Dr. Stuart Ablon
speaker
223 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Dr. Stuart Ablon’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
It is an absolute pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Well, I think in essence, people could find that conflict in their life could decrease substantially. People could find that they're able to repair relationships with people they care about, love, work with, raise. And people could build skills, skills in areas like flexibility and frustration tolerance and problem solving and empathy. So those are some of the things.
I would say a couple of them. One is that still today, despite all the things that we've learned, which we'll talk about, I'm sure, challenging behavior or concerning behavior is still tragically misunderstood and mistreated. And if we can just shift our thinking to better understand what causes it, there's so much opportunity to be helpful in a variety of different ways.
So I think that's one of the things.
Yes.
You know, it depends on the age of the person you're talking about and the setting. But we're talking about everything from tantrums to with younger children to the kind of concerning behavior with teens that keeps adults up at night to the challenges that people have with their spouse's behavior, their in-laws behavior, their colleagues behavior.
Well, the good news is we've seen it get better in the So it's proven, but that's not to really diminish the fact that wherever you're experiencing concerning behavior from folks, you know, it's incredibly frustrating. Like, it's really hard to deal with and it pisses us off. And, you know, so it's really hard to sort of keep our calm and be able to respond in ways that are effective.
But I think we've got some ways to sort of reframe understanding the challenging behavior that can position people in a totally different place.
You got it. And your question before of sort of what have I learned over 30 years? The other thing I've learned is that, and this is probably one of the most, I think, important findings in social science research about helping people. And we're talking about any kind of person, kid, adult.
If you're trying to help somebody with anything related to their behavior, what we've learned over the years is there's only really one reliable predictor of helping somebody to change their behavior. And the good news is it's also the most powerful one. What is it? It's the degree of helping relationship between helper and and help-y, the degree of helping relationship.
And when I say helping relationship, what I mean by that is a collaboration born of empathy, of understanding, of nonjudgmental acceptance. So it's sort of working together on hard things, but coming from that nonjudgmental perspective. And that's what we find, whether it's in therapy or in schools or all kinds of places, that's the biggest predictor of helping somebody to change their behavior.
Absolutely. And also, you know what? I've got a philosophy that all of our work flows from. It's a pretty simple one. When we apply it to kids, it goes like this. Kids do well if they can. Oh. Not kids do well if they want to, but kids do well if they can. And what that means is if a kid could do well, they would do well.
And the reality is, you know, in all the years I've done this, I've never met a kid who prefers doing poorly to doing well. And now substitute that word kid with adult, with spouse, with partner, with coworker, with mother-in-law, you name it. Yep. People do well if they can. It's true. Everybody wants to do well and wants to have healthy, happy relationships with others.
There's just things getting in the way sometimes. And when you're saying like, all these people that might piss you off, but how do I get them to change their behavior? I hate to say it, but they may be saying the same about you because they're surely saying the same about me at times as well.
And so it's really about how do we come to some mutual understanding and how do we collaborate with one another? And what we found is we've sort of developed a bit of a formula for how to do that. And we'll see that not only does it sort of have proven results, but it maps on to how our brains work, how our brains process information.
And to boil it down a little bit, when somebody's pissing you off with their behavior, you want to sort of tell them what to do. And the reality is they're never going to listen to you unless you start by listening to them. And we'll talk about exactly what a formula of that looks like.
You got it.
Yes. And here's why, though. Okay. Tell me why. Well, because if you believe kids do well if they can. Yes. Or people do well if they can. Yes. What you're doing is you're embracing a mindset shift because that's not the most common way of thinking about people and their behavior, especially when they're behaving in ways that piss you off. Right. Or are very concerning. Right.
The more common way of thinking about it is kids do well if they want to.
And if you believe kids do well if they want to, and a kid's not doing well, you're going to assume the reason they're not doing well is because they don't want to. Yes. So then what are you going to do about it? You're going to try to- Pressure them. Make them want to. Correct. And we start this very early on with kids, with rewards and consequences and things like that.
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