Archive for March, 2013
March 29, 2013 4 Comments

Mama G

Reviewing the edits in the Glasser biography this past week, I was reminded of story that took place on Glasser’s first day of his first job. His non-traditional views may have bothered some at UCLA’s School of Psychiatry and at the last second an offer for him to become one of the teaching faculty was rescinded. With a young family to support he needed a job and followed up on an opening at a prison school for girls in Ojai, California, 65 miles one way from where he lived. The Ventura School for Girls needed a psychiatrist and, although not a prestigious position, Glasser jumped at the chance to work there.

Bill, 1950ish                                                                                                                           William Glasser, shortly before he began at the Ventura School in 1956.

Some might think that the famous William Glasser went in there and turned that school around, but that was not necessarily the case. For one thing, he wasn’t famous yet. For another, his beliefs and ideas were just forming. As it turned out, the Ventura School for Girls would have an incredible impact on the formation of the principles of reality therapy, which I shared in the last blog, and in preparing him to see the importance of the principles of control theory. He did help the school, a lot, but he is quick to point out just how much the school helped him. He didn’t start working there with a full understanding of the need for a warm, caring relationship between the staff and the girls, nor had he embraced the idea of punishment being counterproductive, but he witnessed first hand how these elements worked and how much they mattered. This brief excerpt from the book gives us an inkling as to how the school could have been such an important part of his life.

     On his very first day at the Ventura School, Glasser was a part of a significant incident that revealed the impact the school was going to have on him. He had arrived a little late, but Mrs. Perry encouraged him to go down to one of the cottages and meet the housemother and the girls. Since he had gotten there late, it was the afternoon and the girls were either already in their cottage or were drifting back from classes. One of Miss Perry’s assistants took Glasser to one of the cottages and introduced him to Mama G. The housemother titles often started with the word Mama and then the first letter of their last name. The assistant headed back to the office, and shortly thereafter a new girl was brought to the cottage. She had just arrived from Norwalk, California. Glasser remembered it like this:
“She came in and Mama G said hello to her. Mama G sat in the day room with the other girls, except she had a little table, about 24” by 24”, which she sat behind so she could write notes on it and things like that. They had certain paperwork they had to do. And, the girl, a big girl, I mean, 5’8”, like not an ounce of fat on her, must have weighed about 150 or 160 pounds, I mean she was a tough looking girl, and she was angry.
I’ve never seen anyone as angry as her. I’d never seen anyone like any of these girls before. I mean, they were all full of tattoos, which I’d never seen before, self-tattooed with India ink. But anyway, this girl, I don’t remember if she had any tattoos on her, but she just started to curse Mama G and threaten her, and I, you know, I knew there was nothing I could do, but I was still nervous. Cuz this woman, I don’t think Mama G weighed more than, you know, 80 or 90 pounds, 4’10” maybe, and 75 years old. I mean, she was a frail old lady, and this girl is cursin’ her. And as I say, the other girls—‘cuz by that time I was one of the girls—the other girls were watchin’ and I was watchin’, too. They seemed interested, but no one seemed nervous or upset, you know, as if this is not such a big deal. And so she must have cursed the woman—Mama G, I mean—she must have let her have it for 30 or 40 seconds, which is an eternity.
And then Mama G got up from her little table, ‘cuz the girl was kind of leaning on her little table and cursing her right in the face, you know, threatening her, and Mama G got up and walked around the table, around the big girl that was standing there leaning on it, put her arm around the girl’s waist, which was pretty tall for her, you know, and gave the girl a hug and in a very sweet voice said, “Honey, is something bothering you?”
And, then, the girl, dealt with such kindness and total lack of, you know, being angry or punishment, you know, as we would say now, no external control at all, she just started to cry.  She cried and cried, and the tears ran down her face, and Mama G had to take a box of Kleenex and kind of settle her down, and the other girls, including me, wanted to help her, and Mama G dragged her over and said, ‘Now here are the girls you’re going to be with. It’s a nice cottage. These are nice girls. They knew you were coming, and they’re looking forward to meeting you, and this is Dr. Glasser, our new psychiatrist.’ And, I did talk to her a little bit. She wanted to talk to me, and I talked to all the girls, and then I had to leave.”
One of the keys to Glasser’s counseling approach is recognizing the need for the therapist to establish a relationship with the client, to become involved in an understanding of the client’s life and challenges. On his first day at the Ventura School, Glasser witnessed how powerful it can be when the relationship is focused on first.

Mama G sounds like a very special lady to me. So much confidence combined with so much tenderness. She knew that things were going to work out and that love was going to help them work out sooner than any of the other options available. Mama G and God have a lot in common. It is powerful when relationships are valued in the way Mama G valued them. Glasser learned something that day he never forgot. He then passed it on to you and me. And now we can pass it on to others.
March 28, 2013 4 Comments

The Life Principles of Reality Therapy

This week has been spring break at PUC, but life has kept moving pretty quickly none the less. One of the things I have been working on this week is the Glasser biography. An editor had been working on the manuscript for over a month, making corrections on grammar and sentence structure, deleting what she felt was unnecessary, and commenting on areas that lacked clarity. I received the edited manuscript last weekend and have been carefully going over the corrections and suggestions since then. I thought she did a very good job. I also thought I was pretty good with the English language, however it is a bit humbling to have your work carefully edited by someone who knows what they are doing. After reviewing her edits I re-wrote sections that she felt needed it, defended anecdotes she felt should be taken out, and re-evaluated some of the ways I characterized certain events and people. Today I sent back to her a copy of the manuscript in which I edited her edits. It is actually a rich process. I think within the next month I will be able to answer the question, “When is your book coming out?”

Going through the entire book in a few days has brought back into the forefront of my thinking a lot of Glasser’s ideas. For instance, there is a table in the book that summarizes the principles of reality therapy, the therapeutic approach for which Glasser became famous. These principles are really quite powerful. Just in case one or two of them have slipped your mind, I list them here –

Principles of Reality Therapy

Positive INVOLVEMENT
PRESENT BEHAVIOR
SELF-EVALUATION
Make a PLAN
COMMITMENT
NO EXCUSES
NO PUNISHMENT
NEVER GIVE UP

Although Glasser did not come at these from an intentionally spiritual perspective I think there is something very Christlike about these principles. While they were initially designed to guide the process between therapist and client, Glasser came to view them as a way of life, a set of guiding principles from which anyone could benefit. In other words, the principles could help a therapist working with a patient, but they could also help a person working through a life challenge on his own.

Positive involvement is about the need for positive relationships based on a warm, caring regard for another person. Whether counselor and client, husband and wife, supervisor and employee, or teacher and student, positive involvement is essential. In my next blog I will share a story from the biography that exemplifies the principle of involvement. The story happened to Glasser on the first day of his first job.
March 20, 2013 2 Comments

Wintley Phipps says love is . . .

Wintley Phipps

Wintley Phipps and I have something in common – we both hail back to Kingsway College in Oshawa, Ontario. He attended there as a student; I got my first job as a new Physical Education teacher there in 1978. The things we have in common cease at that point. Even as a young academy student at Kingsway it was becoming obvious that he had a special ability to sing. And as most are aware, he went on to achieve worldwide notoriety with his amazing baritone voice. He has sung before six different U.S. presidents and countless others from the ranks of the important and famous. In spite of his own fame, he remains humble in his role as a Seventh-day Adventist pastor and continually gives God credit for any good that comes from his voice or otherwise.

He came to Pacific Union College earlier this school year and blessed us with his message and his singing. The dude can sing, is all I can say! Anyway, during one of his messages he shared the following description of what love is, a definition, if you will, that seems to capture its essence quite well.

“Love is when you choose to be at your best when others around you are not at their best.”

This, to me, is a significant choice theory statement. Choice theory really is about love and belonging and connection, and love is really about choice. Having a feeling of love is great; savor it while it is present. More often, though, love is a choice. It is a choice, as Pastor Phipps reminds us, to show up at our best, with warm regard and compassion for others, with a desire for others to be successful, not because we feel like doing it, but because Jesus asked us to join Him in His quest to shower the world with love.

I hope I am not coming across like I have my act together when it comes to loving others. When others are not at their best it can be very difficult to not behave like that, too. How Jesus maintained His love and dignity during His trial and crucifixion, being so abused, is beyond me. Yet what an amazing example of what is possible for us through His Spirit! As I have said before, choice theory does not make us perfect. It provides insight into our behavior, but that is all. Insight like that is no small thing and I appreciate choice theory because of that. Choice theory supports the choice to love; the desire and power to love comes from the Spirit and He Who is Love.
March 17, 2013 2 Comments

C. S. Lewis, Steve Jobs, Andre Agassi, and William Glasser. Huh?

I recently began reading a new C. S. Lewis biography[1]— C. S. Lewis: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet. The book caught my notice because of its good reviews, but I decided to purchase and read it for basically two reasons – 1) C. S. Lewis is one of my spiritual mentors and I appreciate him a lot, and 2) I am very interested in well-written biographies. A number of Lewis biographies have been written, including by people who knew him personally, but this new book is supposed to be something special. We’ll see. I have read other Lewis biographies – C. S. Lewis (1990) by A. N. Wilson and The Most Reluctant Convert (2002) by David Downing – yet now I have an additional interest in the biography as a writing form. More on that “additional interest” in a moment. I have read other biographies, too, for the same reason. I read the Steve Jobs biography, partly because I was interested in his story, but mostly because I wanted to see how Walter Isaacson, the author, formed the book and wrote about the details. It was a good read, by the way. An even better read is the Andre Agassi autobiography. I bought his book, entitled Open, because it was on sale, little realizing the excellent read it would turn out to be. Again, I was initially interested in how the book was written.

Some of you know why I have an “additional interest” in how effective biographies are written. After Soul Shapers was published in 2005, having already begun interviewing him and researching his journey, I began writing the biography of William Glasser. He has been a significant thought leader in the fields of psychology and education and a prolific author and speaker for five decades. Trying to capture his 50 year career in a book, while accurately and effectively summarizing his progressive ideas, was a challenge. Not being a full-time writer I reached for writing moments between the demands of my day job, that being a college professor, and the needs of family and home. To bring you up to date, though, last summer I completed Glasser’s biography and in December I signed a contract with the Milton Erickson Foundation for them to publish the book. My goal was to write a biography that is interesting, so interesting that even a person not that familiar with William Glasser would want to finish reading the story. Hence, my additional interest. Time will tell whether I pulled it off.

Biographies can be fascinating. Every person, every one of us, has a story. We each are made up of drama, comedy, pain, victory, fear, joy, discouragement, and hope, to name a few of our ingredients. Describing such journeys is the biographer’s challenge. Every person’s story is important and C. S. Lewis was no different. It just so happens that, mostly because of his writing, many of us are interested in his life. We are interested in other things, too, and sometimes these interests can intersect and overlap, as they did for me in chapter two of the Lewis book. The chapter is titled The Ugly Country of England: Schooldays. (Lewis was Irish, which may partly explain the words Ugly and England being in the same title.) Because of my interest in Lewis, and my interest in effective school practices, and my interest in choice theory, the opening paragraph of the chapter caught my attention.

In 1962[2], Francine Smithline—a schoolgirl from New York—wrote to C. S. Lewis, telling him how much she had enjoyed his Narnia books and asking him for information about his own schooldays. In reply, Lewis informed her that he had attended three boarding schools, “of which two were very horrid.” In fact, Lewis continues, he “never hated anything as much, not even the front line trenches in World War I.”

I would like to think that Lewis was exaggerating, but it is possible he wasn’t. One of the schools had a controlling headmaster and such people can indeed be very horrid. Lewis admitted that he was shocked by the school’s brutality and “later dubbed the school “Belsen” after the infamous Nazi concentration camp. For me, I was struck by the potential of schools to be places of lifelong learning and joy, or places of drudgery and compliance. Referring to the latter –

Lewis recalled his education at Wynyard as the forced feeding and rote learning of a “jungle of dates, battles, exports, imports, and the like, forgotten as soon as learned and perfectly useless had they been remembered.”

As an educator (a teacher of teachers, no less) these descriptions jump out at me. I yearn for our future teachers (present teachers would be cool, too) to be a part of creating joyful classrooms where useful learning takes place, places that students will look back to fondly.

I greatly admire and respect C. S. Lewis, and I am interested in the story of Steve Jobs and the development of many of the electronic tools I have come to depend on, and I very much appreciate the candor of Andre Agassi, yet as important as each of these books are, I believe strongly that Glasser’s story is more important than any of them. I say that, not because of my involvement with the story, but because, as the developer of choice theory, Glasser explained the essence of human motivation and drew a map for personal responsibility and happiness. At a time when people are desperate for effective relationships and are craving personal fulfillment, choice theory is one of the best resources for charting a course toward a better tomorrow. (I am starting to sound like a brochure.)

Anyway, the Glasser manuscript is now being edited. There is no date yet for publication. Reading the life journeys of important, famous people can be interesting and even instructive (I certainly want the Glasser story to be instructive), yet these stories, other people’s stories, are not as important as your story. You are the author of your story, a story that is unfolding as we speak. With God’s help, I encourage you to Go For It!

[1] McGrath, A. (2013). C. S. Lewis: Eccentric genius, reluctant prophet. Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House Publishers.

[2] Lewis died in 1963, on the same day that J.F.K. was assassinated, Nov. 22.
March 15, 2013 5 Comments

A Grandmother’s Journal

I recently read a blog entitled 7 Questions You Will Ask at the End of Your Life. The author described how he had found a journal written by his grandmother after she passed away and that the questions appeared in her final entry. I found the questions to be thought-provoking and choice theory friendly. See what you think.

1. Am I proud of how I lived?
2. What did I discover?
3. How well did I play the hand I was dealt?
4. Did I take enough responsibility?
5. What struggles did I conquer?
6. How sincerely did I live through love?
7. How much of my story did I actually write?

These questions get you to thinking, don’t they? As a teacher I am aware of how powerful a well-worded question can be. You may even now be reflecting on your journey, wondering how the answers for these questions are playing out for you. Most of us still have time to write new answers to the questions, which is pretty awesome when you think of it.

Besides reflecting on your own journey, I invite you to evaluate the questions and determine whether any of them could have been written better. In fact, can you think of a question that got left off of the list, a question that should have been included? Who says there are only seven questions you will ask at the end of your life? Maybe there are twelve questions, or seventeen questions. Share your question(s) with the rest of us. I look forward to hearing from you.

(The seven questions can be found at the Marc and Angel Hack Life blogsite at www.marcandangel.com.)
March 7, 2013 4 Comments

Lead Management and Car Washing

From a fellow choice theorist in southern California —

The weather had been nice for awhile and when I got home from work the other day I decided to wash the car. My almost-three son, Jacob, was playing at his train table and on the way back to my bedroom to change clothes I asked him if he wanted to help me. He said that he would like to do that. By the time I changed, my wife and mother-in-law were getting ready to leave and take our three dogs for a walk, assuming that Jacob would be going with them. He declined though, and said he wanted to stay and work on the car project. I was kind of touched by that, although Jacob is a bit of a homebody at the moment.

The dog-walking group headed out and I proceeded to collect things for the car wash. I like to do things in a certain way. For instance, when washing the car I get all the supplies out–the sponges, the bucket, the soap, the ArmorAll, the rags, the vacuum cleaner, the vacuum attachments, and a small trash can. I like to thoroughly do the inside of the car first, and then finish with washing the outside. I start by getting everything out of the car, including the floor mats. I throw any trash items into the trash can and vacuum everything. I was basically going through this routine, getting the shop vac out from the garage, when Jacob, standing on the front porch, asked me if the vacuum was going to be noisy. I said that it would make some noise, but not too much. He said that he thought it would make a lot of noise and explained that he would probably go back inside the house. I wondered what to do at this point, as no one was home, and I was supposed to be supervising him. I continued plugging the shop vac in as he moved toward the front door. I asked him to leave the front door open, intending to check on him regularly.

I started vacuuming and noticed that he was back standing on the front porch. Apparently, the noise wasn’t too loud after all. After vacuuming one side of the car, I started to ArmorAll the dashboard area. It was about then that it hit me. Jacob had said he wanted to help me wash the car, but I was doing it in a way that eliminated him. At the rate I was going the dog-walkers would be back around the same time I was ready to wash the outside and Jacob would probably want to head into the house with them. I realized I needed to change the order in which I usually did things. So, I cleared away all the inside-the-car cleaning stuff from the driveway, and got out all of the outside-the-car cleaning stuff.

Jacob picked one of the sponges as I put some car washing soap into the bucket and began to fill it with water, creating overflowing foam in the process. He was joyful as the foam in the bucket grew and talked about his sponge and how he was going to wash the car. He lightly touched his sponge to the foamy bubbles, never submerging it down into the water beneath, and then moved to the car where he then just as lightly touched the bubbles to the headlight. “Look,” he said. “I’m cleaning the light!”

“Excellent,” I replied. “I really appreciate your help.” We continued “working” together, him often re-doing places I had just rinsed for the final time (I thought), until mom and grandma returned. Jacob actually didn’t head into the house with them when they got back, but instead stayed with car washing job. I liked having his company a lot!

“From what I understand, one of the traits of a lead-manager is that he will try to fit the work to the needs and abilities of the student, rather than forcing the student to fit the needs of the work.”

Later in the evening it struck me that, while I didn’t really do it intentionally, that maybe I had acted like a lead-manager when washing the car with Jacob. From what I understand, one of the traits of a lead-manager is that he will try to fit the work to the needs and abilities of the student, rather than forcing the student to fit the needs of the work. I guess that’s how you say it. I wasn’t thinking, ok, now what would a lead-manager do? It just hit me, what would be best for Jacob? Even though I had to change my usual practice and do things in a different order (gasp!), it wasn’t that big of a deal and it made a huge difference in Jacob’s involvement. I think lead-management has a lot to do with my own thinking and comfort zones, rather than on what I am doing to my students.

Another thing I realized was how sincere Jacob was in his desire to work and to help. He was doing his best and wanted to contribute. I suppose I could have criticized and scolded him for occasionally adding to my work, but to what end. (A Gary Larson cartoon comes to mind, which I have included below.) At two years of age I just wanted to affirm his desire to help and to make his car washing experience as positive as possible. As he developmentally matures, then my communication will change, too. For instance, I will coach on how to clean the wheels and tires and will offer tips on how to get sap off. Through it all, though, I will want to keep the principles of affirmation and appreciation in mind.

Dog mowing lawn cartoon

Choice theory can really begin at birth. It’s more than just giving kids choices. It has a lot to do with how I show up as the parent or the teacher. My expectations set the tone. To that end, I look forward to many more car washes with Jacob. I always want him to feel the same way.