Scoutmaster Podcast 221

I'm Justin Feld and I'm a Scoutmaster with Troop 89 in Downers Grove, Illinois. This edition of the Scoutmaster podcast is sponsored by backers like me. Thanks for everything you do, Clark.

And now see you, Scoutmaster. On a recent camping trip we had this fantastic campsite at the base of a big cliff and I overheard a couple of my scouts kind of arguing with each other and what what had happened was is one had bet the other that he couldn't climb that cliff and cook their dinner up on top of the cliff. And I don't like to step in usually, but I had to put a stop to it because the stakes were just too high. Hello, If you've got a better joke than that, and everybody should right, send it in.

Hey, this is podcast number 221.. Hey, welcome back to the Scoutmaster podcast. This is Clarke Green. Let's take a look at the mail bag. We heard from Chris this past week, who wrote to say I just wanted to thank you for the wonderful emails and blog posts and things. My son just crossed into a scout troop from Weeblows.

I agreed to be an assistant Scoutmaster. I was a den leader and I'm now a cub master for the pack. I'm finding your information to be thought-provoking and a fabulous resources.

I assume my new roles with both the troop and the pack, So thank you. Well, thank you, Chris, for being in touch.

I am so happy to find that people find this useful And I really appreciate your support Heard from Dave Self via Facebook. I just had a coworker ask me some questions about possibly starting up a new troop, and I primarily pointed him to Scoutmaster CG's blog and podcast to help him get off on the right foot.

Well, thanks, Dave. Hopefully we can help him do that. Tell him to get in touch with us. Love to hear from him Over on the blog. This week, One of the things we posted was an infographic about three things scout parents can do to help out with gear.

It's kind of specific, isn't it? But you know I had three pieces of advice.

One was: make sure to put your scout's name and troop number on everything, And if he has a common first name, you know, make sure to put the last name on there too, or at least the last initial, because if they're attending an event with dozens or hundreds of other scouts and they misplace something, it's got a much better chance of finding its way back to them If it is marked. The second piece of advice was: don't pack for your scout- and I don't really need to elaborate on that, Do I? But just from a practical standpoint, if you pack everything for your scout, the scout is not really going to understand what he has with him or even know how to find it. And the third piece of advice was: help scouts keep track of their gear. I can't tell you how many times a scout has told me that they're without some key piece of gear because they couldn't find it at home After each camping trip.

Make sure that they're putting it someplace, like in one of those big plastic containers or something like that, so they'll be able to find it next time. This, these three things, will help your scouts and they will help save a Scoutmaster's sanity from time to time. To Kathy responded: I know your advice is spot on. What I didn't realize was how challenging it would be to be a parent with who is a little bit of a control freak. Kathy went on to say: the first step is admitting you have a problem. Right, I'm learning and I'm pretty sure my son is too.

Yeah, Kathy, we all run into this and but really you know. Let them pack when they're going out on a camping trip. They'll forget a few things.

I still forget things after 40 years of camping, But the way that you learn is: you know sometimes you don't have what exactly what you need. If you want to be involved in the whole packing procedure, just help them, you know, have a list and check things off. It's pretty simple. Just don't do it for them because, like I said, they won't know what they have or where it is. In last week's podcast, One of the answers to an email question involved talking about logistical success versus mission success. I heard from John Dyer who said the excellent nugget in last week's podcast was comparing logistical success to mission success.

Wow, And my ears perk up at that. This is one that also applies to so much more than scouting.

Where did you first hear these two terms together? Well, John, I was writing a reply to that email and it just kind of came up. I'm sure that the two ideas have been put together in other places somewhere. I can't really remember reading it before. It's probably not an original idea, If you. If you're not sure what I'm talking about here, folks, and you haven't listened to the last podcast, go back and listen to the email section and where we make that comparison, We also heard from- obviously a screen name, the hypoxic marmot.

But the hypoxic marmot wrote in to say recently I stumbled into the podcast and I'm enjoying it. Well, I apologize if I left podcasts kind of laid around so that you stumbled over them.

But they went on to say I played the recent segment of Brick Mason to my son and he looked at me and asked: is this where you're getting all of your stupid jokes? Well, you know, we, we- we- try to serve on many levels and provide scouters with stupid jokes to amaze their scouts with. Anyway, the marmot went on to say on the topic of high adventure, as a relatively new scouter I was puzzled at the strong pull in our troop to do high adventure camps that had higher costs associated with them. I cannot figure out why we would go backpacking in New Mexico, when we live in one of the most wonderful places in the world, to go backpacking the state of Colorado. Our scouts are in the midst of planning and preparation of a backpacking trip on the Colorado Trail at probably one tenth the cost of what it would take to go to film on, and we hope it will give them an appreciation of the wonder in their own backyard. Keep up the good fight and thank you.

Well, thank you for getting in touch. Yeah, I agree, A lot of the big trips to the nationally sponsored high adventure bases.

They can be kind of pricey and they they're out of my reach most times and I think they're out of the reach of a lot of my families. You know, unless we do some pretty intensive fundraising or we really go on a two year cycle where people are paying over time. And that's why I'm a big advocate of simple, local kind of homespun high adventure.

I'm certainly not an enemy of the bigger, more ambitious trips, but I think the point is is there are lots of high adventure opportunities out there and every troop should have some kind of high adventure program, if you ask me. Last week we also were talking about Scout Service projects and Jim Woods replied: I have to revisit my idea of having a blanket approval for camp out service projects and Eagle Service projects.

Well, Jim, I think that might be a good thing to revisit. You know, just as a matter of course I approve most of the service projects the Scouts bring to my attention. My chief objection just to having a blanket approval is that Scouts don't end up talking to us and approving those service projects for second class and star and life.

Well, you know that's. That's a really great opportunity to have something to talk to a Scout about, And when we have that, I like to take that opportunity. I'm glad that we got you thinking about that at least.

So if you're finding the resources we offer at ScoutmasterCGcom- the blog posts and the podcast and all the other things that we've created are helping you- You can return the favor by becoming a backer. Funds that we receive from backers make it possible to publish all of the resources that we create and keep them freely available to Scouters all over the world, And since last week, Jeff Zazeta signed up to be a backer.

Thank you so much, Jeff. Thanks for helping us out here. I really do appreciate it. It's very easy to become a backer: Go to ScoutmasterCGcom, Follow the support link right there at the top of the page and you'll get the whole story on that.

Well, in this podcast in Scoutmaster's ship, in seven minutes or less, we're going to talk a little bit about real responsibility And then we've got a couple of email questions to answer and that's going to take up the rest of the entire podcast. So let's get started, shall we Scoutmaster's ship in seven minutes or less?

Scouting gives young people the opportunity to develop into contributing, capable and empathetic adults. Scouting is much more than just leadership, development and leadership.

You know, we all agree it's an important quality, but it's not all there is. Real leadership actually is based on a strong character.

So our principal name is developing character, not necessarily developing leadership. We're not really aimed at that. Principally, what we do is we give people the opportunity to develop strong character, and the most important things a Scout learns are those intangible things that they get out of their experiences in scouting. I've seen touching demonstrations of tolerance and friendship and heroic endurance of difficult circumstances as we watch this development of inner character, of inner strength in our Scouts.

And without that inner strength and that character, there's no basis for developing leadership, is there? So, just to differentiate a little bit between the two: develop character and you'll develop leadership. Develop just leadership. You can do that without really touching on those intangible character elements sometimes.

So how do we really get at this? How do we really get at this development of character?

Well, one of the key elements is something that is almost wholly unique to scouting, and I call it real responsibility, and we enable Scouts to have real responsibility for themselves and for their fellow Scouts. Now, what is real responsibility?

Well, I would argue that real responsibility is the kind of responsibility that functions without a safety net in a lot of ways, You know, naturally, we're going to make sure that our Scouts are physically and emotionally and mentally safe- All right, we're going to make sure that that happens, but we're not going to prevent every single failure. Scouting does its best to optimize the ability to succeed, but to have real responsibility, that means there's the latitude for failure. There's little sense of accomplishment when something is achieved in an environment that has eliminated all possibility of failing.

Failures are pretty charged word, isn't it? We've been conditioned to think that failure is altogether negative, but mistakes teach us some of life's most valuable lessons.

You and I, we did not end up where we are because we never failed. We ended up where we are because we failed and learned from those failures. As a wrestling coach, I welcomed the hard matches and even welcomed losing them, because those- quote- failures, unquote- provided us with more opportunity for learning and sharpening our skills than just going into a match and running over the other team. No championship team gets to their goal without significant development and much of that development is based on how they incorporate the lessons that their failures and losses teach. Handled properly, failure is a very positive influence and it provides really sharp insight into what you're doing and intense motivation.

So when a scout fails, it's up to us adults to take that failure and to turn it into a teachable moment and ultimately, a positive experience. And it's not really that hard to do, is it? Scouting is not designed for efficiency. There are supposed to be lots of bumps and setbacks along the way. They are supposed to be challenges, and those challenges and bumps and setbacks are evidence that scouts have real responsibility. We're on hand to coach and to train and encourage, but never to totally eliminate the possibility of failing or to bail scouts out of tough spots.

We want to work with them to get through these things. So the frustrations of an inefficient youth led program- They are a welcome thing to us.

We don't want to eliminate those things, We want to welcome them. These experiences are the ones that build character And when we take them and we accept them as a positive influence, not only in our scouts lives, but in our lives as well. We're going to come out on top and we're going to have what I like to call real responsibility that leads to the development of good, strong character and, as a result, the development of leadership. I'm down the river, It's a beautiful day. The birds and with such bliss paddle in my hand and the trees above Don't get any better than this. In my blue canoes, in my blue canoes, I'm canoeing, canoeing, canoe too.

Write me a letter, send it by name, Email. That is folks.

And here's an answer to one of your emails. Hey, if you are spending any time looking at the blog lately, every once in a while, while I'm working on a blog, I'll turn on the chat feature and I'll get to talk to readers and listeners one-on-one.

And if you haven't seen this yet, go to the blog at scoutmastercgcom and there's this aggravating little bouncing balloon at the bottom right hand part of the page. If you click on that, it'll take you to the chat feature.

If I'm not there, there's a contact form that you can fill out, And I received one of the letters that I received that you can fill out, And I received one question over a contact form last week that said, how can I run a Cub Scout pack if no one is willing to lead or help? And well you know, obviously you can't, right? Nobody can really run anything if there's no one willing to lead or help. I guess you could for a little while, but if no one's willing to help, you're gonna get pretty tired pretty fast and things are not going to go well. The good news here is that people are usually very willing to help once they understand that they're needed.

So here's what I suggest you do: You call a meeting of all the parents that are involved with the Cub Scout pack and you make it clear that at least one parent per family is asked to be at this meeting and promise that it's only gonna last for 15 minutes- Really only 15 minutes. So, before the meeting, get some index cards and list one task that needs to be completed or one position that needs to be filled on each index card.

Open the meeting by welcoming everybody and tell them that you have a number of opportunities for helping make the Cub program possible for their sons, and then read each card you've prepared and tack them to a bulletin board or tape them on the wall right there behind you. Conclude by saying that everyone will need to pitch in and that each of the parent's presence needs to choose what they would like to do out of the cards that are tacked there on the wall and tell them: you know, the most attractive opportunities are probably gonna go first.

So everybody should hop right up and grab the job or the task that they like the most: One, two, three ready set go, And you know they'll sit there for a moment until they understand that oh, this is serious. I actually have to do this now, and the first parent will get up and take a card and then everybody will do it, and there's kind of a fun spirit to it.

It's kind of a game, isn't it? And then ask everyone who's taken a card to write their name and contact information on the card and hand it back to you before they leave. Tell them you'll be contacting them soon about what happens next, thank them for their time and say that you're looking forward to working together.

Now, this might sound a little improbable, but I gotta tell you this actually works When you get these parents together. If your attitude is being forceful and demanding, you're not going to get very good results If you just kind of warm them up and you make them feel wanted and important, and if you're cheerful and optimistic about this whole thing, you're going to be surprised about how well it goes. Give it a shot and get back in touch and let me know how it works, And I have this email and I'm going to withhold the contact information involved with it. I've been following your blog for months with passion and I thank you. I'm learning a lot. When my son became a scout, I signed up as a counselor for various merit badges and I volunteered for all other activities when adults are needed to accompany the scouts on camping trips and things like that.

I've also completed all the online scouter training courses and I've started to educate myself about the scouting program, and I found your blog and your podcast as a result. Not too long after I became involved in the scouting program, I started to learn about replacing our retiring scoutmaster. At first, I declined because I was pretty sure that others who had been involved with the troop logger would be more qualified, but I was approached again by the current scoutmaster, who encouraged me to take on the task, since at that point no one else was willing to do it.

I accepted, but I was reluctant to do so and I didn't intend to devote myself to doing the best job I can possibly do and to educating myself about exactly how to do that. Now, at a recent meeting, I intervened after I saw that the scouts weren't organized for the meeting. They had no agenda and they had done no planning, despite my offer of assistance. I spent some time coaching them about this. My mistake was probably I didn't follow your rules by asking only questions which I should probably learn to do.

Well, yeah, you'll get it. At the end of the meeting, a committee member and a parent pulled me aside and after 30 minutes of kind of arguing back and forth about how I was doing the job, I had to end our discussion. I was upset by their criticism of my work.

I mean, it's only been a week or two and I still have a lot to figure out, so I'm looking for a little advice. Well, I gotta tell you that is a familiar story.

Now, nobody else wanted to take on the challenge of being the scoutmaster and they finally managed to get you to do it, but apparently they're all experts in exactly how you should be doing the job right. I mean, you have to laugh. There's a sense of humor in this and I understand that this is getting you down. But all these people were asked probably- and I really don't want to do it, but I'm perfectly willing to tell the new scoutmaster how to do things.

Well, I want to address your concerns and I want to think about the concerns of the troop committee and encourage everybody just to kind of calm down a little, because things are going to be fine Now. From the new scoutmasters standpoint, it's upsetting when things like this happen- and they will happen from time to time. It sounds to me like you're committed, you're devoted, you're doing fine.

Naturally, you're going to make some mistakes, but we all learn this as we go along. That's what all of us have done.

So don't be impatient with yourself. Just keep on going and that devotion, that passion for the work is going to win out. These kinds of transitions in any scout troop are rarely easy. They're stressful for everyone and they require an extra measure of patience all around.

Now, in the email I received, you went into much more detail about the Scoutmaster committee member argument that you referenced, but I would say a good way of summarizing it was basically over what you had said and whether you were coaching or directing. What's interesting is that the committee member decided that they would be able to direct you rather than coach you.

So they weren't really applying what they were arguing about, were they? If I had the ear of that committee member, the minimum of a couple of things. One is that they should be working in concert with the rest of the committee and that the chair of the committee and the Scoutmaster are the ones who ought to be discussing these things, rather than a committee member just kind of taking ad hoc initiative to do this. And it should be clearly understood that anybody who is stepped up into the Scoutmaster position- especially someone who filled the position because no one else was willing to do it- to report an encouragement as possible.

I mean, how would any of us feel if, in their brand new position that we kind of got a little pressured into, if someone started criticizing our work the first week we took on the job? No doubt the committee member in question is trying to be helpful, but let's get real here. That kind of thing is not really helping.

The key concept I think that bears on the situation is that, when it comes to the committee and all of the parents of the scouts. They need to accept that the Scoutmaster is going to lead adults. He's the head coach and all the other adults kind of need to follow in line and follow the head coach. This is not to say that the Scoutmaster is going to order everybody around or not be open to suggestions, but that role of leadership is something that needs to be respected. The Scoutmaster has the right to accept or reject advice, to make decisions, to set the way forward.

If the committee and the parents have basic disagreements with this and they aren't willing to accept this arrangement, they should find another Scoutmaster And I would suggest that the new Scoutmaster sent me this email: you'd go and discuss this with the committee and make sure that everybody is agreed on a way forward and you know things will smooth out. You're always going to have some challenges and difficulties with your fellow adults and with the parents of the scouts. You're going to learn to work with those. You need to make sure the committee understands you have a clear expectation that they're going to back you up, that they're going to intervene when parents or other adults become a problem and leave you to focus on your work with the scouts. You have to be very direct and definite about this.

It's not something that we can just kind of say is understood without discussing it. You have to demand this kind of support. Make it clear that you have no interest in being a Scoutmaster unless you do have that kind of support.

Now I read your email and I know that you're a good-hearted, sensitive person, that you're interested in getting along with people, and so going to have this kind of direct discussion and being as demanding and definitive as I've encouraged you to be is going to make you a little uncomfortable. I want you to do it anyways. If I could talk to the committee on your behalf, I would say: obviously you saw some kind of promise in the individual that you appointed to be the Scoutmaster, otherwise you wouldn't have asked them to serve.

Now I want to encourage you to have some respect for the challenge of stepping into the role and cut up some slack, please. The committee chair ought to be working hand in hand with the Scoutmaster and everyone else on the committee, and parents should either reserve their comments or funnel them through the committee chair. Let's keep it simple and let's respect the leadership structure of a Boy Scout troop. And finally, I would add, if I was able to talk to the committee- your loyalty to the new Scoutmaster extends to your attitude with the scouts, especially the scout that lives in your home. Any indication that you're not 100% behind the Scoutmaster is going to undermine their ability to do their job effectively.

So watch what you say and watch what kind of attitude you represent to the scouts in general and the scout who happens to be your child. Hey, if you have a question or a conundrum or a difficulty I can help you with. You can get in touch and you'll find out how to do that in just a moment.