Scoutmaster Podcast 241

I have system curly, Boy Scout Roundtable Commissioner for a hundred an hour head district in New Jersey, Also assistant Scoutmaster of a troop one ninety one, Bethlehem, New Jersey. This podcast is sponsored by backers like me.

And now to you, Scoutmaster. So the wife comes home the other day and she says the, the horn in my car isn't working.

So we go outside, start the car, pop the hood. I look a connection is is come undone.

So I fix it and I say: try it now. She hits the horn, The horn now works And she said: wow, that's something. I didn't know that you could fix things like that.

Well, of course I can. I'm a Scoutmaster. Beep Repair, Beep Repair, Beep. Oh man, Hey, we, there's got to be better jokes out there.

Send them in to me, won't you?

This is podcast number two. Forty one. Hey, Welcome back to the Scoutmaster podcast. This is Clarke Green. Let's take a look at the mailbag because it is chock full. This week Art Stanky is in Park Ridge, Illinois, where he works with troop one, and he said: wrote in to say I've been an email subscriber for some time.

Sometimes I run into Scoutmasters who are more task master than Scoutmaster working with scouts to encourage them to be self-sufficient, make their own decisions. I've been with our troop for 34 years.

Well, good for you, Art. In the beginning we had a troop where the adults were almost always in the background, and I continue to get the troop back to the youth led patrol method kind of troop.

I remember A group of older scouts have finally made up their mind to tell the adults to get out of their way. Well, good for them. I've had the opportunity to work with some of these scouts and had a long talk with them at camp this summer. I suggested they subscribe to scoutmastercgcom and learn a few things.

Well, I hope that we can help them with that. Thanks so much for all your help. It may be that some of the scouts will learn more about scouting and leadership from your work.

Thank you so much for your kind words and getting in touch, art, and we'll do our best to continue to be of assistance. Rob Glazier is a backer for scoutmastercgcom and he is in troop 18 in Muskego, Wisconsin. He wrote in to say: I wanted to say I love the new index feature at Scoutmaster CG. This little sight of yours has become quite a repository and while I'm not one to criticize it. It was getting a little hard going back finding things I knew I had seen before.

I know you must put a lot of work into the site already, so I appreciate the enhancements when they come along. This, the index, is very helpful and if you haven't checked that out yet, folks go to scoutmastercgcom.

Right there at the top, in the top menu, you'll see a link to the index and we set that up so that you can find information that we've published, index by subject, and we're still catching up on things, still getting everything lined up, but it's it's worth checking out. Terry Mock is the scoutmaster of troop 226 in Yorktown, Virginia, and he wrote in to say: love your website and podcast. I have the iphone app and it's not quite working. With my new iphone 6 and iOS 8.1. I like to listen to the blog on my commute and the apps are convenient way to do that. Thanks for all you do.

Your advice has helped me time and time again. Well, well, take that as a cue to mention two things. First of all, we do have an app.

The scoutmaster cg app is available for all of you who are in the android tribe as well as the apple tribe. You can have everything that we produce right there at your fingertips on your mobile device. You apple folks can find it in the itunes app store and you android folks can find it on google play. I will say this: I heard from several of you who have upgraded to the iphone 6 and or iOS 8. There's been a little bit of difficulty getting the app updated for iOS 8, which, according to what I've heard, is nothing unusual right now. Whenever a new operating system comes out, there's usually some bugs that go along with that.

Hopefully, by the time you hear this podcast, we will have resolved those difficulties. If we haven't and you're still having a problem on iOS 8, get in touch with me so I can tell my app developers about it.

Andrew west is the committee chair of troop 5137 in medina ohio and he said: well, you often speak of jumping into the volcano, but my fellow scouter, jeff millman, and I have jumped into the super volcano. We both decided that we could best serve our community by chartering a brand new Boy Scout troop.

Troop 5137 is now officially chartered to vfwpost 5137 in medina ohio. The vfw post has been very helpful in assisting us in getting going well. That is great news, andrew, it's always great to hear about a new troop. We had our first meeting this past monday with 12 young but really enthusiastic scouts. Jeff's going to be the Scoutmaster. I'll be the committee chair.

We're looking forward to working with both the scouts and parents on this new scouting adventure. I've personally gleaned much guidance from your podcast and websites, so please keep it up well. Thanks, andrew, for getting in touch and sharing that good news with us and for your kind words about the podcast and the blog. Going back to podcast 240, i heard from james chaplin, who's a Scoutmaster, cg backer and also the committee member of troop 1882 and a round table commissioner, and he wrote in to say another great podcast. I've been stirring the issue about how we do boards of review in our troop. You have me on a roll, reversing my thinking the way i did things in the past.

I always have to remind our adults that advancement is only one of the eight methods of scouting, or 12.5 percent of what the scouting program has to offer. James, that's brilliant.

I never really thought of it in percentages, as before, but that helps put it, put everything in a little bit of perspective and scale, doesn't it advancement? You know, if you count all the eight methods of scouting, to be interdependent and to work together is only 12.5 percent of the scouting program. Excellent thought heard from frank maynard, another Scoutmaster, cgcom backer. He said i nearly drove off the road when i heard about the white socks in podcast 240. Good answers for a few adults who are getting things a little back to front about scouting and think they know better. Thanks, frank, for getting in touch.

Make sure to go check out frank maynard's bob whites blather blog uh, which is- which is a little tough to say, but but i'm i muddle through uh. At bob whites blather frank has got some really great advice, especially if you're involved on the committee end of things in scouts.

So do go and check that out at scoutmastercgcom. Last week one of the posts was about the authority of youth leadership got a lot of response to it.

Craig hayward wrote in and said part of me really wishes we weren't called Scoutmaster and instead we were called something like scout guider. I think the title adds to the confusion of your role as an adult in a troop. I'd almost like to give the Scoutmaster badge to the senior patrol leader and give the top adult leader post the title of advisor or something like that, because that's really the role you're playing. The title Scoutmaster sometimes can be a little confusing because we're really not the masters or the leaders of much of anything. We're more advisors, mentors, and i'm fascinated by the comment that you would exchange the Scoutmaster badge for the senior patrol leader, and i get what you're saying, but what i'd really really like to see happen is Scoutmasters to understand that they are not the senior patrol leader. That would be.

That would be a pretty good thing. Anthony burgundy wrote in on that post and said scouting is all about the scouts that run it, and i couldn't agree with you more. Anthony bill poster said i love the line in this post: scouting is something that the scouts do for themselves, and adults have the honor of observing, coaching and encouraging.

Well thanks, bill. John nelson wrote in and said i wish i could like this more than once on facebook.

Well thanks, john. And renais said i absolutely love this post.

So many want to control the outcome of the meetings and the camping trips and not let failures happen. Well, who hasn't learned from failure?

But for some reason, a lot of parents are very reluctant to let their children fail or make a mistake, but i think that very thing is one of the greatest moments for learning, and i certainly agree with you, renais, and thank you for your nice comment. Let's see what else was going on in the blog this week on bp's blog, a writing that he did about calm and cheery. That's one that you definitely want to read.

Here's a quote from it real quick. The Scoutmaster initiates the ambition in the boy, leaving him free to gain his objective in his own way. He does not instruct, he leads the boy on to learn from himself. Make sure to check that out. And we also had a post this week which was a report from a Scoutmaster who was one year into the role, and it's called a new Scoutmaster in the volcano. You can find all of this at scoutmastercgcom.

Now, if you're a regular reader or listener and if the information and resources that we share with you have helped you, you can return the favor by becoming a Scoutmaster cgcom backer. The funds we get from backers go towards the expenses of producing and publishing all of these resources- the podcast, the blog posts, the videos- and they're accessible to scouts all over the world.

So you can help. It's easy. Just go to scoutmastercgcom, click the support link right there on the menu at the top of the page. You can choose any level of support. Some of them entitle you to premiums like autograph copies of my books.

So sign on as backer this week and i will personally thank you in next week's podcast. Now, over the past couple of podcasts we've been fielding questions and talking about boards of review, Scoutmaster conferences, things like that.

There's a set of comments and and replies that i made to them on last week's podcast that i want to share with you very before we continue on. In the comments, john michelle asked: isn't there some gray area between a scout is tested and a scout is reviewed?

And what john's referring to? There are the four steps in advancement: right, the scout learns, the scout is tested, the scout is reviewed, the scout is recognized and he's asking: how do you differentiate between tested and reviewed? He goes on to say: i do believe a scout is trustworthy.

So if somebody has signed off that a scout has done the necessary requirement, we should all take that signature at face value and trust that it was completed. But what if at a Scoutmaster conference i'm asking a scout about an orienteering course that he did to fulfill a requirement, for example- and i ask him how you like doing it and he says, well, actually they only talked about that and they really didn't do it.

And then somebody signed the requirement off without really validating anything. Now, should that scout still pass the Scoutmaster conference or should i reschedule the conference?

And it is what i'm doing, retesting? Well, john, that's a fair question and i will agree with what you say. Once a requirement is signed, it's done. We've tested, we're done.

Now we're in the process of review. So what happens if during a review, that we discover that something is amiss?

So a scout can't fail a review process. That's not why we're reviewing. The review may reveal some things that need work, but we'll talk about that in a moment. Let's stick with the specific question that you posed.

The requirement was signed and during the process of review we discover that now it sounds like somebody just kind of pencil with this one and the scout really didn't end up getting the benefit of doing the work to fulfill the requirement. Our next step, after we've completed the Scoutmaster conference, is to talk with whoever signed the requirement.

Let me ask a question: is this the scouts fault in any way. How can it be the scouts fault?

The person that signed the requirement has obviously misunderstood their work and the scout accepted their judgment, and why would he expect them to do otherwise? So we go to the person who signed the requirement. We asked them what happened, and let's say it was a patrol leader or one of the older scouts that signed off that requirement.

Well, i would ask him exactly what the scout did to fulfill the requirement. I'd have him explain it to me, and if he wasn't able to explain it to me, it would be a really good opportunity right then to work with that person to help them better understand the advancement process. It's not my interest to find fault or blame or shame anybody about this.

They've obviously haven't understood something, and so i would take that as being my failing. I haven't trained them properly.

So we're going to sit down and we're going to give this some discussion so that they won't repeat that particular mistake, and then i would conclude by asking if they thought it would be a good idea to go over things with the scouting question to make sure that he actually has the benefit of completing the work required rather than just somebody signing the requirement. So the review process has worked just as we planned. We discovered a problem and we addressed it, and it's in no way the scouts fault. It's our fault for not having properly trained the people who are signing the requirements correct.

So, as you can see, there's no way for a scout to fail a Scoutmaster conference, because it's not a question of failing and passing. And in the case that you ask about, i don't see any reason to hold the scout back. He had nothing to do with it. It was not his fault.

Now, the other thing you asked, john, is a line of questioning like the one that you outlined: retesting the scout. Well, no, i think that's perfect. Tell me a little bit about the orienteering course that you went on. Tell me what you did there.

Did you enjoy doing that? Is that something that you really interested in?

You know we're getting to know the scout and we're assessing our program at the same time. That's part of the reason we have a Scoutmaster conference and it's part of the reason we have boards of review.

So we want to, so we want to direct questions towards their experiences, to discover how well we're doing serving the scout and to learn a little bit more about the scout in the process. Now tanya also wrote in and commented on last week's podcast and said: i don't believe that it's a matter of passing a Scoutmaster conference. It it was really pass or fail here. And yes, tanya, i will agree with you there. And tanya goes on to say the Scoutmaster conference is, however, a tool to ensure that the scout has completed all the requirements and is ready for the border review. If a requirement was incorrectly signed off, in my opinion the scout should be required to complete it before having a border review.

Tanya, while i agree that it's not passing or failing a Scoutmaster conference, i'm gonna differ with your definition of the Scoutmaster's conference. It is not a tool to ensure that the scout has completed all the requirements and is ready for border review, and that's not really a matter of opinion. That's spelled out very clearly in the guide to advancement.

And here we go: guide to advancement: chapter numbers: pencils ready. 4.2.3.5. The unit leader or Scoutmaster conference. Note that a scout must participate or take part in a Scoutmaster conference. It is not a test requirements. Do not say he must pass a conference, while it makes sense to hold a conference after other requirements for a rank or met.

It is not required that it be the last step before the border review. The conference is not a retest to the requirements upon which a scout has been signed off. It is a forum for discussing topics such as ambitions and life purpose goals for future achievement and also for obtaining feedback on the unit's program. In some cases, work left to be completed and perhaps why it hasn't been completed may be discussed just as easily as that which is finished. Ultimately, the conference timing in the advancement process is up to the unit. Some leaders hold more than one conference with individual scouts along the way, and the scout must be allowed to count any of them towards the requirement.

Now, i explained already how it resolved the difficulty, should we find a requirement hasn't been met. In the questions that, as the guide to advancement says, are about obtaining feedback on the unit's program and tanya, you said if a requirement was incorrectly signed off, in my opinion the scout should be required to complete it before having a border review.

Well, i'm going to differ with you again. Again, not a matter of opinion or what i think about the thing. This is very clearly spelled out in the guide to advancement. Nobody can deny a scout a border review ever for any reason.

And we find that in here we go again. Eight point zero, point zero, point two. Boards of review must be granted when requirements are met. And reading from the guide to advancement, quote: a scout shall not be denied this opportunity.

That's pretty strong wording, right? A scout shall not be denied a board of review when he believes he's completed all the requirements for a rank.

Who believes the scout believes when he believes he's required? We completed all the requirements for a rank, including a Scoutmaster conference. A border review must be granted in a case where there is a concern that the scout has not fulfilled the requirements for rank is written. It is appropriate to advise the young man that he might not pass the board and to make suggestions about what he might do to improve his chances for success. It is, however, the scouts decision to go ahead with a border review or not.

So we've spent quite a bit of time on these things in the past- couple of podcasts- and i certainly don't mind that. But let's boil it all down to a couple of things that are easy to remember.

So, principally, we've been dealing with the third step in advancement, the first one being a scout learns, the second one being a scout, is tested, the third one being a scout- is reviewed and the fourth, a scout- is recognized. The review process is not aimed at reviewing the quality of the scout's work or his grasp of the knowledge or the skills that he has gained in completing the requirements. The review process is to make sure that we're all doing our jobs. The review process has a couple of goals.

The most important one that i think we misapprehend a lot, is that, when it comes to talking about requirements and the work the scout has done, what we're trying to do is figure out if we're doing our job, if we've provided enough opportunity for the scout to get everything that we've promised him in scouting. The other things that happened during the review process is establishing a relationship with a scout where we know a little bit about what he's interested in and and what kind of a person he is. We're using this as the opportunity to build that internal standard of the scout, oath and law and having these discussions with him and very explicitly, as it says in the guide to advancement, we are not retesting the requirements. Testing is over. We've passed that step. We're into the review part.

Now this might run smack right head on into the way things are happening in your troop. All's i can say is: these aren't expressions of my opinion. I'm doing my best to represent exactly what's being said in the guide to advancement 2013. It's a very important thing for everybody to read and understand, and it helps clear up all kinds of misunderstandings and difficulties.

So make sure to have a copy and make sure to read it. In the remainder of this podcast, we are going to chip away at the vast mountain of email questions that we've been receiving, and, even though we've had an extended introduction, it is time to get started.

So let's get started. Shall we write me a letter? Send it my name

Email, that is, folks, and here's an answer to one of your emails. Mike bailey is in shoreview, minnesota, and he works with cup scout pack 9626, and he wrote with this question. My son transferred into a new pack this fall as a second-year Webelos. The den is preparing to become scouts in december and all 10 Webelos are on track to complete their era of light.

I'm working with the den leader and it's clear that my co-leader is a little burned out, and you know what i will say, mike, in the second year of Webelos. I can understand exactly what you're saying. It seems like discipline is lacking in the den, even by a Webelos standard. Some Webelos and parents have kind of let us know that they intend to leave scouting after Webelos. They've kind of had enough. The troop that we're going to is planning events from the coming months to entice the boys, but it might be too late for some.

I'm find i'm struggling to find ways to get across that a larger, better journey is just beginning. Without sounding like i'm preaching at them, and i'm pretty new to this group, so i'm a little reluctant to step into that role, i would welcome your advice.

Well, mike, if the Webelos and their parents are tired out and discouraged from going any further, it's certainly an indication that something is off track somewhere, isn't it? You say there is a discipline problem, and whenever there's a discipline problem in scouting, the first thing i think is that the scouts are bored, and if they're just going through a list of achievements rather than doing things that they personally find engaging and interesting, that might be why they're bored.

Has the whole thing turned into dragging them forward rather than trying to keep up with them? You know, that might be part of the answer.

Has anyone asked the Webelos themselves how they feel about all the whole thing? And that might be a good place to start. And while i appreciate what you're trying to accomplish, no amount of salesmanship is going to make up for a program that's a little off the rails. Get those Webelos doing things, not talking about them, not hearing about them, not dragging them through a bunch of achievements. Get them to a troop meeting. Get them on a camping trip.

Make that the focus of what you're doing. The guys that really want to have the arrow of light- they're going to get it anyway. But having the arrow of light and walking off the bridge into the abyss and not into a scout troop, that's not going to help anybody. Aim yourself at creating the opportunity for them to get a really good dose of actual active scouting and see what happens then.

Now mike's question makes it necessary for me to drag out the soapbox and to stand on top of it and to preach for a moment, and this will probably take about two minutes. So if you want to fast forward, go right ahead. I wouldn't blame you a bit. But one of our organizational problems is connecting our independent age-based units with each other, connecting cub packs to scout troops and scout troops to venture crews and things like that.

I'm convinced if we did that difficulties- like mike wrote about- would be a lot fewer. Scouting's a continuum of age-appropriate experiences that we unfortunately artificially interrupt with organizational divisions between cubs, scouts and venturers. We lose a lot of momentum at those transition points and it's a real shame because the losers are the scouts.

Now, before i go on, i want to say that cub scout leaders have the busiest, most demanding jobs in our organization and cub scout leaders are usually our least experienced, least supported volunteers. They rarely get a glimpse of the rest of the program. If they don't understand the entire continuum of the scouting program, it's very, very difficult for them to figure out what their role is and contextualize the work that they're doing to the rest of the program.

So den leaders and cub masters and their colleagues have to create and present a massive volume of program elements in comparison to folks like me who are involved with a scout troop or a venture crew. Over the decades i have had dozens of cub leaders become assistant Scoutmasters and almost without exception they all breathe a big sigh of relief when they realize they don't have to continue to do all this program work and that the scouts are doing that and that the scouts are leading themselves.

So, from what i've seen, the demands of the program during the cub years and the work that's usually done by wonderful people who volunteer to be cub leaders ends up not having any context of the progressive stages of scouting and this tends to skew towards bigger and better presentations and programs at the cub scout level rather than more youth driven activities. Now at the cub scout level, i'm not talking about youth led, but interest and youth driven activities. Most cub leaders are going to be a few years younger and that means there are probably going to be a lot more energetic and they pour a lot into decorating and enhancing their programs.

And now this is all great in theory, but their energy gets spent in an environment that's basically unaware of the progressive stages that await their cubs, and things tend to get a little overheated. So what happens next?

Well, when cubs and their families are presented with a real steady diet of big, showy kind of presentation based programs, they get a little jaded. They end up being spectators and participants in highly designed experiences rather than being presented with opportunities to discover and move along at their own pace and as a result, very little in what they experienced in a cub scout pack amounts to any practical preparation to be in a boy scout troop. I know what the intentions are and i know how the program is written in cub scouts and in Webelos.

But i think that there are much stronger influences that overcome the continuity that we would like to see develop in cubs and in Webelos. So during the second year Webelos cubs either grow tired of being dragged along through things and, as mike shared, they decide they're going to check out after they have the arrow of light- because you know, i've come this far, might as well get the arrow of light, but man, then i'm done- or they join a scout troop without having much of any idea what they're getting themselves into and we see quite a bit of attrition during the first few months.

The expectations of Webelos parents have been set by their cub scout experience, that's scouting to them, and when they get into a scout troop the changes are so big that they often feel a little frustrated. They feel the adult volunteers in the troop aren't keeping them informed. They're usually upset when their sons don't automatically advance like they did in cub scouts. They find patrol leaders kind of wanting and skill and not real communicative. They're confused by the idea of youth leadership and this all leads to a lot of attrition and when i last checked, we lose four or five Webelos out of ten in the first year after they've joined a scout troop.

So that kind of attrition means that the alarm bells go off in the troop. There's a lot of pressure to modify what the troop does to meet the expectations of the incoming Webelos families and a lot of times that means that the troop begins looking a lot more like a cub scout pack than a boy scout troop and we start basing the program on big presentations and events rather than opportunities for real learning and growth that are afforded by the patrol system. Youth leadership and those kind of messy, difficult things. Right, and i see this kind of thing in my own troop.

I hear it repeated many, many times in the emails that i receive and i think the root of the problem, what i first mentioned when i stood up on the soap box here: we've got an organizational wall between these stages of scouting and until that wall is breached we're going to see this problem kind of perpetually repeat itself. So what's the answer?

It's a tough one and it's kind of one of the built-in organizational difficulties that we have. But cub scout packs, boy scout troops, venture crews- all ought to be in contact with each other constantly. Venturers should be going to scout meetings and cub meetings. Scouts should be going to cub meetings helping out with dens, being very involved with the life of the cub scouts. The more experienced volunteers should be aiding and mentoring cub leaders.

Now that's the way that it's set up in a lot of the rest of the world and i think that we could do a lot of good if we started looking at how we could lessen the influence of these organizational divides. That's not a very specific answer, but it's the best i can do right now.

So, moving on, here's another email. One of our assistant Scoutmasters is also the advisor for our order the arrow lodge. This has resulted in a little competition between the troop and the oa lodge. He's encouraging boys to take on leadership roles in the order of the arrow, where, from my standpoint as a Scoutmaster, they've already got a position of responsibility in their troop.

So what i'm experiencing is a kind of a conflict between the order of the arrow activities and our troop. What should i do?

Well, first off, let's not cast the whole thing in the mold of competition. Let's see if we can get all of these wonderful things cooperating together.

We need to get to the point where both the lodge and the troop can benefit from what the scouts are doing. In my experience, scouts can handle both their troop responsibilities and the responsibilities of an order of the arrow office with a little guidance and a little understanding. Our scouts were vice chief and chief and we had a bunch of guys on the executive committee for many years and we managed fine.

Now it's great that you have the lodge advisor handy as a member of your unit so he's easy to talk to and i would say something like: i'm excited. There are so many opportunities for our scouts in the order of the arrow and you and i should be working pretty closely together to make sure they get the best of both worlds. If they start getting really involved, we'll want to watch our schedule conflicts.

So where do we begin? Look at it as a cooperative effort, not something where you're in competition. Share the same concerns that you did with me in this email with him.

I want to make sure we're both on the same page. It concerns me a little bit that we may be setting up a difficult situation for some of the scouts. Let's be sure we're supporting them by coordinating your expectations for them in the oa lodge and my expectations for them in the troop. I mean, it's really up to the adults involved to find common ground and support of the scouts. If this becomes something where the interest of the troop or the interest of the lodge or the interest of the lodge advisor or the troop committee chair or the Scoutmaster become the issue, scouts are going to lose. Whenever adults or organizational interests are at odds with one another, scouts lose.

So what we need to do is work together, with our goal being the best interests of individual scouts. We need to be flexible and approach it with a positive attitude and an attitude of cooperation, and when you do that, the resolutions to these difficulties are going to start showing themselves pretty quickly. Our next email said this. As a relatively new Scoutmaster, my biggest challenge has been getting our older scouts to participate in, or at least not disrupt, our weekly meetings. They are mostly starting life scouts and they really don't want to do much other than sit around and talk. They can get sarcastic and loud and disruptive, and the senior patrol leader is having a hard time controlling them.

I like these guys and i think they have a lot to offer, but i haven't been able to get through to them. Well, i can certainly sympathize with you.

I've had these guys in the past, so i know exactly what you're talking about. First of all, as a new Scoutmaster, you're the new guy and they're testing the boundaries, so you're going to have to respond by showing them where those boundaries are, and you can do this pretty effectively, and the way that i would suggest you do it is a not talk to them as a group. Start having, uh, little informal conferences with them, one at a time, and in those little conferences, ask some questions. The reason i say don't try and talk to them as a group is because you're outnumbered and they're smarter than you. The secret laws of adolescence kick in and a lot of the adolescent world is very uncool to have a straight on conversation with an adult and be seen to be doing that by your friends.

So talk to them one at a time, and here's what i would ask them. I would say: so listen, tell me what are your plans in scouting? Do you intend to become an ego scout.

What kind of an active contribution are you making right now to your troop? Do you think the way that you're doing things, in the way that you and your friends are behaving, is maybe contributing to what's going on, or is it taking away from what's going on?

And how are we going to work together to sort all of this out? See what they have to say, get them to think this through- and you've said that you like these guys and you think that they have a whole lot to offer, and that indicates that they're probably actually pretty good guys. They're just not really aware of what they're doing.

So if you sit down and you appeal to their sense of duty and their sense of honor, and you do that on an individual basis to begin with, you're going to get some good answers and some strategies to help resolve the situation, and then, if they act up after that, you have their own ideas and thoughts to turn into a question, and that should help them figure out exactly what's going on. You've talked with several of the guys and they've resolved to be more helpful and not to be disruptive. You get to the next meeting and they're just doing the same thing over and over again. That's where you can talk to the group. That's fine.

Hey guys, you told me yourself that you consider the sort of behavior that you're participating in right now to be distracting and difficult. So can we stop doing this and start doing those great things that you suggested you could do to be supportive and remember, if they're just hanging around and they have lots of time to sit and talk, that means that they don't have anything to do.

So make sure that they have plenty to do and a lot of this will start to go away. It's always going to drive you a little bit crazy. It's just the nature of the age, and you should pat yourself on the back that they have this great place where they can come at least once a week and they can get together and talk. But i understand your frustration and hopefully the advice that i've given you will help you sort through it a little bit. If you need some advice, or you need a little help, or you just want an understanding area, you can get in touch with me and you're going to find out how to do that in just a moment.