Scoutmaster Podcast 15

And now, to you, Scoutmaster. At a recent training event I was running, we had to break the participants up into patrols for the purposes of the training.

And we had one troop had five or six people who were doing the training at the same time, and so we put them all on their own patrol, and then we had a couple other patrols. So after we had done this, we went around the room and we asked each patrol what their name was, and who their patrol leader would be. I got to the one where all the people from the same troop were, and the youngest one, he must have been like 19 or 20 years old, the youngest one raised his hand kind of reluctantly when I asked who the patrol leader was.

And I said, well, how did you guys decide on who the patrol leader would be? And he looked at me and he says, I was voluntold. Voluntold, that's a new word for me. But it was a very familiar feeling because I've been voluntold to do some things before in scouting.

Do you get it? Volunteered and told kind of at the same time.

Hey, that one is one for the Scoutmaster's lexicon, isn't it? This is podcast number 15. Yeah! My name is Paul O'Connor. Hello, welcome back to the Scoutmasters podcast. This is Clarke Green.

In just a moment, we'll listen to Scoutmastership in seven minutes or less. We're going to talk a little bit about kindness and compassion as a scout leader. Next, a camping story with a not-too-surprising ending.

And then our fourth installment of Avoiding Eagle Scout Trauma. So let's get started, shall we? Scoutmastership in seven minutes. Or less.

Over the last several podcasts, we've been talking about Eagle Scout drama. And our fourth installment of it is a little bit later on in this podcast. But it got me to thinking. I had an email from a set of parents whose son was subject to a lot of Eagle Scout drama. Not from the boy. The boy had done basically what he needed to do, but he was getting a lot of guff from his Scoutmaster.

I just felt so bad. It happens pretty frequently, unfortunately.

And I got to thinking about it, and I said, well, how do we keep boys responsible? How do we show them how to lead a life of integrity?

How do we make them accountable without being shaming or letting anger take over? I mean, as a Scoutmaster, we're supposed to be an exemplary adult. We're to bring all that experience and compassion that we've learned over the years to bear on the lives of our Scouts and to help them. We're supposed to rise above pettiness and bickering and anger by being mature and fair and even-handed. I got two answers for you. Be an adult and be kind.

That's what does it. Scout-age boys are very susceptible to shame, especially from their peers, but also from their parents and their teachers and any other authority figure.

I think if we really work at it, we will learn to redirect, correct, and counsel our Scouts without resorting to making them feel ashamed. Are there proper times to feel shame? Yes. Yes.

But we shouldn't put ourselves into the role of the one who creates that shame, should we? No.

We should be in the role of the one who understands when a boy is ashamed of himself and helps him look at it, like I said, with the benefit of our experience and our knowledge. You've been ashamed of yourself before. I've been ashamed of myself before.

Well, we need to know how to get out of it. And we certainly don't need to be the source of making our Scouts feel ashamed.

You know, compassion and kindness, they're not weaknesses. They're strengths. When we cultivate them, they overcome anger and shame.

You know, if you're angry, it clouds your judgment. Compassion clarifies your judgment. Anger is a real negative, injurious, and scarring thing. When I get angry, I try to remember what an old preacher told me. Because you're going to get angry. I mean, you've got Scouts.

They're of an age. They're going to do stupid things, and they're going to make you angry.

Here's what the old preacher said. He said, you can't keep birds from flying over your head, but you can keep them from making a nest in your hair.

So when you get angry and you're feeling emotional, stop. Understand that it's just a reaction.

And then draw on your maturity as an adult to be kind and compassionate towards your Scouts. Angry, shaming Scoutmasters have angry, shaming, and scared Scouts. Compassionate, kind Scoutmasters, they have compassionate, kind Scouts.

Now, which kind of Scout do you suppose will have a better record of behavior? Which kind of Scout will have a happier, more fruitful experience in Scouting? We're not standing in judgment over our Scouts. No, we're standing right next to them, helping them find the way through difficult times in their lives. And the exercise of a little bit of compassion and kindness will make your job as a Scoutmaster much more effective and much more gratifying.

This has to be the truth, folks, because there is no way anyone could make this up. I want to pass a little hint along to you as a long-time camper, as a Scoutmaster. And that is, for the most part, stay away from canned meat. That's, you heard it, canned meat. Yeah. Yeah.

All right, Spam. Everybody loves Spam.

But, you know, it really should have a skull and crossbones on the label, right? I mean, it passes the digestive tract and goes right to the coronary arteries.

The most interesting thing I remember about taking canned meat on a backpacking trip, my buddy and Andy and I were part of a group that was headed to Alaska. We were about 15 or 16, and we were doing a preliminary campout backpacking trip in the mountains of Shenandoah, Virginia.

Andy and I were really pleased to be partners for the trip, and we had all this new gear and everything, and we were excited. And, you know, we got out there and we set up our campsite after we hiked in several miles and set up our tent and got our fire going. Oh, it was fantastic. We just sat around that fire.

We were kings of the world. And we prepared a wonderful dinner and had that.

Then we sat around reveling in how wonderfully skilled we were as outdoorsmen. And Andy remembered, hey, we have a can of those Vienna sausages.

You remember Vienna sausages, don't you? I think you can still find them. I haven't actually bought a can of them in ages, but... You remember them. They have like a pop-top lid. You pop the top off and you see this kind of semi-transparent, congealed, gelatin-like grease on the top.

Yeah. That was what we were talking about.

So Andy took the can and put it on the grate over the fire to warm, because we could think of nothing better at the time than nice, warm Vienna sausages to top off just a wonderful day. And as we sit and reveled by the fire there in the next few minutes, the stillness of the wilderness was punctuated and broken by the sound of a pretty good-sized explosion. You guessed it, we didn't take the top off the Vienna sausages before we put them on the fire. But the miraculous part was...

You know, the can? It was sitting right where we left it. We got our flashlights out, trying to figure out what that explosion was, and we looked at the can of sausages, and the inside of that can was as clean as if it had been licked by a dog. Look, I'm not kidding. We never found the top. Needless to say, we never found the sausages.

I just, you know, kind of assume they're in low Earth orbit to this very day.

So, yeah, beware of canned meats. And pop the top on it before you put it on the fire, okay?

So this is the fourth in a series of discussions about avoiding Eagle Scout drama, and we've learned the following. We've learned that we need to avoid building up our own internal idea of what an ideal Eagle Scout is and trying to apply that to our Scouts.

What we need to do is we need to teach them to do that. What's an ideal Eagle Scout in their opinion?

What's a successful leader in their opinion? What is a successful activity level for them to be involved in scouting in their opinion?

Now, if you work on this and you have these ongoing discussions and you feature this in the Scoutmasters Conference, you're going to have six of these before you sit down to the Eagle Scout Conference. You will have a dialogue going back and forth, and you will be slowly but surely developing in a Scout an internalized standard that is going to be higher than the actual advancement standard. That's right. If you work at this and you're a responsible Scoutmaster, you're going to get them to build a standard for themselves.

Again, I will repeat, an incredibly useful skill to have throughout life, to be able to look at a job, to have a standard of performance, and internalize that, and then to soar above that standard, to work hard to get to it, and then not to fall to pieces if you don't meet that internal standard, but to look at it, to observe, to see what's going on, and to make whatever adjustments are necessary so that your performance comes up to the standard that you have internalized. First, I want to talk in this fourth installment about the Eagle Project. And Eagle Projects are tough. Not the doing part of the project. They can be challenging.

But there has been this world of things that has grown up around Eagle Projects that serve, I think, in my experience, to confuse and to misdirect the efforts of an Eagle candidate. If you go onto the National Eagle Scout Association website and you download the Eagle Project workbook, you will find about two and a half pages of instructions about conducting the project, all said in less than about a thousand words. 966 to be exact, because I count it. You Google the world's Eagle Scout project, and the last time I did that, I got 1.4 million references. You can avoid a lot of Eagle Scout drama surrounding the project by sticking with the 966 words in the workbook.

I think that's adequate advice. If I were you, I would stop listening, I would just read the workbook, and I would move on. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to do the thing that I am kind of protesting against, because I'm going to add more to the vast commentaries on the Eagle Project, but I'm doing it out of the necessity in the hopes that it might help somebody avoid some drama. If your council advancement committee has amended the workbook, mine has. Just get a clean copy from the current workbook from the National Eagle Scout Association website. Make sure you have the correct iteration of the workbook.

That's important. If you work, if along the way, someone like your district advancement chairman insists on something outside of the 966 words in the workbook, then just ask politely that they show you in black and white the language from the BSA, not the council advancement committee, from the BSA on which their instructions are based. If it's not in the workbook, it's not a part of the requirement.

And here's the things about an Eagle Project that usually cause problems. One is originality.

Now, I've had several Eagle Projects turned back by various district advancement chairmen because they say, well, it's not original, and somebody did a very similar project like that, and we'd like to mix it up a little bit. Let's go to the 966 words. This is what it reads right in the Eagle Scout workbook.

Does the leadership service project for Eagle have to be original? Perhaps something you dream up that has never been done before? The answer, no, but it certainly could be. You may pick a project that has been done before, but you must accept responsibility for planning, directing, and following it through to its successful completion. I mean, there's a clear statement on the question of originality. No.

Anyone who insists on originality is adding to the requirement, which we all know is a big no-no. The other problem is somebody will hand down an edict about a certain minimum number of hours being required for a project. It's a simple statement in the project workbook. It says no minimum number of hours is required. It says that. No target number of hours, no average number of hours.

If stating these things were important to the Eagle Project, or if they were helpful, the folks at the BSA who have seen 2 million Eagle Scouts would have included a number. But there is no minimum number of hours required.

How about the size of the Eagle Project? This is often a problem, too.

Well, you really want to do a big Eagle Project. You know, it's going to be a big deal, so you want to make it big.

Here's what it says. There are no specific requirements on size. Not one. Nada. This is what it exactly says in the workbook.

Quote, How big a project is required? Well, there's no specific requirements as long as the project is helpful to a religious institution, school, or community. The amount of time spent by you in planning your project and the actual working time spent in carrying out the project should be as much as is necessary for you to demonstrate your leadership of others. It's up to the Eagle Candidate to design his project to adequately demonstrate his abilities. Another point that gets kind of confusing about Eagle Projects is the Scoutmaster's role in this whole process. What Scoutmasters do is they approve the project plan, and they may have a role in helping advise and coach the Scout through the planning process.

But we need to remember an Eagle Candidate is conducting his project to demonstrate his leadership of others. Who will ultimately pass judgment on whether or not he's done that? Not the Scoutmaster. The Scoutmaster signs off to certify the project was, quote, planned, developed, and carried out by the candidate. Unquote. Not as to the quality of the project or the leadership.

This isn't the Scoutmaster's concern. This is why we have an Eagle Board of Review. And they and they alone are going to evaluate the project, whether it was worthy of an Eagle, not the Scoutmaster. Eagle Projects may be simple. They may be complex. They might require thousands of dollars or not one red cent.

They may take months or days to complete. They might require a whole bunch of hours on the part of a veritable army of helpers. They may have tremendous impact or simply might just make a difference. Every project in this broad spectrum is valuable, laudable, and important. There are few, if any, universal standards to the size, scope, and originality of the project.

So every Scout, regardless of where he lives, his talents, abilities, or resources, has the opportunity to become an Eagle Scout. It's not that somebody at the BSA forgot to put the numbers in. They're not there for a good reason. I readily guide Scouts to explore what others have done for projects, and I encourage them to be imaginative and expansive when planning their projects. But I guard that my encouragements don't become coercive or don't become thought of as a requirement. I'm not placing myself on a pedestal telling you I'm the perfect Scoutmaster.

I'm just trying to tell you what I have learned over time. Most of these things have come through making mistakes. Take this entire series into consideration. Do a little studying. Make sure I'm right. And hopefully it will help relieve Eagle Scout drama in your job as a Scoutmaster.