Three Strategies To Help You Be The Best You Can Be!

This blog was originally posted on Dr. Caren Baruch-Feldman’s website: http://drbaruchfeldman.com/blog-three-strategies-to-help-you-be-the-best-you-can-be/

In my previous blogs, I spoke about making and keeping positive habits, improving self-control, and increasing grit and resilience. For this month’s blog, I will be focusing on three key strategies that I have found incredibly helpful. The three strategies have in common that they 1) cool hot, immediate, and impulsive thinking 2) activate more long-term and thoughtful thinking, and 3) ultimately, allow you to be the person you truly want to be.

1. Make an Advantage Card

I first heard the idea of an “Advantage Card” when I attended Dr. Judith Beck’s Workshop on Cognitive Behavioral Strategies for Weight Loss. She recommended making an Advantage Card to help people lose weight. The idea behind the Advantage Card is to put in writing the advantages for your new, positive habit and to read it each day. An Advantage Card does not only have to be about losing weight. It can be used for any new habit you want to create. I have done Advantage Cards with children that focused on the advantages for calling out less, decreasing procrastination, or being less anxious. The Advantage Card is an effective tool because it places in the forefront what you want to accomplish in the long-term. However, it is not enough to have an Advantage Card. You need to pre-commit to where and when you will look at the card.

Take a minute now and make an Advantage Card for a habit you want to change. Or, encourage your child to make an Advantage Card for what he/she wants to change. You can’t change others so you can’t write an advantage card for another person (e.g., my child will pick up his dirty laundry). Once you have written your card, pick a time and place to read it. Many people choose to read their card first thing in the morning and to leave it on their night stand or in the bathroom. It only takes a minute to read, but it is well worth it.

2. WOOP It Out

Huh? Dr. Gabrielle Oettingen, the originator of WOOP, discusses this principle in her recent book, Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation. She has done numerous studies and has found that the WOOP technique has helped both children and adults change challenging, negative habits. So how does WOOP work?

W = Wish; O = Outcome; O = Obstacles; P = Plan (if-then)

The idea is that when one tries to increase self-control and/or develop a new habit, one should first imagine what it would feel like to have this wish (w) and outcome (o) occur. But then, just as important, one should imagine what the obstacles (o) are that prevent one’s wish and outcome from occurring. Lastly, one needs to make an if-then plan (p) for this obstacle.

For example, if I wanted to yell less at my children that would be my wish (wish). If I yelled less, I would be happier, my kids would be happier, and I would be a good role model (outcome). However, I don’t do this because the need to be right and getting my frustration off my chest takes over (obstacle). My plan then would be if I find myself yelling then I will remind myself that this is counterproductive and take a step back rather than a step forward (plan).

I used WOOP with a student who wanted to procrastinate less (wish). He imagined that if he procrastinated less, he would be less stressed, happier, and his parents would nag him less (outcome). However, he often procrastinated because he did not want to face the annoyance of the work (obstacle). His plan then was if I find myself procrastinating then I will remind myself of the WHOLE PICTURE and that although I may feel good in the moment, this lifestyle makes me stressed in the long-term (plan).

Dr. Mischel discusses in his book, The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control, that the beauty of an if-then plan is that it gives you time to consider your options and be better able to activate the cool, goal-oriented part of the brain, instead of acting based on what the hot, immediate gratification part of the brain wants.

3. Wait 10

I have a bracelet that says, “Wait 10.” The bracelet (an if-then plan) reminds me to wait 10 minutes before making any decision that my immediate gratification brain thinks is a good idea (e.g., eating carbohydrates after 9 PM). By waiting ten, I have found that I often, although not always, make better choices (drinking tea, instead of eating donuts).

I have made similar bracelets with the kids I work with (e.g., wait 10 before calling out or acting silly). By having a cooling down period, the children have been more successful in tapping into their long-term as opposed to their short-term selves. In addition, to the wait 10 bracelets, I have also made other bracelets with different saying (e.g., “the power of yet,” “breathe,” and “stop and think”) that serve to inspire our best selves.

My point in sharing these strategies with you is not to promote becoming a robot who never engages in fun activities, but rather to inspire adults and children to take charge of their fate, instead of submitting to the short-term, hedonistic part of the brain. Wishing you much success with the strategies 🙂 Caren Baruch-Feldman

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I will be giving a free workshop on this topic (Got Grit? Got Growth? Got Marshmallows? Increasing Self-Control and Resilience in Our Lives and the Lives of Our Children) at the Scarsdale library on Friday, March 6, 2015 from 12:30-1:45. Register with the library by going to http://calendar.scarsdalelibrary.org/event.php?id=894795. If you like these ideas, I encourage you to read Dr. Mischel’s, The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self Control and Dr. Oettingen’s, Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation. Dr. Oettingen’s has a WOOP app and website (/www.woopmylife.org). In addition, you can get WOOP worksheets at https://characterlab.org/goal-setting.

Please check out my website at drbaruchfeldman.com for additional blogs and articles.

Healthy Competition Is Not An Oxymoron

This article was originally published in the January/February 2015 issue of Camp Business magazine.

As a psychologist who works with schools and camps around the world, I am often asked whether competition is good or bad. Proponents of competition speak fondly of their athletic victories and about wanting the same experiences for the young people they serve. Competition, they say, builds character. It’s a competitive world out there, so we had better prepare our children.

Some critics of competition want every child to feel like a winner—always. Or, they want no child to feel like a loser—ever. As the Dodo Bird in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland remarked, “Everyone has won and all must have prizes!” Other critics don’t want to pit one child or one group against another because they feel it breeds aggression. Still other critics object to external rewards, such as grades or trophies or money, to motivate participation.

There is, in fact, some fascinating research pointing to the dangers of linking a desired behavior to an extrinsic reward. When the reward is removed, the behavior often disappears. It is true that intrinsic motivation is more durable and authentic. Fortunately, not all competition occurs in a radically behaviorist framework, where rewards or punishments shape all behaviors. In fact, research on happiness suggests that a focus on effort, the journey toward achievement, and sharing one’s expertise with others brings more lasting joy than winning a particular competition.

No camp director, teacher, coach, youth leader, or parent wants the type of competition that makes young people unduly anxious, that interferes with their performance and creativity, that treats them like trained puppies, or that makes them inherently uninterested. However, to eliminate competition altogether—as some critics argue—simultaneously eliminates opportunities to learn humility and grace.

Research on the negative aspects of unhealthy competition is mostly solid, but using it as a rationale for eliminating competition altogether may throw the baby out with the bathwater. Although some believe that “healthy competition” is a self-contradictory phrase, here is a different perspective.

An Emphasis On Community

The unhealthy competition I’ve witnessed is ubiquitous, focused exclusively on rewards or punishments that are belligerent, rude, critical, and unfair. A classic example is the child who, after a day at school where grades are the only object, is forced to play in a youth soccer league match where parents emphasize trophies, coaches berate kids, spectators scold the referees, one team has vastly greater talent than the other, and not every child gets to play. Life doesn’t have to be that way.

A healthy alternative to cutthroat competition is cooperative competition. This may also seem like a contradiction in terms, but when competition creates only a little anxiety, demands fair play, emphasizes fun, and adopts a growth mindset, then young people’s performance can be enhanced and they learn to make moral decisions independent of adult caregivers.

Cooperative competition emphasizes the following:

Praising effort, not outcomes. Whereas vapid praise is useless, pointing out specific, incremental accomplishments builds self-esteem. The baseball coach who tells her player, “You stepped into it, swung level, and made contact” is doing a better job than the coach who simply says, “Nice cut,” and is a far better approach than the coach who screams, “Come on! Park that thing! You swing like a baby!”
Focusing on strengths. Instead of comparing a player to his teammates, such as, “Why can’t you kick the ball with the side of your foot like Robbie?” focus on strengths. The coach who tells his player, “You’re passing well. Let’s try that corner kick again” is capitalizing on what’s intrinsically rewarding to a child by focusing on her strengths.
Having fun, but not at the expense of others. The joy of any game should not be in the winning or losing, and certainly not in the harming of others, but in the playing of the game and the cultivation of connections. To that end, cooperative competition emphasizes cheers, not jeers, and handshakes, not prizes. The coach who insists on giving the opposing team a cheer and a handshake, regardless of the outcome, understands cooperative competition.
Engaging children in discussions about their own behavior. Instead of criticizing or praising a particular action, teammates and adult supervisors can ask questions, such as, “Tell me about your decision to pass the ball to Jessie” or “What’s the booing about for you?” or “I see you sitting on the bench texting while your teammates are out there.” Simple questions and process comments prompt sportsmanship and collaboration.
Emphasizing teamwork. Every individual behavior affects others. Pointing that out to children as the behavior is happening builds strong teams and communities. Rather than say, “Stop hogging the ball,” you could say, “Look to see who is open. Work together.” Win or lose, the post-game debrief is another opportunity to emphasize teamwork. To wit: “Our performance was best when players stayed in their zone” or “I liked how the bench encouraged the players on the field” or “We fought hard. What do we need to work on, as a team, during the next practice?”
The cornerstone of cooperative competition is how the adults in charge frame the game or activity. Just about any game can be set up in a friendly or unfriendly way, just as any activity can be explained in a way that promotes anxiety and hurts performance and self-esteem.

Is Winnerless Worthless?

Inadvertently inane—both physically and psychologically—are competitions without any winner at all. Naturally, not every activity should be or can be competitive. When I mow my lawn while listening to 1980s tunes on my noise-cancelling headphones, nobody wins. I enjoy it, especially if it’s a sunny day. Mowing is a decent exercise, and I get a Zen-like pleasure looking at the finished pattern. My stepfather, on the other hand, refers to all yard work as “pure psychic pain.” He’d rather be fly-fishing. According to him, standing thigh-deep in rushing water swinging a hand-tied bundle of bird feathers at a spot where you think there might be a fish is fun. Together we prove that noncompetitive activities have an inherent fun quotient, and that that value varies markedly from one person to the next.

The controversy lies not with our varying experiences of inherently noncompetitive activities, however. It lies more with eliminating competition altogether, or amplifying it to absurd levels. On the latter point, much has been written. Rabid soccer moms and hockey dads be warned. On the former point, let’s pause to assess the outcome and our motives. Sometimes, in a misguided attempt to protect youngsters from a type of moderate competition that is healthy and fun, we dial the knob down so low that we create new dangers.

Consider this example from a games “expert” who suggested an interesting variation on musical chairs. Instead of having the last player standing sit out on each successive round, all of the players will try to sit on fewer and fewer chairs. In that way, no one is ever out, and some would argue there is no risk that anyone would feel like a loser. (Is anyone ever traumatized by being out in musical chairs? Alas.)

I’ve played this game at camp with kids and made several discoveries. First, the game results in more injuries than in regular musical chairs. Trying to get eight or nine kids to sit or somehow balance on a single chair has the potential to be an excellent cooperative game. However, there also tend to be lots of stubbed toes and pinched fingers. Second, there is often more peer criticism than with regular musical chairs. I heard kids say, “You’re too fat to hang on” and “My sister’s more coordinated than you.”

What I learned was that no game or activity is inherently healthy. The wacky version of musical chairs cannot guarantee that some kids won’t feel like losers when the game is over. It is entirely possible that the more-coordinated children will feel good about how they were able to scramble together and balance on the chair, and the less-coordinated ones will feel as if they’ve let the group down, or worse.

Of course, it’s also possible that if someone ran that activity better than I did on my first try, the entire group would have fun and leave feeling good about themselves. That is precisely my point. Skilled teachers, coaches, camp staff, and parents can supervise baseball, musical chairs, or basket-weaving and make it either a constructive or destructive experience for children. There are rules to follow, skills to learn, and strengths to capitalize on. There are friendships to be cultivated, ethical decisions to be made, and successes to be experienced.

Winning With Humility, Losing With Grace

What builds character is not keeping a stiff upper lip when your team loses, or when your painting of a horse looks like that of a cow. What builds character is having others like you for who you are, not how you perform. What builds character is having adults who provide success experiences and set good examples for children. What builds character is being supported in achieving a challenging goal. And what builds character is the self-discipline to persevere—to reattempt—after failure.

One of the best examples of this type of leadership I ever witnessed was, coincidentally, in a game of traditional musical chairs at camp. The first person out was actually one of the cabin leaders. He threw his arms up in the air and shouted, “Now, here’s how you get out in style!” He then boogied out of the circle by combining some break-dancing moves with a beat-boxing he made up on the spot.

You can imagine what followed. Each successive child who was out made up his own hip-hop or song-and-dance routine. There was no arguing, of course, because the campers saw that it was as much fun to get out as it was to stay in. No one felt like a loser, at least not for long. Everyone just laughed and asked to play again.

It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how adults frame the game.

Dr. Christopher Thurber is a psychologist, author, and father. He serves on the faculty of PhillipsExeterAcademy in Exeter, N.H., and is the director of content for Expert Online Training.

Got Grit? Got Marshmallows? Increasing Self–Control and Resilience in the Lives of Our Children: Part 2

This article was originally published ob Caren Baruch-Feldman’s website: http://drbaruchfeldman.com/part-2-got-grit-got-growth-got-marshmallows-increasing-self-control-and-resilence/

I left you with a cliff hanger. Although I told you the importance of grit and self-control in the previous article, I didn’t go into details as to what strategies you can use. You had to WAIT! But as cookie monster says, “Good things come to those that wait.” This idiom is true for you as well. In Part 2 of this blog, I will discuss strategies parents and teachers can use to increase self-control, grit, and resilience in their children.

Grit and self-control go hand-in-hand. Self-control is about delaying gratification and resisting temptations, while grit is about persevering and remaining on track. Grit is about how to keep saying “yes” (e.g., staying with a difficult task) when yes is needed.

Whereas self-control is often about how to say, “no” (e.g., not eating the marshmallow, not yelling), when no is needed. According to Dr. Duckworth, “grit is passion and perseverance, sticking with your future, day in and day out.”

How do you encourage grit, self-control, and resilience in your children?

1. Don’t swoop in. It is easy as a parent to break into the “mama tiger,” the part of you that wants to protect your children and solve their issues. However, for small matters, resist! Having some challenges to overcome is good for children. For example, as an Elementary School psychologist, I often help youngsters who are experiencing friendship issues. Although I feel for the children (mostly girls) going through it, I know that these experiences will give them strength, thicker skin, and grit later on.

2. We need to be gritty about our kids being gritty. As parents and teachers, we should make it okay for children to face challenges because that is where learning takes place. As teachers, we should create classrooms where trying, struggling, and taking risks are as important, or even more important, as getting the answer correct. Children need to become comfortable with the struggle so they see it as just a normal part of learning.

3. We need to encourage a growth mindset. How do we do that? Help your children to see that when a challenge arises, there is always an opportunity for growth, change, and evolution. Dr. Carol Dweck, in her book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, describes the difference between a “fixed” and a “growth mindset.” A fixed mindset means that an individual has a set amount, or a fixed amount of talents and abilities. Individuals with a fixed mindset often go through life avoiding challenges and failure. They don’t apply themselves. Why should they? Their talents are fixed. Kids with fixed mindsets can often easily navigate the younger grades, but when they face their first challenge in the later grades, fallapart and quit, rather than persevere. In contrast, individuals with a growth mindset believe that their ability to learn is not fixed, but can change with effort. Failure is not seen as a permanent condition, but rather one from which to grow.

4. Praise the process, not the product. Dr. Dweck speaks about the importance of parents and teachers praising the process as opposed to the product. By doing so, children will be more willing to grow and challenge themselves rather than play it safe. As parents and teachers, we need to move away from “you are so smart” and instead to “you must have worked really hard.”

5. Change the mindset. For all these strategies, one needs to change one’s mindset. Certain mindsets elicit the long-term part of the brain to emerge, and certain mindsets encourage the short-term, immediate gratification part to come out. For example, distracting oneself, not focusing on the hot aspects of the item (looking, smelling, and touching), changing the item to something less desirable, and focusing on the end goal, encourages self-control, grit, and resilience. The point is not to be a robot who never engages in fun activities, but instead to have yourself or your children be in charge of their fate, instead of having the short-term, hedonistic part of the brain take over.

In summary, we need to encourage our children to live their lives as though it were a marathon and not a sprint, to perceive challenges as setbacks to overcome, and failures as learning opportunities. Lastly, we need to lead by example, share our own gritty times, and remind our children that what is often most meaningful comes with work and effort.

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If you like these ideas, I encourage you to read Dr. Mischel’s, The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self Control, and Dr. Dweck’s, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Dr. Tough’s, How Children Succeed. In addition, please see Dr. Angela Duckworth’s TED Talk on grit. Dr. Dweck also has an interesting website – http://www.mindsetworks.com (check out brainology). I also wanted to share the following you-tube videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmW3H-EXYS0 and Life= Risk–Motivation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yetHqWODp0.

I will be giving a free workshop on this topic (Got Grit, Got Growth, Got Marshmallows? Increasing Self-Control and Resilience in Our Lives and the Lives of Our Children) at the Scarsdale library on Friday, March 6, 2015 from 12:30-1:45. Register with the library by going to http://calendar.scarsdalelibrary.org/event.php?id=894795

Dr. Caren Baruch-Feldman has had success using Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to help children and adults with depression, anxiety, stress, ADHD and weight loss. She maintains a private practice in Scarsdale and works part-time as a school psychologist in Westchester County, New York. Caren is expert in conducting and interpreting psycho-educational evaluations. For many years Caren was the Camp Psychologist at Camp Ramah in Nyack, NY. Caren has trained hundreds of teachers, administrators, parents and heathcare professionals giving in-service workshops and lectures throughout the country. Caren can be reached at (914) 646-9030