Scoutmaster Podcast 226

I'm Steve Kearns and I'm the District Advancement Chair with the Portola District in North Orange County, California. This addition of the Scoutmaster podcast is sponsored by backers like me And now the old Scoutmaster. This just in from Troop 1882, where my friend Jen Chaplin is involved.

At a recent Scout parent meeting in preparation for summer camp, one of the older Scouts was talking about summer camp and things like that And he said: you know, being thrifty- a Scout is thrifty- Does not mean you go to the trading post and buy your body weight in Skittles. Just under your body weight, please. Maybe 10 pounds, That's plenty.

Can any summer camp function without Skittles? That's a question to ponder.

Hey, this is podcast number 226.. Hey, Welcome back to the Scoutmaster podcast. This is Clarke Green. Let's take a look in the mailbag. Greg Curtis is the Scoutmaster of Troop 149 in Jamestown, North Dakota. Greg, I'm pretty sure this is my first contact with anybody in North Dakota.

I think I talk with a couple of people about canoeing up there. But anyways, Greg wrote in to say after years of struggling, pushing, pulling and being just plain frustrated with my troop, I really decided to give it up. It wasn't until I found ScoutmasterCG. I found a renewed energy for Scouts. I love the info and all that you provide for us cat herders Here in the great wide open. Thanks again.

Well, thank you, Greg, for getting in touch And I'm glad we were able to be helpful to you. I think that's great, As I have been doing over the past couple of weeks, open up the chat feature at ScoutmasterCGcom And if the chat feature isn't open, if it's not live, you can leave me a message. Jim did And he said congrats on podcast number 225.. That number is near and dear to my heart, being from Anaheim Council- Troop 225. And I thought that's a great idea. I should really start announcing that each podcast is dedicated to the troop, pack and crew of the corresponding number.

So today's podcast is dedicated to pack 226 and troop 226 and crew 226 and not to leave out the sea scouts, ship 226. And we don't want to leave out the varsity scouts.

So team 226. And there you go. I had a nice discussion with Steve, who is from pack 3623 in Michigan, And he was talking about being the cub master and kind of effectively the den leader and the committee chair and whatever else for his pack, Because getting parents to be at meetings wasn't that difficult, but actually getting them to take on a role was- And we discussed that for a little bit. Just to boil down what my advice would be in that kind of situation. You may find that people are going to be reluctant to take on a title or a role, but they're perfectly happy taking on a task. If you look at all the titles that you need- committee chair, - and you break those titles into tasks and ask folks, they will usually take on the tasks.

And then you know, after they've taken on a few of the tasks, they look at the title and they're saying, oh, it's really not that hard. But titles like committee chair, that's very open ended commitment.

A task is something that has a beginning and a middle in the end That can get people through the door and then make them into good, solid volunteers. And when you're talking about volunteering, it's kind of the way of the world that a lot of people do double, triple, four-pole duty as volunteers.

I think actually in each community there are maybe a hundred, maybe 50 volunteers and they spend most of their times in meetings for different things, because you keep running into the same people over and over again, don't you? I'm in a pretty small town and I know if I go to any meeting of volunteers there's predictable three people that I'm going to meet there that are involved with everything.

So anyway, it was good to chat with you, Steve. Keep an eye on the chat feature at scoutmastercgcom.

I'll post a notice that it's live and we can spend a little time chatting Over on the blog. Last week, let's see, One of the posts that we put up right after the podcast last week was some troop meeting ideas, just in case you're stuck in a troop meeting rut. I introduced a new weekly feature with some scouting video pics.

Man, there's just so much interesting stuff out there- so much interesting information, instructional stuff And also what I think is really kind of cool are videos of Scouts and other parts of the world, And this past week I posted a video from Scouts in India. It's kind of a music video and it's a really well done video. Make sure you take a look at it.

Our big infographic for this week was Ten Essentials for Camping and that was pretty well received, And I'm offering all of the infographics that we've produced over the past couple of years all put together as PDF files in the Scoutmaster CG PDF package. So make sure you go to the website and check that out. This week our Greenbar Life author, Enoch Hyze, did a great article on diffusing explosive situations, And the Greenbar Life articles are intended for your youth leadership.

Enoch is now an assistant scoutmaster, but he's young enough to remember what it was like to be a youth leader and offer some really great advice for youth leaders. So send them our way and look for the Greenbar Life features at scoutmastercgcom, Just like the video pics. I hope to post a quiz every week because quizzes are fun. I really enjoy doing them And this week I put one up with 10 different knots and a lot of people knew all 10 knots. They're pretty common knots.

They're scouting knots for up to first class and a couple of them get involved with pioneering merit badge there, So they should be pretty familiar to you. If you haven't taken the quiz yet, go ahead and you can get a little badge to tell everybody how great you are. That you can put it on Twitter or on your Facebook feed.

And then just yesterday we had our weekly entry from Baden Powell's blog, which was some thoughts on discipline. And go check that out, because it's not what you would think it would be because of the title. Very interesting take on the subject of discipline from our founder sort of Robert Baden Powell. We'll hear from him a little later too. Let's see what else is going on.

Well, I know a couple of thousand of you have the Scoutmaster CG app and it's a great way to keep the resources we create at your fingertips on your mobile device, And you can get it on iTunes or on Google Play, depending on if you are a member of the Apple tribe or the Android tribe. And before we move on, I want to make sure to take the time to thank Michael Strong, who signed up as a ScoutmasterCGcom backer this week.

If you haven't heard of it, we have a backer program and the funds that we get from backers go towards the expenses of producing and publishing the podcast, the blog post and all the stuff that we're able to keep freely available for Scouters all over the world. Go check that out. Go to ScoutmasterCGcom, Click the support link right there at the top of the page and you can join the growing number of Scouters who are quite generously becoming backers and helping make all this possible.

Well, in this week's podcast- good old number 226, in Scoutmastership, in seven minutes or less, we're going to talk about the Scouter as a guide and three types of leaders, And then I've got an email question to answer and that's going to take up the remainder of the podcast. So let's get started, shall we Scoutmastership- in seven minutes or less,

Now, any Scouter, anybody working with youth, at one minute may be a coach at next. They may be instructor. A little later on they may be a counselor or a manager, or a leader or a trainer. The common thread woven to all these roles is the spirit of a helpful guide. Let me contrast two different types of guides. Imagine a bus tour of some important city somewhere and we're seated in the air-conditioned comfort of a motor coach and we roll along.

The guide explains each landmark in detail so we don't miss anything. In fact, there's so much explaining- and you know how, if you've ever been on one of those tours before.

The guide's on a script and there's a lot of explaining and there's not a whole lot of time left for questions, and we sit there and we listen attentively and we dutifully turn our heads to the left and to the right and then the tour is over. Now contrast that tour with a hike guided by a knowledgeable outdoors guide, Our group takes the lead and finds the trail.

Where the trail branches, The guide will tell us which way to go if we can't figure it out on our own. He doesn't mind if we stop now and again and we admire a flower or take in the view, and he'll happily tell us what we're looking at if we ask.

But he's not going to push us along, He's going to let us take our own pace And though the guide may drop a hint here and there, he's going to volunteer very little information. We may miss some sites along the way or we may pass by interesting things, but we will probably get more out of what we discovered on the hike than the things that the tour guide told us about on the bus.

Do you see what I mean? Like the guide, scouts are more responsive than directive. We inspire and encourage scouts to explore and learn at their own speed. Guiding scouts is more of a gentle push in the right direction, more of a suggestion rather than a command, more of a question asked rather than an answer given.

We can better understand that special kind of leadership required to be a good guide in three different leadership styles, And to do that I want to read you two quotes. The first is from Baden Powell, the founder of Scouting. He said leadership is the key note to success. But leadership is difficult to define And leaders are difficult to find. I frequently stated that any man can be a commander and a trained man may often make an instructor, but a leader is more like a poet, not manufactured.

The second quote I want to read you is a very old quote from Laosu. The best leader is one that people are barely aware of. The next best is one who is loved and praised by the people. Next comes one who is feared. Worst is one who is despised. If the leader does not have enough faith in his people, they will have no faith in him.

He puts great value in words and says little, so that when his work is finished the people all say: we did it ourselves. Now, Baden Powell and Laosu lived on opposite sides of the world and wrote centuries apart.

But they both describe three distinct leadership styles And you know I'm going to define some styles here. But it doesn't mean that we're not going to define some aspect of all three styles. But the first style of leadership is authoritarian leadership. This is Laosu's feared leader and Baden Powell's commander I can remember as a young director of a program department at our summer camp I was kind of insufferable and authoritarian. I was certainly demanding. I wasn't particularly friendly and I mistook my kind of abrasive personality for clarity of mission.

I was brash in the editorial and I really wonder that any of the counselors that were working for me lasted through the summer. I did get my comeuppance at the end of the season when one of them had the sand to write exactly what he thought of me and my job in his evaluation at the end of the year, And since then I've always considered that I have owed him a great debt of gratitude because it gave me a chance to look at myself and it changed me for the better. Authoritarian leaders do get things done, but our goal as scouters is much broader than just efficiently completing tasks.

Scouting has well defined expectations, but these are not enforced in an obedience oriented, authoritarian manner. We want our scouts to be obedient, but we don't want them to be frightened.

What we want to do is encourage them to ask questions and find their own direction and then respond by helping them find the answers to make things happen. The second kind of leader I want to talk about is what I would call a permissive leader. Lao Zhu called this the despised leader. Let's correspond this with Baden Powell's trained man. And what I mean by a permissive leader is when I was hired to coach a middle school soccer team decades ago, I was young enough to remember authoritarian coaches and teachers that I really didn't like, And I resolved I would be the kind of coach everybody liked- The cool coach, the cool teacher. I traded the discipline and authority a coach needs to have for currying favor with the team, and the result was a real mess.

If you're a teacher or a coach out there and you've had a similar experience, you're laughing right now because you know exactly what I'm talking about. What my players needed was a coach, and a coach who would give them structure and discipline. They didn't need another friend. They already had plenty of friends. Permissive leaders: they're not usually very sure of themselves and they look for reassurance in the approval and friendship of their followers. For all their effort, permissive leaders don't earn respect or friendship.

More often than not, they end up with people laughing at them behind their backs in the way that Lao Zhu describes. Now the third type of leader is a responsive leader. This is Lao Zhu's leader that the people are barely aware of, and what Baden Powell called a poet. Responsive leadership is really kind of this barely perceptible influence that empowers people to do things for themselves, By listening more than talking, because, remember, Lao Zhu said that this type of leader values words and uses them infrequently. By exercising goodwill and having an unshakable faith in the people that were leading, responsive leaders can create an atmosphere of shared accomplishment And, rather than dictating their own wishes, responsive leaders inspire others to adopt high expectations. Their example of service is a powerful motivational force.

In difficulty, they're going to respond not with authoritarianism, but with empathy and compassion. Now I'll tell you, after many fits and starts and years of trying, I do actually find myself being a responsive leader more often than not.

I know there's still plenty of room for improvement, but if I trade the kind of self aggrandizing authority and my desire to be appreciated for an honest aspiration to serve other people, I am happier, and so are my scouts. My ideal scouter practices this kind of responsive leadership, enabling scouts to do things for themselves while offering an appropriate amount of direction to assure they remain safe and they get the most out of scouting.

I knew I could do. I knew I could do. I knew I could do. I knew I could do, I knew I could do.

I need a letter. Send it by name Email. That is, folks.

And here's an answer to one of your emails. So I got this really interesting email this week and it started out by saying our troop is doing summer camp this year with two other troops and I thought, wow, that's going to be cool. A relatively small summer camp experience, kind of one that the troops are doing on their own.

I think that's a really cool idea. And then the author said I'm in charge of 10 or so scouts who will be attending my classes. And I thought, uh oh, classes.

Well, we need to talk about that. I'm wondering if you have or know of a resource that outlines a teaching curriculum for tender foot through first class rank in a week. And I said, uh oh, we're going to have to do some thinking here.

So in my reply this is what I wrote- I said: now you're going to summer camp, right, we're not going to school. We have schedules and teaching and tests and reading assignments and classes and curriculums.

We're at camp, so let's keep it camping. So what happens when we go camping? If you look at the requirements up to first class rank, that's what happens. That's what scouts do. We don't hold classes and work on requirements. Scouts go camping and in the course of camping, they do things that complete the requirements.

This is really kind of a deceptively simple distinction, but one that's so important in scouting and we all too frequently miss this. This isn't just some semantic nicety of actually having classes, but calling them something different. This is for real.

What opportunities ought to be able for scouts at summer camp? Well, take a look at the requirements. That's what needs to be available. You're going to pitch some tents and some tarps. You're going to plan, prepare and clean up after a meal. You're going to take a hike, play a game, build a tower, go swimming.

That's what scouts do. Are you following me?

Do you get it? It's not a list of requirements. It's what you do when you go camping.

So let's take our 10 scouts and meet with them in the morning and say: today you're going to build a fire and cook your lunch. Now, what do you need to build a fire?

What safety concerns do you have? What tools are you going to need?

Do you know how to use the tools? What kind of wood is going to work best.

How much do you need? Do you know how to cook in a Dutch oven?

Do you think there's anything in the scout handbook that would help you figure things out? I'll tell you what, guys. I'll be back in an hour with the food.

I want to leave in about five or ten minutes, so give me a list of what you need. While I'm gone, you guys figure out how to get a fire set up, get the wood, get everything you need and have everything ready to light when I get back and I'll bring the matches and then we'll have lunch and then you go away and let them at it. They have a scout handbook. They have a bunch of questions to ask. They have a task to do. They're going to figure it out.

They might get it right, they might get it wrong, it doesn't really matter. They're camping and they're having fun. They're hanging out with their buddies and they're learning.

So you're going to get back and you're going to take a look and maybe there's a couple of corrections to be made or maybe there's a little bit of knowledge to fill in a lot of times. That is going to be taken care of by asking more questions.

So, guys, how did that go? Did you figure things out?

Who did what? Where did you learn how to do that?

Are you having trouble? Get it started?

What would you stop doing or start doing to make things work better? Do you see what I mean?

And then you can cook lunch and so you make whatever corrections there need to be made or modifications to what they've done. We haven't sat them down and taught them anything for even 30 seconds, much less sat them down and had a class with a curriculum involved. The next day, let's say we're going to go swimming.

What should you be thinking of? Is there anything in the scout handbook that may that you may want to know about going swimming?

What kind of an area do you need for swimming? Should there be a lifeguard? See what I'm saying. The next day, you can say: today we're going on a hike.

What do you need to bring? Where are we going?

How will we get there? Do you need a map and compass?

Did you bring one with you? Do you know how to use a map and compass together?

Does the scout handbook say anything about using a map and compass? I'll tell you what I have- some things to do, and in an hour I'll meet you at this spot that I've marked right here on the map.

Do you guys have any questions? So, instead of sitting down and having a class and a curriculum and a plan, let's go camping and do the things that scouts do.

And then you know what's going to happen: is, at one point, the lights going to go on and one of the scouts is going to ask you: you know, we went on that hike, is that a requirement for tenderfoot? And you can say: well, I don't know.

Did you check tenderfoot? Let's take a look here.

Which requirement? Do you think that it is?

Read the requirement to me? Do you think that you met that requirement?

And now they're getting self motivated because they've discovered: oh, these things that we're doing, they're in the book and they actually meet requirements, and all I have to do is ask about them and if I've done them, I can get them signed off. And if I haven't really done them, well, now I know how to work on that.

So, no classes, please, just go camping. No handouts, no forms or charts or papers. A scout has a handbook. That's all he needs. You might want to have, maybe like a central bulletin board with some posters, some information, but let's not have any paperwork.

Okay, we're camping and the other thing I would say is: you said that you're going to work with ten scouts, and that's great. You might break them into patrols of five or they may stay as one big patrol. It's kind of up to them. But let's remember that scouts do things in patrols, not in a big herd.

If there's more than eight or ten guys, that's two patrols doing things far enough apart so they don't interfere with each other. Start with the challenge in the action. You know. I gave you some examples: cooking lunch or going on a hike or going swimming. Ask the questions, especially where can you find out what you need to know, and let them go, let them try these things out, then reflect on what they've done and maybe explain a few things that they may have missed. Now.

Is this going to take more time than sitting them down in a class? Well, of course it will.

Will they get all of the requirements up to first class? I doubt it. By the end of the week they'll have one really important thing: they will have learned how to learn and how to motivate themselves.

Every time you find yourself teaching or explaining something, stop and start asking questions so the scouts can find the answers for themselves. Every time the action stops and the scouts are sitting there listening to you talk, stop and get them active again. And I would say also, not everything you do for a week at summer camp needs to be advancement: build, start or go fishing or climb a tree or play a game or take a nap or wander around or hang out with your buddies. It's camp, we're at camp, and camp is a great place to do all of these things. My final thought for you is: Bayden Powell said that advancement is like a suntan. It's something that you get when you are in the outdoors.

Scouts don't join scouting to be in classes and follow curriculums and earn badges. They join to do cool stuff with their friends and they learn things and earn badges as a result of the things that they do.

So have a great time at summer camp, but remember it's not school, it's summer camp and there should be a lot of fun involved and your goal is scouts going home having learned how to learn for themselves