Scoutmaster Podcast 307

I'm Mike Beals and I'm Assistant Scoutmaster with Troop 226 in Roswell, Georgia. This edition of the Scoutmaster podcast is sponsored by backers like me.

And now to you, Scoutmaster, Here's the most innovative and useful gear innovation for camping that I've heard of in many years. They're microwave sleeping bags. Seriously, microwave sleeping bags. You can get like eight hours sleep in 10 minutes. Yeah, microwave sleeping bag, get it.

Hey, this is podcast number 307.. Welcome back to the Scoutmaster podcast. This is Clarke Green.

So first things first. Let's take a look in the mail bag Heard from James Miller about podcast number 360..

He said a very useful and encouraging podcast, because I'm struggling right now through some planning, organization and comfort levels around safe to fail and found this podcast particularly helpful. And in last week's podcast we talked about how Scouts plan. I encourage you, if you haven't heard that, go back and listen to it. But James went on to say, in particular, the cautionary note to avoid the back in my day: gloom and doom twitch. It's important to understand that our Scouts come to us in the world that they live in, not in the one that we had in our youth, which is a very good way of putting that. James, Thanks for that.

Our Scouts are living in their world, not ours. Interesting when you think about it, huh. But anyway, James concluded by saying: as most helpful scout or focus training I've ever had, really hit the spot.

Well, thanks, James. I'm glad it was useful to you.

Brent Dixon, who is an assistant Scoutmaster with Troop 192 in St Cloud, Florida, wrote in to say just wanted to let you know how impressed I am and how much I am enjoying the so far, so good audio book. This is truly a useful and entertaining guide for all of us trying to figure this whole thing out. I'm laughing, crying and diligently taking notes as I listen to the program. Thanks for all you do. Keep up the great job you're doing, sir Brent. Thank you.

It means a lot to me to know that this is actually working for you. Brent's referring to my book So Far, So Good, which we just released an audio book version of it last month.

I got to tell you it's now available. If you are an Audiblecom subscriber, you can get it on Audible now.

I listen to a lot of books personally through Audible and I recommend it highly, and I'm really happy to have So Far, So Good as an audio book on their platform. You can also get it directly from me at ScoutMasterCGcom, both as MP3 files and all formatted and ready to go for iOS devices- And also heard from Richard Witkowski, who's an assistant Scoutmaster, right up the road from where I am with Troop 117 in Coatsville, Pennsylvania, And he wrote in to say: absolutely awesome book. Thank you, Clark. It opened my eyes but also confirmed we are clearly on the right track as a Troop.

And again we're talking about So Far, So Good, a new Scoutmaster story. Go to ScoutMasterCGcom and follow that link to Clark's books and you'll find out how to get a copy.

Well, this past week we had a couple of live chat sessions, as we try to do every week, Usually Tuesday and Wednesday mornings. Watch the Facebook feed and the Twitter feed.

I'll provide you a link so that you can come and join us on the live chat. We talk about all kinds of things, sometimes deep subjects and sometimes not so deep, And oh, people were chatting back and forth about different camps and different program ideas and different things happening around the countries. We had some really great chat sessions this week. In addition to all of those who've been on the chat before- my frequent fliers, I like to call them- We also heard from Jim Yenser, who's a Scoutmaster in Western New York, and Todd Rabie Sr, who's the Scoutmaster Troop 400 in Murphy, North Carolina. Both joined us on the chat for the first time this past week. Oh, let's see What else is going on.

Well, I want to talk about seminar CG for a moment. Been talking about it since the first part of the year And the plan is is to launch seminar CG when there is a sufficient amount of interest and resources to do that, And we're doing that through something called Patreon And I'll tell you more about that in a moment.

But I want to let you know I am writing away and developing two courses right now. You'll see the introduction to the first one: Challenge Learning and Achievement in Scouting.

That particular seminar is a kind of a deep dive into what we commonly call advancement, And advancement, you know, is so procedurally intense that we don't often talk about the why behind it. You know why we're doing it in the first place. I got to tell you it really frustrated me as a younger Scouter And it took me a long time to get sorted out, And I'm excited to share a lot of the things that I've come to understand about Challenge, Learning and Achievement in Scouting during that seminar with you And the other one I'm working on is ASAP Youth Leader Training As soon as possible. Youth Leader Training Because we know- I mean you know- Scouting is built on youth leadership.

But developing an effective relationship with youth that you know empowers them to lead is perhaps the biggest challenge for adult volunteers who work with Scouts. I know that because it was a really big challenge for me, But I'm confident anyone can apply the ideas and methods I'm going to share in that seminar effectively.

Now, if you are interested in helping me make a seminar CG a reality, I'm asking you to go to Patreon and to become a patron at $5 or more a month. In addition to getting access to seminarcgcom, there's other premiums available to anybody who comes to Patreon And to do that it's wwwpatreoncom backslash scoutmastercg. If you're interested in the seminars, making them a reality, go there and become a patron this week. Help us out and we'll get that resource launched very, very soon. The other way to help us out: if what we're doing is helping you, you can respond in kind by becoming a backer at scoutmastercgcom. Just go to the website, click the support link at the top of the page.

It's pretty easy to do And you'll find a number of options that will make you a scoutmastercgcom backer. And I want to take a moment to personally thank Merlin Keisenberg, Brent Dixon and Steve Puckett, who've all become backers since our last podcast, And in this week's podcast we're going to spend some time talking about how Scouts do what nobody else does, And I've got an email question to answer.

So let's get started. Shall we Scouts Mastership in seven minutes or less?

So when scouting is really happening, when it's really popping and sizzling along, Scouts are doing things that few, if any, of their peers are doing. Now, I'm not thinking about, like, the nature of their activities, like I don't know, canoeing or mountain climbing or something like that. No, I'm thinking about something that we've discussed many times before. What I'm thinking about is the amount of trust and autonomy they have in planning and carrying out those activities and leading themselves through them. That's something that few, if any, of their peers experience outside of scouting.

How do we provide them with that really rare, rarefied kind of experience? So why is trust and autonomy important?

And more interestingly, and perhaps frustratingly, is: how do we get there as Scouts? I mean, how do we allow that autonomy that is sometimes so difficult to create and maintain. Trusting young people to do what we expect them to do in scouting is, and has been and will no doubt continue to be, the big challenge right for us as Scouts, And it is the most important element in Scouts: being able to do what nobody else gets to do.

So I want to talk for a moment about experience, because experience is important, and experience is what we want to grow in the young people that we serve. But there's something important to understand is we cannot substitute our experience for their experience. They have to get that for themselves. Experience is not always a transferable commodity. If you want to be meta about it, I'm trying to transfer my experience to you right now.

How's that going? By the way, You know I can talk about it.

I can talk a good game about the experiences that I have my understanding about it, But until you experience it, actually you know it's just a bunch of words right Now. This is especially true when it comes to working with young people, because when we were young, we had relatively little experience and little practical knowledge of the world, And so it's difficult for us to remember that as adults and how we leveraged one experience against another in building our adult lives. Our knowledge and experience is not all cordoned off into neat little packages. It's more like a matrix of things, of how we understand and work with the world, like a treat with roots and a trunk and branches. This sort of thing takes a long time to grow.

And just to stretch the allegory a little bit further, we have not just grown by necessarily organic experience. Our experience looks more like a spellier rather than an organic matrix, right, And an espelier, okay.

So now I have to explain that. So an espelier? You'll recognize it immediately if you go to a botanical garden or you go to a vineyard. An espelier is the way that a tree or a vine or something like that is trained to grow up against a wall, usually in a very symmetrical way. Beautiful things.

But our experience as we go along, we prune and we train, as we learn, right, Every single branch that we've taken in our lives is not still there, because some of them were dead ends So we got rid of them. So I don't want to take that allegory to like the absolute breaking point, but I'm using it to point out the idea that the growth of experience and knowledge is a really complex, lengthy process that, once we have it, we cannot necessarily accurately recall not having it. We don't understand sometimes, when we share our experience with young people, that it just doesn't seem to go anywhere, And the reason is is not that they're willful or not that they're stupid, it's just that they don't have the espelier of experience that we do. They don't have anything that they can attach that to.

Do you understand what I'm saying? The takeaway here is is that you cannot talk or train or teach some things. That is especially true when it comes to things like leadership, responsibility, trust. You can't really talk those things into people. You can only create the opportunity in which they can be experienced. That's the key thought.

Okay, So how do we go about that? Well, all of this has to happen in an atmosphere of trust, And one of the key barriers to trusting young people is the inevitability of failure in gaining experience.

You may forget how many times your ideas or initiatives failed when you were younger, or discount how many times they fail now and how difficult it has been to learn some of the things that are now the roots and trunks and branches of your experience as a spelier right. But you understand, on one level, that failure is good because you can only fail if you try.

So failure indicates action and initiative. Failure does not have to be tragic and scarring. It mostly should be energizing and creative. And I'm reminded of what Edison said in finding the right filament to put in the light bulb, because it took forever.

They experimented with all kinds of things, And I remember a quote from Edison saying: well, you know, we found a thousand things that didn't work, And each one of them was a failure. Right, Those failures were necessary to creating the solution that did work. I always have to mention this when I talk about the necessity of failure, I am not suggesting that scouting is about zero adult intervention or zero context. It can't be. There's a lot of context to scouting and we occasionally intervene with things like: no, do not eat that mushroom, do not jump off that

Cliff, do not swing that stick around, You'll hit somebody. And you know all of the thousand other reasonable adult interventions. And we provide our young people with context. We don't do that sort of thing. We don't do that kind of activity.

We do what scouts do? We do these things. That's the context.

As I've said countless times, by now we play a very specific game with very specific aims. So let's sweep all this together, Let's tie it all together into an idea that's easy to remember. Green Bar Bill said it: first, train them, trust them and let them lead. Training means showing them the boundaries and the possibilities that are involved with scouting, the context of scouting And, if you're not sure what I mean by context, the rules of the game, the field of play. Trust means valuing the creative and energizing forces that happen when we attempt and fail and when we come across our own shortcomings. I mean: remember your experience.

To Spellier right, How did that grow? Did it grow just perfectly, step by perfect step? No, A lot of failures, a lot of things that had to get pruned away, a lot of things you had to abandon in growing the experience that you depend on now.

And then let them lead means creating and maintaining the process of opportunities to experience leadership. We can take that great old adage from Green Bar Bill and we can bring it down to three words: Train, trust and let One last time. Train means show them the boundaries and the possibilities, show them the field of play and the rules by which the game is played. Trust means valuing the creative and energizing forces in failure and initiative, And let means creating and maintaining an open process of opportunities for them to experience leadership, where we step back and our scouts get to do things that nobody else does.

Email, that is folks, And here's an answer to one of your emails. Well, as promised, I have an email question that came from Craig Snodgrass, who's the Scoutmaster of Troop 1 and out the Dean of California, And Craig's question comes after last week's podcast about planning, And he says this. Thanks for describing the fundamental thinking behind planning. Your advice to focus on doing what scouts do has helped, But I remain curious, however, about long range planning.

I get that those plans need to be doing what scouts do- quote unquote: camping, hiking, service projects- but how frequently and how many? Do the patrol leaders council plan as many or a few activities as they wish, Or do scouts give their patrol leaders council guidelines like the number of outings or meetings per month or per season? Craig, that's a good question, because long range planning is increasingly important.

I think it's always been pretty important to have the next several months laid out. A lot of scout troops create an annual plan, and that's always been highly recommended.

So, within those long range plans, though what you're asking is is: how much input do we have into it? Well, I want to draw a distinction between your input and the program, because actually, you really don't end up having a whole lot of input in it. In one way, because we're following a program, We do the things that scouts do. That's just accepted. It's not up for debate, not up for questioning.

If we were playing the game of basketball, we wouldn't leave open the possibility that we could perhaps try the game with a football or try it on a football field. No, there's just some things that- and as I was talking about earlier- are context.

So let's make sure that we're rooted in the context of what we're doing, as this long-term planning is being undertaken. So we're doing the things that scouts do.

The second piece of it is: you're saying: well, how frequently does this happen? The only general answer I can provide to you with that is as frequently as the particular situation that you find yourself in permits.

So when we go to the literature and we look at planning, we're going to see charts and metrics, And charts and metrics are useful because they give you like a basis to begin with, And we also would look at something in the BSA called the journey to excellence, which is a set of standards that you can achieve. But the other thing that you have to look at when you look at all the stuff in the literature, these are great ideas of how to make things happen. Couple that with your understanding of why you're making them happen in the first place and what you can expect from your community and your families. You're going to find out that you're pretty much on par with those ideas in the literature. Or you might fall a little below them or you might be able to go a little bit above them, And that will change from year to year. I guess my quick answer, Craig, is: respond to whatever the local conditions are, And that response is shaped both by what's in the literature, by the program itself, and what you're dealing with on a local basis.

I hope that helps. Hey, if you have a question or a comment about anything on the podcast or anything you find at scoutmastercgcom, I'd love for you to get in touch with me. It's easy to do and you're going to find out how to make that happen in just a moment.