LET THEM Part One

Introduction to Let Them

0:00Well, Ralph, do you hear the music in the background? No, I don't hear any music, Jim, at least unless I'm not hallucinating. Yeah, well, I guess you're not hallucinating. Anyhow, what does that mean, the lack of music? Probably means we're not in the studio where we have all the gongs and whistles and music, but we're actually in my living room because we are recovering,

0:31I'm recovering from my close encounter with gravity. Also known as falling and having a broken hip, right? Yes. Okay. Anyhow, your way of phrasing it sounds much more intellectual and philosophical. Well, it wasn't very philosophical when, yeah, easy for you to say, when I landed. Yeah. It's not the fall, right? No, it's the sudden stop.

1:02Yeah. You and I, the Babers and the Carols, both have Wendy as our house cleaner, and she keeps us kind of, you know, spruced up, even though Sheila and Karen do a wonderful job. But Wendy was over this morning and she was talking about herself and her dog, which was a pretty big dog, about 100 pounds or so, went after a rabbit and dragged her for about 25 feet on the ground.

1:33So, hey, at least this time you didn't have a dog doing it to you. You did it to yourself. It was my own stupidity.

Reading Let Them

1:41Yeah, well, hey, we've been reading, both of us have been reading a book. And Karen, have you read this book? No. Okay, Karen is not. Karen, remember her from last week? She came in and talked about whatever we were talking about. Yeah. And Karen, you're welcome to make any comments you want. Okay. But we've been reading a book called Let Them. Okay. By Mel Robbins. And we've been listening to her podcasts also. And I'll put the podcast URL up there under Learn More.

2:18Just kind of give you a heads up. It's a little confusing. She starts with the podcast. Then she goes back. She mentions something that happened a couple weeks before. And then she puts up a selfie of that thing that happened a couple weeks before. And then she goes on with a regular podcast. And it's a pretty interesting podcast, isn't it, Ralph? It is. And one of the things that kind of caught my attention, Jim, is that this, that what she talks about is the let them theory.

2:50Now, this is a theory that has come through from some modern psychologists who are trying to help people deal with personal stress, work stress, et cetera, et cetera. And the thing that struck me when I first started reading the book was, you know, this is maybe new in terms of what she's trying to explain to people who read her book.

3:27But it's really very old. It goes back to the Stoics. Yeah, right. And we just haven't read much Marcus Aurelius lately, have we? No, most people haven't. And the idea behind this whole thing is that the let them theory says people are going to react, act, do things, say things, think things.

4:01And what we can do that's most effective is to let them and say, okay, I don't like what so-and-so said or did. You might say, you might not say this out loud, you might say it in your sub-local speech, right? Right. Okay. And so you say, what can I do about that?

4:32Well, the overwhelming tendency of a lot of people is to jump in and say, I feel the need to control them. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And so I'm going to say, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, about what they said or did. Uh-huh. And how well do you think that works, Ralph? In my considered opinion, it doesn't work worth a damn. Uh-huh. Hey, and you swore. That's kind of like Mel Robbins did.

5:06Yeah. Okay. Hello, she's a lot saltier than that. Yeah, but the thing is that it doesn't work. What it does, though, is almost universally, it gets the person to whom you are giving what you think is really good advice. Really good advice, yeah. About what they said or did. Uh-huh. You really want to know this, don't you? Yeah, and it gets their back up, and then they respond, and the next thing you know.

5:36You're responding to the response. Yeah, and then you end up saying, well, that was pretty awful. Uh-huh.

Why We Want Control

5:44Why is it, Ralph, that we want to change people or manage situations or prevent outcomes or, you know, control others or control how others see us? Well, I think, Jim, it's basically somewhere between anxiety and fear. Yeah, I think you're right. I mean, somebody says something, and what happens immediately to us? We start writing a novel, right? Yeah. Yeah. So, hey, okay, I understand what's going on.

6:14It's this, this, and this. When, in fact, it's none of the above, right? None of the above, yeah. And the thing is that, you know, I look at it and I say, okay, I've had people that I taught with who said, you should be doing XYZ in your class. Why are you not? Oh, yeah, okay. And your response might be? My response might have been, it's my class, damn it.

6:47You know, I don't need your advice. Okay. Or I might have said, well, I understand why you could think that, but, you know, this class has some unique features of its own that I think this is more effective. Okay, so, at the second response, you started out well that this is a unique class, or no, I think you said, yeah, that's a good thing.

7:20But then you immediately began to defend yourself, right? Right. So, that's what happens when people are giving us good advice. We go into the defense mode really quickly. Yeah, and the other thing I could have said, well, you know, I, yeah, you have a very valid point there. Or how about, that's interesting. Yeah, or that's interesting, or I can understand why you think that, something like that. But basically, not I'm going to defend myself or anything else.

7:57What I'm doing is listening and then detaching myself. That's what you'd like to do. That's what I'd like to do. Yeah, and I, I have to admit, it's difficult. It's not always easy. It is not the first thing we think about, is it? No. Okay. It's a lot like the fight-flight response. You know, the amygdala gets triggered, boom, like that, and, and we just react. And we either want to fight back, and if it's your colleague in the classroom, fighting is usually the way we would go.

8:30So fight, flight, do we say, you know, well, you know, good idea, I'll see you later. Probably not, because you have to see this person again. Another response is freeze. Just, okay, well, I'm not going to do anything. Or another one is the fawn response. I've been reading about that one lately. We, oh, we've tried to please the other person. Yeah. Yes, that's, that's a very good idea. And I'll try your ideas in my classroom, when, in fact, you're not going to, because you've been doing this for 30 years, and this is the way you do it, right?

9:02Right. Yeah. So the, the let them theory really goes into, or backs into the whole flight, fright, easy for me to say. Yeah. Flight. Flight. Fight. Freeze. Fawn. Okay, so when we do encounter somebody with, oh, an opinion, a suggestion that we don't like, what's the best approach?

9:42Well, to me, the best approach is to acknowledge what they've said, and then basically say to yourself, I'm not going to overreact. Mm-hmm. So somebody gives me what they think of as good advice. Yep. And I say, oh, interesting opinion.

10:15Mm-hmm. I'll, um. No, it's not an opinion, Ralph. It's exactly what you should be doing. You should be doing X, Y, and Z in your classroom. So it's not an opinion. Oh, yes, it is. Yeah, which gets us back into the whole fight, flight thing. But, you know, the thing is that if I can detach myself and, you know, in, in the book, Mel Robbins gives several interesting analogies.

10:49And one of them is rowing a boat upstream, and, you know, you have to keep rowing incredibly hard to keep going. Well, one of the other things that struck me as a good analogy to trying to be detached from what other people are saying and thinking and doing is, you probably have used or seen the little things that are designed to catch mice that might be trying to get into your pantry.

11:31And you put down a sheet of paper. Okay. And the mouse runs over the paper, and the paper is sticky, and the mouse gets stuck. Mm-hmm. Okay. So a lot of this is kind of like I hear something, somebody says something, I don't get invited somewhere with all my friends, and I get all weirded out about it. That's getting stuck. Okay, yeah. I see what you mean.

12:02And, yeah, that's a good example. It's interesting that Mel Robbins uses a lot of her own examples with her family and with particularly her female friends. Yeah. How, you know, a lot of them have to do with feeling slighted, feeling left out. And, hey, you know, six friends went to somewhere over the weekend, and she wasn't invited. And, hey, you let them, right?

12:33Yeah. Although it might be hard in this case to say, you know, let them. That might not be our first response. Our first response might be to suck our thumb and say, why wasn't I invited? Yeah. Yeah. What, you guys hate me now? Yeah, that's right. Hey, you're just taking another step up there, don't you? Yeah. Well, I hate you, too. You know, and we can really work on the novel. Yeah. And then the other thing is that she, you know, when she said, how do you end up reacting to this long term?

13:06Not just, oh, my friends hurt me because they're going away and having fun all the weekend. She said, well, you know, I look back at the last five years, and I've really been working very hard. And I haven't spent a lot of energy in keeping contact with my friends, and maybe I'm responsible for that. So maybe what I should do is say I'm going to call them up and say, look, two weeks from now or a month from now on such and such a weekend, let's have a barbecue at my house.

13:45And so I invite them, and I'm the proactive person, and I reconnect. So you can use the let them to help you alter some of your behavior if you're contributing to the, what would we call it, the problem. Yeah. And so that is the second part of it. So let them, let them have whatever reaction or thought or activity they have.

14:17Let me do what I can. So let me be more proactive. Let me extend an invitation. Let me whatever. If you think that that relationship is worth saving. Yeah, I think that I've been working on a book on trauma, Ralph, and this control thing seems to be really close to what I've been reading about and writing about.

14:51The, you know, with trauma, we have people who have been traumatized, but what do they do? They're hypervigilant. They try to control other people. I can remember a family that I had in therapy. I had the four boys and the dad, and the dad was really over-controlling. The kids hated him. I mean, it was in the therapy sessions. They would come out, and he'd be there, and they'd say how much they hated their father, you know, which is pretty bold.

15:26Anyhow, we began to look at trauma, and we saw that the stuff that had happened to him in, you know, the war over in the Gulf 10 years ago, 20 years ago, had really, you know, had come back to central Michigan with him. And that when he got into a situation where he felt, you know, he was threatened or felt that there was danger, he helped people out by trying to control them.

15:56And, you know, he was trying to control his kids. Yeah. And, yeah, kids, particularly teenagers, make really bad and sometimes stupid decisions. Right, Ralph? Oh, yes. Yeah. Don't ask me, Jim, of some of the stupid decisions I made because there are so many examples I can't bring them to mind. Well, it's probably a good defense mechanism also. So we've got this guy who's now trying to control everything.

16:26And then the question is, can he control it? And the answer is no. No, you know, you can control your kids as long as you're, you know, right on top of them. But the moment that you, you know, kind of let them go out in the world, they have to make their own way, their own, think their own thoughts, make their own decisions. Well, let them, now we're not going to let them do anything stupid. You know, hey, Dad, I think I'm going to get a fake gun and go and rob a convenience store.

16:59You dumbass, no, don't do that. Yeah. Because even the fake gun will get you into an armed robbery charge. Yeah. And, you know, the thing is. So we're not going to let them do stupid things, right?

Limitations of Control

17:19Right.

Limitations of Control

17:19And the other thing, and this is maybe a good place to stop on the first book review or podcast that we're doing about the let them theory, is to say extending what you're saying about the father who was trying to control his kids. And the reality is that you can't rescue anybody.

17:57You can't rescue somebody who says, I'm addicted to drugs, alcohol, tobacco. Social media. Social media. Until they're ready. Wow. So you can listen to them, you can hear them, you can say, I understand that you have a real problem with that, but you can't say, I'm going to get you into therapy or I'm going to get you into rehab or whatever,

18:30until they come to you and say, I've got to get some help. So there is one thing that we can control about Ralph, and that is when our part one of this podcast ends. And so with your cue, I would say to our listeners, it's time to keep your stick on the ice because we're all in this together.