Scoutmaster Podcast 215

I'm Jim Boggs and I'm the Scoutmaster with Troop 102 in Fort Myers, Florida. This edition of the Scoutmaster Podcast is sponsored by backers like us.

And now it's the old Scoutmaster. Here's a story that I found pretty interesting. Some of my scouts were arguing about where the sun went at night.

They just couldn't wrap their minds around it, So they decided to watch the sun that evening very, very carefully to see if they could settle the argument. So they sat down on the top of a hill and they waited, And the sun slowly sat over the horizon and disappeared. And they sat and they waited, and they waited, and they waited all night And suddenly it dawned on them.

Oh well, that's the best I could do. If you've got a better story, send it in please. Hey, this is podcast number 215..

Welcome back to the Scoutmaster Podcast. This is Clark Greene. Let's take a look at the mailbag here. We heard from Stephen Kaminski. He is with Boy Scout Troop 1829 in Midlothian Virginia And he wrote in to say thanks for all you do. You've motivated, inspired and educated this scouter every week for over a year now.

I've browsed the internet and have yet to find any guidelines or suggestions for how to best reflect with Scouts regarding an outing that they've completed. What I'd like to understand is how to best do this with patrol leaders and talk about their leadership. I feel it imperative that Scouts have time to think about how they have led and how they might do things differently or better on the next trip. Any advice is certainly appreciated.

Well, Stephen, thanks for the question. I think it's an excellent topic and that's exactly what we're going to do in this week's installment of Scoutmaster Ship in seven minutes or less.

So we'll get to that after a little bit here. Michael Dummer wrote in to say I got to say I really appreciate the podcast. They give me plenty to consider. I started listening to the archive. What a treasure. It was fun to listen to number one and see how quickly you became comfortable with podcasting.

Well, Michael, it all started back there with podcast number one and it was kind of an experiment And I wasn't quite sure what I was getting myself into. And here we are, 215 later, And I'm glad that you're finding them useful. I really appreciate you getting in touch. Robert Knapp said: Clark, once again, you nailed it in podcast 214.. I forwarded the podcast to one of our new troop committee members who's recently bridged over from Weebelos. Your insights into the transition from being a Weebelos leader to a scouter in a scout troop could not have come at a better time.

Robert, I'm glad you found that useful and hopefully- hopefully, it'll be helpful for your new troop committee member too. We heard from our pal, Bess Elwell Cook, who is a guide leader with the Cambridge Garden Guides down in Sydney, Australia, And she wrote in to say I found your discussion on God in the Scout Oath in podcast 214. Really very interesting and thought your listeners might find a different perspective useful Here in Australia. Our guide promise reads: I promise I will do my best to be true to myself and to develop my beliefs, to serve the community and Australia and live by the guide law. This wording makes guiding available to a person of any faith. It internalizes our spirituality by asking us to do our best to be true to ourselves and to continue to grow and be open minded in that I will develop my beliefs.

It emphasizes the idea that we're all a part of God somehow and that we have the duty to be true to that God part of ourselves. This simple promise has really affected my choices in life Recently during a difficult transition at work. I remembered the words of the promise and it was really a bit of a revelation. I needed to be true to myself and that helped me resolve the work issue, Still loving the show well. Thanks, Bass, for getting in touch. We discussed in the last podcast some aspects of belief and religion in scouting.

It is interesting to realize that there are many different ways that that aspect of scouting is expressed in the different promises and oaths that have been adopted by different scouting organizations all over the world. We heard from Dale Carwyke- Dale, that was my best attempt at pronouncing the last name, I hope I was close- And he wrote about a post that we had on the blog this past week called Scouting as a Craft, And Dale said in this era of high tech, we must never forget the need for high touch. In addition, Scout is a craft. It's hard to teach but it's great when it's mentored. Thank you, Clark, for reminding me of this. Gary Murrow commented on another blog post we had this week which pointed to everybody to an article called The Overprotective Kid, And Gary just briefly commented it should be mandatory for all parents to read when their boys enter scouts.

Well, I don't know if we could make it mandatory. It certainly is useful And if you haven't seen either the Scouting as a Craft post or the one about The Overprotective Kid, go to scoutmastercgcom and take a look.

I want to take a very quick moment to thank James Bogg, Andy McDonald and a donor who asked to remain anonymous for becoming Scoutmaster CG Backers this past week. If you are a regular reader or listener and you're finding what is offered by scoutmastercgcom to be helpful to you, you can return the favor by helping us keep things up and running and become a scoutmastercgcom backer. Funds from backers go towards the expenses of producing and publishing the blog posts and the podcasts and the videos and keeping them freely accessible to scouts all over the world. This is probably a shorter than normal podcast.

I want to go back to the email that I mentioned that we received from Steve Kaminsky in Virginia and talk about reflections. We're going to do that in scoutmastership in seven minutes or less, Since one of the emails I received this week also harked back to the early editions of the podcast.

I started out by thinking, hey, let's do a segment called scoutmastership in seven minutes or less And I think for the first little while I was probably pretty good at keeping it under seven minutes And it didn't take too many podcasts to give up on that idea almost altogether. So it's still called scoutmastership in seven minutes or less, even though it tends to run just a little bit longer.

So, anyway, let's get started,

Shall we? Scoutmastership in seven minutes or less? I've often written and talked about the importance of reflection.

We want our scouts to reflect and use the product of those reflections to grow and develop as useful people. And reflection is really just, you know, kind of a fancy term for talking about what has been going on and how things went, examining the way that they unfolded and, in that, looking for opportunities for growth and development in our scouts.

Now Stephen Kaminski, in his email to me, said: I feel it imperative that scouts take the time to think about how they have led and how they might do it differently or better the next time. I got to agree, Steve. This is really crucial. It's very important. It's a really great tool for developing character and developing leadership, And how you go about it as a scouter is crucial to making it successful. Scouts are very action oriented, right.

Their capacity for reflection is a developing capacity. So we have to align our expectations as to what's going to come out of that reflection to their level of development, And each one of them is going to be just a little bit different, isn't it?

If you think about it, at that age, you and I learned more by a repetition of silly mistakes than by the power of logic or by accepting and doing exactly what we were told. Now I haven't run out of gas in my car for- oh man, probably about 20 years or more, But I remember as a teenage driver running out of gas several times.

In my mind back then, stopping at the gas station was downtime right And it kept me from my immediate goal, So I would just keep on going and subsequently ended up running out of gas a couple of times. Sometimes I didn't even pay attention to the gas gauge. Sometimes I knew I was going to run out, but I thought, yeah, I can press it just a little bit further.

Now I'll bet that most of you had similar experiences. Of course, this was not real clear thinking, because it took a lot longer to walk to the gas station, get gas and take it back to the car and get the car started, you know, And if I'd really run a drive. That means you got to prime the carburetor and all that stuff. But that's just the way I thought at the time because I was a teenager. Eventually I got a little more intelligent, but only after repeating that same miscalculations several times.

So now, as an adult of 54 years of age, I think it's really important to give my scouts the benefit of my experience. I can talk my brains out explaining what I know, but it's not going to work because experience itself is not a transferable commodity. I can tell all the stories that I want, I can issue all of the dire warnings that I want, I can encourage good thinking and good behavior and logic- all I want. But the things that we've learned through our experience is what we've learned, And we've learned it not because we accepted logic or we accepted the experience of our forebears right out of the box. No, we had to test it for ourselves. We had to gain our own experience.

I'll be much more successful in helping scouts if I show them how to learn from their experiences, using the process of reflection, rather than expecting they're just going to accept my experiences and that's it, And I think that's a really important distinction to make. We can talk our heads off, but remember exactly the way that you were, exactly the way that I was at that age. We needed to have the experience. We needed to try these things out, test them for ourselves and see whether they made any sense or not.

So, to repeat myself, we're going to be a lot more useful to our scouts if we help them learn from their experiences using the process of reflection, rather than expecting that they're just going to blindly accept whatever we tell them and act on it exactly as we tell them. And if we're successful at helping them learn how to do this, we've given them a tool that they'll be able to use for the rest of their lives.

Now, reflection does not often need to be some kind of formal sit down type of thing. I see it more as an ongoing process, a dialogue that we have with our scouts. Whenever we speak to them, You're holding up a mirror and getting them to examine what they're doing. The less judgment or opinion you bring to the process, the better. I mean, a mirror does not issue an opinion or a judgment. It just reflects what it is presented with.

Unless you know, it's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and a Disney cartoon. But that doesn't happen in real life, does it?

So when we're doing this, I recommend that you be as clear and unopinionated and neutral mirror as possible. I also recommend that you don't start out by telling a story or making statements first. Just ask questions and get scouts to stitch things together with their answers.

These are purposeful questions and you have a point to make, but you don't want to just announce the point and then start asking questions. What you want to do is lead the scouts to discover that point for themselves. Here I am talking to a patrol leader, for instance.

I just watch them doing a game and I say: well, how did the game go? And the patrol leader looks at me and says: oh, you know pretty well.

Well, why don't you tell me a little bit exactly about why you consider that it went well? Everybody had fun.

Well, did you see anyone who wasn't participating? Yeah, you know, John was sitting down most of the time.

And why was that, do you suppose? Well, he doesn't like games.

Well, why doesn't he like games? Oh, I don't know.

Well, have you ever asked him? Why?

No? Well, do you think it would be a good idea to see if you can find out what's going on there? Yeah, I guess. I mean, it would probably make John feel more comfortable, wouldn't it, if somebody was talking to him and asking him why he wasn't interested in participating in the game. Maybe there's some kind of reason that you don't understand why he doesn't want to join in, and you might be able to help him out there. Yeah, I guess I could do that.

So, before you go talk to John himself, what exactly are you going to ask him? So you get the idea here, right? This reflection can go on for a little while and that patrol leader is going to begin to stitch things together And by the time we're done, it's their idea to go over and talk to John and ask him about what's going on, and not my idea. I haven't told him to do anything. I've offered him some ideas and solutions and he's decided that he's going to adopt them.

Now, I always try to end this kind of a dialogue with something like: you know, that is a great idea. You guys really know your stuff. Do me a favor, let me know what happens after you talk to John. I'm really curious about that.

I think it's really going to help him. What I've just described is a dialogue, a reflection. I've asked the patrol leader to give me some very specific answers about what's been going on and what just happened.

Now I could have done this just with a monologue. I could have called the patrol leader over and said: I saw, the game that you were just playing, John wasn't participating.

Somebody needs to talk to him about that and find out what's going on, And the patrol leader probably would have walked away and gone- okay, I'll do it. And he would have gone away taking this whole thing as a direction from me, the boss, about what he is supposed to be doing. Instead, in this process of reflection, I've gotten him to stitch together the same thoughts that I was having and to arrive at his own conclusion about what should happen next, And in doing this, I'm getting him to think in the way that a leader thinks right. It takes some time to practice this and to get good at it.

I think one of the things that you can do as a scouter is play a little game with yourself and limit yourself to only asking questions in that dialogue. One of the problems with us as scouts is we're adults and we want to explain everything in detail, and we tend to deliver long monologues with many digressions, and scouts are very good at feigning polite attention to us for a little while, But as their distress grows, the signs that we've lost them are pretty unmistakable. I mean, they stare at the ground or they glance from side to side trying to find an escape route or, less subtly, they can just fidget around or roll their eyes and yawn. If you're like me, you can talk them right into the ground.

So limit yourself to asking questions and keep your ears open and listen carefully to the answers. It takes work and practice, but learn how to spend a minute or two- And I'm not talking about a figurative minute or two, but a literal 60 to 120 seconds- in dialogues that lead scouts to discover things. Remember that reflection is unbiased and unopinionated. It ought to be as clear as a good mirror, And you want to ask questions, not deliver judgments and opinions.

Now, there's going to be plenty of times when you're tempted to do that, and there may be a few times where it's appropriate. But aim at asking questions and listening carefully to the replies So as you gain more experience as a scouter, you're going to become- ooh, I don't know- maybe a little bit psychic. I can tell you, after 30 years of doing this with surprising accuracy.

What's going to happen in most given situations, on a scout camping trip or to scout meeting? There's not this like tremendous unpredictability about the way scouts are going to act or react to certain situations. There are a lot of times I can see mistakes coming from a great distance and sometimes I will head them off at the pass and prevent the mistake. But more often than not I let them go ahead and make the mistake because I know the value of the lesson that that mistake creates.

I feel pretty confident in my ability to be able to sit down and reflect with them so that they gain experience and knowledge about how things work. And the final piece of the puzzle is understanding that you are never done with this. You never complete this process. You never ever arrive. My scouts are making the same silly mistakes and miscalculations today that scouts made 30 years ago when I first became a scoutmaster. Job security has never been an issue for scoutmasters.

Once you've made progress with one group of scouts and you feel like you've really accomplished something, then the next group comes along and you get to start all over again, And that's part of the joy of doing this work. You get better at it. As time goes by, You learn more. You gain some experience. That process that you go through in learning and gaining experience helps inform the way that you work with your youth leaders, because they're going to be going through the exact same kind of processes and gaining the same kind of experience that you do year upon year.

So reflection is an incredibly powerful tool to help us form character and develop all the great things that we want to develop in our scouts.