teenagers

The Challenges Ahead
My process for determining the voice for this blog is ongoing. I feel like that mosquito in the nudist colony – I know what to do; I’m just not sure where to start. In the past several days, news stories and studies (see Pew Trust) have come out about the clouds of regret and depression that hover over my fellow Baby Boomers. When we nervously look for renewal and hope from those younger than us, we are confronted by films like Race to Nowhere and news that students in college are suffering from mental health issues in shocking numbers.

The Talk
When I write here, I have tried to put past bitterness to the side and share lessons learned, in the hope that they may be of value to someone. I’ve done some things and been some places that might help provide some people perspective on their travels. The need for this perspective was brought home to me during a conversation with a young man worried about where the world is headed. He said…

“I’m worried about taking on the challenges of the 21st century.” This very general concern might annoy me in other contexts, however…

since this was my 9 year-old son, I put on my best listening skills as he continued…

“When you and Mommy are dead, I’m not sure how I’m going to know what to do about those challenges” (Ask someone who knows him. They’ll tell you it sounds like him). I didn’t have a lot of great advice at that moment but I was able to refrain from a lecture about Bentham’s Utilitarianism versus Pareto efficency and we instead discussed some of the qualities that I thought he needed to cultivate. We talked about things like courage, friendship, service, freedom, and responsibility.

I’m glad that he’s in a wonderful school that has allowed him to develop his natural gifts. It’s one of those places that understands that knowing the name of something doesn’t equal knowledge. Unfortunately,it only runs through 8th grade – well, there’s always homeschooling!

The Curriculum
My goal and desire for him is that he continues with his fascination for the natural world, continues to develop his physical skills to navigate through it, develops the physical and moral courage to confront the bullies who will inevitably invade his journey if he’s ding it the right way, learn sales (after all, so much of the life we live is transactional), and follows the “Heinlein curriculum” – “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”

I want him to grow strong and I also want him to grow gently. I also want him to develop the practice of seeking and practicing good habits. Whether you’re 9 or 79, developing the right habits can help you grow into who you are supposed to be. The spiritual journey does not mean from “here” to “there.” The knowledge and enlightenment that we seek are no further from us than is the voice of God. We don’t need more names, knowledge, or skills – we only need access to the wisdom that we have always had. To begin or strengthen the process of unlearning, we need to develop good habits. And so I present…

Good Habits
When you have formed a good habit, not only will it become necessary to you, but the corresponding bad habit will no longer hold any appeal and will die a natural death. A new set of neural paths is thus formed while the old paths are gradually obliterated. Neuroscience says that forming a new, better habit is much more effective than trying to eliminate a bad habit. Good habits are like a group of lieutenants or executive assistants, working for us by relieving us of the need for conscious attention to an excess of details. Compare the efforts of a child learning to walk, or of a man learning to swim or ride a bicycle with a young child running through a playground or the expert swimmer or cyclist and you have a good example of what habit can accomplish. Our conscious mental processes — in the area of right-thinking – are often as ineffective as the efforts of the child learning to walk or the adult learning to swim or ride a bicycle.

Suppose we were forced to make the same effort in breathing that we do in any voluntary action, how laborious it would be. In the same way, controlled thinking is an effort at first, but stay with it long enough and it becomes a habit and almost automatic. When you make your habits your friend, you make your nervous system an ally. Just like bike riding or walking cease to be conscious processes, an expert thinker comes in time to balance his mind and control it in accordance with the laws of right-thinking. Little or no conscious attention is required for the body or for mental processes.

With most of us, wrong-thinking is habitual and automatic. When right-thinking becomes automatic and as unconscious as breathing, we shall have become truly our own friends. The heart beats and the lungs are inflated without conscious effort and those muscles are never tired, whereas voluntary action of the muscles soon fatigues. Athletes who persist too long in the development of any set of muscles become physically unbalanced. Too much conscious direction of thought produces a sort of mental paralysis – we become unbalanced mentally.

Reflection AND Action
Reflection must eventually find an outlet in action. It must find expression because of that intimate association of thought and the nervous system. If it does not, we become self-hypnotized by watching our own mental processes. Mere affirmations are not enough. One who goes no further than affirmations is like a would-be bicyclist who devotes the majority of her energy to affirming that she can ride, without ever getting on a bicycle to give his thought an outlet in action. Endeavor to give concrete expression to the truths you hold in mind, for only then do they come to life.

Kindness, consideration, cheerfulness, self- control may all become habits. They should in fact be designated as normal habits of a first-class mentality – the normal inheritance of the spiritually well-born. They are acquired, sometimes painfully and with much effort. Gradually, like the expert cyclist for whom bicycling has become a habit, we are relieved from conscious effort. We are balanced and able to enjoy the “scenery.”

When we find ourselves thinking thoughts of an undesirable nature, we must put the brakes on, stop the current of thoughts, and turn on to another road. If we have developed an alternate map of the territory and are clear about the values that inform our journey, we will be okay. Putting on the brakes and changing the path is where the Will comes in – the topic for a future post. Until then, remember that it’s easier to cultivate good habits than it is to try to bury bad ones. It’s also never too late to begin the process of growing gently.

P.S. If you find this of interest, sign up (in the box on the right, or wait for the fancy Pop-up) for my gentle emails on moving through the crap.

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?

Help Them Out Of Their Corner

Bullying
Bullying has captured the national attention. Some tragic incidents have caused a reexamination of how parents and schools can keep kids safe. The use of the Internet and social media sites have made it easier to attack victims and complicated the search for a solution.

Sources
Bullies are not a new phenomenon. Bullies are sometimes created out of their own fear and insecurity. Some are predators. Lt. Col. Dave Grossman talks about the world being divided into lambs, wolves, and sheepdogs. Most people are sheep. They are kind, gentle, and productive. Then there are the wolves who prey on the sheep without mercy. Sheepdogs live to protect the flock and to confront the wolf. If you have no capacity for violence, you are a sheep. If you have the capacity for violence in pursuit of your ends and engage in it with no remorse, you are a wolf. If you have the capacity for violence and combine it with a deep love for your fellow human beings, you are a sheepdog. While I think there are more gradations, I believe this is a helpful outline when examining the problem of bullying.

The Real Enemy
The normal prescription for victims is to get teachers and parents involved. it is important to bring the physical and emotional violence to light but this is usually not enough when a predator is involved or when the group mind has taken over. In talking about the human mind, Primo Levi said that: “Many people – many nations – can find themselves holding, more or less wittingly, that ‘every stranger is an enemy.’”
The stranger, the enemy is kind of complicated in the case of bullies. I believe that many bullies are created as a result of their estrangement from their essential natures. This is coupled with an estrangement from Nature. This mirrors a pervasive national numbness of spirit and somatic deadening.

My Theory
I also believe that we are sacred, individual creations of God. We descend into purgatory or worse when we lose contact with this sacred essence. Those who live in this wilderness of the spirit hate those who maintain its essence.  For bullies, the keepers of the sacred flame are the “strangers” and the “enemies” that Levi talks about. They are a mirror and reminder of what was lost. Our current existence does not provide them with guides on how to regain what was lost. The bullies among us default to anger and hatred. In a paraphrase of a quote on power, Rosabeth Moss Kanter pointed out that “absolute powerlessness corrupts absolutely.”

I like to think that I have the soul of poet. With this disposition, I was fortunate to go to a school where open bullying was frowned on. I have been in other situations where my “sensitive side” could have been a liability, except for one thing – early on, I learned that there were times you had to kick someone’s ass and be prepared to have your own kicked, in defense of protecting your spiritual core. I was raised to be a “sheepdog.” I was taught to protect myself and others.

Solutions
Communities and cultures need to be developed where bullies are not tolerated but the problem cannot be legislated away. Theodore Roosevelt said that his father taught him to be tough as well as kind. His father believed that if Teddy was tough enough, people would not long laugh at his being kind. Victims need to be given tools. This needs to start with what Timothy Gallwey called “The Inner Game.” The tools of sports psychology and things like Neurolinguistic Programming could help with building mental toughness – confidence, resilience, positive self-talk, relaxation, motivation, and creating well-formed outcomes. This would be combined with physical skills that would help the poets among us explore the intersections between physical and moral courage. Even Gandhi understood that violence could sometimes be morally required.  Learning basic skills of self defense – based in boxing and some form of grappling – would provide confidence and a sense of agency while the adults figure things out.

At the same time, the bullies who have not achieved predator status need to have chances to rediscover their sacred purpose. They need to be coached and guided to appreciate the miracle of nature and to recognize the sources of their actions. This is not possible with the current factory model of schooling.  Decisions will have to be made.

My children have inherited my poet’s soul. My job is now to teach them how to protect that soul and the gifts that God has given them. My prayer is that they will add the job of “sheepdog” to their resumes.

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.

The denigration of females? Tasteless language wrapped up in bad grammar? Just some more misogynist rap? Not exactly. This was part of a “game” played by teen boys at the elite, all-male Landon private school in Maryland. They played a game mimicking a fantasy sports draft that involved the ranking of local girls in terms of sexual desirability. The goal was to have sex parties with points given for sexual conquests. Landon’s group of “young gentlemen” have had a problematic recent history that can be glimpsed in the story link above.

These were no knights of honor. These boys were raised in a school culture that begins in 3rd grade. Who are their fathers? What did their non-participating classmates have to say? Their intent was to prey on local girls. I read one news story that took the view that “boys will be boys” and that they were just a little immature and foolish to publish this stuff in an age of omnipresent Internet scrutiny.

It seems to me that this was more likely a story of familial narcissism and entitlement. It was a perversion of the daring, competitiveness, and energy that are a part of healthy male energy. How does this happen? Sports performance coaches talk about “sensitive periods” in athletic development for young people. This has to do with the pace of development of a young person’s particular motor abilities (e.g. balance, endurance, speed, strength).

These sensitive periods are also present in the emotional development of adolescent males. Fathers and other responsible adult males are supposed to help induct these young men into the masculine fraternity. In my perfect world, young men would be a combination of William Wallace (you know, Braveheart) and Gandhi. If boys this age aren’t guided through the minefield of puberty, they will end up locked into a cage of greed, materialism, selfishness, sexism, and aggression. Money and status often provide more of an impetus towards these things than an inoculation against them.

My wife and I have our own set of instructions and parenting process for our daughters should they come across young piglets from whatever race or class. That may be the topic of another post.

I was watching “City of Joy” with my 9 year-old son the day after I read about these Landon boys. This a movie about a victimized Dalit community in India and an American doctor (played by Patrick Swayze) trying to find himself. I explained to my son his role and path to becoming a modern day knight. I explained that it would require mental, spiritual, and physical skills and toughness. I told him that I expect him to ALWAYS be the first to stand up to bullies. Some may find my view of man as protector and knight as sexist in its own way but I do not apologize for this. I have also made it clear to my girls that they should rely on themselves for their personal safety.

Bottom line, there are shepherds, sheepdogs, and wolves. Maybe boys will be boys but we shouldn’t ignore the bad fruit that will be harvested if we don’t pay more attention.