Scoutmaster Podcast 300

I'm Chuck Wolfe and I am an Assistant Scoutmaster with Troop 342 in Raleigh, North Carolina. I'm Mike Hodder and I'm an Assistant Scoutmaster with Pac-41 in Columbus, Ohio. This is Andy McDonald and I'm an Assistant Scoutmaster with Troop 631 in Guido, Florida. I'm Ed Gratrix and I'm an Assistant Scoutmaster with Troop 63 in Monroe, Connecticut. I'm Ray Pritton and I'm the Scoutmaster with Troop 42 in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. I'm Stephen Jarvis and I'm a Cubmaster with Pac-46 in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

This edition of the Scoutmaster podcast is sponsored by backers like us And now the old Scoutmaster. So for generations, men have looked upon the bald eagle and found inspiration. Yet the eagle looking upon a bald man doesn't seem to be inspired at all.

Hmm, odd, isn't it?

Hey, this is podcast number 300. Who would have ever thought? Hey, Welcome back to the Scoutmaster podcast. This is Clarke Green. Wow, 300..

Okay, so let's get over that real fast and let's move on to the mailbag. Huh, Dave Smiley, who's from Santa Rosa, California, wrote in to say congratulations on podcast number 300.. I've listened to many of these several times and continue to find nuggets of wisdom each time I listen. Can't thank you enough for all the help you provide for Scouters everywhere. Here's to the next 300 podcasts. Dave's an old pal of the podcast and the pog, The podcast and the blog And it's always nice to hear from you, Dave.

Thanks, Andy Sherwood wrote in to say I'm a new assistant Scoutmaster to Fairly New Troop and have been trying to find good resources to be a better Scouter and to better support our Scouts. This week I discovered your website and podcast and it has been a very welcome and useful discovery. Thanks for all you do and for helping the rest of us Well. Thank you for Andy for getting in touch. It's always great to know that things are useful. Greg Barnett is with Troop 213 in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Said I wanted to follow up on renewing my support for what you do and thank you for all you contribute to Scouting. Thanks so much, Greg. And in the same vein I got this message: 300.. That's a perfect game. Frank Maynard here from Bob White Blather.

Thanks, Clark for helping us understand what Scouting's really all about and how we can do our best so our Scouts can get the most out of playing that other perfect game, the game of Scouting. Keep on rolling those strikes.

Thank you so much, Frank. Really appreciate that. And Frank blogs about Scouting at Bob White Blather and it's definitely something you should be following. Frank has a lot of experience as a committee chairman and has helped a lot of people navigate their way through that particular role in Scouting as much as a great deal more. Thanks again, Frank Also had this from Jim Hilliard. He says: as a Wolfden leader, I've been trying to figure out what age-appropriate youth leadership means for eight-year-olds.

I got an education at our den meeting this week. We're working on a belt loop requiring the wolves to create a project out of recycled material.

I didn't tell them how big the projects were to be or what shape or form they should take or what would be good enough to satisfy the requirement, And so they showed up with a bunch of stuff to build the project and for about five minutes they floundered around. Some of the parents were looking at me to step in and provide guidance, but I held back and observed just enough to ensure they were being safe and kind to one another. And suddenly these six eight-year-old Cub Scouts self-selected into two groups and things were taking shape.

One group built a table complete with storage space and a trash can, and the other put together a castle complete with a moat and a flag made of newspaper that we were all asked to salute. By the way, They had more fun at this meeting than any of the other ones they've been at this year and they were rightfully proud of what they created in 30 short minutes. My eyes were opened, letting Cub's lead themselves and create, with a few guidelines and some safety supervision had worked.

Now, how often do we get frustrated when we see 12-year-old Scouts mill around and apparently not accomplish anything at a troop meeting and then we step in and try to help them? We're robbing them if we fail to help them think through the objectives on their own ahead of time and then try to step in and fix things that really aren't broken.

Now I'm full of ideas to help my eight-year-old Cub's continue to explore their creativity. I just wanted to share this moment of epiphany that I finally understood after six years as a Cub Scout leader and three years as a Scouter with a troop.

Oh, we've all had those moments and if you haven't had those there to come, If you give it a shot, you know, if you step back, observe, let things happen. Don't try to fix things that aren't broken, because we're working with Scouts, You know whether they're eight years old or 12 years old or 17 years old, they have to sort things out and once you give them the room to do that well, there are some pretty amazing results actually. Thanks again, Jim. We had a couple of live chat sessions this past week. Watch the Facebook feed and the Twitter feed and you'll figure out when we're going to have a live chat session. I can tell you.

Usually it's Tuesday and Wednesday mornings, So check in, come and join us on the live chat. A lot of folks checked in this past week, A lot of our frequent fliers, and we had some new folks participate. Paul Blinkow is in Shoreview, Minnesota. He's about to go to Wood Badge and he's thinking of maybe raising his hand to be the new Scoutmaster for his troop. Jeff Bodicom is with troop 131 in Homedale, New Jersey and he's been a Scoutmaster for about a year. And William Anno is a district commissioner and Scoutmaster in Northern Florida.

Tuesday and Wednesday mornings we usually have a live chat at scoutmastercgcom. Love to have you join us. Hey, before I go any further, I have one favor to ask of you: If you're a regular follower of the things that happen at scoutmastercgcom, you've read the blog, listened to the podcast and these resources have helped you. I'm asking you return the favor by becoming a scoutmastercgcom backer. It's very simple to do. Go to scoutmastercgcom, Follow the support link at the top of the page and you'll find a number of options that will make you a scoutmastercgcom backer, And the funds we get from backers cover the expenses of producing and publishing everything at scoutmastercgcom, including what you're listening to right now.

Wow, this is a big list, but I want to take a moment to personally thank Shane Adams, Susan Lynch, Shannon Greer, Fred Glover, Steven Driver, Benjamin by the way, Sean Mungle, Gregory Contos, Chris Jones and David Spradlin- all who have become backers since our last podcast. Once again, go to scoutmastercgcom, become a backer this week and I'll be sure to thank you during our next podcast. This is podcast number 300.. I've been talking about it for the past few weeks. The rest of the podcast is going to be taken up with my personal start: stop and continue exercise.

So let's get started, shall we? He's my favorite all time Boy Scout. He's my favorite all time Boy Scout.

I want to take some time to look back at scoutmastercgcom. The Scoutmaster blog started with its first post in October of 2005, and that's just over 10 years ago. That post is titled Why Scouting. It's still up. It's still there on the blog and I'll link to it in the podcast notes. The first podcast, the first scoutmaster podcast, was published on January 25th 2010, which happens to be exactly five years ago today.

When I started the blog, I'd been a scoutmaster for just over 25 years. I started at the very young age of 24. In 1984, believe it or not, 10 years ago- I decided I wanted to start writing about what I had learned about scouting. I wanted to encourage the BSA to make some changes and I wanted to write about those. And some of those changes have come to pass. Others still are waiting.

But right now, all told, I've been volunteering for the BSA- for I haven't really stopped to count, but it's probably close on maybe 37,, 38 years. I've worked at the unit level with Cub Scouts. I've been a Webelos Den Leader. I've been a Cub Master, an Assistant Cub Master. Like I said, I've been a scoutmaster.

Right now I am a Venture Crew Advisor. I've worked at the district and the council level and I have a fairly wide experience of the Boy Scouts of America as an organization.

But, as I've said in the past, you know that's what we are right, That's what the BSA is. It's an organization. The BSA is not- quote- scouting unquote- it's an organization that contains scouting.

My subject and what I want to promote and grow is scouting rather than just an organization. Baden Powell pointed out: we are a movement rather than an organization, And there's a lot of differences between those two things. For the past 10 years, I've been privileged to connect with scouts all over the world And one thing I know for certain is: regardless of what organization we're serving in, we all experience the same challenges and we all achieve the same victories and we share the same aim, and that very simple aim is to help young people, and the principles of scouting apply no matter where you are. As everybody grew more familiar with the internet in the past couple of decades, scouters were very early adopters.

There were web pages and listserv started and later on, blogs and then podcasts, and a lot of those things have come and gone. I'm kind of amazed that 10 years later, this has been so compelling and so interesting and useful for me that I'm still here talking to you.

How about that? I mean, I am constantly amazed by the potential of tools that we have in our hands now to allow us to share and inform and to work together. It's been challenging and it's been very exhilarating trying to sort all of these things out, all of this technology.

Some things have tried to work pretty well, some things didn't, And that brings me around to what I wanted to talk about And that's what I ought to stop doing and what I ought to continue doing And some things that I need to start doing Now. Stop doing thing is a fairly short list, because I've tried and abandoned a few things over the past already. I'll say the single test I used to evaluate what to stop doing is whether it seems to be helping folks to be better scouters.

If it works, I want to keep doing it. And there's also like the question of is it working for enough people? Because there's a significant amount of time and resources that you put into this.

So I'm not necessarily concerned about having the biggest audience in the world, But am I getting through? That's really kind of the test for a lot of this. The only really substantial thing I'm going to stop doing this coming year is supporting the Scoutmaster CG app.

If you didn't know that, I had one so much. The better Apps turn out to be very costly and getting them right and maintaining them is very time consuming And I think there are really better things to devote the time and resources to. If you have the app uploaded on a mobile device and find it useful, it'll likely continue to work, But a little later on this year is the contract that I have for an app provider runs out. It will stop being maintained and updated And, like a lot of people, I pretty much abandoned Google Plus as a social media platform.

The audience was relatively small and not very active, So the effort required to keep that up has been experiencing diminishing returns. Google Plus- remember Google Plus?

Everybody was on it for about a day and a half, but well, listen, I know some people still find it very useful, but from my standpoint, it's not something I'm going to continue to try and keep up with. And speaking of continue, that's actually a pretty easy list too.

First, let's talk about the blog. In the past few months, I've been going through over 1800 posts that have accumulated in the past 10 years.

Many are still relevant, but some offer either dated information or they aren't particularly well written or conceived, So I'm deleting and editing my way through them. If you're keeping an eye on my Facebook feed, I've been republishing some of the old posts I find particularly compelling And they get a lot of play over on Facebook.

But in the coming year I'm going to continue publishing the blog, but probably with what will seem like fewer articles, probably one at most two new articles a week, And there's a couple of reasons for this. If you've ever looked into blogging, it's a really interesting field. Trends and standard practices have come and gone, but the single immutable truth in blogging is that great content draws and maintains and grows an audience.

Now there are a lot of days when I'm pretty sure I have written nearly everything I can about scouting, And it's a stretch to come up with new ideas or new ways to look at old ideas, And if you look back at old posts you'll find a lot of repetitive information. So I want to keep things engaging and valuable, expect to see fewer, but what I hope are higher quality articles over the next year.

Let's talk about the podcast. There are many similarities between the blog and the podcast content And I feel as though I've said a lot of the same things over and over again.

Now I think it's reasonably useful to keep repeating things, because there's always someone who finds a given subject or question: new and interesting. So expect email answers to continue, along with most of the standard podcast features you've grown used to.

You won't likely see a whole lot of substantial changes in what you've experienced with the podcast And I've saved my start list for last because that's really the most exciting part, right? The first big start item is all about you and your stories.

I kind of stumbled into the whole idea of storytelling as being a way to help instruct people and to demonstrate how things work with my last book- So Far, So Good, which is the fictionalized story of a scoutmaster's first few months on the job. It turned out to be a pretty effective way to get the big ideas and scouting across the people, as well as to illustrate some of the methods I found successful in working with scouts as a scoutmaster.

So I'd like to dedicate more time to telling stories And I'd like to hear and broadcast your stories, kind of like what I shared earlier from Jim Hilliard, the story about his epiphany working with his wolf den. So that's my first big start item is to encourage you to get in touch with me and share your stories. You may not think your story is important or exciting or particularly compelling, And while I'm certainly interested in any kind of once in a lifetime tales you might have, I am actually more interested in the ordinary ones, because that's what we all share. It's those seemingly ordinary and seemingly inconsequential stories that we all have in working with scouts that are actually the most compelling, because all of us are turning the key on a meeting room door several times a month. Working with our scouts and knowing that everybody else is doing this and the things that they experience is really encouraging and inspiring for everyone. There's a lot of comfort and encouragement in knowing that we aren't alone and that we encounter similar challenges and triumphs.

I want to turn your story into blog posts and podcast interviews. Let me know what's going on out there And we'll work out how we're going to share your story with everybody.

Now the biggest item on the start list is something I've been working on for the past several months, And that is seminarcgcom. What I'd like to do is develop some online courses for scouts everywhere to study the big ideas of scouting. There's a lot of training out there from our different scouting organizations that deal about specific policy and procedure and methods that apply in a given scouting organization, But a lot of times we seem to miss out on the why behind all of those things, the kind of the why behind the how. Learning how to do things is fairly cut and dried, right Policies and procedures- fairly cut and dried, You figure that out.

But why are we doing them in the first place? I think I can be of service in helping folks study and understand those big ideas. Back last summer I ran a beta course with several scouts who volunteered to help me out, And it was successful in helping me figure out how to set these things up.

And I'm working on the first course that I want to publish soon And that centers on what we in the BSA call advancement, And the working title for this seminar is Learning and Achievement in Scouting, And this seminar is going to cover not so much the mechanics of how to fill out forms and get badges so much as the why behind those things. Now I've worked out the mechanics of publishing and offering these courses and I want to launch the new site, SeminarCGcom, as soon as possible and add courses based on what you tell me you would like to study And, as I said, I want to focus on big ideas and those things that get left out of a lot of our formal training And along with that, I want to have some very practical things, some very practical program ideas and methods and things like that too.

Now, if you're interested in SeminarCGcom, I'll link to it in the podcast notes, But you can go straight to SeminarCGcom and sign up for the SeminarCGcom email list and I'll keep you apprised of how this is working and how things are developing. And this leads me into the next item on the start list.

Now, two years ago, I initiated the backer program and hundreds of listeners and readers have responded over those two years And that has enabled me to keep going by supporting everything that we're doing here financially. I'm going to keep the backer program as it is for now, but I'm going to begin promoting a new support tool called Patreon.

Patreon is a pretty well known crowdfunding platform where patrons can support people who create online things like music and videos and, like me, with podcasts and blogs. Now, once I've got this site launched- and that will happen a little later on this week- you will be able to pledge a monthly payment to support the work and in exchange, you're going to get access to all the courses at SeminarCGcom, A new resource I'm working on that enables easy access to downloading and listening to the podcast archive, which was the intention of the Scoutmaster CG app back in the day. But I figured out a much simpler solution And, depending on your level of support, you'll get free access to my eBooks and the PDF package and a discount on my print books.

SeminarCGcom is a sizable commitment for me in time and resources, So I've set up Patreon to assure that there's sufficient interest in the idea before it's launched. And, trust me, really I would rather not discuss or deal with money, But the simple truth is is that all of this costs something, and I have to free up enough time to devote to producing these resources. In one way, all that comes down to dollars and cents. I'm going to stick with my commitment of making everything that we produce freely available to Scouters, and your participation in the backer program and in the new Patreon program is going to help me keep that commitment.

A couple of other items on the start list are well underway. I've just completed a significant hardware upgrade that's going to enable me to produce more video content. Look for more gear reviews and practical program ideas on my YouTube channel very soon. I'm also producing an audio version of my last book.

So far, so good, And I want to have that published by the end of next month. And I've got several new books in the works And once I have a critical mass of patrons through Patreon, you patrons, you're going to tell me which ones we ought to get to work on and get published.

So that's my stop, start and continue for 2016 and podcast number 300.. I want to end by saying what a privilege it is to be able to work with such a wonderful group of people, All the folks who join in and participate in so many different ways all over the world- literally all over the world, which is just totally mind blowing. I just it's a huge privilege.

Baton Powell noted several times in his writings that when you give of yourself, when you give, it's not a zero sum game, is it because you get so much back? And I don't regret any of the time or resources I've given to Scouting over the past 35 plus years because I've gotten so much out of it personally, And I know that you do too.

So let's keep on keeping on, shall we? And help me create resources that advance this wonderful movement that's able to help young people all over the world.

Now, remember, I want to hear your stories, So I need you to get in touch with me, and you're going to find out how to do that in just a moment.