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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But in essence, as long as we sort of have more power over somebody, we never quit trying to do that, motivating people to behave better, which is all fine and well if what is standing in somebody's way, is a lack of motivation.
And if you're trying to motivate somebody when motivation isn't the issue, not only is it not going to be effective, but it might make matters much worse. And we can talk about what I mean by that. So when you shift your focus and you say, kids do well if they can, people do well if they can, what you're saying is, if that person could do well, they would do well. And if they're not,
Something else is getting in their way. And I personally don't buy that it's just a lack of motivation. And now here's where the research comes in. Because we have about 50 years of research in the neurosciences that has shown beyond the shadow of a doubt that people who struggle to manage their behavior, they actually don't lack the will to behave well.
What they lack are the skills to behave well. Skills in areas like problem solving, flexibility, frustration tolerance. And I can give you fancier names for those things, clinical names.
You got it.
And it sets you up to sort of collaborate, to help, to be a helper. Because when you sort of define this as a lack of motivation, then what it sets you up to do is to try to sort of use power or control to try to motivate somebody.
And I want to point out something because you said something really important a moment ago. You know, there's a difference between just being aggravated by somebody's behavior. Yes. And being aggravated, but also really concerned and hopeless and worried. Yes. And as a parent, there is no worse feeling.
Yes.
This is a girl I worked with in the Boston public schools who was having a really hard time both at home and at school managing her behavior. And she both was a sort of what I call an exploder and an imploder.
So exploder means like she would, scream. She turned over her desk. She would throw things. She'd hit other people. An imploder means she would quietly put her head down and cry. She would sneak out of the room and ask to go to the bathroom and not come back. She would shut down.
And to me, by the way, all these are, these are different flavors of saying, I'm having a hard time handling something with the skills I have. Yeah. Why would a kid choose to do any of those things if they could handle the situation better? You know, kids do well if they can. Why does this get you so emotional? Because just kids being misunderstood. Yeah. and mistreated.
And it doesn't have to be that way. We know better. You know, we know better. We have to do better. We have to do better. And I don't blame us because like, this is how it works in history. We learn. Conventional wisdom gets overturned and we learn better. And it takes a while until we change our practices.
And we're in that period now, which is why I'm thankful for you helping spread the word here because we can shift our thinking and do better here. We don't have to lose kids. And I just looked at this girl's letter and I've seen this a million times and it still makes me emotional every time because this girl was struggling so much.
And they used a sort of classic sticker chart to try to motivate her to behave better. Right. You know, like get stuff if you behave well. Yeah. And it wasn't working great. And I asked her, you know, when I was meeting with her, I asked her what's happening with it. She's not great at letting people know what's bothering her and things. Yeah. But she would write for me. Yes.
She could do it in written form. And she could draw things. Yeah. And so I asked her, you know, how the thing was going, the sticker chart. And she wrote this for me. And it says, my brain is idiotic. I make stupid mistakes. I mess everything up. I always make a mess and get hurt and ruin everything. And that's a kid we're trying to motivate to behave better. You got to be kidding me.
I mean, how we missed the mark. This kid, more motivated than anybody in the face of the earth to behave well. Why? Because she didn't want to feel this way. So Sherry has all the internal motivation in the world. Last thing we want to do is send her the message. We don't think you're trying hard enough.
Well, so what I want to say to them is that it starts, most importantly, from this place of mindset.
And that we've got to take ourself out of this position of wanting to make somebody change, impose our will upon them in some way, whether we do that harshly or nicely. And what we need to do is remember this person's doing the best they can to handle what the world is throwing at them with the skills they're able to bring to bear in that moment.
And so what we wanna do is we wanna try to help figure out what are they struggling with so much? Which skills are they having a hard time accessing? And how can we help them with those things? How can we help problem solve? How can we help them build skills? And I have good news here, too, is the skill building process.
It's not something where you're going to send your kid or somebody out to have somebody else build their skills. You can help them do that. And it's not by some sneaky process. It's just by collaborating with them on practicing problem solving, but using the real life problems that they're confronting.
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