CoachBri’s Blog

These four premises or conditions are embedded deep in our personal psychology and are the root cause of conflict and misery within all our relationships.

Premise One
Most people think that when we feel something the source of that feeling is outside ourselves. In our belief system we have been conditioned to think that a stimulus from outside forces us to think, feel or do something. In our language we use phrases like: “You make me so mad!”, “You hurt my feelings!”, “You pushed my buttons!” or “You make me angry!”. This first premise gets practiced the most when we take information personally. We seem to do this more when we are under pressure.

Premise Two
This premise is practiced when we don’t feel good and we blame that feeling on someone or something outside of ourselves. So people will say something like this: “I don’t feel good and it’s your fault”. These people are blamers.

Premise Three
In the third premise people often use language like, “Not only do I not feel good but I know how you should change”. This behavior is about taking one’s unhappiness and trying to change other people or other situations rather than change.

Premise Four
Premise four is practiced when, as we mature in our lives, we gather a sense of what we know is best for us. Then we get this tremendous insight that begins to be practiced in our relationships which is this: “Not only do I know what’s best for me, I also know what’s best for you”. Or, simply put, I know what’s best for everyone else. When this happens this is one of the greatest sources of human misery within a relationship. Knowing what one is best for people immediately creates disconnection. especially with teenagers.

I believe that anyone can take any relationship in their life that they are having problems in and see one or more of these premises being practiced. These premises are practiced in many sophisticated ways in our behaviors. Here are some of the ways that they are practiced:

Habit One
The most damaging habit of all is the habit of criticism. If you want to make your relationship better with anyone, stop criticizing.

Habit Two
The next habit that destroys relationship is humiliating people to control them. I think this speaks for itself.

Habit Three
The third habit is blaming other people for one’s mood. Often people that practice this habit are faultfinders.

Habit Four
The fourth habit is the habit of complaining. People love to complain to avoid self-evaluation.

Habit Five
The fifth habit is nagging. No one ever likes to be nagged about anything. Do it and it destroys connection.

Habit Six
The sixth habit is the silent treatment, which is not to be mistaken for planned ignoring. The silent treatment is the behavior that someone does in order to gain control of the situation and punish.

Habit Seven
Habit number seven is a combination of punishing and rewarding behavior. People often like the rewards but hate the rewarder. If punishments worked in deterring people’s behaviors our criminal institutions would be empty.

Habit eight
The eighth habit is the habit of guilting people. Guilting people into doing what you want them to do is manipulation. No one likes to be manipulated.

I’m stopping here although there are many more of these external control habits that we practice in our relationships. You only have to examine what you’re doing under pressure to reveal more ineffective behavioral choices you make. Good luck with that!

Coach bri

I recently spent the three days at one of the local high schools in my county dealing with at-risk students. I am always amazed at how these students respond to straight up communication and no games. One of the elements of dealing with students at risk is that they have a great bullshit monitor. As soon as they hear it, they know it!

I am often asked by teachers, “What are some of the things that I can do to continue what you’re doing in my class?” This is a very difficult question to answer because they’re not me and I’m not them. But what each teacher has to do is to remove all coercion from the classroom. The emphasis of the teacher must be on building a comfortable environment and a healthy relationship with the students. At-risk students are at risk students because of unmet needs in their life. The unmet needs that they have experienced (which most are unaware of) flow out of the poor relationships in their lives with their parents and other adults. If you come from a family where mom and dad who didn’t have good parenting skills (for those lucky enough to have a mom and dad), then this sets the ground for trouble.

Many at-risk youth that I deal with are disconnected from the thoughts, feelings and behaviors in their relationships. Often the behaviors they use as a defense are the same ones practiced by their parents because of their ineffective relationships with their children. You often hear these students say that they are picked on; this sense of being picked on comes from a perception that the world is a hostile place. Because of this sense of hostility, they are just trying to survive and therefore are not really accountable for their behavior. The second defense used by kids is often blame. Blame is used so that a person doesn’t have to be responsible for their actions. Another popular defense mechanism for youth at-risk is criticism. Criticizing as a behavior gives the person using the behavior a chance to feel that they have some power in that situation. Therefore many at-risk students use criticism as a way of hurting others to protect themselves. Really it is the idea that “I will get you before you get me”. Another defense is the defense of the victim. Here the student uses what he does as a tool of revenge to justify his behavior. Keeping it as a justification prevents the person from self-evaluating their destructive behavior. Another defense these at risk students use is denial. This behavior is very difficult to deal with because it doesn’t allow the teacher to process with the student their involvement in the present situation. This prevents the setting of limits needed to keep everybody safe. Another tactic used by at risk youth is withdrawal. Here the person totally shuts down and tunes out and uses their tuning out to avoid the chance of looking at behavioral change or choices within a situation.

These disconnected students practice these external control behaviors and are masters at it. As a matter of fact, they’re so good at it it takes enormous strength and courage to deal with these behaviors in a group setting. All of these behaviors set up by at risk student to engage the teacher in a power struggle. If this is accomplished, conflict will be produced as well as the confirmation that all adults are useless. Teachers need to understand that these troubled students are experts at what they do. By perpetuating disconnected relationships, both the teacher and the student do not have to self-evaluate and look at the choices they are making in the relationship together to get along. What really is happening in the situation of conflict is people have moved away from behaviors that meet their needs. Conflict quickly comes to an end when one person gives up the fight and puts the relationship ahead of the conflict. To become emotional in a situation with a student renders the teacher helpless because they soon become part of the problem.

External control psychology practiced by students in a classroom has four basic premises. The first premise is reacting to information and convincing them that they have no choice. The second premise is when things go wrong, blame others for the miserable way they feel in the learning environment. The third is trying to change the learning environment so that success or ineffectiveness is not tied to the choices that the student is making but rather how the environment isn’t changing for the student. The fourth premise is worked out in the classroom when the teacher tries to use coercion, to tell the student that the teacher knows what’s best for them. The student practices back this fourth premise by trying to convince the teacher that what they’re teaching is useless to them and, more importantly, not worth knowing. When any of these four premises are practiced in the classroom (and I believe many times they are), the environment becomes a battleground. Teachers spend most of their time trying to put out fires in relationships and less time teaching.

What I was discussing was violence at school and we discussed the latest shooting in Finland, I asked the class how they felt about it. One young man replied he thought the whole thing was hysterical. He was quickly challenged by his peers and criticized heavily for saying what he said. This disconnected youth was a master at setting up conflicts within the classroom as a means to satisfy his need for power. Not taking the information personally, I asked this student to describe to me what was hysterical about the situation. As soon as he had the floor he used the behavior of withdrawing to set up the next power struggle. When the youth saw that I was interested in what he thought because he thought it and wasn’t interested in criticizing him for what he thought, he had a difficulty dealing with the information. He didn’t know where to go from there. In that situation I rescued the student by saying that in this classroom you can think what you want to think and say what you want to say. I also stated that I’m interested in how you think and also how you feel and whenever you want to share, please feel free to do so.

As I said earlier, these at-risk youth are way better at disconnecting then we are at connecting and that’s what the problem is. My advice to any teacher is to always ind new and better ways to connect with the student. Remove all external psychology from the classroom and create an atmosphere to satisfy the needs. And show kindness and compassion in the most difficult times. At the same time, let the student know what you stand for as a person and what you’re willing to live with, what you’re going to ask them to do and what you will not ask them to do. This is setting limits and boundaries for students. Structure allows the student to find themselves in the classroom, as long as the relationship comes first and the structure second.

Coach bri