Chris Parry-Mitchell and The Behaviour Management Toolkit

I have been good friends with Chris Mitchell for a while now and this week had the pleasure of her company over coffee and a cup of tea in Blackburn's nicest cafe, The Coffee Exchange. It was great to see her again, happy and healthy. It was a great chance to catch up, and for me to talk at length about David Allen's book, Getting Things Done, and my personal quest to improve workflow and productivity. Not only did Chris stay awake during this (and she was drinking tea, not coffee) but she listened and gave good advice and inspired me to make changes; but what else would one expect from the author of The Behaviour Management Toolkit? 

I have to declare an interest at this stage, because not only is Chris a friend of mine, but we also share a common perspective on working with people and have similar training, often with the same Neuro Linguisitc Programming (NLP) practitioners and trainers. Indeed there are many similarities between Chris's work on avoiding exclusion from school and the Proactive Carer Programme I developed and delivered with my friend, Adam Gibson of Lancashire Counselling Services. Both draw on NLP and Transactional Analysis and both share a common ethos, the fundamental principle that if you help people develop resources they will have more choices and their behaviour and circumstances will change in positive ways. There are other shared principles: the power of groups and group work and the need for passionate and committed leadership that encourages and equips individuals with the knowledge and skills to make small but significant changes. I often use a metaphor that someone gifted to me, that if you sail from Portsmouth to New York and you're one degree out at the beginning of your voyage, you'll be in a different country by the time you've crossed the Atlantic. Fine if you don't mind landing in Canada, but you get the idea: small changes over time yield significant results.

So what's in The Behaviour Management Toolkit and how useful might it be to teachers and trainers working with young people at the point of being excluded from mainstream education? It's a ten session programme, with all the handouts and worksheets on a CD-ROM taped to the back page. It aims to equip young people with the insight and skills needed to make different decisions, change their behaviour and get better outcomes. Almost 300 children have been through the programme run by Chris in Preston, Lancashire, and  more than 80% of those have remained in education. Now this could be the programme, it could be the expertise of Chris and her two colleagues, John and 'Swifty' (Andrew 'Swifty' Swift is an old student of mine, but I take no credit for the excellent practitioner he has become). More likely it's a combination of these factors as well as the potential all young people have to seize an opportunity to change when they are given the chance by adults who appreciate their struggles and care about their futures!

The Behaviour Management Toolkit applies some classic NLP patterns: the Mercedes Model, submodality shifts and an extremely effective perceptual positions exercise to educate group members about their own thoughts and feelings, the impact of their behaviour on others and why that matters. It uses ideas from TA (warm fuzzies, cold pricklies, the Drama Triangle and game playing) to help young people understand and take responsibility for how they communicate. Each session begins with participants identifying and sharing their achievements that week, creating positive feelings, generating positive feedback and helping to change internal filters so a young person starts to notice what's going well in their lives and not just what's going badly. The whole programme is well put together, so each session builds on the previous  one and models learnt early in the programme are reapplied later on. Chris says she responded to feedback  from her young participants, making changes and increasing the programme's relevance and effectiveness. I think it's a superb piece of work, but the ultimate test is, does it work? Well, the statistics and the participants' feedback says it does; and whenever I've visited the project I've noticed an atmosphere that's warm and safe and purposeful, and the young people I've met there are full of praise for Chris and her team.

I hope practitioners working with hurt young people and their sometimes challenging behaviour make use of the Toolkit. In a previous career I delivered offender programmes for the National Probation Service. These were based on the principles of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, an approach I much admire, but which, in that context, lacked the optimism and the humanistic underpinning found in The Behaviour Management Toolkit. I use it when teaching NLP based interventions to students on the BA (Hons) degree Working with Children and Young People at The University Centre at Blackburn College, a course that 'Swifty' graduated from several years ago! Congratulations to Chris Mitchell and her team, changing lives and living your mission!

Some Reflections on Self-esteem and Confidence

I've been co-facilitating group work sessions on self-esteem and confidence for a good few years now and each year another penny drops and I develop my understanding.

First of all - like fish and chips - self-esteem and confidence are related but quite different concepts. Self-esteem involves some kind of measurement, from the Latin aestimare meaning ‘estimate’. It involves a self-assessment - the measurement of our own self-worth.

Confidence also involves a measurement, it's an assessment of how well we (or someone else) can be relied upon to behave in a particular way or perform a certain task. So, I'm fairly confident that I can finish writing this blog, but I'm not confident that anyone will read it!

So what is the relationship between self-esteem and confidence? I can't answer this question fully. You would think that people with high self-esteem would also have high levels of self-confidence; but there are many people, some pop stars for example, who have very low self-esteem but are confident enough to get on stage and entertain thousands of people. Maybe this kind of incongruence is unsustainable, so eventually the whole façade comes crashing down. It seems to me that self-esteem is the foundation on which self-confidence is built and without firm foundations confidence can be pretty shaky. In contrast, if someone is confident about performing well at some task and they perform badly, then that can be generalised to, “I didn’t perform well, I am a loser”. It's an interesting interaction.

I think it is completely rational to have low self-esteem, especially in an unsafe environment like an abusive relationship or family. Low self-esteem has to be maintained just as much as high self-esteem, it's just that the maintenance of low self-esteem has become so automatic and effortless that we do it without thinking. Low self-esteem makes sense because it keeps us safe and prevents us from taking risks. Feeling we are not good enough to go for a new job justifies not applying and saves all the anxiety of going for the interview or the possible rejection of missing out. Low self-esteem keeps us safe, but at a huge cost because people with low self-esteem can miss out on the good stuff and on reaching their full potential.

Feed Your Self-esteem

On the groups I co-facilitate I try to help group members uncover the strategies they have for maintaining low self-esteem. For example, individuals develop ingenious ways of discounting compliments from others. Once that is exposed, an individual can choose healthier ways to handle positive feedback. I invite group members to list some ways they can "feed" their self-esteem, treats that cost nothing but make them feel good: having a hot bath, going for a walk, feeding the birds or writing a blog entry! It's our attitude that's important. Having a luxurious bath with candles and aromatherapy oils feeds our self-esteem much more than "a quick bath then we don't stink in the morning".

The final thing I ask group members to do to improve their self-esteem is to keep a diary for one week. I ask them to write in their diary each night three positive things that have happened to them during that day. At the next session they can read out their diary entries and re-live the positive things that have happened. Everyone who takes part in this experiment begins to feel a little more positive because instead of filtering for bad stuff, they are filtering for good stuff. They begin to notice what has been there all along, the small but significant events that feel good and contribute to our improved self-esteem.