high school

What Happened To The Village?
They say that “It takes a village to raise a child.” The village for most children in this country, is nothing but a ghost town. It doesn’t matter where you fall on the economic spectrum – as a child, you are better off finding your own Lord of the Flies island and bringing the Crazy Glue for the conch shell. You’re either “Waiting For Superman” to put you on a glitzier conveyor belt to serfdom or you’re “Racing to Nowhere” because you are the progeny of the wealthy elite who tend to eat their young (after my education at Collegiate School, Princeton, and contact with board members from Boys and Girls Harbor, I AM The Spook Who Sat By The Door regarding my knowledge on this).

Those of us who care at all about the school system, can succumb to the bystander effect. A lot of people are looking at the problem, so someone is sure to step in with a solution.  Why won’t anyone let the kids in on the joke that is their future?

Why Can’t I Keep A Job?
I pride myself on not being a bystander. Some would say I’m no better than the Good Samaritan who administers mouth-to-mouth when a Heimlich is called for but what the hell… I’m a man of action if nothing else. This is one reason why I have moved into the area of “personal development” as part of my professional portfolio. I went through a period where I lost “friends” when I stopped practicing law to enter the field of education. I have now lost more “friends” after abandoning my prestigious leadership position at a dysfunctional nonprofit. In both instances, my initial reaction was that people were somehow embarrassed by my change in status. Now that I have more clarity, I see that the discomfort these people suffer is because of the choices they have made with their lives.

My reading choices are eclectic and range from nutrition and sports performance to economics and biography. My guilty pleasure is the action/adventure genre. I’m currently reading a novel from Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series. I’m about halfway through. Reacher is trying to get to the bottom of a suicide that he witnessed that has left him with questions. As a result of his inquiries, Reacher (a former military policeman and occasional government operative) has been apprehended by what appear to be agents from some Federal agency. He is shot with a tranquilizer gun and placed in a cell in an abandoned firehouse. When he wakes up, he sees two local police officers involved in the case, also locked up. Reacher is able to overpower his jailers and when he sets about freeing the other two, he is stopped by their concern that if they escape from these anonymous inquisitors, they might be confirming their “guilt.” Reacher points out to them that they are guilty of nothing and that relying on their jailer’s benevolence is a fool’s game.

I realize that many people are okay behind their prison walls as long as one of their kind does not attempt to escape. Reminding people of the possibility of freedom is provocative.

Personal Development
When I talk with young people – my own children or other people’s – I tell them about this personal development thing. There are a lot of other professionals who will instruct them on the transactional nature of their formal education. The stuff I talk about has to do with getting rid of limiting beliefs, how to create well-formed outcomes (aka “goal-setting), managing stress and their emotions, discovering their muse, discerning and establishing their values and acting in accord with them, developing habits of courage and action, and the importance of developing their moral imagination. Whether it’s an audience of a single teenager, or a group of veteran Baltimore police officers, I believe it is my job to convince them that these things are survival skills for this new time we find ourselves in.

The Power of One
What next? Learn more about:

• Growing Power
• Transition Communities
• Exuberant Animal
• Edmund Burke on Moral Imagination
• Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Frederick Douglass
• Essays by Wendell Berry
• Community by Peter Block
• our Personal Development workshop

It’s part of the Long Defeat.  Are you in?

I’ve been gone and I apologize! I have a good reason. I’ve spent two weeks with JFK High School at their football camp. I’ve previously mentioned that I am the volunteer strength/conditioning coach as well as the running backs coach. It’s been quite an education. My high school football experience at Collegiate (about 35 years ago) was not adequate preparation for this experience.

The first week was 10 hour days in the rain with young men who are coming back from a 1 and 8 season record. There is a completely new new coaching staff. The second week consisted of 14 hour days in the heat at Monticello, New York. I was reminded why I was there when one of the boys told me he didn’t know Monticello was part of New York since New York consisted of “the three boroughs.”

We’ve got players who dream of stardom in the NFL and players like MK who joined the team in this, his senior year, because he wanted “to do something fun, stay out of trouble, and not be like my gangster brothers.” They don’t have a list of colleges they want to attend, they haven’t taken the SAT, most of them would be the first in their families to attend college, and they don’t have a lot of role models for success – inside or or out of school.

The nights for the coaches consisted of film study, chewing tobacco, a LOT of profanity and sausage sandwiches at 2am. I did the film study and sausage sandwiches ( and I still lost two pounds! – perhaps I can write “The Football Coaches Diet?”). My 9 year-old son was a trooper and witness to this “man thing.”  Times like this make me even more happy that I left the professional lie that I was living.  During the day, I got to practice what I had learned from books, DVD’s, “Remember the Titans,” “Friday Night Lights” and YouTube about what it means to be a football coach. My preparation didn’t prepare me to talk the boys through their tears of pain and frustration, the need for my Reiki skills, the need for mediation and bouncer skills, and the fact that the Emotional Freedom Technique would be accepted and welcomed by tough teens from the Bronx.

I have a new respect for the game and its potential to develop and reveal character.
To play at a high level requires incredible amounts of self-discipline and focus. There is a need to surrender your ego to accomplish a greater good. If you want to succeed, you must be persistent and learn to deal with adversity. At its best (and please don’t tell my fellow coaches that I said this) it’s learning how to trust and to love.

The boys at Kennedy work so hard to improve at the game. Their cynicism would melt from their game faces and an audience would gather when I or any of the other coaches talked about our lives and our journey to manhood. They were so kind to my son – teaching him the “proper” way to do a “soul handshake;” correcting his form when he threw the football; listening to his plans to breed mice; thanking him for his help with drills and providing water; and in one case, a player sharing that, like my son, he was also named for a character from Norse mythology. In his case, his mother expecting a girl, named him after Thor’s daughter! This revelation was overheard and he was the source of teasing but he felt the cost of the disclosure was worth the benefit of gaining common ground. So many of these young men are incredible and deserve much more than life has planned for them. I hope I’m able to tilt at this windmill for at least this season.

I should be doing more of the work on my bill-paying coaching business but right now, this volunteer coach thing is working for me. So on my way to being a rich and famous leadership and life coach, I’ve found something else to keep me in the ranks of the army that continues to fight “The Long Defeat.”

My adventure now includes a role as a volunteer high school football coach.  In fact, my posts haven’t been as regular as I’d like because of the “two-a-days” being conducted at the high school’s field in the Bronx.  This post is not going to be profound.  In writing it I get to be a little wistful, a little amazed, and a lot frustrated by the experience.

Each time I show up to the school, I enter into an unapologetic man’s world.  It’s one of sweat, profanity, chewing tobacco, childish humor, and talk of the glory days long past.  My own football glory days were limited as my high school had only enough personnel to field a team for two of my high school years.  With the recent revelations about the brain injuries that football can cause, I now believe that my truncated career was a blessing.  But I now get to engage in mature reflections about the game and at the same time improve my cognitive function by learning its intricacies.

I’m working as the strength coach and assistant running back coach at one of the largest high schools in New York City.  Their four-year graduation rate is under 30%.  Despite the challenges, a group of 45 young men show up in the summer for ten hours of daily character-building.  In between sprints, pushups, and blocking schemes they are directed to pull up their pants, eliminate the use of the “N word,” to support each other, and to “finish strong.”  These tough teenagers look you in the eyes, thank brand new coaches for their advice, and begin to figure out that they should have a cause bigger than themselves.

They don’t know, that despite this work ethic they are developing, that their life choices are being unfairly limited by people they have never met and by circumstances that they had no hand in creating.

This coming weekend is football camp in upstate New York.  I’m taking my 9 year-old son with with me but it still means time away from family, close living conditions with the other coaches who are not in touch with their feminine side in the same way that I am (and who also happen to be strong, engaging male figures for these boys), and time away from the marketing that is critical for my fledgling leadership coaching business.  However, there are men to build – 45 African-American, Dominican, West Indian, Puerto Rican, and Russian teens who deserve to get a little traction on the path to the people they deserve to become and who are fighting against incredible odds.  Stay tuned.

I have never found regret to be a useful emotion. It’s tough to learn from regret and it prevents forward movement. If you can work yourself up to something a little stronger, like guilt or remorse, there may be some positive benefits – a necessary apology, or a change in behavior or a different approach for next time.

As Frank said, “Regrets? I’ve had a few, but then again, too few to mention.” I was able to figure something out when I practiced law and while not perfected, it has allowed me to lessen some of the kinds of regrets I hear too many people experiencing. Perhaps this is because of some really high self esteem but I like to hallucinate that it’s mainly because of a fairly regular values inventory.

We get our values from experience, family, role models, and various cultural/media messages. For the most part, they remain outside of our conscious awareness. Our values often change with context, age, and experience but I believe that people are happiest and most successful when they are able to establish “bedrock” values that aren’t contextual.

In some of my recent work with police officers I was interested in their answers in response to questions about their values. Like many of us, they hadn’t given too much thought to their personal values or to the values that are important to police work. In this line of work, if your personal values don’t line up/aren’t congruent with those of your job, the consequences can be extreme. It was a good discussion and the conversation was more honest and robust than it could have ever been with the board members and many senior staff at Boys & Girls Harbor.

Some of the questions I asked them are the questions I have asked myself at different times in my professional life:

• What’s really important to you?
• What motivates you to do what you do at work and for your family?
• What things, people, experiences do you feel you can’t live without?
• What do you get most excited about?  When?
• In what areas of your life do you refuse to compromise?

After you answer these questions, ask yourself, “Do I live these answers?” Understand that when you don’t, you pay a price. It’s too simple to be described by single words but since we live in the land of McDonald’s, here are a list of some values that serve as my bedrock:

• Honesty
• Compassion
• Directness
• Freedom
• Truth
• Generosity
• Mastery
• Family
• Duty
• Sacrifice
• Knowledge
• Achievement

These aren’t in order of importance.  Another interesting exercise is to rank them.  Send me a comment or email if you want a post on this.  What I do know, is that there was a conflict between my bedrock values and the people who were calling the shots at my job.  I am grateful that they brought me back to awareness and I thank you all for joining me on my latest adventure.

Write me with examples in your life when your values came into conflict with the living (not espoused) values of your job.

Jai Ho!

Tomorrow will be my last day as the Executive Director of Boys & Girls Harbor and as the Head of School for the Emily N. Carey High School(which I founded). I will be joined by the Director of Development, the Assistant Director of Development, and the Deputy Director/CFO, who have also submitted their resignations in protest. With responsibility for children in college and private school, and a school that I started and support for poor girls in India, I will definitely miss my six-figure salary. I will not miss the false bonhomie, the air kisses, or the careful commitment to mediocrity from so many members of the Harbor’s board of directors.

I will be able to breathe easier now that I will no longer be surrounded by the collective wisdom of Masters of the Universe who packaged mortgages for Bear Stearns, counseled Lehman Brothers and the Boys Choir of Harlem into failure, invested with Bernie Madoff and Marc Dreier,and who had the leadership insight to promote people like E. Stanley O’Neil to positions where they could work their “magic.” These were people who were confident in providing me with their opinions on human capital and business efficiency.

These are the people who expected me to remain silent while they planned their “investments” in the youth of my community-the community where I have spent over half a century. We were supposed to be happy with the crumbs that fell from their table and to compliment them on their generosity. They talked up the value of Midnight Basketball and dance programs and rejected a school that was positively effecting dozens of teens who had dropped out of their public high schools. The lives of all those young people from the high school who are now in college or serving their country, give lie to the value that others placed on their lives.

Well, I have turned my back on the “bread and circus” initiatives. It will be a tough financial go but I know whatever happens, my children will not be embarrassed by my path. I have learned a lot about friendship and people of action and the quicksand of “process.” I will continue to speak out about entitlement from wealth and the conveyor belt of education that poor children are relegated to by people in positions of power and wealth. My anger comes from a familial place of faith and history.

I thank all those individuals and foundations who really “got it.” I hope to work with you in the future.

“Cowardice asks the question, ‘Is it safe?’ Expediency asks the question, ‘Is it politic?’ But conscience asks the question, ‘Is it right?’ And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular but because conscience tells one it is right.” – Dr. Martin Luther King

In the end, I am left with pity for those who will never feel the pull of that conscience.

The forum will be different but the discussion will continue.