I am getting comfortable with a reduced Son-Rise Team thru Firing and Attrition + Anna for the First time Ever Finds Word Mispronunciations Funny, Suggests Adding Punctuation (adding a period) in a Text I was asking her to send. This following a dramatic drop in my staff after many frustrating months trying to train and and let go people in a timely way, I'm discovering low levels of very intense coaching and teaching by me is more effective than I realized.
I find it hard to fire Son-Rise Participants, need to run my Son-Rise Program more like a business from now on
Don't blame the Son-Rise Program! They tell us if someone isn't performing well it's important to let them go and feel comfortable about it, but I just struggle with that still. It's my belief system or experience holding me back, to have so much trouble firing people or at least reducing their hours, when I realize that would suit us better. I've felt forced to keep people at higher hours because they say they'll quit if hours go below some number, and if I've spent time training them and they're already pretty good, I don't want to lose ALL their hours, yet failing to reduce their hours means someone else I feel is better with my child and more of a support for me gets screwed and sometimes quit, so this is not a functional way to manage!
I need to run my autism therapy program like a business. I admire Jack Welch, the legendary GE CEO who made it company policy to fire the bottom 15% of employees every review period. I wanted to do the same thing but was frustrated to find something stopped me from doing so, myself. I was itching to let go of or reduce hours of people who were at the bottom of my program when two people left for other reasons, and was surprised how relieved I was, even though at least one of the two was really pretty good and promising. I finally fired our most ineffective person too, and was so relieved to have that time and money back at this person's session time.
Another Son-Rise parent once said years ago (Gaylen) that a small team of highly effective people doing more hours each was her most ideal situation. I finally get what she meant, this time by accidentally attrition, but I was already getting this earlier but not willing to actually fire to get here:
- The fewer the people doing more hours each, the fewer trainings per week or month.
- The better these few people are, the more they can do with the training with their initiative, attitude and energy / interest, so you get the most mileage out of each training.
- Fewer paid Son-Rise training sessions per week/month means more money for biomedical treatments, my business, quality activities and playroom supplies such as books, visits to trampoline parks, sports activities that cost more money such as martial arts, museum visits, shopping to improve and organize our environment, and helping me feel less strung out, stressed out.
- The reduced hours, such as I eliminated evening participants every night except Fridays, means:
- I have time to read books with my daughter that I mine way more learning and value out of that all of my other participants (plus usually an additional session if noone else comes during a day) and
- I have time to fit in a movement lesson (Anat Baniel Method Neuromovement) most nights. I'm an ABM practitioner so I'm using the "Desk Trainer" series that have a cartoon guy (at anatbannielmethod.com) doing movements that are supposed to last under 10 min, but I have to pause them, instruct, add variations, etc. and in so doing they end up lasting 20-30 minutes. The good news is that they are the kind of lessons I can benefit from as well as I teach them.
I think back to when I had 13 people at one time during one crowded summer in Dallas. It was all (or mostly) volunteers at that time. There was no room for me on the schedule that summer! I had her in session even during meals which was pretty unproductive. I was exhausted training people all day, and almost everyone was a novice and not that good. Many were doing things that undermined the program that I didn't catch because I couldn't watch and train so many beginners effectively, such as people starting to leave the radio on during session for long periods, which pretty much washes out all meaningful interaction and speech by the people in the room. I had low self esteem and was thinking they, being "normal" and not autistic like me, would be better with her and just by nature of being around nonjudgmental, positive-attitude normal people - even those less trained than me - she'd be learn more and bet somehow better off. That turned out to be wrong. She didn't "move" developmentally all summer despite throwing so many normal people at her, then started developing quickly as soon as they started leaving in August for break and I chose to work with my daughter more hours because there were now openings, including that she could eat lunch with me since that session was left open first. Within 2 weeks of working with me again, she suddenly started using prepositions, something I had been working with her on for more than a year - I believe approaching 2 - and which she had not changed at during that most-crowded-ever summer.
Implementing a System to Overcome Difficulty Training / Firing Son-Rise Participant Trainees
I've been frustrated at how long it's taking to train people for my Son-Rise Program, winnow and train our way to the best people, how often some of the best people quit, and how slow I've been to fire people who were so-so or even very slow and highly ineffective in the playroom. I want participants so I'll have time to leave the house and to work on my business, taxes and such, but cringe at the thought of so much time and effort training them, knowing they won't actually help our child move forward until they are trained for 6mo-1yr and keep thinking I can speed this up through video training (some of which is already on youtube) but I'm not handy as video editing and need to spend time on that before I can make a great, edited series of training. Still, I'm going to start video training for my participants going forward. Keep your eyes open for that in the future and let me know if you are interested in viewing those videos and if so, which areas of participant training or management you'd like to see me tackle first.
I was relieved to finally let go a trainee that wouldn't join our daughter, was poor at the work, and fell asleep on multiple occasions and was warned a number of times, who this person was sleeping 15-20 min during their last session, who had unproductively sucked up so many of my hours training because I was never certain when to fire him and for which offense, but having him in our program meant I had to set up a whole series of standards for doing this going forward. I was determined that noone who was underperforming was going to be taking up space and funds in our lineup, and the extra money could be used to pay effective people more to retain them. I don't understand why it was hard to let go of this person, given they were poor on every front, but I think it's because I felt like a fraud saying we're all about acceptance, endless patience, nonjudgment etc. for my daughter and modeling it toward them, then drawing a line and saying "it's unacceptable" to them and kicking them out. I kept remembering feeling uncomfortable and unacceptable when I was more autistic, and don't want to put them through that, but that's their decision to have the discomfort of being fired - they chose to sleep! Why do I feel like I have to shelter them from their own choice and consequences? I remember I would never sleep on the job even if I wan't that good at it, and did try hard. People sleeping when they agreed to work and collecting a paycheck is a form of deception and fraud and theft, after all. I'd never do that, and they shouldn't do that to anyone either. Getting in touch with anger and indignation of this also made firing easier, and helped me shake the attitude I use toward my daughter off and replace it with a real-world decision.
I found it would be easier if I let people go very quickly in the future after a single warning and let them know that there would be a timed performance improvement requirement both at initial hiring and after any subsequent "feedback", which I am now recording by both video (using a webcam on my mac) and in writing (I created files for each participant where dated feedback training and initials are entered). Of course emails to keep written, searchable records of written warnings. This would keep me from getting to attached to them or feeling like I had sunk too much effort on them to let them go when I really should have.
I think what's hard is that being formerly autistic and still somewhat autistic, I always learn/ed slowly and felt like I was unacceptable and was always rejected. This may be why the slower / worse someone learns, the more unacceptable their performance, the more they seem to have few options, don't realize how unacceptable their behavior and progress is for our needs, and the more I feel bad firing them because I keep over-identifying with them as myself. I have tried to do a "dialogue" with myself (I'm an Option Process Mentor-Counselor and can be reached at [email protected] for those who want phone sessions) about how to reframe the situation, and found that latching onto how good it feels and how rewarding it is when we have a GREAT performing participant is for all of us and how it helps our daughter, and how much of the reason my daughter isn't as far along as I'd like is because I didn't weed out our program, but this still only partially works.
Discomfort at being weeded out adds on top of difficulty weeding people out, because after all I'm autistic (high functioning compared with my daughter), and it's our brain's literal biomedical problem to have difficulty pruning neurons. It's excruciatingly difficult to choose paths, which book to write, and which people to remove, just as a few examples. But just as I'm settling on which businesses to pursue, I need to make a decision what kind of life and Son-Rise team I want, and know I need to grow and be a different person to get the team I want going forward.
My current business coach Grant Cardone, the "Godfather of Sales", says in his ebook "10X" that if you fear something you think you should do (not some crazy or dangerous thing) that it's a sign that you're supposed to do it right away, because time only feeds the fear. I took his advice right away and moved up my mammogram to today, and that did feel great! I think I would have been much happier and more productive and my daughter would have progressed better if I had fired or cut hours right away and plan to do so going forward. Grant Cardone also says if you're not doing things outside your zone of comfort and creating new problems, you're not growing and moving forward, so creating the problem of how to move people out of the program and face uncomfortable firings would be preferable to old problems of being dragged down by underperforming team members and the myriad exhausting and drain this causes me.
Since I'm deciding to run my program like the business coaches I listen to such as Eric Edmeades, Grant Cardone, Billy Gene from Billy Gene is Marketing, etc, I set time-based quality standards for our participants from here on out. Billy Gene says "be fast to fire". Eric Edmeades tells you to remove people who are nice and ineffective by well documented file reviews and warnings.
In our program going forward, for example, anyone who can't master joining our child's autistic behaviors (a fundamental skill of Son-Rise) in 2 weeks means they must be warned in writing and then let go in less than a month. They will have no more than 2-4 weeks to repair or adopt any training elements. This was added to our team policy. Joining autistic kids vs. refusing to is a litmus test for those who have attitudinal issues about our program, such as who secretly judge it and try to fake us out, wasting our time but never really on-board our approach. If you can spend 4 sessions - 8 hrs - and can't make a change as instructed, you usually do a dialogue (Option Process Dialogue, which I'm certified to do) to figure out why you're having trouble doing so, and once you change that belief - usually a judgment that doing so is bad in some way - you can join. If you can't figure out within 8 hours how to do what you're being asked, we are just not a good fit then. People who judge our approach are unable to figure out their beliefs why they are failing because they don't want to expose the judgments because they want to conceal them, and have no intention of changing and I need to make them leave, since joining, together with the nonjudgmental and enthusiastic attitude that it requires - is the most important element of our program and we can root out those who don't fit and don't want to fit right away.
I've found that playroom participants who have an issue about joining, it's a litmus test of having an issue with the non-judgmental attitude or unusual philosophy underlying the program, and it for the most part never goes away, people keep faking me out and then going back to not joining. People who have an issue often will not explain well why they have an issue, won't do a genuine self-searching dialogue for the underlying reason effectively which requires non-judgment of themselves to search and disclose; I find myself teaching and reteaching these people and start resenting them but having to let go of the resentment, yet why do that if I can get a new person who loves our program and doesn't make me act like Sisyphus, rolling the boulder up the hill every day only to have to do it again endlessly, just to justify that I'm not judging them and am endlessly patient.
Can't I not judge participants, but still say they aren't a good fit and try someone else? Is it judgmental to try many variations of things and then know prefer and it suits me best to frequent a certain gym, eat a certain brand of pita bread, pick one pair of running tights over another, or pick one doctor over another? Isn't life all about finding your preferences and not having to apologize for them unless they hurt someone - and picking one of these over another does not - in fact, you must pick a winner and the others will lose your business, money, etc and may go out of business, but that's just how life is. Apparently I'm so scarred from my autistic period I feel like I'm being a bad person to life life the way we were all meant to live it. Those who embrace, learn quickly and stay a while (those who like it stay longer, so it's correlated) are the only people who actually add to our child's development when sufficiently skilled, and make my training hours multiply and grow through their own initiative and energy - why can't I choose them? What about all the people I never get to meet who God or the Universe intended to help us that I've never met because of my mental holding pattern that is probably scarring from my autistic years?
At the Son-Rise Program classes I learned the importance of eye contact and the nonjudgment / acceptance enough to enjoy eye contact rather than being nervous and avoiding it, since i was afraid of non-autistic people sniffing me out and rejecting me and seeing it in their eyes - not to mention having them think they had nothing to learn from me and didn't want to learn the program from me. I was thus afraid of having to sit in the room with "strangers" to coach and interact with them to run our program, which is central to Son-Rise, because it would be so uncomfortable because they'd judge me. Now I think it's raising the bar to feel I'm on the other side and judging them - or their performance - as not as good as someoe else's and making them uncomfortable, and that's making me too uncomfortable to act. But those people should go do something they like more and are better at, not ruin our program! Yet my habits and autistic cringing is still there in this case. I think I need to grow into a person who can let people go and know it's OK and not personal, and help them see they aren't resonating with or liking the program either, and for sure are not helping me. I'm trying to keep in mind how different life would be and would have been if I had chosen people who fit better, and am committing myself to letting people go even if they and I are uncomfortable about it.
I have to let them go before I've sunk too much training into a person to let them go easily, something else I've identified in dialogues I did with myself. I am prioritizing letting them go right away (2-4 weeks) as a way to have a great program, not merely a good one. There is a famous saying, "Good is the enemy of great", and I belief this is true in my playroom and broader life (that broader topic is for another day).
I'm finally and am ready to cut back to just me if necessary, although I feel trapped in the house and feel guilty that I'm not working with my daughter all the time, what I'm finding is I do something super intense and important with her. Yet I can see increased learning from her and there are funds to use for biomedical treatments again, such as heavy metals chelation and cranial sacral therapy, now, so I'm warning that up as an adjust physical support to her learning.
Our Daughter Is Developing Quickly with our reduced Team Including More Hours with Me, but I'm going a little Stir Crazy and Feeling Guilty (for no reason)
Anna's Son-Rise® + Anat Baniel Method® Program is down to a core of me + only a few very skilled Son-Rise trainees of mine, then our current most effective Son-Rise participant went out sick for the past 1-2 weeks, leaving only me plus one session a piece for two others. I'm going crazy in the house, including Anna in a lot of organizing and cleaning - which is very good for the autistic brain to sort and create groupings - plus 1-2 intensive Son-Rise + academic sessions and one movement lesson a day. With spectacular speed I was able to teach her several concepts I've been asking others to do for the last year or two, using movement rather than stuff on paper, except to codify what is happening after she understand and can recreate it, which I had to to do with numerical incrementing/ decrementing long ago on "number lines" or "linear numerical backbone".
In less than a week Anna and I have covered:
- multiplication through finger math representing what's on the page through movement, which also includes factoring larger numbers, reintroducing counting by multiples, etc.;
- division, factoring and fractions, including various ways to represent it (with the a÷b, a/b, and a over b '--";
- addition and translation into division, including communicative properties of multiplication and addition + factoring (yes, all these are wrapped up into the same understanding; you can't understand one without the others - it's like saying you're going to teach walking but teaching swinging a leg forward but not stepping on it). She was able to recall today when asked what the "communicative property of number addition or multiplication" was. Asking questions of her "what is the communicative property of multiplication / addition?" she did not answer. I told her, "You have to answer something! You have to say 'I don't remember' or 'I didn't understand the question' or guess, or say what you remember, you can't just not answer like a plant or a dog! You have to answer! She paused and said, "I see the snow" (outside our car). Then I said, "No, I asked about the communicative property of addition or multiplication of numbers." I directed her memory back to the time she was learning this material, and said "What do you remember when we were in the bathroom writing those numbers on the mirror with soap?" which I had her participate in the prior day. She paused LONG what you remember about our discussion the other day, You . The KEY to asking questions is to remind her
- introducing statistics, including tallying, creating fractions, geometry of dividing circles evenly into slices, and representing on a pie chart, raising the level of academic challenge and learning in a kids' activity book that's otherwise below her level but which she loves because it's graphical and colorful and fun looking. For example, she was supposed to just color the circles with the indicated latter in it such as capital or small Q, but then I had her list all the letters appearing on the page, count how many of each, add them all together using a number line so it could do a visual representation or regular counting movement over 10 (limit of finger math), then creating fractions based on these numbers such as "q" has 4/12, "d" has 2/12, etc., then creating a 12-slice pie chart (tracing a small bottle lid), dividing evenly (geometry) and color coding the slices of the pie to correlate with each letter and the number of slices.
- Categorizing Animals Species into Types such as Mammals (plus Primates), Reptiles, Fish, Invertebrates, Birds, etc. I ask her questions every day to have her put things she knows well, in these buckets, such as our old dog, an animal we once found that when I describe the situation she remembers to be a dead bird we once tried to revive, the mice we used to own, the kitten one of our ex-participants got, roaches, salmon we buy, etc.
- A number of concepts about earth, such as varying types of forests, equator, etc.
- I'm continuing our cultural literacy effort, watching famous movies everyone knows or references.
It's all detailed and I should put it in videos and if you the audience think you can use that and ask me, I will show you how to teach these with an autistic person, but only if I get enough response. It's SUPER IMPORTANT that a person learns the math concepts through body movement, and visual representation of other concepts that cannot be represented this way, or forget it! For example, I spent a frustrating 10-15 min trying to teach the same math concepts of factoring, multiplication, counting by larger than on number, communicability of addition and multiplication, etc. using dried lima beans and number lines other than her fingers, which were still visual and tactile, but hands-based teaching won hands-down (no pun intended)!
How you teach matters at least as much as what you teach, and the ABM and Son-Rise way is to make sure the person understands what you're doing or don't go forward, reduce and reduce the level until they understand for sure and then build back up to more complex concepts. Connect things to what the child FOR SURE knows or it's hard just to participate in the lesson and the stress of having to imagine your set up and on top of that learn a new concept pretty much guarantees you'll make no progress, whereas using familiar things, like the slices of pizza from whole foods which she's seen and bought a ton of times and knows what 6 slices looks like from that, or our butterflies we used to raise, she'd know instantly and feel at ease while you try to manipulate those memories into new concepts.
ABM Neuromovement Lessons Help you Add fuel to your Child's recovery without a lot of time
I asked Anat for help understanding how to apply her thinking to schooling, and she was excited to do an interview with me to answer my questions, but am finding I'm finding my own answers this last few weeks. The brain needs variations and more intensive learning needs to be followed by ample integration time. I think having so many mostly novice participants was a big drain on me and not worth the time to train those people, so going forward I will choose carefully and screen / parse quickly and with great energy.
I learned Anat Baniel Method and became a practitioner, because I wanted to be able to do more concentrated lessons and get breaks on some days rather than doing many more hours of Son-Rise, to provide variations on approaches, since in my opinion the two approaches are highly similar. It's seeming to pay off to mix them, still joining and having a positive attitude throughout. ABM Lessons are so intense you can only do up to a half hour at a time and the child needs to do something else that's low key for several hours at least to integrate, and I can feel good leaving her alone for those periods while I work.
I couldn't spend many hours a day doing son-rise and have a life and as explained above, since there's a lot of work and issues that translate into time spent (and money, usually), so even help in the playroom is something of a burden (until the participants become fantastic at 6-12 months usually), and will treat participation more as a privilege now, which it has always been, to learn what I know how to do so effectively. Participants, up until the highly effective stage, are mostly there for your sanity so you can refresh and be there for your uber-valuable session(s) with your autistic child.
The level of excellence they need to cross to jump in value is "Adding Changing Roles" in my Participant Performance Pyramid, something that people who have attitudinal issues with the Son-Rise philosophy NEVER get to due to their underlying judgments of the program. If they are going to cap out, even if they are great at that level, then, they must go out. "Move up or move out" is the reality so why not implement it quickly? Those people need to go somewhere where they can be more effective, less judgmental, etc. because they're doomed here as far as performance in that mindset. Doesn't God or the universe want us to succeed at our effort to recover our child, have a happy life, and succeed in our business ventures? Letting people go quickly would be an acknowledgment of such, as opposed to keeping less effective people and feeling burdened and being less successful.
Son-Rise + ABM Neuromovement Lessons Cause our Daughter to Start Developing this Week
First time our child ever suggested adding punctuation - today!
Today my daughter, whom I asked to text one of our most skilled participants to see if she was well enough to resume sessions, was repeating back the text content before sending, as usual. She said, "Can I send it?" I said "Yes". Then she asked "Can I put a period [at the end of the sentence]?" I was shocked because I've been asking her to pause at periods, and she usually reads right past them, not pausing at the end of the sentence, so she can't truly understand them as separate units, for years. Suddenly, today, she asked to add punctuation - suggesting which kind - to the text, something she has never asked to do. Anat Baniel always says "The Brain is a quantum system" and any change, no matter how small or insignificant, indicates a change that can add to, reflect or cause major shifts, and that noticing and appreciating the importance and weight to all spontaneous changes - those that the child suddenly makes effortlessly as a reflection of their improved brain - helps those changes stick. So I pointed out to her that that's the first time she's added the period at the end of a sentence on her own and how neat that is, and then let it go, as Anat would want us to do. Draw attention to it for her brain to notice, but don't make a big deal or add a lot of distraction that could disrupt this pattern setting into the brain. That's the quiet enthusiasm, her spin on enthusiasm, something the Son-Rise Program includes.
First time our child ever got how it's funny to mispronounce words, today!
Our daughter started laughing when my son intentionally mispronounced a word - "pepper" as "peppaire" with a french twang, then mentioned how this was like how he immitated his trainer. I asked her how he imitated his trainer, and she said, "Very Good, very Good" in that "Veddy Good, Veddy Good" pronunciation. She was smiling and laughing after both. This was the first time ever she's noticed and enjoyed these intentional mispronunciations and accents, despite my son doing this for the last several years. He specifically mispronounced "pepper" many times - we were reading The Brain's Way of Healing and there's a chapter about walking off the symptoms of Parkinson's all about a guy named Pepper he has read whenever I took him to school, now suddenly she hears and delights in it. Progress!!
- - -
I'm an Anat Baniel Method® Neuromovement® Practitioner and am happy to discuss this method as well as conduct Option Process Dialogues (I was a certified Option Process Mentor) whose certification has expired, but am seeking several people to do dialogues by phone for a reduced price for re-certification. Limited time only! Please email me at [email protected] for more details on my services.
Recent Comments