Scoutmaster Podcast 161

And now the old Scoutmaster. The new patrol leader is very concerned about making sure that their first camping trip is absolutely perfect, And so he makes sure that he plans very, very carefully. He makes sure that each patrol member has a list of things to bring, and they have a grub master who's going to take care of making sure that the food gets there and then coordinate getting it cooked. And he decides that, just to be sure, he's going to make sure and test every single piece of gear with the patrol quarter master before they leave. After all these elaborate, lengthy preparations, the patrol heads out on their hike and they settle in and they set up camp and they go to cook dinner. And the grub master comes over to the patrol leader and says the matches you gave us don't work. And the patrol leader says they must work because I tested every single one of them. Alright, this is podcast number 161..

Welcome back to the Scoutmaster podcast. This is Clarke Green. Let's take a look at this week's mailbag. Chris Hopkins is with the Hudson Valley Council and he wrote in to say: I'm trying to locate the person that created the merit badge infographic on your site. It's a resource I'd like to share with our leaders. And I did get back to Chris and our conversation resulted in a high resolution PDF of the merit badge blue card infographic that is on the site at scoutmastercgcom. that makes it really easy to print and to share. And any of the resources- the podcast, the posts, the infographics, anything you find on scoutmastercgcom is there to be freely distributed and shared with scout leaders. So do go ahead and make sure you do that and take this as permission. You don't even have to ask, okay? Thanks, Chris. Thanks for being in touch and I'm glad you found that infographic useful. Bob Dawson is an assistant Scoutmaster with Troop 316 in Holland, Michigan, And he wrote in just to say: thanks, all you do for scouting. Thank you, Bob. Bob was looking for some help with the podcast archive And you know, since the site redesigned, I'm working on upgrading the podcast archive a little bit, but you can find it easy enough. When you go to the website you'll see a podcast archive link in the upper right-hand corner. That'll take you to a list of podcasts. You just click on one and it opens up a player in a new window. You can listen to all 161 podcasts that way. Thanks for being in touch, Bob, And thanks for the kind words. Jim Herman is the Scoutmaster of Troop 99. He's also a den leader for Den of Bears in Pack 90 and will be a tiger leader soon, And Jim says that's the youngest of his four boys. I haven't been on the site in a few months. I follow you through email subscription. The new format's great and I appreciate all you do with this resource. Lately I've taken to sharing articles with my Troop parents. Your site has probably been the most influential single resource I've had in the last few years And I figured the more I share with my scout's parents, the quicker they'll get on board. Thanks again and keep it up Well. thank you, Jim. I certainly appreciate hearing from you. I'm glad you're finding things useful. Shane Lehman is with the 63rd Ottawa Ontario, Canada scout group. He said I stumbled across your podcast about a week ago. Shane, I really do you know apologize. I try not to leave the podcast out there where they are an impediment to travel. But yeah, it was a joke. I try. I must admit I was not sure what to expect. I've had limited contact with the BSA Troops but I found the podcast very informative and planned to listen regularly. Scouting really is an international brotherhood And you're right, Shane, And thank you so much for writing in And I do appreciate the kind words. Justin Ross Day is in the first Model Warrie Cub Scouts and first Win Chelsea Cub Scouts, And I love every minute. I am a Cub Scout leader in Australia And, even though our scout ways are slightly different, I can connect with a lot of what you say. I run two groups in a place called G-Long in Australia, But I'm now coming up to two years in the groups and I use your common sense as a guide. Thanks for listening. I really do appreciate it And following right up on that, Richard is a scout leader with Second Bankstown Scout Troop. He says I'm a relatively green scout leader from Australia. I just wanted to say thanks and let you know I'm learning a great deal from your blog and resources. In our troop I'm training three new assistant leaders and I've directed them to several of your articles, which they found very useful too. In any case, please do keep up the great work and know that your positive impact is being felt all the way down under. Cheers. Well, cheers to you, Richard. I'm glad to know that this stuff translates into Australian. Yes, I am, Thanks. Clegg Warpel wrote in to say I'm glad I found your site. started with the podcast 40 and found myself wanting to join in the conversation. I always tell adults that if they feel like they aren't doing much of anything then they're doing a good job. I get very excited about troop elections because of how well they work. The hard part is telling other adults not to worry when some of the elected scouts don't follow through. Good job, I have a lot of listening to catch up on. Well, thanks, Craig. Yeah, you know, it's not that easy sometimes and boys are boys and they don't necessarily follow through the way we adults should. but they're learning stuff and that's the important message to get out of it all. right, Rob Stock is in the Lewis and Clark Council in the Great St Clair District with Troop 11.. He said: thank you very much for the answer to my email question. I was hearing a little voice in my head echo basically your reply and I really appreciate the website too. Well, thank you, Rob, And you know you can email me with your questions and comments at Clark C-L-A-R-K-E at ScoutMasterCGcom. Clark C-L-A-R-K-E at ScoutMasterCGcom. I want to remind you that this Sunday, May 10th, is our next Scout Circle. Get Together and you go over to ScoutCircleorg, ScoutCircleorg, and you'll be able to view a live video presentation and discussion with Frank Maynard. Frank is the author of Bob White's Blather and he is a long-serving Troop Committee Chairman and he'll be on Scout Circle Sunday, March 10th, from 9 to 10 pm Eastern Standard Time- ScoutCircleorg. go on over there and you'll have a chance to listen to Frank and then ask him questions, and I'm sure it'll be a great conversation. Before we go any further, let's listen to this. It's March and March means that there are new Scouts because the Webelos have crossed over and there are parents all over the country getting a list of gear that they're supposed to go out and get their Scouts so they'll be equipped for their adventures with their new Troop, and what are they going to do? Well, I've got a great idea for you, and here to talk with me about it is Bill Fleming from KhanahoCreekcom. How are you doing, Bill Clark? we're doing fantastic, and are we ever looking forward to a great camp and season? Here I am. my boy just joined Scouts and I got a list of gear. I'm trying to figure out where to go and what to buy. How can you help us out? At KhanahoCreek. we've put together a scouting bundle or, if you will, a beginning outdoor enthusiast bundle, not just for Scouts but for anybody who enjoys the great outdoors and wanting to get into some equipment that they can rely on. and within that bundle we're willing at KhanahoCreek to mix and match those components to help fit your needs, No matter where you are or what conditions you're going to encounter. Bill's going to help you out. Go to KhanahoCreekcom and there use the discount code CG113.. Thanks Bill, Thank you Clark. Look forward to talking to you next week. In this podcast and Scoutmaster's Ship in seven minutes or less, we're going to be talking about four mistakes, four pretty common mistakes that Scout leaders make and some things we can do to kind of perfect our leadership style a bit. and then we have a couple of questions in the email section and that'll take care of this podcast. so let's get started, shall we

Scoutmaster's Ship in seven minutes or less.

Well, sometimes it seems we're doing all the right things, but the results we're hoping for don't materialize. When Scout leaders grow frustrated with their work, it's usually because we're making one or more of the following mistakes. Number one is that we can tend to become a little over-involved- You've heard the term helicopter applied to parents and teachers and Scout leaders who are a little over-involved in their children's lives. Scout leaders can over-plan. we can seek to control too many of the variables and we can reduce the scouting experience to something more like a carefully guided tour rather than an open-ended adventure. We can become too driven by the concept of educating Scouts to the exclusion of real growth. Our honest good intentions sometimes cause exactly the opposite results that we were hoping for. In our effort to protect our Scouts from uncertainty and adversity and to optimize the productive use of their time and to develop balanced and healthy personalities, we can undermine some important natural developmental processes that actually drive the results we're looking for. Number two is we can become very risk-averse. Our culture attempts to calculate and control risk- and you know everybody does, All cultures do- But several factors have distorted our perception of risk. We have access to information on a scale I would have to say that is just unprecedented in human history, but our ability to sort through that information individually hasn't really grown proportionally. Fear and foreboding and highly attenuated emotions are in the news all the time, They're in entertainment all the time, And new media just floods our screens and airways with this. Now, I'm not suggesting that this is some kind of coordinated conspiracy or anything like that. It's just human nature. We simply don't get a balanced journalistic report about a child being abducted or abused or some kind of accident. We end up being there watching the events unfold hour upon hour, And we just don't see the story once. We see it hundreds of times. If it gains enough attention, we're likely to see it dramatized in painful, lurid detail on a television show or in a movie, And communicating emotions on a visceral level is, in many ways, you know, the goal of everything that we do as humans. We want people to understand the way we feel, and we want people to understand the way things happen. The problem is, we've become so good at doing it. we can mistake emotion for information. These messages teach us mistakenly that all risk is bad, and our reaction is to reduce or eliminate risk in our children's lives in an attempt to make them safe and predictable. We find out soon enough, though, that it's really impossible to do So. we resolve to control more and more of the variables, and this is more damaging than protective. If parents do this, and scout leaders do it too, Failure is that we misunderstand the place of failure. We've become so concerned about success that we all have but eliminated the risk of failure in many aspects of our children's lives. Failure is actually good. Failure builds resilience and character. Failure is not the enemy. The enemy is shame and anger and discouragement and disappointment in reaction to things that don't go right. Our scouts need the latitude to attempt things and fail at them. It's fine. Whether or not our children and our scouts learn from failure hinges on our reaction to failure. We probably all recall some landmark in our childhood experience where we failed and the adults around us reacted with anger or shame. We don't want our own children to experience this sort of thing, so we either rescue them before they fail or overcompensate by controlling the natural consequences of the failure. How we react to failure is much, much more important than rescuing our children from it. Number four: scout leaders tend to emphasize rewards and we tend to lack objectivity. Scouting is not just a system of challenges and rewards, A list of things to do to get a badge. It's a journey through these important developmental experiences. We know success in life is not a simple metric comparison reduced to winning and losing right. Our problem is that in our parenting and leadership, we can make it seem that everything a child or a scout does is measured and compared to others. When this becomes the norm, parents and leaders become cheerleaders instead of coaches. Now, our children and our scouts both need encouragement as either undeserved or disingenuous. Coaches, on the other hand, are pretty objective. They help you find your strengths and weaknesses and they give you the tools to work with those strengths and weaknesses. Cheerleaders- not so objective. They're always basically telling you about how awesome you are, Even when things aren't going very well. parents and scout leaders need to balance their coaching and cheerleading to achieve real success and real growth, Those things that we're really driving at. They must have a studied and consistent objectivity. Our children don't grow, our scouts don't grow and achieve because they are awesome- Okay, Even though they are- But they grow and achieve because they learn to try to overcome challenges, to learn from failures and learn to be persistent. How do we avoid some of these common mistakes? by balancing our leadership. The overly effusive cheerleader and the overly critical taskmaster are both ends of an unbalanced spectrum. Balancing our leadership style is a never-ending challenge and one that we should be working always to improve. So here's some ideas that you may think about. Risk is not always dangerous. Surely, some risks are unacceptable, but not all risks are dangerous. We have ample program guides and rules that define the line between acceptable and unacceptable risk. Scouts need the latitude to choose. Life is all about choices. You choose to do something or to be something, But shaping and controlling every choice to guarantee that it's a good one is not a balanced approach, Neither is having no control over that whatsoever. Every game has a field of play and has a set of rules, and so does scouting. Some choices in scouting are simply out of bounds. Some choices in life are out of bounds, but if we eliminate possibility of all the out of bounds choices, we're not creating people with a resilient character or people who are able to make good choices. I think another thing we can do is have a lot of empathy, and we need to have balanced empathy. We're in danger of forgetting that our scouts and think most adults are unerringly sure of themselves that we don't question or regret our own actions. Letting them know that we've fallen short at times and that we've recovered can help them better address their own difficulties. We need to be objective. Our scouts are awesome. Our children are awesome. We know it. We know how intelligent they are and what vast potential they have. Of course, we know they can do great things, but our greatness comes from hard work, not from just being awesome. Help them understand that being talented and skilled is only part of the equation. The rest of it is up to them. Once we have that objectivity, we really need balanced reactions. We need to avoid being angry and we need to be encouraging and empathetic and understanding. We need to balance rewards. Every achievement is certainly a step forward and every victory ought to be celebrated, but it doesn't always have to be a tick or tape parade down Main Street. A few words of honest praise mean a lot more than that kind of showy over excess. And finally, we have to understand that failure is not a bad thing and it's a powerful teacher. We know that achievement comes more through hard work than the force of somebody's personality or awesomeness. In the same way, every failure is not caused by a lack of personality or character. Our job is to lend every achievement and every failure that objectivity that will help our children and our scouts grow into useful, important human beings.

This is Cliff Jacobson, and you're listening to the Scoutmaster podcast with Clark Greene

Email. that is folks,

And here's an answer to one of your emails.

So let's see, I had this email says I'm a scoutmaster with a troop of 14 scouts and I was planning on trying to go to some of the local churches and talk with their congregations about scouting. I thought it would be a great way to spread the word about our troop to the community and hopefully recruit a few new scouts. but a lot of the pastors I've contacted have not been very receptive to my idea. Frankly, that's the opposite reaction to what I was expecting. I understand why the local school district doesn't give us access, but I expected local churches to maybe be a little more welcoming. Do you have any other ideas where I might go to recruit new members? Well, I gotta tell you that going out and speaking to a church group or a school group or something like that, I'm not going to say that it's unaffective and it's not a good way to spend time. I think that it can be a job of recruiting done, but I wouldn't focus on that quite so much. If you go to another community group and you say I would like to come and talk about my community group, well that might be seen as kind of treading on their turf a little bit, especially with churches, with youth programs and things. They may welcome you and they may not. I wouldn't be surprised if they don't. Here's my simple recruiting formula. If you distribute a thousand pamphlets or handouts or something like that, you maybe get three or four potential scouts to attend a meeting- Three or four out of a thousand. If you go and you speak to a group of a hundred people, you maybe get one or two. If a scout goes and talks to five of his friends, one of them is going to come to a scout meeting. If parents talk to other parents- let's say they talk to five or ten other sets of parents- you're going to get two or three. you're going to get two or three families who will send scouts to a meeting. So if you just look at the ratios involved- and hey, the ratios I'm giving you are just kind of based on a seat of the parents, estimate from my own experiences, because I've tried all of those things And the gold standard for recruiting is scouts talking to their friends and parents talking to other parents, And it's hard to tell which one is the most effective, but I know that parents talking to other parents is maybe just a little bit stronger than scouts talking to their friends who aren't in scouting. If I was in the position of really wanting to build up the troop and recruit a whole lot of guys, I would spend my time promoting those actions that have the best ratio of effort to results. So let's get the scouts to talk to scouts. Let's get our parents talking to parents and see what happened. I got this email from a scout leader who said: I'm a little confused about this because our Scoutmaster distributed this memo after our last camping trip And the memo says: on our last camp out, several scouts were sleeping alone in their own tents. Sleeping alone in your own tent is a no-no. It's against the buddy system and youth protection. Please don't do this in the future. If there's an odd number of scouts, they can triple up in a tent. The practice of sleeping alone in your own tent leads to poor citizenship and isolates the scout. For instance, at Fillmont, if a scout needs to get up and use a latrine at night, he has to go with another scout. The person who sent me the email said: some of these things don't seem quite right. Can you give me your opinion on this. Well, that is actually a pretty bizarre interpretation of the buddy system and I think that the folks in your troop may have gone just a tiny bit overboard. So let's get some references on the buddy system. In the scout handbook, on page 39,, it says: for many outdoor activities, scouting uses the buddy system to help ensure everyone's safety. You and a buddy can watch out for each other during a camp out by checking in now and again to be sure everything is alright. So let's note a couple of things out of that. Many outdoor activities- not all outdoor activities, it says, but many outdoor activities- and that you check in with your buddy now and again to make sure everything is alright. So that doesn't mean that you and your buddy are necessarily constantly in each other's field of view. The Scoutmaster handbook, on page 99,, when it's talking about gear for scout troops, it says two person tents are practical for most patrol and troop camping. They can be carried in backpacks and are available with sewn in floors and insect netting. Two scouts in a tent can also strengthen the use of the buddy system. Note that that quote says CAN strengthen the buddy system, Not must or shall. There's no dictation there that the only way to do this is to have a minimum of two scouts in a tent. I mean it really it's just kind of practical information about having enough tents, about being able to backpack with them, and sharing two person tents is being recommended, But it's in no way required. If we look at the guide to safe scouting, the buddy system is explained this way: The long history the buddy system in scouting has shown that it is always best to have at least one other person with you and aware at all times of your circumstances and what you're doing in any outdoor or strenuous activity, So that's someone knowing where you are, that you're okay, They are with you, but not right next to you holding your hand the whole time. In inherently risky or strenuous activities like swimming and boating and climbing and scuba diving and things like that, the buddy system is a bit different, isn't it? That's where you absolutely have a buddy and you're absolutely aware of each other all the time, in every circumstance, when you're in a pool, when you're in a boat, when you're scuba diving, when you're climbing. that buddy system is a little more attenuated and a little bit different than just the general buddy system. going on, Now, if sleeping in your own tent alone leads to poor citizenship and is an isolating experience. I would guess that in this troop, the same is true of the adult leaders, right? I'm sure none of them sleep alone in their own tents, because that would be isolating and that would lead them to being poor citizens. Of course, all the scouts don't have their own bedroom at home either, so they don't feel isolated or turn into bad citizens, right? I've been an adult volunteer for more than 30 years now and I've trained people in youth protection and many other things more times than I can count, and I have never, ever, found anything remotely like what is being described in this particular memo in any of the literature. If a scout shows up and he has his own tent and would rather not have to share a tent, I don't really see a problem. 99.99% of the time when I'm camping I have my own tent, I don't share it with anybody else and sometimes I'm a fair distance away from everybody else. And as for what happens at Fillmont, scouts are advised to have someone else awake and they need to use latrine at night. because why There are bears in Fillmont and bears wander around at night, It's not because it's in danger of being isolated or being a bad citizen, It's just a safety measure. Now listen, we can tend to go overboard on things like this because we think if a little bit of safety is good, a lot of safety keeps our boys safer. So let's agree that this is all coming from good intentions, That the buddy system is important and even required in some situations And, like I said, Aquatics is one of them. I think some people assume that it has to be strictly enforced all the time and in all situations, and that is very right in theory, but it's very wrong in practice. So just to review, for many outdoor activities, scouting uses the buddy system to help assure everyone's safety. You and a buddy can watch out for each other during a camp out by checking in now and again to be sure that everything is okay. Two person tents are practical for most patrol and troop camping and they can strengthen the use of the buddy system. but there's no standard being dictated there And the long history the buddy system in scouting has shown that it's always best to have at least one other person with you and aware at all times of your circumstances and what you're doing in any outdoor and strenuous activity. So the whole idea is that our scouts look after each other, That they're aware and responsible for the well being of their fellow scouts.