Groups! Get into your groups! I hated groups. We never got anything done in groups! It was a big waste of time being with people you didn’t want to be with. And they tout: be the leader. Yeh, right, and have to do all the work. Everybody always did as little as possible in class and now that the teacher wasn’t in charge, they could do less. Goal, what’s our goal? To do as little as possible! Oh, the goal we are supposed to have or come up with, that’s just a joke. Groups are such a waste of time.
One plus one is more than two, leveraging or synergy of a group. That is a story told to the gullible. Lead, that’s another story told to the someone. I don’t think anybody really believes in lead. You just do what you have to and take care of yourself. Me, I was a loner. Teachers and adults all had experience, but they were way off. Why would I follow someone so misguided. They had no idea what I wanted and they didn’t care. They just knew what they wanted and that just meant work and wasting my time.
I played on basketball teams, football teams and I did my job. In fact, I did my job well enough to be pretty good at it. I sort of got the idea of a little “teamwork” stuff, but it was mainly do my job and get credit for my little job. How did what I did affect the team? How did I contribute to other’s job? How did we work together? No, I did my job and that’s it. I didn’t really have much of sense of all that other stuff. I’ve been preached to about how teamwork is good, but I’m not sure I got it.
Family! The family unit is dying. There are so many types of families: The single working parent family; The both working parent family; leaving their kids to be home alone for hours; The non-functional family; The “big” families. The extended families; The isolated families; The drug or alcoholic parent families; The rich spoiled or bribed kids families; The welfare and poor families. The foster families; The no kids families; The friends families. What is a family and what is it supposed to do? Do we get any training in developing the family we want besides the family we were raised in?
We are social creatures, but do we get much training in how to be or productively work with people. We either get it through our accidental lives or we don’t. Hey, towns and cities are sort of accidental units as well. They design the streets, the feeways, the subdivisions, the shopping malls, but we don’t design cultures, societies, towns or cities. The just sort of end up as some accident of the people who live there.
I’m definitely not suggesting “forcing” people to “BE” a certain way or a group, family, or culture to be a certain way. It’s supposed to be leaders who get people to willing join them and create the future. What I’m suggesting is not even leadership. What I’m suggesting is most of us don’t know how to be a joiner or follower or a leader. To me that sounds so ugly! Joiner, follower sounds so weak and vulnerable. I don’t need anybody taking care of me and they probably just want to take advantage of me anyway. No, thanks! I had no skill in doing this successfully. I sense it, but do get it, but the team or followers are just as important as the leader in getting the job done. I just haven’t been trained that way and don’t want to see myself as some lowly joiner or member.
I mean if I wanted a park in my neighborhood and some guy said he wanted one too, doesn’t that sound tempting. But what kind of park does he want? And is he going to expect me to do all the work, like in school. I do not want to have to force him to help. I’d love a park in my neighborhood. I’d love his help, but how can you trust people. Besides it will just be a lot of work, I don’t have time for.
I mean cars are a system of things working together. McDonalds are a suppliers, advertisers, managers, product, buildings and kids working together for profit (how do they get those kids to work?). The Olympics showed the pro-basketball players had to work together or even those superstars would be beat. There are lots of examples of people working together. There does seems to be something about “how” they work together affects their results. There’s probably a lot of ways for people to work together, but there must be some things that really matter or count. Especially the followers and joiners. We know leaders are all about getting these followers and joiners to get together in some certain ways. What is that way and could a follower and joiner be trained to make this happen faster and better? Leadership is important, but what about all this bottom up leadership. What is that all about and is it trainable.
Family, how might that be defined or set up. What’s the purpose of a family? If you have blood connection to me, you are family? Is that how it works? Is that it? If you had a choice, what would you like in the family you were born into? Maybe, love? How about support? How about acceptance, forgiveness, encouragement, education, ….. What else?
If you were raised in an abusive alcoholic family, would you have any idea, habits or training that would let you set up the family of your dreams? Probably not. What are your chances you would ever be shown, exposed, taught or trained how to do this? From the list above: no love, no support, no acceptance, no forgiveness, no encouragement. But you would be taught drinking, take care of yourself first and abusing others if you felt like it.
What if a teachers came into their classrooms and the students had already taken role, gotten out the books or material for the day, broken into groups and were engaged in their projects for the day. The teacher walked around supporting,helping, encouraging, bringing together people or groups for faster, better or special advancements. Every student seemed to be functioning in an important role for the class, their education and growing and developing themselves!
This class had a project, a goal, an objective and the students and the teachers had bought into the project or goal together. They were doing and looking for the best way to make it happen! These students had given themselves homework the day before, done it and had come in prepared. They were self monitoring, supporting and dedicated to their class and their project.
Could that have happened in my school. No way! I was trained to wait and be guided by the almighty teacher. My education was up to him. I was dependent on him. I hoped he cared for me, but I really knew he didn’t, not really. Would he ever think of giving his great teacher responsibility to us? Would we take it? I can answer that, “NO!” I had no idea how to educate and train myself. I wasn’t trained, he was. I felt it wasn’t my job to educate and train myself. It never occured to me that I could affect or guide the person I was to become. I mean I wasn’t smart enough and didn’t have the perspective to train and educate myself, did I? I was never sold or considered I was very trainable. My opinion was never considered and I’m not sure I even had one.. I wasn’t stupid and I don’t know how I could have teamed up with my teachers and gotten closer to person I wanted to be, so I didn’t. I guess it was just easier to let them educate me and not rock the boat. I was being trained to be and feel helpless to do anything about who I was becoming.
I know schools have been promoting be kind, fun, interesting and all that stuff to get kids to do stuff. …. But what if they were promoting “Valuable”? You know teaching and training me to become the person I want to become. Now, I know one man’s junk is another man’s treasure or >> what is valuable to a kid and what a parent or an adult sees as valuable may be different. Teaming up with kids seems a little incomprehensible and impossible. We don’t do it that way. The fun or force, right now bribe, carrot and stick, seem so functional and is sort of working.
Could you imagine a project (future) that could be rewarding and get buy-in by teachers and student, boss and employers, parents and family. A challenging project that gave its members a sense of honor, pride, comradery, and accomplishment might be possible. But what do you do with the members that don’t buy in or don’t want to do it: the heel draggers; the saboteurs; the disgruntled complainers; the distracted; the tired; the self absorbed superstar; ….. The ones that don’t want to do it as a group, team, or family? That’s the missing training. We don’t do it, it doesn’t exist so it’s hard to imagine. Train leaders yes, but the rest of team needs training too!
There are so many books on leadership, but maybe it's the followers, the members, the joiners are the ones that need training. I didn’t know how to be part of a team, even though I was good at my job. I didn’t really know how to be part of family, even though I wasn’t a bad person. I definitely didn’t know how to be part of a group with a project, but I was very smart and capable. Teachers, teams, parents may need to be educated, but so do the students, members of teams and families. They each have their role and both need training. They are all important, very important. One does not exist without the other. The job of one is very dependent on the other. The captain of a team needs excellent team members to do a good job. Parents need well trained kids to be good parents. Bosses need greater employees to be amazing bosses.
The teacher has to trust and train the students before the students will trust the teacher, let alone himself.. Do either of them know how to trust? The parents have to feel their children are capable before their children will feel they are capable parents and they are capable children.. Can they see capableness or are they stuck seeing their limitations and faults. The boss must see the potential in his employees for the employee to see potential in the boss, the company and themselves. How would potential be brought into existence by these two? I’m horrible at groups, families and teams, as I was never trained how to function in them.
I did things with others, because I was forced to or had to. I was trained to do a good job, but I did not get sold and buy in. This one plus one is greater than two has only shown itself to me in little glimpses. That is, I know it exists. When it exists, it is amazing. At first I thought is was only a matter of chance or luck, but then I started to note that there might be some training involved.
Do abusive alcoholic parents have to have kids that are alcoholic and abusive? Do welfare parents have to have welfare kids? Do angry parents have to have kids that are angry? The data says they do run in families until something disrupts the pattern, then a new pattern emerges (accidentally). What if children were exposed and could choose a training. Well, maybe not as children, but maybe at 18 years of age? We raise our children and they get trained. We don’t have any design or choice, we are just doing the best we have with how we were trained. We didn’t seem to really see or know we had a choice. We know it’s not genetics, but we have some very solid training running our lives.
The threads of habit are developed everyday. Then as we mature, these threads have combined and formed ropes that are binding us to who we are. We are social creatures and live in a world of people. This is good if one plus one is greater than two. The challenge is many of our ropes tie us to a lonely, uncooperating, untrusting, uncaring life where even the possibility of one plus one existing is rare. It might happen accidentally every now and again and when it does it will be amazing. But to have it happen intentionally, I have not been trained, my ropes isolate and hold me back from involvement. I don’t know how to be a follower, a joiner or a leader. I’m smart, very capable, I’m just not trained.
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