Posts tagged “unconditional love”
May 31, 2018 2 Comments

Before the Seminar Even Began

“How do you think I can make my wife do what I want her to do?” He said it louder than he needed to, but he wanted to get the attention of the man on the other side of the registration table.

“I don’t know. How do you get her to do what you want her to do?” The man behind the table replied.

“No, I’m asking, how can I make my wife, and my kids for that matter, do what I want them to do? That is what this seminar is about, isn’t it?”

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The man behind the table looked at the questioner for a moment, studied him actually, and finally replied, “Well, the seminar is about having a better marriage . . .”

“Exactly,” the questioner interrupted. “That’s why I’m here. I want a better marriage.”

“How did you find out about the seminar?” the table man asked.

“A friend told me about it, said I should check it out. I had been complaining to him about my wife and kids and he said this seminar might help. So here I am.”

“That’s interesting,” the table man replied.

“How so? What’s interesting?”

“Well, the seminar is about having a better marriage and a better home; it’s really about having better relationships, in general.” No interruptions this time, so the man behind the table continued. “This seminar is about freedom and power and joy . . .”

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“I like the sound of power,” the questioner again interrupted. “That’s why I’m here, like I said.”

“Power can be a very good thing . . .”

“Exactly,” the questioner affirmed.

“ . . . although this power, the power we’re learning about this evening, is about the power we have within us to not be controlled by our negative thoughts and feelings . . .”

“Excuse me,” the questioner questioned.

“It’s about being free to be who we really want to be, rather than being controlled by circumstances.”

“So what are you saying? You’re not going to show me some tricks to make my wife do what I want her to do?” The questioner’s concern was evident.

“The trick lies in being the best version of yourself, while supporting your wife as she becomes the best version of herself.” Their eyes locked, the man behind the table could see the questioner thinking this through.

Eyes still locked, “Can I get my money back?” The questioner thought he had heard enough.

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The countenance of the man behind the table changed and his tone changed as well, “Look, sir, I’ve had enough! No, you may not have your money back. Now get yourself into the meeting room and find a seat on the front row!” With anger and disgust he moved toward the questioner and handed him a packet of materials. “Go on, get moving!”

The questioner was taken back, for just a moment on his heels and retreating, yet he quickly recovered, his face becoming set in his own anger and defiance. The two of them now were only feet apart, both obviously frustrated and angry, the packet being held out by one of them, the other refusing to reach out and receive it. Their eyes again locked, the silence between them spoke volumes.

The table man let the moment continue, the anger palpable, the silence screaming, and then suddenly he changed. His face relaxed and a slight smile appeared. “I want you to remember this moment,” he said calmly to the questioner. “I want you to remember how you feel right now.”

The questioner was trying to process what was happening to him. His mind and body, which quickly had gone into an angry, defensive mode, now slowly began to relax. Yet he wasn’t sure he wanted to relax, wasn’t sure it was safe to relax. “What are you talking about?” he replied with a touch of disgust in his voice.

“I just tried to make you do what I wanted you to do. How did that work . . . do you think?

The questioner thought about this, a light ever so slowly dawning somewhere in his mind.

“Deep inside you, in the depths of your soul, you want to be close, really close, to your wife, and you want your kids to want you and to want what you can offer them. You just experienced how a person thinks and feels when force and power are used on them.” The man behind the table quit talking as he saw the questioner’s eyes become filled with liquid sadness.

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“You’re right,” the questioner responded as he wiped his eyes. “I do want to be close to my wife. She is a special person. And I do want to be close to my children. I love them so much.” Again, his eyes filled.

“Look, we don’t need to go through the whole seminar before it even starts. But I’ll just share a few of the key ideas we’ll be learning about. One of the things you will learn is that the only person you can control is you. That idea alone has pretty incredible implications. We’ll learn about habits that bring us closer to the ones we love and on the other hand, habits that hurt our relationships with others. And another thing we will learn, and this will be of special interest to you, is that as long as we are connected we have influence. That’s why our connection to our children is so important.”

The questioner was listening now, bringing it all in.

“A few moments ago,” the table man continued, “when I tried to make you do something, the connection between us was definitely hurt, on the verge of being broken.”

The questioner nodded in agreement.

“I wanted you to attend the seminar, but you wanted the exact opposite.”

“I was outta here,” the questioner agreed. “I was getting angrier by the second.”

“So that’s the point. The seminar is about how ineffective it is to try and make people do what we want them to do. It hurts our relationship in the process and we usually don’t get what we really want.” The table man thought for a moment. “The fact is that if you want your money back, and not attend the seminar, well, you can make that choice. You have that option. But I just want you to know how much I want you to be a part of it. I think you will benefit, however it strikes me that the rest of us would benefit from your being here as well.”

The questioner now smiled just a bit himself and reached out and took the packet of materials. “It looks like there is still front row seats available,” he said as he looked toward the almost empty meeting room.

This post is a re-print and first appeared on December 19, 2015. Quickly search the Year At a Glance links for easy access to many other posts on teaching, raising children, marriage, leadership, mental health, spirituality, and much more.

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“But even if we don’t have the power to choose where we come from,
we can still choose where we go from there.”
Stephen Chbosky
May 24, 2014 15 Comments

Glasser and Jordan

 

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Jim and Jordan

My son graduated from law school today and this event, in its own way, brings up warm memories of my friend, Bill Glasser.

Jordan was never much enamored with traditional teaching methods, although learning has always been important to him. During his middle school years he was drawn to music and has poured a lot of his abundant creativity into his guitar, keyboard, and drums ever since. After graduating from high school he was not very excited about college and continuing the whole school thing and seemed intent on heading out on his own, even if the heading out involved elements that to me were short-sighted, unrealistic, and even dangerous.

By the time Jordan graduated from high school in 2001, Glasser and I had become friends. The Glasser Institute (its name at the time) was doing quite a bit of training on the Pacific Union College campus and Glasser was on campus a number of times over a three year period. I had shared with him about Jordan and some concerns I had and he expressed an interest in talking with Jordan, which Jordan was open to as well. After his time with Jordan, Glasser assured me that Jordan was fine and that he was going to be fine in the future.

I felt that Jordan would be fine, too, although the routes that Jordan chose at times created questions in my mind. He did do the college thing for a while, but with just a year left to finish his social work degree, he headed off to New York City to pursue his music and to .  .  .  well .  .  . experience New York City. NYC is not the easiest place to survive, yet he did so, on his own, and he re-enrolled in Brooklyn College and finished his undergraduate degree. I think he was in NYC for close to seven years.

Not too long after Jordan connected with Glasser, I began my doctoral program, which eventually led to my doing a dissertation on the development of Glasser’s ideas, which then led to my becoming his biographer. Starting in 2003 Glasser and I had a lot of time together, sometimes during formal interviews and sometimes just visiting about life. He would frequently bring up Jordan, interested in how he was doing and what the latest was with him. “He’s gonna be fine,” he would point out. I appreciated his interest and his confidence in my son.

I wish I could call Bill today and let him know that Jordan is more than fine; that he’s married; that he and Katy own a food truck; that they grow a lot of their own food; that they have six chickens; that Jordan continues to love his music; and that he graduated from law school. Bill would celebrate with us today. I feel that he was a part of Jordan’s journey.

Someone said to me today, “You must be very proud.” I replied that I don’t think pride is the word that describes my feelings. I explained that I am very happy for Jordan and that I am impressed with what he navigated to achieve a degree in law. To me, “being proud” has to do with his accomplishment somehow meeting my needs. I want to be careful not to go there. Maybe I am too sensitive about this (a result of choice theory, I think), but I don’t want to convey that something he has done has increased his value in my eyes. I was proud of him before he entered law school and, yes, I am proud of him afterward, but not because of the degree. I am proud of him for the man he has been becoming for quite a while now.

So, it is a big day for our clan and I wish Bill could have been a part of it. Somehow, I think he knew a day like this was coming for Jordan. Thanks again, Bill, for your belief in Jordan, and Jordan, dude, way to go!

 
May 18, 2014 7 Comments

Glasser’s Big 3 Quality School Pieces

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Glasser believed that three essential elements in a Quality School are –

+ Relationships

+ Relevance, and

+ Relf-Evaluation

(It helps if all the elements on a list like this begin with the same letter.)

There are nuances to these three elements, and there are other elements entirely, but any school that authentically and effectively addresses these three will be well on its way to being a Glasser Quality School.

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Relationships

Glasser wanted schools to be places of joy, where staff and students treated each other warmly and with respect. I refer to this piece as Intentional Friendship. It isn’t something we just hope for, it is something we strategically plan for and implement. Students respond well to our Intentional Friendship efforts, however not all will do so right away. Some have attended schools that rely on coercion and punishment and have never experienced a place – at home or school – that is based on positive relationships and natural consequences. They have used their cold, adversarial attitudes as leveraged responses to the school’s effort to control them. When a school ceases to behave in this way, and to literally take the fight out of their rules and procedures, students don’t exactly know how to respond at first. So they test their teachers to see if this approach is really real or just some form of control in disguise. I think a term we need to embrace is the idea of Unconditional Liking. And by that I mean that we behave like we like our students, not just love them in some ethereal, spiritual way, but really like them. Many of our students have never experienced unconditional anything. It’s a powerful element in a Quality School.

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Relevance

We all crave it. We want things in which we are involved to matter. Students are no different in what they experience at school. Busy work is the opposite of relevance. Teachers know this, yet it isn’t always easy to develop lessons that are relevant. Part of students’ complaints about school is that so much of what they do isn’t relevant to them. Consider some simple ways that topics and assignments can be made to matter more.

+ Fifth and sixth graders learn and review Math processes by calculating the performance data of their favorite baseball team – earned run averages of pitchers and batting averages of batters. Older students can study the concepts of Billy Beane, the GM of the Oakland A’s, and the metrics from which little known players are evaluated and ultimately hired at a much lower rate than the well-known, but expensive stars. (The A’s are in first place as we speak.)

+ Second and third graders track 10 day weather predictions on The Weather Channel and determine their rate of accuracy.

+ Eighth graders consider the effects that a meat diet has on the planet. How would things be different if everyone was a vegetarian?

+ It is now being said that major portions of the Antarctic ice shelves are melting and that the rate of melt is now irreversible. High school students present reports on the extent to which this claim is true.

+ High school students research the effects on the economy of raising the minimum wage to $12.00 and hour and give presentations that include the math they used to support their conclusions.

These are just examples. You can come up with even more I am sure. The point is that as teachers we must be vigilant in our search for relevance.

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Self-Evaluation

The Self-Evaluation piece is an essential piece of a Quality School, yet it is easy for educators to leave this piece out. Our view that academic evaluation is the teacher’s domain runs deep apparently. Maybe we view evaluation as our responsibility; maybe we see evaluation as an element of control that we don’t want to share; or maybe we think students won’t take it seriously. Whatever our reason for doing all of the evaluating, as teachers we need to reconsider this way of doing things and think of ways we can share this process with students.

One way to do this is to include a student self-evaluation column, as well as a teacher verification column, in the rubrics that you produce. Not every assignment will have such a rubric, but certainly the major assignments and projects will benefit from giving students a chance to rate their own performance. When they submit their assignment or project they will also submit a completed self-evaluation. My experience is that they in fact do take self-evaluation seriously. Their scoring and my scoring as teacher do not always match, but our scoring differently always leads to important conversations about their performance.

I may say that “I notice that you have given your self a 5 out of 5 on the personal examples section of the paper. Could you show me where those are?” The student may then attempt to show me how they interpreted that requirement or they may admit that maybe they didn’t do as much as they thought on that area. We eventually agree on a score, politely, focusing on the content rather than the person. I have noticed that it isn’t unusual for them to give themselves lower scores than I gave them. It is fun when that happens to point out to them the ways they got it right.

Glasser and Deming agreed that self-evaluation was really the only evaluation that mattered. We have to hold to this principle, pursue it, nurture it, if we are to create learning environments that are need-satisfying.

Relationships, relevance, and self-evaluation are just as important in the home, or in our churches, too. They are basically three of the essential principles of life.

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Remember that our Choice Theory Study Group has been cancelled this coming Sabbath, May 24. I know you may be keenly disappointed, maybe even overcome with despondency, but try to have a good weekend anyway.
March 11, 2014 6 Comments

The Importance of the A in DREAM

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In the last blog we were introduced to the GREAT DREAM acronym and the ten simple habits it represents that are proven to make us happier. Those habits are listed here again, with the average ratings of the survey participants (scale of 1-10), which reflect how often they performed each habit.

1. GIVING: do things for others – 7.41

2. RELATING: connect with people – 7.36

3. EXERCISING: take care of your body – 5.88

4. APPRECIATING: notice the world around you – 6.57

5. TRYING OUT: keep learning new things – 6.26

6. DIRECTION: have goals to look forward to – 6.08

7. RESILIENCE: find ways to bounce back – 6.33

8. EMOTION: take a positive approach – 6.74

9. ACCEPTANCE: be comfortable with who you are – 5.56

10. MEANING: be part of something bigger – 6.38

While there is much that is positive and helpful in this list it is worth noting the habit that received the lowest score – that being self-acceptance. Accepting ourselves is one of the most important parts of good mental health, yet we have a hard time actually doing it.

Much has been written about accepting yourself and loving yourself and the whole idea of self-esteem, in general. All of us seem to struggle with the idea of self-acceptance. Could this struggle represent the seeds of discontent and distress that lead to poor mental health? Where does our lack of self-acceptance come from? The answer is probably different for each of us. Some of us were brought up by adults who were significantly wounded themselves and passed those wounds on to us. Others of us were raised by well-meaning adults who loved us, but who still relied on criticism, blaming, and punishing as the ways to get us to behave. Still others of us come out of a religious background that painted an inaccurate picture of God, a picture that portrayed Him as an angry, exacting judge. There are many possible reasons for why we don’t give ourselves the same break we desire to give others.

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This is one of the areas in which choice theory is helpful, in that the theory reminds us that the answers to our basic mental health issues lie within each of us. The theory explains that we are not trapped in our past, even if that past includes criticism, punishment, and inaccurate God pictures. It explains the freedom we have to live in the present and celebrate our gifts, as well as our potential.

Love your neighbor as yourself.
Matthew 22:49

When schools embrace traditional forms of classroom management and grading they contribute to the seeds of poor self-esteem with which so many of us end up struggling with.  Anytime the focus is on performance, students come to believe that their value is wrapped up in their achievements and accomplishments. Even successful students (maybe especially successful students) are damaged by this message, because their self-esteem is contingent on their latest performance and what others think of that performance.

This is one of the reasons why Glasser Quality Schools (or schools that live choice theory) are so successful – that being the focus is on positive relationships, intentional “liking” relationships that aren’t dependent on how students perform. Students are valued as fellow human beings with inherent value based on that alone. High achievement takes place in a choice theory school, too, but it is the result of relationships and relevance, rather than the end-all in itself.

The A in DREAM stands for acceptance, a quality we readily admit we need to nurture when it comes to our response to others, but a quality we struggle to apply to ourselves. Let’s recognize this struggle for what it is and make a decision to start treating ourselves better.

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Classroom Application:

Have student partners create a graphically-rich poster that expresses or exemplifies unconditional love.

To prepare the students for creating the poster, assist them in exploring responses to questions like –
What does it mean to be unconditionally loving?
In what ways have you experienced unconditional love?
Is there such a thing as conditional love?
What kinds of conditions do loving people place on one another?
Is it possible to have expectations of another person and have them be unrelated to a decision to love?
Is it harder for teachers and parents, who feel such a deep responsibility for children, to be unconditionally loving?

Allow time in class for the posters to be created and then post them around the class when they are completed. A few days after they have been posted, which allows for students to look at each other’s posters, allow time for teams to explain their posters and respond to questions.

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The difference between pain and misery?
Pain is what we walk through; misery is what we sit in.

Every once in awhile a commercial comes along that captures something special. Coca Cola Argentina recently did just that with a commercial that traces the life of a young couple and the wonderful challenges that come with having children. I won’t say more than that for now. Just watch the commercial. Afterward, I have a question for you.

Yeh, I know. A powerful message for all of us, whether we have young children or not.

So, my question is – Could this video clip be used in a choice theory workshop, and if so, how might it be used?

Looking forward to hearing your ideas.

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