A week ago I was honored to present to the programs who help young people with juvenile justice involvement transition to community and adulthood in New Mexico.  I was very impressed by their dedication to their work, and the presentations I saw describing some of the programs they operate.  I had presented last year, and it was very enjoyable to see their confidence in their work had improved greatly.

There were several in the room who were really dedicated to helping young people, and it was motivating for me to see their interest in new strategies.  I hope I get to go back.

I haven't posted very much lately, largely because I have been doing some work with the Indiana Youth Institute.  The Indiana Youth Institute works with youth serving agencies in Indiana in a number of ways.  One of those ways is to provide consultants at discount rates to help agencies with any number of projects.  Their team is professional, knowledgeable, and willing to help with a wide range of needs.  

In the trainings we offer, we are very interested in helping adults have success at influencing young people and to do so in fun, easy ways.  One of the most challenging aspects of parenting, or even coaching young people is their changing reactions to questions as they move towards and into their teens.  The simple "How was your day?" question which once started sharing about all the things that happened, and usually more than we want to know, is reduced to "fine", or "okay".  As young people move towards their own private identity, the goal of these responses is to shut us down and keep us out of their business, and it works.  If we press, we begin to feel rude, as they have answered our question, and they certainly think we are being rude.

While it really won't work very often for the "how was your day?" question I find we can get much more information by using "implied" questions.  Implied questions are statements about your own inner state of curiousity which invites someone to help you fulfill your need for information.  For example: "I wonder what you would think about ............" If this is delivered with a tone of voice that communicates pondering, then it will often get a response.  Another form is "I am curious about........."  You notice that both of these sentence forms are statements, and it is important to end the statement with a question tonality at the end.  It works best to just lay it out there as a statement to the universe about your state of mind.

Some others I have used are:

• I am really curious about what you will do for a living when you are older.
• I have been thinking a lot about whether or not you will want to go to college.
• Sometimes I just think about the type of person you will fall for.
• I think it will be interesting to see how you decorate your own home.
• I would like to know what you think about your teachers.
• I wonder which of your subjects is easiest, and which ones challenge you.

The form of the implied statement is an "I statement" about what is in your mind, which invites a comment from others.  One of the most powerful aspects of this approach is that it leads the listener to think about what you have shared, even if they don't respond.  The earlier statements lead the listener to think about his or her future, and the teachers and subjects.

The implied question can also be very influential when paired with references to the bond you have with someone else, or to a strength of the person.  For example:

• I wonder sometimes if you have any idea how great you are.
• I wonder when you will realize that you are liked by a lot of people.
• I don't think you know how much you are loved.  
• I don't think you get how good you are at .............

Now that I have shared this, I wonder how often you will think about how to use implied questions to open up dialogue with others.

The Search Institute is one of the leading organizations in the world in youth development.  Here Peter Benson outlines how to find the "Spark" in young people and help them thrive. Watch it, and explore with those around you.  What are the Sparks of those you love?

There is a common statement in youth development work "If you expect young people to do great things, they will do great things."  Young people around the nation have proven this time and time again, and it has helped reduce the stigma that young people aren't contributors.

I was very blessed early in my career to work with H. Stephen Glenn, and one of the most important things he taught me was the "EIAG Process".  He pointed out that an individual's perception is the key to their attitudes, motivation, and behavior.  Therefore, in order to deal with any behavior, it was important to understand the belief behind any behavior.  Also, if you wanted people to learn and apply, the teaching and learning process needed to tie content to someone's existing perceptions.  To do that, he taught the EIAG Process.

The process works fairly simply.  The first thing that occurs is any experience that has potential for learning.  It can be a lesson in a classroom, or it can be any situation that occurs and is followed by a conversation.  So the E in the EIAG process is Experience.

Once the experience is occurring and/or has occurred, you tie the experience to perception by first asking questions that challenge a listener to "Identify" those aspects of the experience which are important to him or her.  These are "What questions" like:

• What happened?
• What are you feeling?
• What did you see?
• What was important?

These questions help connect with the experience and identify the impact.

After this, the next goal is to help the person "Analyze" the significance of the experiences he or she has just identified.   To to this, you would ask "What" and "Why" questions like:

• Why was that significant?
• What caused that to happen?
• What is meaningful about it?
• What made that important?

These questions further build a perception of meaning in the moment about the experience.  However, people, especially young people often have trouble generalizing and applying learning across contexts.  In order to help with that, we ask "Generalizing questions" like:

• How can you use this?
• How is this valuable to you?
• In what way will this affect what you do in the future?
• What wisdom did you gain from this?
• What did you learn from this whole thing?

So, at the end of the process, we have helped someone identify what happened that might be useful or significant for them, helped them analyze the specific usefulness or significance, and invited them to think about how this learning would be usefule on a more global scale.  I invite you to try this with any of your students, children, or anyone else in your environment.  It does work. 

I have been reading Richard Bandler's Guide to Trance-formation: How to Harness the Power of Hypnosis to Ignite Effortless and Lasting Change. While I have always realized Richard Bandler was a genius, I have usually found books difficult to read.  This one, while it still has some challenges, has some gems that have really led me to pause and think about the work we do with children and others whose lives have been affected by trauma.

The most powerful possesion that most people have are their beliefs.  Many of us really can't even tell the difference between our beliefs and reality, because we filter reality through our beliefs.  Our beliefs tell us what we, and others, can and can't do.  I titled this post the Power(s) of Believing because believing has both incredibly powerful positive and negative potential.

For a number of years now, the research has indicated that the experience of trauma, especially repetitive trauma creates lasting changes in the brain.  Taken at a surface level, this could be very discouraging to those who want to help children and others who have been abused and neglected.  If someone's brain has been changed, then what can be done.  I have seen this research lead people to just accept and accommodate to the problems caused by trauma, rather than work to heal the effects.  They have read the research and developed limiting beliefs, beliefs that people can't be helped.

Henry Ford once said "Whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you are right..."  This is a very applicable statement for working with trauma survivors.  The power of believing we can't make a difference makes an incredible difference, in a negative direction.  There are many ways the lives of trauma survivors can be improved when those around them believe in their potentials.

The power of believing we can make a difference is even more powerful.  Trauma effects the brain, making measurable changes in brain function.  So does meditation, Tai Chi, being held, and any number of other experiences we can make available to a growing child, or even an adult client.  We need to be careful to read the research, know what the effects of trauma are, then work diligently to prove that those effects can be largely healed.  I have done this successfully, but haven't had the brain scans to prove it.

Neurolinguistic Programming began with this presupposition.  Richard Bandler and John Grinder sought out people with exceptional abilities, used a methodology they labelled "modeling" to codify what these people actually did, as opposed to what they thought they did.  This presupposition, along with another one "People can learn anything if you break the "chunk" sizes down small enough" allowed them to replicate excellence in many areas.

Modeling allows us to observe and interview people with excellent abilities and create a model of how they do it, then teach others how to do it.  This led, among other things, to the NLP "Strategies" model, in which we are able to identify how people do things now, such as make decisions, and then teach them a new process which was learned from excellent decision makers.  

One of the most frequent applications is to help people improve their abilities to learn.  One of my associates adopted a nonverbal autistic child who had been in Kindergarten in an institution for three years.  Using this presupposition, along with incredible love and the persistence of both herself and schools, has the boy going into mainstreamed sixth grade, doing age appropriate work.  She very consistently modelled how he learned, then found materials which would use those strengths, while stretching him to learn in new ways.  The only downside was the investment of thousands in learning materials that the schools didn't have and couldn't even legally use.

This has been my basis of learning for years, and has caused some stress in my life.  When I wanted to learn something, I intuitively sought out someone who did it well and asked that person, or those people to teach me.  It resulted in a wide variety of skills, but difficulties in convincing others that I had the skills, as they weren't learned in a university.  

One of the best applications of this approach, which predates NLP by thirty or so years is the work or Reuven Feuerstein with his theories and methodologies of cognitive modifiability.  Since the end of World War Two, he has been successfully mediating and improving cognitive abilities of children and actually improving IQ.  His latest book, Beyond Smarter, Mediated Learning and the Brain's Capacity for Change, from Teacher's College Press outlines how his process works for increasing a young person' ability to learn.  

This presupposition challenges us to think of possibilities in ways that most cultures inhibit.  We tend to develop beliefs in limitations, and, whether or not those beliefs are true, defend them.  This sabotages both global human development, and the success of the individual.

So, ask yourself what you would like to do that you haven't learned, find someone who is good at it, and stretch yourself.  It can be fun.  For my older readers, it also helps stall the onset of senility.

There was an exciting development in the Indianapolis Star this morning.  The Lilly Foundation donated 2.5 million dollars to Mind Trust, an organization dedicated to educational reform in Indianapolis.  Indiana has become a very reform minded state, with Mind Trust, and the Indianapolis Mayor's Office, having paved the way for innovative change.

This year, the Governor and Superintendent of Public Instruction led the way in getting a number of controversial education reforms passed which gives the state the ability to charter schools, allows for vouchers for private schools, and both makes it possible to give performance increases to good teachers, and to terminate underperforming teachers.  

While teachers' unions and others might be uncomfortable with the new legislation, changes are necessary in the Indiana educational system, especially in Indianapolis Public Schools.  As someone who has worked with this system and other systems since the 1970s, I am much more interested in looking through the lense of improvement rather than that of change.  

For example, Mind Trust is very supportive of Teach for America, which recruits top college graduates and brings them to Indianapolis to teach.  The New Teacher project is another organization with which they are involved.  The only downside here is that the most intelligent people don't necessarily make the best teachers.  Sometimes they are the worst.  I graduated from the Indiana University School of Education several years ago, and several of my classmates went on to be classroom teachers.  Of the ones who stayed in education and became outstanding teachers, only one was a top graduate and obviously smarter than the rest of us.  I have always been in awe of him, but most of my smartest classmates left education after a few years.  Two of the best three of my peers graduated towards the middle of our class and became awesome teachers with long careers and a number of accolades.  

The traits of good teachers are often more relational than content centered.  Anyone who has taught or been around teaching knows that the abilities to control a classroom in ways that young people like and accept, develop relationships with your most motivated, least motivated and all the students in the middle, and facilitate learning for everyone in the room are the traits of good teachers. It is far more about quality of heart and love than about degree of intelligence.

Unfortunately, in the current environment, the teachers who work the hardest and do the best jobs will frequently be the ones we leave.  One friend of mine, an excellent educator, is taking an early buyout from her school system because it is a good financial deal and she knows she can do other things.  A more critical factor in this case is the loss of wisdom.  My friend is an excellent mentor to young teachers and the system is losing this asset.  Current teacher evaluation methodologies often leave too much room for political bias and result in good teachers receiving bad evaluations.  Excellent teachers are youth advocates and that isn't always popular with administrators.

Two other people I know in the system who aren't so excellent, are staying because they are in a secure job and lack the confidence to do other things.  This isn't the intent of the system, but early buyouts usually cull the best older workers rather then the worst.  

I point this out, because it is a change, but it isn't an improvement.  Developing new and less political ways of evaluating teacher performance, improving the performance of those who can improve and moving the ones out of the system who can't is not just a change, it is an improvement.  Bringing in people who want to teach, love to teach and can teach is an improvement.  Bringing in people because they are smart is a change, but not necessarily an improvement.  We need to be very deliberate an thoughtful about this difference and not cause more harm than good in our strategies.

Lilly, Mind Trust, and all those pushing these reforms are to be commended.  I only hope that the mantra of change is tempered with the wisdom necessary to actually produce improvements.  If so, our city and state will benefit greatly.