Problem Solving in 60 Minutes
When families malfunction they may not know how to do target correction. Do not play the blame game! Use win-win techniques.
Agree on some ground rules for your quarrels.
Quality Progress (Redmond, 2007, 80) moves people closer to a solution in 60 minutes with four basic tools. Redmond’s suggestions are similar to those made by Richard Feder and John Mitchell nineteen years earlier in a ‘4-day task force’ (1988, August).
Rule 1 - Agree on time management
Both sources argue for the restriction of time as a key to efficiency. While some problems may require more urgency, sixty minutes is an arbitrary time in which Redmond demonstrates problem solving.
Please do not vent for hours without allowing some kind of decision to be made. Repeating your beef over and over just makes your family more “hard of hearing” each time you speak.
It is hard to respect someone who chooses not to be rational. Vent to an older friend who can talk with you like your grandmother might. They’ve been down that road and have seen what works or does not work.
The following are simple, but not easy ground rules for problem solving.
A Family Plan: dignity, equality, unity
Technorati Tags: family planning, positive peer pressure
How can we create a family of dignity, equal worth and unified purpose? Doing what comes naturally (nothing) will not do it.
As Zig Ziggler said:
If you fail to plan, you plan to fail,
How do you plan?
Start with the end, the goal, in sight. That’s good advice from Stephen R. Covey, planning expert (stephencovey.com). If you want to stress-proof your family life, you must make a family plan. Here’s a start.
Consider what we have to know in order to create the best family life.
We need to know what every family member considers most important, and what each person needs to do and be (willing? organized?) in order to get there.
To do first:
- Make copies of my “What is Family” list below. Feel free to distribute this plan to others if you give me credit and list my blog address.
- Have each family highlight the words which describe your family now.
- Have each person circle what your family should be when you work your plan.
- Brainstorm ways to eliminate the negatives and accentuate the positives in each list.
Brainstorming rules are few:
- First, respect each person’s opinion, no matter how much you disagree or how crazy it sounds.
- Secondly, find agreement on rules for eliminating those ideas which are unrealistic or outside your family values.
Your Family Vision: An Essential Foundation for building a strong family
Find the purpose of your family.
(To be read out loud in a quiet place…each family member separate from the others).
Is family a place where, when we knock, they have to let us in? A resource? A refuge? A learning center?
Is family a millstone,
touchstone,
milestone,
bulwark?
(If you don’t know these words, look them up.)
Is family a burden, a standard, a fortress, something you pass by on your way to personal fulfillment? Is it a source of enrichment?
Is family a labor force which produces leisure for us? A safety valve for venting? A nuisance? A service organization? An embarrassment?
Is family a critical, negative, no grow force? A hostile communication environment? A place where nobody cares? A bad example? A lost childhood? A fragile identity? A den of thieves?
Is family a sense of roots? Is family something we use and abuse? Is it security in the midst of our adventures? A fantasy? A team? A sacred duty? A place to go when we are old and broken? A warrior-priesthood band of brothers?
Is family a survivors program? A listening post? A source of bragging rights? Who, on their deathbed, ever said, “I wish I had spent more time at the office?”
Tell me if you can: what’s the point of having your family?
Now, work through what you have to be and do in order to bring about your family plan.
- Write down and post the positive ideas in several places around the house. Move them (slightly) often so they are noticed better.
- Review them daily together.
- Give three cheers and a group hug to the family member who can identify the most positive or negative behaviors. No blame for the negative, just identify it. Write it down for consequences later. See if it persists three weeks before judging it as deliberate sabotage of the family plan.
- Remind each other that love is emotion in motion. Unlove is obstructing lifelong love and growth. Pray.
- Create positive peer pressure for your friends. After they get over being jealous, they will want what you have and you can share it with them. Dignity, equal worth, and unified purpose are extreme strengths.
Inattentional Blindness: Personal Jihad
Technorati Tags: Jihad,inattentional blindness,Personal terrorism,child discipline,Walid Shoebat
Moderate Muslims, we are told, consider jihad a personal struggle for spiritual purity.
Americans ignore the facts that over 100 references in the Koran refer to jihad as genocidal slaughter of unbelievers with only one quote referring to an internal struggle[1]. (Source: www.shoebat.com)
Muslim violence (jihad) supersedes peaceful contemplation in every country now ruled by Islam. Americans are too distracted, too comfortable, to pay attention while Islam gains a strategic foothold.
The American approach to Islam is a perfect example of inattentional blindness.[2]
Arien Mack and Irvin Rock, psychologists, first showed that people who were paying attention to something else in their line of sight were “blind” to something that was right before their eyes.
What does this mean for you?
Pay strict attention: your children’s lives depend upon your focused attention to discipline.
Consider your self discipline and their discipline plan.
While you are teaching your children Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, Muslim children learn lullabies and poems about flying body parts and rolling heads.
Here is an example:
“Sharpen my bones into swords, for I am a bomb, I shall eat the flesh of my (Israeli) occupier, O Killers, your blood is ‘Halal” for us, (meaning “kosher” or all right to spill)[3]
Oh, you say, “that’s not me. I’m aware of everything: I’m plugged into news 24/7. I know what is a threat to my family.”
U. Neisser, D. Simons, and C. Chabris, experimented with viewers watching a film. Viewers were focused on counting how many times a basketball was passed from one team member to another, while someone walked through the scene wearing a gorilla suit.
A surprisingly large percentage of subjects did not notice something as obvious as a person in a gorilla suit moving through the scene they were observing, if they are paying attention to something else. (Several examples of these experiments can be viewed on the Visual Cognition Lab page of the University of Illinois.)
Every country in history which has fallen has done so because of failure to perceive a threat.
Let’s look at some brief lessons in military history, you can research further through Wikipedia:
1. Carthage - fell after this city-state’s council failed to recognize the threat Rome posed. They allowed Hannibal’s victory over Rome to slip away simply by not reinforcing Hannibal when he had the upper hand.
2. Rome - many theories here, most show the failure to recognize a threat either from within or outside Rome itself.
3. Greece - the most famous lesson of recognizing a threat was told in the recently fictionalized movie 300. Recognizing the threat where his countrymen did not, Spartan King Leonidas led a personal bodyguard of 300 Spartans to hold a strategic thoroughfare named Thermopylae.
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300 by Frank Miller, Lynn Varley Read more about this book… |
4. Persia - failing to recognize Alexander the Great’s tactics as a threat the entire Persian empire was captured by this young Greek king.
Back to the present
“All four major Islamic schools of thought agree that jihad is not merely a personal struggle, but a call to wage war on the infidels by all means possible: giving money and recruiting and training people are also means of jihad.”[4]
It is not only your Christian faith at risk when you’re not looking. It is your life and the lives of your children.
Discipline is not just for kids. It is for you, the adult, first.
Do you “relax” for hours after work with flickering pictures and telephone chatter? Do you understand that you are being hypnotized into a passive, shallow thought pattern?
Print media requires more logic from you. (See “Twilight of the Books, by Caleb Crain, The new Yorker, December 24 and 31, 2007)
Are you really going to study this, or will you dance past these issues into your chocolate paradise of brain fog?
Do you feel uncomfortable when someone needs to be confronted with facts? Like Pilate when he confronted Jesus, do you wonder, “What is truth?” Have you found ways to learn and grow smarter your whole life, or are you stuck in a high school low effort mentality?
Before you can discipline and teach your children, you must have a plan. Stress Free Discipline provides a tots-to-teens plan for life skill mastery and lifelong family teamwork.
What’s a parent to do?
To begin: I suggest you need to simplify your life and read more, with and for your children. Restrict the phone calls, the ipod, the wireless flood of distractions which pacify but do not satisfy your mind. See the tech junkie quiz at rd.com/tech.
Right now a flood of raw data makes you anxious because you cannot use it all or digest it, but you keep trying. Distractions, as good as they may be, may be a real threat to your thought life.
Inattentional blindness can kill you. Pay attention. Read up. Prioritize.
[1] Why I Left Jihad, Walid Shoebat, Top Executive Media, 2005, ISBN 0-9771021-1-4, p. 36[2] http://www.skepdic.com/inattentionalblindness.html [3] Ibid, p 20[4] Ibid, p.96
Stress-busters 2: Sharing stress
Technorati Tags: stress,consistent discipline,colds,sharing,leadership
When I was Drew’s age, I thought that if I gave 
my cold to someone else I would not have it anymore.
Now I make sure my grandchildren understand they’ll both be miserable if they share a cold.
The passage of stress is much like sharing a cold.
I can accept Drew’s stress that he is not getting what he wants when he wants it. I will feel miserable and he gets spoiled. I can make exceptions to the rules. I can slide around rules the easy way, being inconsistent. I become a bad parent, or in my case, grandparent. Good parenting is too much work!
If your children are constantly testing you, they have been conditioned to obey you only when you are stressed: (1) standing over them, (2) constantly repeating directions and giving them all of your attention, perhaps (3) screaming at them or hitting them.
Only then, they notice, do you really mean it.
When you aren’t looking, they are doing as they please. As they grow, you age. When you want shared goals, they’re “doing their own thing.” Your family is fragmented. You’re a nag. They’re escaping responsibility, piling it on you, or getting even for your on-again, off-again discipline in underhanded ways.
When you accept your child’s stress, you’re burdened and angry.
It’s no favor to them to let them have their way, but you’re too weary (from the stress you have chosen) to do what is right. Poor discipline is too much work!
Make that child obey! Discipline is not punishment most of the time but it is consistent consequences.
Ask yourself: Does my child put stress on me to give him or her what she wants? Have I trained her to be bad by changing the rules? Is this good in the long run? Is this like a cold: we’ll both be miserable? Whose problem is this?
“Meaning it” is stressing the child enough so that he or she chooses to obey rules over getting his/her own way. If you are consistent, poor behavior will self-destruct in a couple of weeks.
Who’s running the ship?
In the Navy, sailors inform the commander and then follow his orders.
Researchers gather data, organize it, submit it upline, filter it through their knowledge, experience, values and sometimes bias. Artificial intelligence is interpreted by human intelligence.
View full resolution, size: 1024×768px, 76 KB, Author: Jon Sullivan
Yet, no matter how intelligent the sailors are, they submit their lives and their skills to the greater good. All good commanders are humbled by their responsibility and the awareness that it was their team which achieved the victory, not their own brilliance.
A 17 year old sailor influences the course of thousands of others on the carrier.
In the same way, feelings inform thinking and should submit to conclusions thoughtfully made in your home.
When feelings are in command, we are tempest tossed, up and down with any tide. Yet without the support and information of our feelings, thinking is weak, unbalanced, and blind.
Feelings are a source of power only when they are under the control of thought.
Feelings can send us into a perfect storm of a life if they are not disciplined by thought. Imagine a commander who has mind-bending irrational fits ten days out of every month or when berthing a ship.
Feelings are manipulated by ad agencies, politicians, media and spouses for their own ends. Our children are taking notes.
Their ability to discipline themselves, control their impulses, enrich their lives, and inform their future all depends on us. We translate the world for them.
It is scary. Will our family values survive? Media myths are confusing everyone. How will children make choices for their future?
The Navy has commanders. Football games have coaches. Cheerleaders have a Head Cheerleader. Families have leaders.
"You can’t have all Chiefs and no Indians" as my Grandma used to say.
But wait! Who is the leader in your family? Do children make the rules because you lack leadership skills? Do husband and wife fight constantly without settling basic leadership issues? Where will you live? How will you live?
Consider your family. Who is the sailor and who is the commander, responsible for the whole ship?
Imagine a commander with responsibility but no power.
Perhaps that is your husband. God has given him responsibility for the whole family.
Wives, have you grabbed command of your ship? Has power been stripped from your marriage because your feelings have sent your family into a whirlpool of emotional choices?
Are you really the one who should be making the basic decisions in your family?
I suggest that God’s plan is the one most likely to succeed. Superhuman power is behind it.
Everyone submits to Christ, the High Commander. Then husbands make the decisions after consulting with counselors and family members. They make a reasoned choice.
Wives, take it from Grandma DeSelm. Stop fighting your man.
Those power grabs will finally exhaust you and they are rough on your body. Your adrenals give out.
They are part of the Genesis 3 curse when Adam and Eve got evicted from the Garden of Eden. Eve was cursed to desire to dominate her husband, but Adam was to rule over her. Women, then, need to get used to that reality.
The godly family functions as a team without bickering over who will submit to whom in the end. 
Every member has valuable skills, personality traits, and insights. Commanders know that.
Husbands know that or find it out in God’s time, not ours, ladies.
God holds men directly accountable for every family member, as the commander is held accountable for the welfare of every sailor.
Family members need to follow all moral orders as sailors follow commands and angels follow God: with joy, in detail. That is how it is done in Heaven. Practice now.
