Supercoach - Michael Neill [4]
Here’s another example, one that might hit closer to home: Imagine you’re having difficulties with your resident teenager. You want them to help out around the house and be more respectful toward you and your partner, but they seem determined to set a new world record for “most dirty clothes piled up in one corner of a bedroom.”
At Level I, you could go in guns a-blazing and order them to pick up their dirty clothes “or else.” You might even try a subtler approach—the dangling carrot of concert tickets or a shopping trip to the nearest mall in exchange for a cleaner room.
At Level II, you would read parenting books that would tell you how to handle discipline problems with teens, or even one on how to handle difficult people at work in the hopes that you could map it across to your own child at home. (Of course, if you come across a copy of What to Do When You Work for an Idiot in their bedroom, chances are they’re planning a little Level II intervention with you!)
But at Level III, you would know that what’s called for is a shift in perspective—a new way of seeing the situation.
For example, when my daughter Clara was six, she went through a period of violent temper tantrums that frightened her teachers to the point where they were considering either putting her on medication or kicking her out of school. My wife and I had no clue what to do about it, so we turned to one of my mentors, supercoach Bill Cumming.
He helped us by approaching the situation on all three levels simultaneously. At Level I, he would continually check in with us to ensure that we were doing okay within ourselves—that is, we were getting adequate sleep, food, and exercise and doing whatever else we needed for spiritual self-care.
At Level II, he taught us some wonderful strategies for dealing with difficult children. The one that sticks in my mind is the two C’s: clarity and consistency. We got clear about what was and wasn’t okay, and we were consistent in our enforcement of those rules.
However, what made the biggest difference, and has stayed with us to this day, was the Level III intervention. In working with Bill, we came to realize that the only reason someone would behave in the way Clara was behaving was if the person felt unwell within themselves. As we began to see the discomfort in Clara that was leading to her acting out, it became much easier not to take her behavior personally, as if it was her way of punishing us for our parenting failures.
More important, any catastrophizing we’d been doing in our heads about how this would be a problem for the rest of her life, and if it was this bad now, “imagine how bad it will be when she’s a teenager,” fell away. We began to see her as a little girl doing the best she could to control her environment, and knew that when she had better strategies at her disposal, her innate wisdom and common sense would guide her to use them. That made it easy and natural to feel the full force of our love for her, even when she was behaving in ways that were shocking and at times a little bit frightening for us. Instead of sending her to her room when she had a tantrum in a behaviorist effort to “extinguish” the unwanted behavior, I began to go into her room with her and just quietly be with her as she worked through whatever it was she was working through.
At first, she didn’t seem to like our new approach. Instead of simply putting holes in the walls of her bedroom, she seemed hell-bent on putting a few in my head. But after a few tantrums, she somehow recognized that she was safe with us—and that feeling of safety allowed some protective mechanism inside her to let go and her natural wisdom to come back to the fore.
Now, six years later, Clara is more secure in herself and her thinking than most adults. And while we may well butt heads at some point during her teenage years, it’s far more likely to be due to something triggered in us than in her!
Ten Sessions to Transform Your Life
“All people occasionally stumble across the truth,
but most pick themselves up and continue
as if