in their twenties needs to address all these things that I talk about in that decade of the twenties. And sometimes someone in their forties during a workshop, they'll say, man, I totally miss those things that you talked about that I should have worked on my thirties. Is it okay to work on those things in my forties? Or is it too late for me?

Paul Tokunaga:

Of course, it's never too late to work on these things because life is not as linear as this framework is. But I think the framework does try to identify things that seem to ring true for most people in each particular decade.

Jon Steele:

So it sounds like these are guidelines, not necessarily hard and fast rules, a framework that's got some space to move, whether you're in that decade or not. You can also be a little further down the road, and you can look back and say, oh, actually, there's some things there that I could use some work on today from my twenties even though I'm in my thirties or forties now.

Paul Tokunaga:

Absolutely. Well, the vast majority of our listenership is in their twenties and thirties. So right now, today, we're gonna start talking about the twenties. And I'd like to know, Paul, what is the primary focus of our twenties?

Paul Tokunaga:

In a nutshell, Jon, it's experimenting. It's trying out a lot of different things and doing things in different ways. And then in the process, begin to figure out our strengths and our weaknesses. So in your twenties, you're not expected to perform in a sustained way that allows us to be on the same playing field as someone in their thirties or forties. Food analogies work really well for me.

Jon Steele:

Oh, I love them. Bring them on.

Paul Tokunaga:

So here's a food analogy for the decade of the twenties. Picture life in your twenties as the Bacchanal Buffet in Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. You cruise to different stations. You grab a little sushi. You take some prime rib, medium rare.

Paul Tokunaga:

Thank you. You get some oysters on the half shell. You sample maybe twelve dishes. And why do you sample twelve dishes? Because you can.

Paul Tokunaga:

And that's what I think of the twenties. Is it time to sample to try different things? You're in your twenties. You don't have a lot to lose. You experiment.

Jon Steele:

See, that's interesting to me because I would think for somebody that's coming out of college, they've spent all this time sort of studying in a particular area. And I wonder if the natural progression for them, at least in their mind, is, okay. Now it's time for me to focus in on the things that I've been studying and to start applying those things to zoom in their focus because they've spent this time studying. But you're saying that the twenties, this is a time for expanding your horizons. Don't start narrowing things too quickly as far as the options that are in front of you.

Paul Tokunaga:

Yeah. I've talked to too many people in their twenties who graduated from college, and they'll tell me, you know, I have a major in blank, but I don't really wanna go into that. And then give me the reasons why they chose that major. Some of it was parental pressure. Some of it was that they did well in that in high school.

Paul Tokunaga:

Others was like, gee, I have no idea. I had to pick something. So I picked this. And so it's not always the thing that they have a high aptitude for or even passion for. So I think it's a good thing, a healthy thing in your twenties to open the lid of the can and say, perhaps I will go into this, but why don't I use the twenties to explore some other things?

Paul Tokunaga:

Things that I've always wondered about, or maybe I dabbled in, or maybe I minored in, or maybe it was an extracurricular activity in college that truth be told, I loved it more than what I majored in. Maybe I should pay attention to those things and just see where it leads. There's not a lot to lose in your twenties by doing that. And then I think as you go on, you just get a stronger sense of either, yeah, this is me. This is it.

Paul Tokunaga:

Or it's like, it's not what I thought it would be. Maybe it'll be a hobby someday or something I'll pursue 20 years from now, but it's not for me. But at least explore and pursue those kinds of things.

Jon Steele:

For me, it sort of happened by pure happenstance that I stumbled into a number of different things and got to test out. You know, I got my master's degree in clinical psychology, and I was gonna go on to a PhD, but that didn't work out. So I was gonna take an interim year to build my vita and then reapply. And so in the interim, I did some teaching. And it was during that time of teaching that I found out, oh, I actually really love being in front

Jon Steele:

of a group and teaching like this. This is a lot of fun. And at the same time, I was getting some experience volunteering with InterVarsity on campus and then did a little bit of both at the same time and then moved into full time staff work, and that staff work has taken me down different roads within that. And so there's all those places where you do things that sometimes you don't even intend to do, and you start discovering some of these giftings or things that you just really enjoy. Maybe it's not your full time gig, but it might be something that brings life to you.

Jon Steele:

Paul, as you think about our alumni who are stepping out into this post college life, this new world, these new experiences, as far as testing out lots of different things, experimenting, what does it look like practically?

Paul Tokunaga:

Can I mention some of the things that I did in my twenties?

Jon Steele:

Yeah. Please do.

Paul Tokunaga:

So I started a list and the list got a little long. Here's some things that I did in my twenties to explore different areas. Couple of years out of college, I coached a little league baseball team. I'm pretty sure they made a movie after watching us play called the Bad News Bears, but it was a fantastic experience working with kids. Around the same time, I was developing my social conscience.

Paul Tokunaga:

The United Farm Workers were having a lettuce and grape boycott, and they needed neighborhood organizers. So I raised my hand and I said, I'll be a neighborhood organizer. I led workshops in my twenties on things like singleness. You know, what did I know about it? Fortunately, I was paired with a woman who was 60, so we balanced each other out.

Paul Tokunaga:

And the other thing was racial reconciliation. I didn't know that much about it. Again, I was paired with someone much older and seasoned and he kind of brought me along and coached me. I did open air preaching on college campuses in Florida. One of the scariest things I've ever done, but maybe one of the most helpful things I've ever done in developing as a speaker.

Paul Tokunaga:

I wrote a children's story in my twenties that was part English and part Spanish. And it was based on the parable of the prodigal son and it was set in the barrio. I took up a new sport in my twenties, racquetball, and I briefly considered going pro. I tried to write a fiction book in the style of Ray Bradbury, and I never finished the first chapter because it was so bad. I backpacked for 7 days in the Sierra Nevada.

Paul Tokunaga:

First time I've ever backpack, maybe the last time. I dated a white woman from the deep south. So those are just the things that I did that came to mind. So a whole variety of things, and I love my twenties.

Jon Steele:

Now I imagine as you test out all of these things, there has to be some amount of failure that you just expect. Can we talk about failure just a little bit, Paul?

Paul Tokunaga:

Oh, yeah. Well, failure was having a little league baseball team that was, like, 3-17. And in the middle of season, one of the parents tried to get me fired as a manager because I was doing such an awful job. I call that pretty good failure. But I, you know, I learned a lot.

Paul Tokunaga:

I was brought up in public school system and most of these boys were from private schools and well-to-do families. And I had not had much experience with either of those worlds. So it was great exposure for me. You know, one thing in experimenting with all these kinds of things, Jon, is as I enter my thirties, it gave me a clearer sense of what I wanted to do in my thirties. It was like a winnowing, what are some of these things I wanna hold on to and keep doing in my thirties and maybe, you know, beyond my thirties.

Jon Steele:

So it sounds like part of the purpose of being open, experimenting with lots of different leadership styles, and working, and having fun as well. There's a broadening so that those things can be focused, and that that's happening as you're moving from twenties into thirties. I have another question about failure. Knowing that failure is a part of life as we develop in our twenties, how would you counsel someone who is maybe paralyzed by the fear of failure or just has that thought, of like, I must get this right? How would you counsel someone in their twenties that is afraid of the idea of failure?

Paul Tokunaga:

I think overall, Jon, failing in your twenties usually has less deep and long term consequences than when you fail later in your life. Let's say you're single in your twenties. You get fired. So what do you do? You learn all you can from it.

Paul Tokunaga:

You swallow some humble pie, and you hit the streets for your next job. It's not the end of the world. The key thing, and this is where some people lose out, is they wanna block out that past experience and move on to the next thing because it's gonna be better. It's gonna be different. And that was a hiccup for me.

Paul Tokunaga:

I think that's a mistake. I think whatever we come out of successes or failures, we should give some reflection to what did I do in that position that went well? What did I do in that position that, let's say, I got fired that got me fired? And we may not agree a 100% with why we were fired, but there's always some elements of truth in there. It's important to look at those into the clear light of day, ask, what did I do wrong?

Paul Tokunaga:

Where did I not get the job done? And how can I grow and learn from those experiences?

Jon Steele:

Sounds like there's maybe a need for reframing failure, what failure means. If you fail at something, it does not mean that you are a failure. This is not something that defines you internally as somebody who just can't get things right. And also that failure is something that we can learn really important information from. There's data to be gathered from failure that can help us sort of fill in the gaps for our next steps.

Paul Tokunaga:

Absolutely. And one of the dangerous things, I think, is when we decide to just move on too quickly, what happens, I think, is sometimes we just get bitter about what we went through. We start pointing the fingers at other people. It was their fault, not my fault. We start playing the blame game, and then we just quickly move on.

Paul Tokunaga:

Operating that way will just backfire on you.

Jon Steele:

Paul, opposite end of the spectrum, let's talk about people that are especially ambitious, knowing that we're in a world where being an influencer, being Instagram famous, YouTube famous, TikTok famous, being at the center of some growing tech giant making lots of money where that seems more accessible than they've ever been, more possible. How would you counsel our alumni who want to be at the center of worlds like that?

Paul Tokunaga:

Well, I'll just speak from personal experience. At my core, I'm a very ambitious person. When I got to college, I became a journalism major. I was in print journalism. And my sophomore year, I was invited to the California Intercollegiate Press Association annual convention, and they had a competition on-site.

Paul Tokunaga:

And I won the on-site feature writing competition for the schools in the state of California. I shook hands with Miss California. And I thought, this is it. I'm on my way. And if you would have said on your way to what?

Paul Tokunaga:

I said, I'm on my way to becoming the best writer, period. And this is just one step along the way. I just started taking as many writing courses, taking on new assignments in writing, several editorial positions for the paper, on and on. And then somewhere along the way, people got in the way, people who needed Jesus in their lives. And that really messed up my ambition because it was like God was saying to me, okay.

Paul Tokunaga:

What's it gonna be, Paul? Me or that gold press card you won in Sacramento, which symbolized your ambition to be the best? I was dying to win a Pulitzer prize, and I thought I was on my way. I guess you could say this has become a lie first for me, but it became real during that time. It's in Mark 8:34 through 37.

Paul Tokunaga:

I'll just read them if that's okay.

Jon Steele:

Yeah. Go ahead.

Paul Tokunaga:

Jesus called the crowd with his disciples. He said to them, if anyone to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who wanna save their life will lose it. Those who will lose their life for my sake and for the sake of the gospel will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?

Paul Tokunaga:

Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? And I was trying to gain the whole world and slowly I began to realize I'm going to forfeit my life in the process. So I understand ambition personally. I would say it's important if you're very ambitious to ask the question, what's your motive here? And then peel back several layers of your answer until you get to the heart of your true motive.

Paul Tokunaga:

And then ask yourself, what is it gonna cost me to achieve this in terms of my relationship, my family? What's it gonna cost in terms of my soul if I go after this thing?

Jon Steele:

Those feel like some very serious questions to be wrestling with so early in life, but that also seems like what an incredibly strategic time to be asking those questions, to not kick the can of motivation down the road and ask these things when you have a bigger family or when you're further invested in something than to find out that your motives have not been beneficial for you or for the people around you. The twenties seem like a great time to start asking and exploring those questions of why am I motivated to do what I want to do here.

Paul Tokunaga:

And, you know, Jon, where the rubber met the road for me was the most important thing in my life was having my father say he was proud of me because I did a number of things that didn't make him proud of me. Joining InterVarsity staff was one of them. And then all along the way, he would encourage me to do something else, really anything else but ministry. I come from a Buddhist home. And one of the hardest things in my life was never hearing my father say to me, even to the day he died, Paul, I'm proud of you.

Paul Tokunaga:

And I had to decide that's gonna be a cross that I have to carry if I'm gonna follow Jesus. I need to be willing to give up having my father proud of me. I remember once a Christian leader asked me, he was speaking at a conference I was at and we had a coffee break and he just kind of nonchalantly asked me, Paul, is your dad proud of you? I was in my thirties and I just broke down weeping because I realized I don't think he is. And then it hit me how important that was to me and that this is where I'm gonna have to give up.

Paul Tokunaga:

Sorry to get so dramatic here.

Jon Steele:

Oh, no. This is this is real life right here. I appreciate you sharing that, Paul. Because I think that gives us a very real life example of what does it look like to examine our motivations and to discern, is there something that I need to let go of here? And that sometimes that can be, like, having parental approval and having your parents be proud of you, that sounds like a good thing.

Jon Steele:

Yeah. I want my parents to be proud of me, of course. But to say, for some of you, this is what it looks like to release motivations that are not not going to perpetuate something good, something kingdom oriented. If you are constantly in pursuit of the pride of your parents, at what cost? At what cost are you willing to pursue that?

Jon Steele:

And it may be a cost that's far too expensive for us to pay or for someone else to pay for us. Thank you for sharing that. I think it gives us a very real example of what it looks like to examine our motivations. Paul, I know that there's a resource that you recommend for particularly ambitious people to start reading "The Inner Ring" by C.S. Lewis. Can you tell us just a little bit about that resource, why that's something useful to look into?

Paul Tokunaga:

Yeah. It's simply an essay found in a little volume he wrote called "The Weight of Glory". And I had a very astute boss early on in my early twenties who saw that I was struggling with ambition. And he kinda, nonchalant ways, had this book and he said, hey. You might want to read this.

Paul Tokunaga:

It might be helpful. And after I read it, I thought, helpful. Nothing. This is gonna turn my life around if I follow it. Because of questions, what are you looking for?

Paul Tokunaga:

What are your values? What's important to you? And how do you choose your friends? Very important question. When I lead senior leadership training cohorts, it's mandatory reading before they start.

Paul Tokunaga:

You can Google it. It's really about a 15 minute read, but it's really, really powerful.

Jon Steele:

Maybe we'll find a link for that and put it in the show notes so people can access it really easily. So, Paul, as we're thinking about motivations, as we're thinking about exploration, trying lots of different things, it seems to me that maybe there's some guardrails that might be needed as we're exploring and asking these kinds of questions. Are there personal disciplines that we should be considering that are particularly helpful in our twenties alongside of this experimentation, exploration that we're doing?

Paul Tokunaga:

You know, one thing that I think is really important is to develop a solid devotional life. In college, if you're a believer, you're in a Christian organization, you're surrounded by like minded people, people who are encouraging you. How's your quiet time going? How's things with Jesus? When you get away from that, you're not going to have as many people usually around you who are going to ask those questions.

Paul Tokunaga:

So you have to be really intentional in your twenties to say, that was important to me in college. It's gotta be equally important, if not more important as a young adult. And you might have different spiritual disciplines, but to have a regular intentional devotional life is important.

Jon Steele:

I appreciate the fact that you identify that that might look different. I think it's really easy for us to try to shoehorn what our college spiritual rhythms look like into our post college life and to acknowledge you're in pursuit of health, a healthy devotional life, and that's going to probably look different because your time is gonna look different than what it did before. Be in pursuit of a healthy devotional life, whatever that looks like for this season, because then that trains you for adjusting it for the next season as well to know that this just changes. It's something that is fluid and needs to keep developing. What you're in pursuit of is health and consistency.

Jon Steele:

Are there other things that you would recommend, other personal disciplines or pursuits that we should be doing during our twenties?

Paul Tokunaga:

Yeah. One thing I wanted to mention, and this made the list fairly recently. For lack of a different term, I just said name and own your demons. And I define demons as things like an addicting sin, an idol in your life. It might be a secret that haunts you.

Paul Tokunaga:

It might be a skeleton in your inner closet. It's a foe who fights you for Jesus' lordship of your life. It's not the kind of thing that you're probably going to share with a lot of people. Maybe you've never shared it with anyone else because it's too personal or maybe it's too embarrassing, too humiliating. Maybe if you go back and revisit it, the idea of it just scares you to death.

Paul Tokunaga:

But it's important to name and own your demons and then proactively battle them. The sooner you can identify them, the better, I think.

Jon Steele:

Again, it feels like here in the twenties, you're exploring out in the world, but also a lot of self exploration and asking big questions about who you are, what motivates you, what are the things going on in the background that maybe you're not even aware of, people around you might not be aware of, and what does it look like to start proactively assessing and removing the things that are just not helpful. Do it now in your twenties.

Jon Steele:

It's going to be much easier than 10, 20, 30 years down the road when those things are even more deep seated than they were in your twenties.

Paul Tokunaga:

Yeah. To use a gardening analogy, it's like pulling the weeds out when they're 3 inches high. Later on, they're gonna be a foot high, 2 feet high. The roots are gonna go deeper.

Paul Tokunaga:

They're gonna be harder to yank out. Get them while they're fresh, when they're easier to pull out because the longer you live with those demons, the more entrenched in your soul and your heart they're gonna get.

Jon Steele:

Paul, all of these things we've been talking about, it feels like there's a lot of really practical, useful advice, helpful tools that you've been giving to us. Is there anything else that we haven't touched on yet that needs to be said?

Paul Tokunaga:

Here's what I would say, Jon. Try something that you've never done before that when you're in your seventies, you will impress the heck out of your grandchildren.

Jon Steele:

That sounds awesome.

Paul Tokunaga:

They're going to go, you were so cool when you did that.

Jon Steele:

If that was the case, that would be the first people in my life to ever say I was so cool. But I like that idea very much.

Jon Steele:

Paul, thank you so much for talking through this very important decade. There are many of our listeners that this is the life that they are living right now. And so I'm hopeful that this will be beneficial for them.

Jon Steele:

And I'm excited for us to chat some more down the road here about the thirties as well. So thanks for joining us today, Paul. I appreciate it.

Paul Tokunaga:

Thanks, Jon. Great to be with you, and we'll see you in our thirties.

Jon Steele:

Sounds great. Hey. Thanks so much for joining us today, alumni. If there was anything that you learned, really enjoyed, or that encouraged you from today's episode, would you send us a DM or tag us in a story? We'd love to hear about it.

Jon Steele:

You can find us at After IV pod on Instagram and Facebook. And if you haven't already, take just a second to unlock your phone and subscribe to the podcast. If your platform lets you, leave us a rating and a review. And if you like what we're doing here, share us with your InterVarsity or other post graduation friends. Thanks again for listening, and I will see you in the after, alumni.