Scoutmaster Podcast 164

Hey, this is Clark and I want to remind you that this podcast is brought to you by ScoutmasterCGcom Backers. The funds we get from our backers cover the expenses of producing and publishing everything at ScoutmasterCGcom, including what you're about to listen to. Go to ScoutmasterCGcom and click the support link at the top of the page and you can join hundreds of your fellow Scouters who help me keep the podcast freely available for Scouters all over the world.

Have you heard Kevin Callan, author and Canadian canoe and camping enthusiast? Kevin's written a new book. It's called Days, But Not Confused- Tales of a Wilderness Traveler. I came across this.

I think this is a good rule to apply to see if your trip is an adventure or not. If a trip isn't long enough to require the use of a toilet trowel, it's not a real trip. If you have to use the toilet trowel, that means you're in the woods long enough for it to be an adventure. Thanks, Kevin. Hey, this is podcast number 164..

Welcome back to the Scoutmaster Podcast. This is Clarke Green. Let's take a look in the mailbag- Pretty full this week. Stephen Kaminski, assistant scoutmaster with Troop 869 in Midlothian, Virginia, writes in to say: I just got back from a scoutmaster leader training the outdoor portion this past weekend in the heart of Virginia Council. My first night was uncomfortable, sleeping in my camp-issued canvas tent while the temperature was 28 degrees. My second night was downright cozy, as one of the members of my patrol let me an additional sleeping bag.

As an adult, I was quickly reminded of the effect that kindness has, no matter what our age. In this case, I happily found it most difficult to get out of my cocoon of sleeping bags the next morning. While I'm just getting into the Boy Scout side of scouting, I've already shared your patrol leader information with my new patrol leader and his assistants. I've also done my best to drop a hint or two about your podcasts and website, as it's done its job to remind me why we put ourselves into these uncomfortable situations on purpose. Thank you for your insight and willingness to share your experience with those of us out here, helping to make a difference and help the scouts we are working with become men. I make it a point to queue up your current or past podcasts as I leave the driveway on my weekday commute to work.

Once I do, I find it difficult to pause the podcast until I return to it later that afternoon. Thanks again, and here's hoping you can continue your good work. And thank you, Steve. It's always great to hear from folks and know that they're listening and getting something from the podcast. I really appreciate you being in touch. I had this email from George Aegon and George is in Manahawk in New Jersey with Troop 61.

Since I read your blog a few times this week and I always agree with your take on things, I periodically send links to my assistant scoutmasters. Have them check out something that relates to an issue or an event in our troop. Thanks very much for putting yourself out there and thank you, George, for getting in touch. I'm glad to hear from you. Over on iTunes, Doug Marks left a five-star review that says Clark has great information and really makes you think about how best to serve the scouts.

Thank you so much, Doug. Heard from Penny Neal. Penny is up to her eyeballs in Fintcastle, Virginia. She's a commissioner for three packs and three troops. She's an adult volunteer with a crew, a troop and a pack, with a son who's an Eagle Scout and two grandsons and cub scouts. She wrote to say I enjoyed the pioneering sculpture pictures and I will show them around my troops and crew.

What fun. And yes, they do look like a lot of fun. If you haven't seen that yet, go to scoutmasterscgcom, Look for a recent post called pioneering unleashed and take a look.

It's hard to explain, so make sure you get over there and take a look at it. We also heard from Daniel Desjardins in Litchfield, New Hampshire. He said: just started to listen to the original podcast, I'm up to number 26 now. I enjoy the great content. Keep it coming.

Well, thank you, Daniel. I really appreciate it And, Bolchanse, being a new scoutmaster in training, It's great to hear from you. In this podcast and scoutmastership: in seven minutes or less, we're going to talk a little bit about 23 leadership questions.

Now, this was a post that we put up on the blog a week or so ago and we're going to go over it here on the podcast, And then we have an email question answer And that's going to fill up the rest of the podcast. So let's get started, shall we?

Scoutmastership in seven minutes or less. So one of the things I do, and probably one of the things you do too, is spend a fair amount of time thinking and reading and studying about leadership and just what the heck that is.

You can find a lot of information out there a lot of books and a lot of definitions, And I kind of have made it my task to try and boil all that down into something that I think is simple and direct and understandable for our youth leaders. How do you convey the message of leadership to them?

How do you talk to them about it in a way that they'll find compelling and interesting and engaging and where they'll begin to understand and practice those things? The best method I've come up with is asking questions, And don't try to provide all the answers, but provide a lot of questions and get them thinking. Then things will start to click. Developing leadership takes some time. It can't be condensed down into a course of study or a special leadership training weekend or something like that. While those things may be helpful, the only real way to learn to lead is just to get out there and start leading and see what happens and encounter the disappointments and the setbacks and the difficulties and learn to move past them and develop those skills.

Now we had a leadership challenge weekend a couple of weeks ago for our older scouts. One of the tools we used was a self-evaluation with a set of questions, And the way we use this tool is. We gave the scouts this leadership self-evaluation sheet.

We said: find a quiet place and sit down and rate yourself on how well you answer these questions. And we did that early on.

We did that the Friday night of the weekend And then, after they had been through some challenges and exercises all day on Saturday, we asked them to go back and try that again. I never saw one of those sheets. I didn't see how anybody filled it out. This was not a way to score people against a perfect mean or to compare them to each other. It was a self-evaluation tool just to get them thinking, to understand some of the various components of what being a leader really means. But the idea was to get them to go back after this leadership challenge weekend and see if they had improved anywhere.

Then we sat down and we had a reflection and discussion around a campfire And they mentioned some of the different things that they thought they had improved on. Now I made this the subject of a post on the blog a week or so ago. Let me go through and talk about the major kind of leadership competencies that these questions are based on. I will tell you I borrowed very extravagantly from materials published by the National Outdoor Leadership School. These are absolutely derivative of some of their conceptualizations of leadership, And the first set of questions was based on leadership behavior.

How well do you treat everyone with dignity and respect? How well do you help others at all times And how well do you admit to and correct your mistakes? Sitting down and answering those questions- that's not an easy thing to do, especially if you're 13 or 14 or 15.. But if you sit and you start thinking about those, it will begin to highlight your strengths and also the things that you need to work on.

There's a basic overall personal competence that a leader needs And that's based on these questions: How well do you know and apply scout skills? I mean, if you're pretty weak in that, that's something to develop because it's going to be necessary for you to work with those skills throughout every level of scouting.

How well do you set goals and follow through And how well do you pay attention to others? That's just kind of this basic competency of knowing and being aware of what's going on around you. Communication is another key leadership competency.

How well do you give and get directions and information? How well do you inform others as situations change?

Now that one. There's a lot of weight there. There's a lot in that.

So far as being a leader, How well do you inform others as situations change? How well do you listen actively?

How well do you ask questions if you don't understand? Being a good leader means having an advanced sense of good judgment and decision making.

So how well do you use all resources and information? How well do you understand clear limits and boundaries?

How well do you know what matters to others? All of the answers to those questions are going to gauge how you make judgments and decisions.

How well do you know what matters to the people that you're leading? I mean you can't make a good judgment, You can't make a good decision, without knowing that. The next term that identifies this set of questions and this leadership competency I lifted 100% from the National Outdoor Leadership School and I love it: Tolerance for adversity and uncertainty. Tolerance for adversity and uncertainty: I mean if I had to pick somebody out, if it was up to me to choose a leader, I would be looking for somebody who was tolerant to adversity and uncertainty.

How well do you respond positively when things change? How well do you turn challenge into opportunity?

How well do you endure and enjoy challenge? I mean really the difference between somebody who is just like a competent manager and somebody who is a competent leader is the way they respond to adversity and uncertainty. Another important aspect of being a decent leader and a good follower is self-awareness.

I mean, you know, if you'll remember being 13,, 14, and 15, you were pretty self-aware A lot of times. You didn't put that in the context of being aware of others and aware what was going on around you. But you can leverage that self-awareness- the kind of highly attenuated self-awareness that boys have in that age- to begin to get them to look at other people and to consider the way other people are feeling and what they're aware of.

So how well do you understand your abilities and limitations? How well do you learn from experience and improve?

How well do you hold yourself accountable If you do those things well for yourself, if you have that self-awareness that can be expanded to helping others develop that kind of awareness and also encouraging that kind of group awareness- The last leadership competency that was vision and action- How well do you use your initiative to make things happen? How well do you figure out what needs to be done and do it?

How well do you encourage and help others? So these 23 questions, like I said, we use them during our Leadership Challenge weekend just as a self-evaluation, just as a way to get guys started thinking. But this is also the source of 23 great Scoutmaster Minutes. This is also the source of a great two-minute end of the Petrolators Council meeting question that you can take and you can ask and begin a discussion that way. This is also a good tool to use when you're kind of doing that after-action reflection.

You know you've had a meeting or you've had an outing and you sit down and say, okay, guys, so let's go through and ask ourselves how well we did these things, And I think it'll help focus things. I am certainly not recommending that you take all these questions and you sit down for an hour and a half and you drill your youth leaders on them.

Do a little bit here and there, Use these as conversation starters, as reflection starters, and let me know how they work, will you? No, we need to settle. Thrifty, brave, clean and reverent. A Scout is just a middle-owned foreman, a courier's caddy, a champion- thrifty, brave, clean and reverent. I certainly don't need to do this, but I use recordings of some of the people I interview as a little buff during the program. If you were willing, you could say: this is Bob Mazooka and you're listening to Clarke Green on the Scoutmaster podcast.

You bet, you bet I'm happy to. This is Bob Mazooka, he's got exactly the Boy Scouts and you're listening to my buddy, Clarke Green, on the Scoutmaster podcast and he is doing a fantastic job.

Well, thanks, thanks, Bob. I'll have to play the entire recording so people don't think I told you to say that, Okay, that's good, that's fine. Write me a letter, send it by name

Email. That is folks.

And here's an answer to one of your emails. So I got this email from a scout parent and her name is Melissa and she says this: I am new to the Boy Scout program. My question or concern is that I am not getting answers to any questions I have. For instance, my son is attending a merit badge event. He's supposed to bring a blue card for the counselor to sign. I got the blue cards from the Scoutmaster, who did not know they needed to be signed before he took them back to the merit badge counselor.

I only found out because another parent told me they needed to be signed by the unit leader. So now my son took the blue cards to his next meeting to have the unit leader sign them, but he wouldn't sign them because they were not filled out, since my son and I did not know that that was necessary.

Is there any kind of a briefing or meeting for parents so that we, especially those of us with no experience in Boy Scouts, know what to do or ask, so that others in the future don't experience what I feel is a lack of needed information? Well, Melissa, thank you so much for getting in touch and asking a question, and I feel your pain. I really do.

I know that this is frustrating and I want to help kind of unravel some of this frustration a little bit. And I'll tell you that usually you're not going to find a whole lot of information for parents because that information is going to the scout and the scout is expected to manage his own advancement and to pack his own bag and to take care of himself. There's really no briefings or meetings for parents or really a whole lot of effort in explaining things to them in a lot of ways because- and I know, at least in the case of my troop- this is very intentional and to understand why that is, we've got to talk about what scouting is trying to do. Here. I encourage parents to get comfortable with the idea of not knowing a whole lot about what's going on. The whole purpose of what's going on is to get their scouts to know these things and to find and discover the answers to these things.

It's not that I think parents should be kept in the dark or keep their noses out of their son's business or anything like that. It's because we want scouts to learn to figure these things out on themselves.

So there's immediate goals in scouting, like getting a merit badge, and then there's these big, broad goals like learning how to look after yourself, learning how to get information, learning how to go through the process of getting a merit badge, learning how to approach and talk to adults who are not your parents, learning how to ask questions. When we put our scouts out there like that, they are going to encounter some frustration and some discouragement. That's where we really need our parents cooperation to help them overcome that frustration and discouragement. One of my key challenges as a Scoutmaster is getting parents to buy in on this. They think they know what I'm talking about, but there's really no way they can actually understand it until they've been through the whole process. I've watched this happen hundreds of times, literally hundreds of times.

The amount of self-reliance and independence you see develop in your son is commensurate with the amount that you let go and let him do for himself. Can I tell you this: my son is now 30 years old and he works for the college he attended in admissions and promotion, and he will tell you that the one key skill many new students lack is the ability to navigate through the very routine things that they are used to having their parents do for them.

And this is, you know, young ladies and young men who have graduated from high school, who are entering into their freshman year of college not knowing how to do laundry and not knowing how to sign up for classes or even the rudiments of managing a schedule or the skills of self-regulation. Now, not saying that when he arrived at college for his freshman year that he didn't have certain challenges and difficulties to overcome, but he had a base set of skills, mostly developed through scouting of independence and the ability to find his own way in the world. If your son decides he wants to go to this merit badge event that he'll need to have blue cards and things like that, I wouldn't get the blue cards for him and I wouldn't find out all the information about how to use blue cards. I start asking him questions.

Well, do you need anything when you go to this merit badge event? It says here's something about a blue card.

How do you get a blue card? Oh, I don't know, mom.

Oh well, have you asked? Uh, have you looked in your scout handbook to see about that?

Have you asked your patrol leader or your senior patrol leader or your Scoutmaster about that? How does how you're going to need to figure out how that worked.

You know, when he comes home and he says: hey, we have a camping trip, here's my permission slip, I need you to sign it and I need to bring some stuff. Well, what stuff do you need to bring?

Is it in your scout handbook? Have you asked your patrol leader or your senior patrol leader or your Scoutmaster about that?

How are you going to pack it? What are you going to pack it in?

Is there anything special that you need to be thinking about? Is there any special gear that we need to get for you?

And then let him at it? I mean, let him pack his own bag.

He'll forget something- and you know I still forget stuff, I mean after 30 plus years of camping- but he will learn more from the forgetting than if you pack the bag for him. He's going to get discouraged and he's going to get frustrated because in a lot of ways this is not easy. At first blush it seems a little harsh or it may look like you're not being a responsible parent, and that is an odd feeling for most of us. It's a difficult feeling. Thing is you'll soon see him start to figure things out more and more.

You'll find that your job is not so much doing as asking questions and helping him discover answers. Help him look past the initial frustrations and overcome the reluctance and fear that most boys have and asking questions of anybody about anything, especially somebody like a Scoutmaster who can often be kind of a daunting figure, and soon he'll start to ask the questions himself. He'll absolutely shock you the amount of things that he can do and you'll see this not only be applied in scouting but you'll see it start to spread through every aspect of his character and his life. My advice to parents is to step back, be supportive and understanding and cooperate with the bigger processes at work. Look for teachable moments. Help your scouts figure out what to do next.

Not by supplying all the answers or knowing all the answers, but by asking questions. Sounds simple, doesn't it? Of course it does, but it's not. It's one of the hardest challenges that you're going to meet as a parent. Interesting thing about scouting is it's not just an opportunity for scouts to learn and grow. It's also an opportunity for adult volunteers to learn and grow and for their parents to learn and grow.

I went through this process. It was uncomfortable, it was challenging, but ultimately it was very rewarding.

And remember, i was the Scoutmaster, so i knew everything. And man trying not to provide all the answers and letting the boy figure these things out on his own- that could be a real challenge at times. I honestly hope that helps and i honestly hope that i haven't offended the sensibilities of any parents who are listening out there. But i'll just repeat one more time. There are some specific goals in scouting that are very easy to understand, like getting a merit badge or getting your next rank or going on a camping trip or something like that. But those are all tangential.

They're not the real goal. The real goal is developing competent, self-confident, self-starting human beings with a lot of compassion and initiative, not only to help themselves but to help other people.

If you catch that vision and you start working with your son in scouting in that wise, i think that you will get some results that will be well worth the initial discomfort and the initial kind of difficult feeling that you have in letting them go. I've seen it happen hundreds and hundreds of times and i could tell you that it works. You could get in touch and send me an email question, and you're going to find out how to do that in just a moment.