Scoutmaster Podcast 71

And now to you, Scoutmaster. So, uh, I was down to camp the other day, went in the trading post. The aquatic director was there I got. I'm a little worried about him. He was trying to cash a buddy check. Think about it, It'll come to you.

Hang on, There it is, Hey. This is podcast number 71.. Hey, Hey, Hey.

Well, welcome back to the Scoutmaster podcast. This is Clarke Green. Let's check in and see who got in touch this week. Mike Duff wrote in and said: I discovered your podcast last summer And, as a new Scoutmaster, it's been a tremendous resource. There have been many aha moments listening to your podcast.

Yeah, I'm like there's a couple of aha moments every now and again, but there's some real ooh moments too. Thank you for all the time it must take to put it together And please know that it's been making a big impact on the Scouts and families of Troop 381 in Prairie Village, Kansas.

Well, thanks very much, Mike, for your kind words. Hello Troop 381.. Hello, Prairie Village Kansas. Good to hear from you all. Alan Green wrote in and said this: I had three sons in two troops. They're all grown up now.

I have to admit that with my first son I probably stepped in more than I should have. I was an assistant Scoutmaster, one among several, and the Scoutmaster finally had a pal well with all of us dads who were involved and said that we got a little too emotional when it came to our own sons.

He suggested, just like you did, that it might be a good idea if we worked with somebody else's son and let our sons, you know, kind of do scouting. I adopted the advice and the second son was left more to himself than the first. The third son joined another troop and I followed.

I think the best time for my sons was when I was watching from a distance. On two occasions I didn't make summer camp with the troop and my boys struggled a bit but they overcame it without me and I think they were the better for it.

I see parents now make the same mistakes I did. They hover over their boy and they don't realize that scouting is a time for a boy to be away from home and discover the world and society apart from his family. I would like to tell them to work a little bit and let scouting, the Scoutmaster and the troop leaders do their work Well.

I think that's great advice, Alan, and I really appreciate you being in touch, Let them live their own lives a little bit. It's really difficult when you're a parent and a scout leader at the same time. It's hard to find the right perspective, the right amount of involvement.

You know it's a puzzle for all of us, but there's Alan encouraging everybody that maybe a little bit less is more for most of the scouts. Andre Crawford wrote in on Facebook. You can find us on Facebook at Scoutmaster Blog. Go on Facebook, search for Scoutmaster Blog and hey, there we are. And Andre joined us there and said I was finally able to listen to the podcast last night.

Thank you so much for taking the time to discuss these questions. I feel it can only be a benefit to those of us who are new to this.

Well, thank you, Andre. I hope to have you aboard. Andre's asked a couple of questions about being a scout parent and working along with his son.

I think we were able to help out a little bit there, Andre. A lot of folks online left some comments and some encouragement Speaking about online over at the Scoutmaster Blog, this week we have a caption contest. You can find the Scoutmaster Blog by going to scoutmastercgcom And take a look at the caption contest. It was pretty popular this week. A lot of people signed on to look at it and offer a caption for a kind of humorous photo that one of the readers sent in, And I would love to have you come and take a look at it and vote for your favorite caption.

If the photos keep coming, maybe we can make it a weekly occurrence. So go on to scoutmastercgcom and take a look And there's a wonderful, impressive coveted prize for the winning caption. It's a May giveaway for the May Scoutmaster newsletter, And that prize, which is a right in the rain outdoor journal kit, goes to Phil Peck, Scoutmaster of Troop 141 and Kokolala, Indiana.

So, Phil, congratulations. Thanks for answering the question that qualified you to be randomly selected from all of those who gave the right answer for that month's giveaway. Finally, here let's see, and Chris said this: Clark thanks for the story of a scout dad. I was listening to your podcast yesterday and I thought it was great. I'm the father of two scouts: One's an Eagle Scout and one's a new Tenderfoot. At a troop court of honor last night, one of my sons received his Silver Palm and one of them received his Tenderfoot rank.

I reflected on how short a time all of this is and how blessed I am to be a part of it. Thank you for your wonderful podcast. I select an adult volunteer each year. They think makes the most difference in their lives. At the conclusion of the court of honor, the Scoutmaster announced that the scouts had selected me.

I don't think I've ever felt so humbled as I did last night to receive that honor. Wow, that's great news, Chris, And that's a really nice tradition for the scouts to do that annually. And congratulations, It sounds like you're having a wonderful time and scouting with your boys.

Just so happy to hear it. As it is Memorial Day weekend, I'm going to go ahead and re-broadcast a couple of favorites from the archives. One of them is talking about volunteering with some boundaries, and that'll be in Scoutmastership in seven minutes or less.

And then I've got a story to tell you from Scout Camp about the night the helicopter landed in camp. Yeah, one of my favorite stories to tell from camp.

So that sounds like enough for this podcast. So let's get started, shall we

Scoutmastership in seven minutes or less. Have you ever heard somebody call being described as being generous to a fault?

I guess, ultimately, you could give away everything that you own, But then you wouldn't really have the resources to perpetuate being generous, would you? So generosity is a little bit of a paradoxical value.

We can't continue being generous unless we have maintained some store of resources to share. Volunteering- and I guess we're, you know, absolutely talking in the specific area of scouting, But volunteering- is a form of generosity that, if you push it too far, is going to bankrupt the virtue that creates it. Scouting and church and school and charities and any other form of volunteer where it can demand ever greater commitments of time and resources until the poor volunteer just reaches a breaking point. You can call it burnout or fatigue or what have you.

This happens when the volunteer reaches that point of frustration that just you know they can't stand it anymore. You've seen it happen. If you've been around scouting long enough, you've probably seen it happen. Maybe it's getting ready to happen to you.

So being able to continue on as a volunteer, as a scouter, means you really have to have some boundaries, And if we don't set boundaries, there's a good chance we won't be volunteering for very long. We have responsibilities of family and career and the work that we do volunteering, and we have to continuously measure and prioritize these things and they can go way off balance.

Here's some thoughts that can lead a volunteer to go way off balance and, to you know, not have a proper set of boundaries. The first thought would be: if I don't do it, nobody else will.

Well, I got to tell you honestly, more than likely: if you think that you won't, you don't do it, nobody else will. It's more or less.

You're saying: if I don't do it, nobody else will do it the way I think it should be done. Am I right? I mean, there are tasks and positions of extraordinary importance, but they're fewer and farther between than we think. If nobody else will take on a given position or a task, it might be because it's really not as important as we once thought, or that position has been grossly overinflated by a previous volunteer who kind of ignored their own boundaries. Another thought experience is: nobody really knows how to do this like I do. Yeah, that might be true.

So train somebody else how to do it now. Truthfully, nobody's going to do it just like you do, but things will change and change is not always bad. You heard it here first. Change is not always bad.

How about this? How about this thought?

How about this myself, rather than to show somebody else how it's done? How many times have you thought that it could be true? But volunteering is not always about efficiency. Scouting is not always about efficiency. Sometimes it's about opening up opportunities to let other people enjoy the accomplishment of volunteering.

How about this thought? Nobody really knows how to do this like I do.

They're not going to do it, and they're not going to do it exactly like you do, and that's fine, because they need to have the freedom and the latitude that you've had in developing your particular style of working on something, don't they? Isn't that the way we remain satisfied?

In this kind of work? Things are going to change, and change isn't always bad. Staying viable and being a contributing member of the volunteer team is preferable to like flaming out in a short blaze of glory. Things begin to spin out of control if we ignore these factors, and the first factor is that emotional investments and what you're doing as a volunteer can skew your judgment.

Here's a really good example: a parent who volunteers to help with an organization that serves their child can't ever really stop being a parent. They can try, but it's almost impossible. It's hard to be an unbiased volunteer when your child's involved. Long time volunteers who've put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into something tend to be overly defensive in their work. That's another kind of emotional investment. This is my deal and I don't want anybody else screwing it up.

These two common emotional issues can be huge blind spots to progress, to unemotionally evaluate situations in our volunteer lives. Sometimes we just can't leave delegated responsibilities alone.

Do you know what I'm talking about? You give somebody a job and then you want to micromanage it because you want it done just so well.

We have to allow other people some autonomy in their work, good management and leadership principles, but the incentives are different than the work we do for pay and some people don't respond to the incentives of volunteering with the same energy and integrity as they do when a check is involved. People will break commitments or make minimal efforts that they wouldn't consider appropriate in their professional life, and we really can't change that.

We can only factor it into the equation like ways that some people are not really great volunteers as an excuse not to delegate. You got to delegate things off and let people do what they're going to do.

We need to focus on the goal and all of our immediate goals need to serve the ultimate goal: maintaining a vision. What we're trying to accomplish is as important as the work itself. If we'll save a lot of wasted effort and heartache if we concentrate on the goals of our work. We're tied up in the methods and trying to figure that out. Let's just keep an eye on the goal. And if it's scouting, the goal is the success of your scouts.

We have to know our limits. I don't know my limits. You don't know your limits. Few people really see themselves that clearly.

Now, who knows your limits? Well, your spouse knows your limits and you've got a few good friends that know your limits and we need to ask them: are you doing too much?

Do you think that I'm overextended? And then we need to listen to the reply. Sometimes the easiest way to fix your life as a volunteer is a little two letter word and oh no, sometimes it's the right answer. We are fortunate to have these wonderful people who dedicate their time to scouting and they have a sense of responsibility. But sometimes that sense of responsibility, it's easy to drive them to greater responsibilities with a little bit of guilt.

You know we're really having a problem with this. Nobody else will do it.

I mean, we're nice people but we can't allow ourselves to be compelled by a sense of duty or guilt alone. We have to have a sense of proportion and responsibility for our own lives and sometimes that sense.

Volunteering is a tremendously gratifying and enriching experience and we can't allow ourselves to be pushed beyond reasonable boundaries if we're to stay volunteers and we're to be effective in the work that we did.

This has to be the truth, folks, because there is no way anyone could make this up. Some of the best times I ever spent in scouting was the years that I worked as a staff member at our summer camp.

It was just a wonderful time and we got to see some things that you know a general person going down and camping and kind of hanging out would not be able to see. Some of these were good, some of these were bad, but one night stands out as being a really remarkable person at our camp.

So around about, I guess around about ten o'clock, tap sounds and the campers are all off to their campsites and off to bed and one of my friends and I decided we were going to head into town and so we took the old camp road out and you know, the camp road is about a mile long or so. It's, you know, dirt and gravel and that's kind of unusual at this time of night for somebody to be headed into camp and they're kind of swerving around and things like that.

And we see this car approaching, so we kind of stop and we signal them to stop and there's a couple of fellas in the car who we don't know and we ask them if they're camped there this week and they say no, we're kind of lost. And we say, well, you know, you're headed into a scout camp and it appeared to us as though these guys had had a few too many and we're very confused about where they were headed.

So they said, yeah, well, you know, we'll turn around, I guess we'll head on out. And they were kind of arguing with each other.

But I got back in our car and we proceeded to head out the road, imagining these guys would turn around and head out with us, and nope, they just kept on going down into camp when we saw that, and so we turned around and we followed them into camp and we stopped them and oh, one thing led to another and you know it turned out to be a couple of guys who had a bit too much to drink and we called the police to go and wait at the gate for the police to show up. So we were waiting there for 10 or 15 minutes and we see some emergency lights up on the main road and we say, well, they're the police, they're coming in.

And so we're sitting at the gate and I stepped out into the road and kind of waved to indicate that we were there, we were going to lead them into camp. Comes through screaming through the gate of the camp, right past us, beeping the horns, sirens and everything, and starts screaming down into camp a fire truck.

So I looked at my buddy and he looked at me and we said we better get back down into camp, something's wrong. So we got in the car and we went down following this fire truck.

And we get a certain way down the road and all of a sudden there is this amazing bright light shining down from the sky into a grove of trees beside the road and we were really freaked out because it looked like an alien invasion. I'm not kidding, I mean it was this tremendously bright spotlight and we hit the gas. He said: oh my gosh, what in the world is happening. And we started heading back down the road into camp.

And we got into camp and we found out that what had happened is there had been a staff swim at the pool after taps and one of the fellas had injured himself and they got so upset about the injury they decided they would call in the Medevac unit. And this is what the bright light was. It was this helicopter with- I guess they call it- a midnight sun and it's properly named. It's this giant search light on the helicopter.

Of course they had no idea what the pool was, so they were kind of sweeping through camp and of course they hit a lot of campsites. And the story was- I heard from several Scoutmasters the next day- they were kind of sweeping through camp and all the scouts got up and cheered and waved to the helicopter. The reason the fire truck was there is because apparently every time they call out a Medevac, they call out a fire truck in case the helicopter crashes, which is very reassuring, isn't it. But the Medevac finally set down and they got the guy and they took him out. Fortunately the injury wasn't as serious as anybody thought and he was back in camp within 24 hours. But, wow, I'll tell you what a night.

If you ever get a chance to serve on camp staff, you know. Take the advantage of it because it's a lot of fun.

So stay up late and keep your eyes open-