Friday, March 13
Several weeks ago Father Michael O'Connell told us that with the first group of women admitted to Jeremiah, nearly everyone washed out. They needed a better way to prepare women to enter the program.
They looked to Twin Cities Rise that had developed this empowerment training program. This training helps people change the way they view themselves in relation to the world. It helps them start to understand that everyone is born with the core value that they are important. Women go through the empowerment training as part of the pre-admission process. Twin Cities Rise has also trained all of the Jeremiah staff in empowerment.
Twin Cities Rise views this training as central to their success in upgrading the employment skills of men and women they work with. So we will hear more about this powerful tool from Cy Yusten, executive director of Twin Cities Rise, and consider how this training might be extended to more families with small children.
Cy Yusten
Executive Director
Empowerment Institute
Twin Cities RISE!
Twin Cities RISE! views empowerment training as central to their success in upgrading the employment skills of men and women they work with. The Jeremiah Program contracts with RISE! for empowerment training for its participants..
Voluntary: We discovered a long time ago that if a person wants to change their life, you can help them. I can’t change anybody’s life, but if they want to change their life, I can give them some keys. Empowerment is an all-encompassing idea that really does help people change their lives.
Return on investment: The program is an anti-poverty program. The state kicks in a little money every year; about 66 percent of our budget every year comes from donations. We have been in operation for 15 years and the state estimates it has given us $3 million. The state also says it has received about $15 million back in savings. The state looked at the income taxes it has received and savings in public safety and social service programs. And that doesn’t count the savings to federal programs. We think our return on investment is a lot bigger.
We create our own reality: Our thoughts drive what happens to us. What you do is a culmination of how you perceive the event and the reaction you choose to it. And it leads to an outcome. If someone cut you off in traffic, you might get angry. If I was in the backseat and said, “I know that guy. His wife has cancer. I bet he is heading to the hospital,” you would slow down, back off and wish him the best. But it is all in how you interpret the situation. It is not the event that causes the outcome. It is our reaction and our belief system that causes the outcome. By knowing that—and if we know that—we can create any outcome we desire. It is all in how we see what is happening.
Brief history: Steve Rothschild, former VP of General Mills, started the program. Someone got him involved in an anti-discrimination program in Minneapolis. He started focusing on men from communities of color. They were missing from their community and their families. So we ended up with moms in poverty. Steve started to study poverty in general. He took the position that he could end poverty in his lifetime. You get men back in their communities, back in the family where they can serve in a supportive role. The biggest key is employment. RISE! stands for: Responsible, Independent, Skill, Empowerment. Originally targeting communities of color, the program has opened its door to anyone. We are about 60 percent men, about 70 percent people of color and almost totally low-income.
Early lesson/key connection: People can’t just have any job. If you want to help them change their lives, it has to be a career track position. Steve identified a career-track position as one that paid least $20,000 a year with full benefits and hopefully with promotion opportunity. In Year One, 19 men enrolled. All 19 got placed. A few months later all 19 men were fired or had left. Then Steve Rothschild met Steve Stosny (the author of The Powerful Self; also see at www.compassionpower.com) The learning from that initial failure was that RISE! participants needed help with the soft skills, the interpersonal skills to work on a team. Between the two of them, they created the curriculum we call personal empowerment.
A bit about the brain: Experiences create convolutions on the outside of our brain. Every time we have experiences it adds another wrinkle. Repeat the same experience time after time and that wrinkle becomes a groove and it becomes very deep. Every habit you have is something that you have learned along the way. Can you unlearn? Sure you can. But you can’t erase the groove. The groove stays there. What we know from brain research, if you want to create a new habit, you have to practice consistently and continuously over a period of six to nine months to create a deeper groove.
Personal Empowerment: Personal empowerment is an extensive training program. People look at their bad and good habits, the ingrained behaviors. We use the psychology of cognitive restructuring.
- Do you know what you are thinking?
- Do you know how your thoughts lead to feelings?
- And do you know how your feelings lead to behaviors?
Say someone cuts you off in traffic. We fall back on an old belief structure. What were you taught in elementary school? No cuts. When the guy cuts in front of you, you are going back to an old belief structure. We use cognitive restructuring to help you change the way you view those things. If you can change your thought pattern, you can change your behavior. They are all connected.
Power of the pause: We teach ways you can slow it down and pause, so you have time to change that thought structure. That is what it takes. (There is an organization called 6 seconds.org. If someone says something offensive and I can pause for six seconds, the outcome will be different. Their training in a nutshell is to think of six best friends or name six states to cause a break. My response will be different.)
Emotional Intelligence: We use emotional intelligence. IN the mid-1990s’ Gardner coined the phrase “EQ is better than IQ.” (EQ is emotional quotient.) I have a ton of research that says that emotional intelligence will lead to your success. Your mental intelligence is formed by the time you are age 4. You can affect your IQ by 5 or 6 points throughout your life. Good luck, you will never gain more than 10 points. You can change and grow and develop your emotional intelligence every day of your life. There are five aspects to the development of emotional intelligence.
- Self awareness
- Self regulation
- Self motivation
- Empathy
- Social skills
Self awareness: We have to know ourselves to change. You have to be able to regulate your emotions—and think about the way you think—as well as changing the way you think. Every time you think a thought, it is a choice. When you recognize you have those choices, you can do anything you want.
Going younger: Our average participant is 30, 31 years old. RISE! said, why would we wait and allow a decade of failure? Let’s take it to high school. Let’s change their attitudes about self. That is what the achievement gap issue is about. If you look at the kids who are not achieving, who are they? What do we know about them? They typically come out of generational poverty, or have poverty issues. It can affect your state of mind. You acquired modeling from parents and grandparents. We can begin working on the achievement gap by working on generational poverty. What can we do about kids attitudes that, “I don’t belong here.”
School initiatives: We do some training now in schools. We are working in St. Paul and Minneapolis. We have 127 kids in St. Paul going through personal empowerment classes. They are the emotionally disabled students, in a lot of ways we have written them off. St. Paul was interested. If we can move a kid from totally isolated to part-time mainstream we could save $18,000 a year per student. I know two students just since our training last spring who moved from a federal 4 to a federal 3. I know the district has already saved $36,000. We trained 10 people, and they can work with hundreds of kids every year.
Looking inside: We work in junior highs. In adolescence, kids are faced with personal identity. Who am I? Who will I be? Will people like me? They are doing a lot of looking outside of themselves. We are trying to redirect them to look inside. The “Will people like me?” almost means I am willing to sell out. We are pushing the idea of personal empowerment. Whether someone likes me or not is their issue, not mine.
Grandma rule: One kid told me I just wanted him to “act white.” I said no, it’s just the Grandma Rule. When you go to your grandma’s house, do you sag your pants like that? Do you use that language? (The kid said he didn’t.) We work on thinking about going to the closet and having the opportunity to decide what I am going to wear today. There are some folks I want to impress. I want to influence them. I can do that simply by how I present myself. It is the Grandma Rule. It is not about acting white, it is about taking advantage of what you know about yourself and the other person to gain the most out of life.
Happy people: They did a 20-year longitudinal study on happy people. They discovered that happy people surround themselves with other happy people. You can increase happiness by three degrees by being a happy person yourself. Which means if you are a happy person in your social networks, your happiness will contribute to the happiness of your friends’, friends’, friends. Happiness is a state of mind. It is how we interpret what is going on around us. We get total control over that.
Core values/core hurts: We teach about core values and core hurts. Core values are things you get as a birth right. We believe there are three core values: You are always loveable, important and valuable. (LIV). We have people repeat that in training. I am loveable, important and valuable. We call that power mode. Some kids don’t believe it. They operate from core hurts. We have to learn how not to let our past affect our present. We are not what happened to us. That just happened. Hopefully, we learn things from that that we carry into the present. The past is not who we are. Women in the Jeremiah Program are amazed when we tell them, yes they are loveable, important and valuable.
Not for everyone: Does this work for everybody? Absolutely not. For train the trainer program, you go through personal empowerment first. You have to experience it to teach it. Then you have a facilitator development program. Third you co facilitate. It is 120 hours of training. We have people who go through that process and they hold the empowerment as intellectual exercise—it’s good for other people, but I don’t need it. They will never be an authentic facilitator. They won’t be able to talk about how it works in their life. What are the issues you have, the core hurts that interfere with you today? We ask them to name those things. That can be really hard, to look that issue in the face and name it.
Naming the problem: If you want to help someone change their behavior, you have to name that behavior. The person that uses sarcasm, you have to be able to say to them, “when you use sarcasm, it makes me feel like I am not important or valuable. I know that is passive aggressive behavior and I don’t like the way it makes me feel. If you are going to continue to have a relationship with me, I want you to drop the sarcasm.” I am not forcing the other person to do anything. But I am defining limits. They know what I will do next. I can’t control the other person’s behavior. I can always control mine.
Q&A
Q: Are you involved in taking this training to families in their homes?
A: Can we use empowerment in that setting? The answer is yes. The unfortunate part is finding someone to pay for that. We are in discussions with the Peace Foundation on the north side of Minneapolis. They have 18 community liaisons. We have found a foundation that is interested in doing it. We think of this as completing the circle. The parents, elders and influential adults in the community have to have this training. We are making contact with ECFE programs. They are the natural place to do this. If we can do this with the parents, we know it will reach the children. Children learn from modeling.
Q: Do you need volunteers for facilitation?
A: Absolutely. The Jeremiah Program is paying to train three facilitators. Those individuals have agreed to put in two years’ volunteering. Training a trainer takes 120 hours of programming and costs $10,000. All of our trainings are highly interactive, with role plays, discussions and practice time.
Q: Elaborate on the last two aspects of emotional intelligence.
A: Empathy is not the walk-a-mile-in-my-shoes things. Empathy is built on the idea that everything a person does makes perfect sense to them at that moment. If you look at them and think, “that seemed to be the most logical thing to do,” then you stop saying, “What were you thinking!” The message being sent is “What was wrong with you.” Instead of responding that way, we say, “help me understand what you were thinking about when you did that … “ Social skills are all those things that allow us to be effective with other people: The power of influence, how to collaborate, the ability to recognize emotions in others.
Q: What are the most frequent core hurts?
A: Children who heard from their parents, “You are an idiot. You are so dumb, what is wrong with you?” They begin to believe at an early age they are not capable. Who knows where those statements come from? It is the opposite of being loveable, important and valuable. Those core hurts you can carry around for a long time and be completely wrong about them. My parents never went to one of my basketball games. I carried that hurt for years. When I was 34 I asked them. Mom looked at me and said, “You know how you were. You never asked us.” Most high schoolers don’t want to be around their parents. I remember that. She was trying not to embarrass me. She was waiting to be asked. In an instant when it was clarified, it all went away. Can I fix that? No. But I can learn from it.
Q: What about the role of religious faith in motivating people?
A: The abstract nature of a deity is difficult, especially for some children. When we talk about this, we talk about mind, body, heart and spirit. We think there is a need to recognize we are connected by spirit to things greater than ourselves. If you can’t be connected to something greater than yourself, then your whole life is centered on who you are. It takes away some of the motivation. We try to stay away from specific religious approaches. We use a lot of spiritual stuff. Do you know what the largest living organism is on the planet? An aspen grove. The largest one covers about 55 square miles. The roots connect all the trees. That is one of the examples that I use. We are all connected. My happiness extends by three degrees.
Q: Talk about your work in prison?
A: We have a program called Inside Out in three state prisons and the Ramsey County workhouse. We work with men due to be released in the next six months. We provide direct training in personal empowerment. As your release date nears, your anxiety level goes up. You don’t know what will happen next. My life has been completely controlled. Now I am going to be personally responsible for what happens next. I have to support myself somehow and not fall back into the old ways. If there is ever a group that could benefit from personal empowerment, it is that one. We have been invited by DOC to expand the program and serve more men. Typically we hire a lot of our own graduates.
Q: How do you get some of these people who don’t want to be in the program, into your program?
A: In the prisons you can sign up if you want to. In prison, the reality is there is nothing to do. If we are entertaining at all, it’s great. It is very entertaining to hear people’s stories. It works well in the prisons. In our core program, people come to us because they want to get out of poverty. If you want to do that, you will have to take about 20 hours of course work a week and 2.5 hours will be personal empowerment. They are not signing up for empowerment, they are signing up for a better job. We are showing them a way to do that.
Q Talk about the connection to your work and the achievement gap?
A: If you look at the research on how to predict whether a student will complete college, there are two tests that are best. One is a test of hope; one is a test of optimism. Both of those tests have higher predictive quality than the SAT or ACT or high school grades. Hope mean you have an idea about what could happen, and you are working on a pathway to get there. That is what college is all about. The other research says if you can increase students’ emotional competencies, you have less disruptive behavior, fewer disciplinary problems, more connectivity with the instructor, and a higher value for what the teacher can bring to you—even if you don’t like the teacher. When you are in a positive frame of mind, your brain is more effective. You learn faster in a positive frame of mind than you do a negative. (I have a three-page tabulation of research studies, I will send them to Don.)
For schools that don’t make adequate progress, we reconstitute the school. It gets rid of the teachers who are there and makes them reapply for their jobs if they want to return. Research out of England shows that if you reconstitute a school, you increase the staff’s stress level. The first thing they lose are their emotional competencies, which is the ability to work as a team and to be effective in their relationships with others. Who are the others? It is the kids in their classroom.
Q: What are the tests for hope and optimism?
A: I don’t have the names. I pulled them out of the research. From my work with students, I totally believe this.
Q: Any research on the school work? …
A: We just started this last year with St. Paul schools. This year we are training six Minneapolis teachers, also in special ed. Part of both of those projects is that there will be an evaluation done as part of the project. We are working on a smaller number of students in Minneapolis. We will do pre and post emotional assessments with them.
Q: What is the impact on creativity?
A: Creativity gets blocked by other issues that come up. I don’t have the freedom to think in creative ways. Have you read the book, My Stroke of Insight? The author had a stroke, the left side of the brain has a huge block clot. She talks about moving into a period of great peace and contentment. The left side is the logic side. It is also where the parent voice resides, a lot of the rule structures. She lost all of that. She lived in the right hemisphere. She could get totally captivated by something that she saw. The creativity is on the right side. Her proposal is, we can learn to emphasize whatever side we choose to by becoming more aware of it. See: http://www.mystrokeofinsight.com/
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