Boys Developing Horsepower

November 20, 2011 • Admissions • by
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I travel in a professional world filled with adults who love kids and who believe in their futures.  This love is expressed through many different venues.   But the most heroic and rubber-on-the-road adults in this category are those who work at treatment facilities for teenagers with substance abuse issues.  These people dedicate their lives to bringing kids back from the brink.  I’ve met many and admire them all.

At a recent conference I met a team from the Resolution Ranch, a small facility for boys in rural Texas specializing in ranch life, complete with horses and horse care.  I love this concept because I believe every child on Earth needs to have a personal relationship with a dog and a horse, for both have magic, though in different ways.  Dogs heal the heart.  Anyone who has ever had a dog knows this.  They pour out their love to you and ask for nothing in return but for you to be you.  Horses, however, force you to balance your emotions and to be clear about what you want.  The famous Horse Whisperer Buck Branneman, in the excellent documentary about his life declares that you have to control your emotions to be a good horseman.  Some say horses can read your mind, but I’ve experienced that they actually read your heart and express whatever you are feeling at the time.  Trust me – you don’t want to feel fear or insecurity while sitting atop 1000 pounds of skittish power.

So helping troubled and lost boys bond with horses as a way to develop inner control is a genius idea.  The remarkable team at Resolution Ranch – Neal, Chris, Chelsea, Londa – take boys 13-17 years old for 6-9 months and help them find themselves again.

Scratch a troubled kid, find a trauma.  I urged them to look into EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique), also known as tapping , because of its remarkable results in clearing trauma.  Talk therapy can only do so much when a child holds trauma at the cellular level.  I’ve personally witnessed miracles (including with me) resulting from energy psychology techniques.

So here’s a big shout out to my new buddies at Resolution Ranch.  What boy down deep in his heart wouldn’t want to live on a ranch, cowboy style, and learn what it means to be a man?  Troubled or not, they are the lucky ones.

Little Dog, Big Purpose — The Power of Reframing Experience

November 19, 2011 • Parenting • by
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I was walking out of my hotel in Leavenworth, a crazy little town in the mountains of eastern Washington State designed to look like Bavaria, when I met the most remarkable characters.

A lovely woman carried a small pocket dog inside her coat, heading for a comfort break. I couldn’t resist. Her dog was so cute I called out to them both and as she approached, the woman told me all about this little canine cutie-pie named Chee Chee Rodriquez.

Chee Chee was a rescue dog, mistreated by a brutal owner who broke many of her teeth and a few bones in her face. She is smaller than most small cats. The shelter workers who rescued her called this amazing lady, Kathy Ketchum, who is quite familiar with traumatized creatures since she works with traumatized children. Kathy said yes to Chee Chee and a star was born.

Chee Chee is about to receive her certificate as an assistance dog. Kathy takes her to nursing homes and to schools with troubled kids where they work their magic. And magic it is, guys. These two beautiful people – one two-legged and one four – attract others like magnets, for how else to explain my calling out to them? When I travel I keep to myself.

It was then I noticed the rainbow over the mountain. Kathy winked and said, “it’s actually a double rainbow”, and as we watched, it formed its full arch. The rainbow got brighter as Kathy told me two important truths she passes to children and that I share with you now.

First, she tells them that if they are judged, it’s only their “wrapping” that others see critically. When she was young, she had polio and a walker. When the teasing got too much for her and her heart was breaking, her father told her, “It’s just your wrapper they are judging. Imagine it’s your birthday party and you’ve received two gifts. One is beautifully wrapped with colorful paper and a beautiful big bow and the other is a brown shopping bag. Naturally, you’ll open the pretty one first, figuring that it holds the best present. Inside is a $5 bill, which is pretty good. Inside the brown paper bag, though, is a $100 bill waiting just for you. So you can’t tell the gift by its wrapping. Always look for the gift inside, regardless of what it looks like.” She tells the kids she meets that they hold that $100 bill inside themselves, waiting to be discovered.

Then she told me that she teaches children how to be the most popular kid at school. “If you see a new child, go talk to them. If you see a shy one, invite them to your table and introduce them to your friends. If someone is being bullied, stand up to the bullies and put your arm around the one being picked on. Give them the gift of your acceptance and protection. Invite all the misfits to your lunch table, and soon you’ll be the most popular kid in your school. My two nieces took my advice and each became Homecoming Queen two years in a row.”

;-)

All the while she softly spoke, Chee Chee looked me square in the eye.

The rainbow became so big, so double, it became surreal. I began to wonder if this woman was real, with her magic dog and angelic presence. We finished our conversation and when she hugged me goodbye I felt a warm sensation in my heart as real as my heartbeat itself.

If you know any children who are hurting, please share Kathy’s stories. Our most important job as adults is to offer hope to others who are losing theirs. Children are so vulnerable. The hurts they sustain often last a lifetime and can derail them from their life’s purpose. Reframing their situation as Kathy’s Dad did for her can bring them back from the brink.

Creation is in the improvisation

November 19, 2011 • Creativity • by
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Recently I had the pleasure of attending the wedding of a beloved friend, a young man from China who is in the US in search of his American Dream. I’ve never been to a Chinese wedding before. I’m not sure how traditional this one was, since Peter and his beautiful wife Sharon are Christians now. My spouse and I figure it was a blend of New World and Old, for nearly all of the 80 attendees were Chinese immigrants working in the vast service industries of NYC, painting the nails and massaging the knots out of countless harried New Yorkers, present company included. The wedding was held on a Tuesday night in Queens because the guests work on weekends. We two were the only non-Chinese there. Many of our compatriots spoke no English.

There was a traditional 12 course Chinese dinner served on giant lazy susans embedded within the tables, steaming platters sharing space with fresh packs of cigarettes (no filters, of course), small gift-wrapped boxes with candy and bottles of Chinese liquor that was a cross between vodka and brandy. Real fire water. I have no idea what I ate, and it was all delicious.

Seated to my left was Li Zhongmei, one of the most famous dancers in China, subject of the new book, “A Girl Named Faithful Plum”. She is one of the most interesting people I know, an elegant and fantastically beautiful woman with the skin of a twelve year old and the slender frame of a small bird. She owns the nail salon I frequent, which is how I know the groom and many of the wedding guests.

At the appointed time, Zhongmei excused herself and slipped off to change into a beautiful costume, for she had come to dance for Peter and Sharon. Everyone buzzed excitedly about this, knowing how famous she was back home.

All I can say is that her dance was extraordinary. She moved across the floor like water, smooth and graceful with twirling arms and a face that turned luminous – or should I say numinous – as she performed. There was something about that change in her expression, when her face transformed, that I found electrifying and I asked her about it when she returned to sit beside me.

Was she was aware of how her face changed as she danced? Oh yes, she said, because she danced an improvisation. She explained that a choreographed piece demanded such detailed precision, such focus, that the dancer rarely feels the exchange of energy with the audience. She decided to dance improv in order to connect with Peter and Sharon and our happy crowd. She wanted to honor us and to feel connected with the whole.

“The creation, the gift, is in the improv”, she explained.

Creation is in the improv, in the messiness of winging it, going on instinct, risking embarrassment and failure, the very things we are NOT teaching our kids.

Our children are exhausted. Over-stimulated. Bombarded with academic and social demands from adults and peers alike. Deprived of privacy, not to mention sleep and proper nutrition. “No child left behind” morphing into “no child left unscathed”, where children are slapped with near-impossible demands on their time to produce for the many adults with whom they intersect.

So where is the opportunity for improv and, therefore, for their gift?

Kids need down time. They need time to daydream to access their imagination and time to sleep so they can receive inspiration in dreamtime. All inventors know that rest is as crucial as action. Please find ways, if even small ones, to cut your kids some free time. Let them twirl and dance and laugh and breathe.

It’s all in the improv, after all.

The Four Seasons of Admissions

June 20, 2010 • Admissions • by
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One of the reasons I always loved working as a college admissions officer is the cyclical nature of the business.  Its sequence of events is so dependable that I began to think of admissions as having four distinct seasons, very much like Nature’s own. These four seasons are called Recruitment, Selection, Yield and Assessment.   They each have different goals and timing, and they require different behaviors and skills from admissions officers.

It was a relief to know that as surely as night follows day, the rigors of recruitment travel would soon be replaced with the pleasures of reading applications of teenagers eager to be admitted.  When I was bleary eyed after reading the Nth application in lonely solitude, it was time to come together as a staff to make decisions about whom to admit.   Weeks of decision making in marathon sessions behind closed doors with good colleagues and way too much sugar and caffeine birthed a class as well as an esprit d’corps for having survived it.  The day the decisions were sent was always so bittersweet, filled with excited thoughts of kids we loved whose applications we championed, coupled with real sadness for passing by so many for whom there was no space.  That day would quickly morph into preparation for that final outreach to the admits in a campaign to win their hearts, minds and an acceptance of our offer.  Finally, after the big push was over, it was time to review our goals as an office, to learn what had worked and what had been ineffective and to begin planning for the next class.  After some desperately needed R & R, it was time to begin the cycle all over again.

Cycles are great for such intense jobs as admissions.   They relieve the pressure and help reset the mind.  The memory of spring makes the late winter bearable.   ;-)

In the coming weeks I’ll describe these four seasons of admissions in detail so that you can better understand the world of the college admissions officer.  I’ll offer advice about how and when to approach admissions staff and help you understand what to expect from those encounters based on the season.   As with all things in life, timing is everything.  For example, just as you wouldn’t think of calling a neighbor at midnight to chat about mundane neighborhood business, you shouldn’t contact an admissions officer during reading season to ask general questions about their school.  A question that might be interesting during Recruitment season can be viewed as an annoying waste of time during Selection when their energies are directed to a different task.  Having an awareness of this sensitivity will make you a more effective advocate for your child during the process.

A Better Way to Look at College Admissions:

May 1, 2010 • Admissions • by

A Better Way to Look at College Admissions:

Marilee Jones’ Four Rules of the Game for Parents:

Given that this is the most competitive era of college admissions in history, and that you can control neither the outcome nor your child’s anxiety about the outcome, I’d like to suggest a better way to look at the college admissions process and four specific rules of the game to help you navigate it gracefully.

Sure, you can do what most people do now:  listen to everyone with an opinion about the topic, feel depressed, get upset with your child for not being more proactive, get depressed, feel as if you have to fight for your child’s very survival, get really depressed.  Or you can see the college admissions process in a different way.

The college admissions process is the closest thing to an initiation that we have in this secular society. There are initiations in many religious traditions, but not in our secular sphere.  Initiations are designed to help us formally allow our children to grow up and join the adult world.

An initiation is a process and not an event.  It always carries an element of anxiety and fear.  It calls on all skills previously learned, and most importantly, it can only be done by the initiate and no one else.  It is the process by which our kids are granted permission to show us what they can do, to show us that they can manage anxiety and still function successfully, that they are ready for adulthood.

At the very moment that we should be cheering them and helping them though the process, some of us actually cripple them by not trusting them to write the best essay, to interview well, to make the best choices of college.  We can send signals, overt and covert, that can make our children feel that they are not ready, not truly capable of applying to college in our absence.  We see it as helping out – helping them with editing or even writing their essay, helping them connect with the ‘right’ people who can get them in, taking over the planning and management of the process.  But to our kids, the message can often feel as if they are not good enough, not smart enough, not mature enough, not ready to go through the process on their own, at the very time when they must prove publicly that they are ready to be an adult.  By jumping in to help them in this way, we are essentially tackling them at the knees when they need to stand the straightest.  We are actually hurting them in their moment of glory.

You do have a role in your child’s initiation and make no mistake – your role is crucial.  I’ve outlined four basic steps, rules of the game, to help guide you through the entire process in a graceful way.  They may seem simple, but like all Zen-like principles, they are actually quite challenging.  If you follow these rules, however, you will not only model good adult behavior for your child – the main point of the exercise – but you will also maintain an excellent relationship with your child that will last for years to come. Remember, you are modeling for your child how an adult acts under stress and your child is watching you all the time.

Rule 1: Watch your Language:

Vow that you will never again refer to your child’s application or choices in the first person plural, as in, “We’re applying to Yale and Georgetown.” Your child is applying to college, not you.  It is their application process, not yours.  Every time you use the more inclusive language of ‘our’ or ‘we’, you are sending the message to your child that they are not quite ready for their initiation, that they can’t manage it on their own.  You are taking away their independence, holding them back just when they should be gaining strength to show the world that they are capable of handling the anxiety of describing themselves on paper, submitting it to strangers to be judged on unknown parameters and then being publicly judged with an acceptance, a waitlist or a rejection. It’s very easy to say ‘our’ and ‘we’.  I still find myself doing it occasionally.  But stop yourself every time you hear yourself say it, back up and rephrase the sentence.  “My child is applying to Yale and Georgetown.”

Rule 2: Watch your Attitude

Teenagers need to vent sometimes and thank your lucky stars if yours does that with you.  But if they complain about their teachers or their guidance counselor or how unfairly they are being treated in life, get into neutral and just listen.  It’s so important that you keep your attitudes about their situation in check because your opinions can contaminate their experience.  You can ask how you might help them, but otherwise, you should be modeling the old phrase, “been there, done that, life goes on and life is good.” In other words, keep reminding them that no matter what happens, everything will be fine.  When they are most frightened, you must ground them and help them stay calm, not spool them up with your own anxiety.  Stay steady and in neutral.  Their problems are not for you to solve.

Rule 3: Watch your Behavior

Behavior often follows attitude.  We know that sometimes a simple call from us could fix our child’s problem, but what would they learn from that?  If we had carried them everywhere to keep them from falling when they were first learning to walk, they wouldn’t be the healthy functional walkers they are today.  Humans learn best by trial and error. Since it’s your child’s initiation, vow never to intervene in their application process.  Vow never to do their work for them – ever.  Never threaten to sue anyone, or intimidate or act in any way like a jerk, because you’ll only regret that later and you will have missed the chance to model good adult behavior for your child who is watching you all the time to see how it’s done.  Cheer them from the sidelines.

Rule 4: Celebrate No Matter What

Parents frequently (and inadvertently, I’m sure) cut their child down by publicly criticizing the admissions decision or their child’s final choice of college after they have been admitted.  Many parents simply can’t hold their disappointment, which can be humiliating for their child.

No matter what happens at the conclusion of the college admissions process, you must find a way to make peace with the results. Many students feel as if they have let their parents down if they don’t get admitted to a specific school, and they carry that guilt for years. Remember that the main point is not for your child to get into to X, Y, Z college, but to pass through the hardest initiation of their life.

Take your child out when the letters come in and celebrate their bravery, their ability to tolerate the anxiety of not knowing the results for months, their uniqueness.  Now is the time to tell them how proud you are of them.  Find things you admire about them and speak that freely.  For example, you could tell him what an excellent friend he is and how you wish you were as good a friend to yours as he is to his, or tell her how much you admire her organization and stamina and how you want to be more like her that way.  Speak what is authentic and true.  If you cannot talk this way, write your child a letter and ask them to read it after you celebrate the decisions.  Do your best to focus on the successful completion of their firewalk, their initiation.  It’s not about the college that admitted them…it’s about how your child went about the process.  Be proud of them no matter what.

The Cinderella Syndrome

April 1, 2010 • Admissions • by

The Cinderella Syndrome

By Marilee Jones

Remember the story of Cinderella?  Raised by her jealous stepmother, she was treated very poorly by the family because she was beautiful.  Naturally, as in all good fairy tales, her Fairy Godmother intervened and made some miracles so that Cinderella could secretly attend the palace ball where the Handsome Prince was looking to pick a wife.  Cinderella’s ugly step-sisters hoped that he would notice and pick one of them, but then he saw our heroine, they danced, midnight came and in her haste to leave before turning back into her original raggedy self, she lost her glass slipper.  The Prince, frantic to find her again, took that shoe to every house in the kingdom where there were females, which brings us to the point of this story.  When approached to try on the slipper, the Ugly Step-Sisters each tried to jam their foot into the slipper, trying desperately to be someone they were not.

I witnessed this phenomenon in college admissions all the time. In their applications, students try to be who they think admissions officers want them to be.  They try to jam their foot into that glass slipper, trying so hard to be picked as ‘the one’, when in reality, they actually just need to be who they are.  The whole point of the college admissions process is to identify the match between student and school, between Cinderella and Prince Charming.  The good news is that there are several Prince Charmings for every Cinderella, several colleges for every applicant, and the secret lies in finding a match.  That can only happen when the applicant makes every effort to be himself or herself throughout the process, having the courage to wear their own glass slipper.

The Myth of the Soul Mate

March 1, 2010 • Education • by

The Myth of the Soul Mate

By Marilee Jones

I don’t know about you, but I was raised to believe that there is just one person for each of us out there in the world – our soul mate – and our main job in life is to find that person and live happily ever after.  This belief is both scary and self-limiting and best of all, is totally made up.  Who knows how many possible mates there are for each of us on a planet of 6 billion humans?  If we believed that there are endless possibilities in life, that there are many, many people we could choose to partner with over the span of our life, we would feel freer somehow and might make better choices.

It’s the same with choice of college.  There are so many colleges and universities in the US (2500+ 4 yr. schools alone, not to mention the 2 yr. and professional schools) that we can conclude there are many good matches for each applicant if only we can reject the notion of one soul-mate and stay open to the possibilities.  For parents this means that some of these choices may be schools we are not familiar with, not in the top ten schools nationally.  Just because we haven’t heard of some colleges doesn’t mean they aren’t good.  And many schools will be the right match.

Parental Over-involvement

February 1, 2010 • Parenting • by

Parental Over-involvement

By Marilee Jones

When we step into a young person’s life and dominate, making the decisions and deflecting responsibility, we actually hurt their path into adulthood.  Childhood is the time of experimenting, when roles are tried on and discarded, values tested and changed, when failure is a healthy option and the best teacher.  Just as keeping a child hidden away from the world to protect them only hurts their socialization in the end, becoming overly involved in their college process robs them of the chance to know themselves better, to have faith in their own choices, to develop the legs that must hold them in the world.

The Myth About Perfect

January 1, 2010 • Lowering Stress • by

The Myth About Perfect

By Marilee Jones

If the hallmark of the Boomers generation is the focus on ‘me’, and the hallmark of Gen X is the need to control their own lives, then the hallmark of the Millennials is the need to be perfect.  Millennials have been the most protected, experienced, exposed, pressured generation in history and few of them feel that they’re good enough.  We adults have handed them a template of behavior by which they will know they are OK.  They are to: always make good grades; avoid drugs, alcohol and sex because all are dangerous now; take chances and show initiative but never fail because failure is the kiss of death; develop a ‘passion’ to appeal to college admissions officers; keep smiling; and love us no matter what.

Obviously, this is not as nature had intended and many young people are hurting from being made to feel ‘less than’ because they don’t fit the pattern.  In this culture based on bold action, what happens to the dreamers?  The visionaries?  The healers?  The thinkers?  The artists?  The hermits? The loners?  Everyone has unique DNA with unique talents and desires.  People are meant to be different from one another and the culture needs all of us.

There is no perfect.  Perfectionism is a disease, an addiction to be avoided at all costs.  Growth and ultimate success lies in the imperfection of failure and the resilience that develops as a result.

If your child is a perfectionist, begin to consciously celebrate imperfection within your family.  Offer compassion instead of judgment, express humor instead of anger.  Remember your many past imperfections and how they all worked out for you in the end and when you have that teachable moment, tell your child about them.  Through your own acceptance you’ll let them know that it’s OK and safe for them to be themselves in the world.  And the world will be grateful for this.

No Time to Dream…

December 1, 2009 • Creativity • by

The Importance of ‘Barbie Time’

By Marilee Jones

I once asked a group of high school students how many daydream during the day and few raised their hands.  Most rolled their eyes and finally a boy in the back yelled out, “Dreaming?  Forget it, there are no awards for that.” Everyone laughed at the absurdity of the question.  No one in their lives valued the dreaming time, so they had no incentive and no time to do it anyway.

Every object outside of nature originated first in the imagination of a human being. Just take a moment to think about that and look around you to see the sheer diversity of human-made creations.  In one quick scan around the room, you will find hundreds of examples of the products of human imagination…your coffee cup, the pen you write with, every stitch of clothing you wear.

I like to think of the imagination as the 6th sense, an organ – not unlike the skin – that picks up information and translates it in ways that then can be examined, manipulated, inverted, reordered.  As far as we know, imagination is a uniquely human sense, the tool we need to create what we want in life.  The blueprints for anything to be created in the 3-D world, for all of human advancement, are formed there. The imagination is the thing that makes us all unique.  Within it lies that little pilot light of individuality that reminds us who we really are.

Yet adults constantly tell kids to stop daydreaming and get back to work. This is particularly troubling because adolescence is the period of intensive self-discovery, the time when kids are supposed to become attuned to their own uniqueness, the time when they begin to differentiate themselves from others.  They need a healthy imagination for that.

When my daughter was little, she loved Barbie dolls.  At first it was a struggle for me to accept, since I never played with dolls as a kid and I grew to become a feminist who believed that Barbies brainwashed girls into becoming focused only on their looks.  But as I watched my daughter script and direct complicated community plays throughout our house, I gave up my resistance and got over it.

One day, when she was five years old, Nora came with me as I ran too many errands for the time I had free.  After the 4th store visit, I was heading for the mall when she begged me to go home for awhile.  “C’mon, Nora, we’ll run to the mall and have a girl’s-day-out lunch and then do some shopping there.  We’ll have fun. We’ll rest at lunch.”    No, she cried, “I need my Barbie time”.  I reluctantly returned home, whereupon she ran upstairs to her room to play with her Barbies and I collapsed on the couch, feeling resentful that my day’s plan had fallen apart because she needed to play with her dolls.  Forty-five minutes later, she came back downstairs, refreshed and ready for the mall.  I, in the meantime, had lost all of my energy and had to work hard to rally.

Just after that, I participated in the Meyer’s Briggs test where I came to learn how different people recharge their energy.  Some need to be outside in an external environment, around people and light and action – the mall -, like me.  Some need to be alone for awhile, to recharge in their own internal way, like Nora.  I came to see that she was using her Barbie time to recharge and refresh herself.  She was also using 100% imagination with no real point…imagination for the pure pleasure of it.

One of the most serious problems in our culture today is how we adults curtail our kids’ Barbie time, expecting them to do something socially responsible or leading toward an external reward.  A good friend of mine recently bemoaned that her daughter was having trouble fitting in at her new school.  When the child came home from school, she just wanted to go to her room and rest for the afternoon.  My friend was frantic because ‘resting is not achieving’.  She kept urging her daughter to study or read or write or practice her instrument, like the other kids do when they go home from school.  She worried that her daughter won’t be competitive enough to get admitted to a top school.  Her daughter was in 7th grade, the worst year in all of Girl World.  No wonder her daughter wanted to come home and rest – she was fighting her emotions all day at school.  She needed her Barbie time, her recharging and imagination time, to figure out how to get through another day of catty, bratty girl behavior.

We have done a good job of educating kids about the dangers of drugs and alcohol, but we reward workaholic behavior, and in so doing we are substituting one addiction for another. Here’s the simple fact: it’s hard to access imagination and creativity when you are working all the time.

Most importantly, what does it mean for the future of our culture, especially American culture – built on innovation and creativity – when our children have no time to dream?

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