Lessons from Camp

Memorial to Robert Baden-Powell, Westminster Abbey

Treasured Readers,

Last week I joined my elder son at the Tomahawk Scout Reservation, where he spent a week surrounded by great natural beauty, learning jokes about bodily functions.  He’s 11 years old; it was heaven.   I slipped our drycleaner an extra fiver to do what she could about the smell of his sleeping bag, and my own tent is now dry, packed, and ready for next year.

He learned more than just how to tell jokes or identify poisonous plants.  As we were driving back, he announced, “Dad, I learned something that I think will be really important.”  

“What was that,” I asked.  I’ll admit that I was a little frightened of what that might be.

“If you want people to work together and do a really good job, yelling at them isn’t a good way to get that.”

He was involved in a fire building contest, and there was some dissent on his team.  The leader’s yelling, he observed, only led to less cooperation.  My son concluded that the best way to persuade someone is to first listen to them,  “to understand why they’re doing what they’re doing, what they want.  Then you can tell them what you think, and after that you can usually work it out.”

“Yelling isn’t respectful; it just makes people angry,”  he continued.  “Even if you don’t convince them, people will work harder if they think you care about them.”

Holy smokes.  This kid was really paying attention.

My profound parental pride notwithstanding, my son discovered on his own, without high-priced training and consulting, one of the key lessons taught by ELA’s (very reasonably priced) training and consulting: ethical persuasion centers on respect, empathy, and then reasoning.  (Yelling rarely advances any such efforts).   He noted that it probably takes practice to get good at persuasion, but that skills in “making people feel good about working together” would be even more useful than building fires or treating snakebites.

Is it too early to recruit volunteers for his Senate campaign?