Podcast 06: Joe Gauld: Unique Potential, Destiny, and Parents

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1 Podcast 06: Unique Potential, Destiny, and Parents Hello, today's interview is with Joe Gauld, founder of the Hyde School. I've known Joe for 29 years and I'm very excited to be talking with him today. Good morning, Joe and thanks for being with us on this podcast for Parenting Teens: The Biggest Job We'll Ever Have. Happy to be here. Great. I've introduced you in our introduction to this podcast as the founder of Hyde school. I know you're many, many other things to many, many people, but let's start with that. You founded the school in 1966, is that right? Yes. I've heard you talk many times about having a crisis of conscience that led you to the founding of this school. I'm wondering if you define that crisis of conscience, what does that mean to you? It was New Years Eve, in 1962, I went to a faculty party and everything was great. I found my smile was too fixed, I was trying hard to be sociable, finally got off by myself to figure, "What's happening to me? What's wrong?" Realized that I didn't believe in what I was doing. I was a very successful coach, teaching calculus, putting kids into place like MIT, but at a deeper level, I just knew that we were not reaching the deeper potentials of kids and really not preparing them for life. There had to be a better way. Once you know the truth, you can't unknow it. That night I made a commitment to find a better way, which ultimately led to the founding of Hyde in 1966 and the premise that I tried was the concept every individual has unique potential, which I sought to support with a character curriculum that emphasized the development of character, so that was the whole idea. It must have seemed like a daunting task, I mean, what a challenge. It was one of these things, I had let go of what I had done before and I was saying, "Okay, we're going to try this. If that doesn't work, I think it will lead us to something that did." Was that it did work, however, I can't go over all the changes that were made over the years, but of course a couple of great big ones that happened to us with this whole focus on character, not academics, but character and character is the larger concept. Academics is a part of character. The big changes that were brought about over the past 50 years are, the first thing, you teach character by example. The adults, if

2 you're working with kids, you have to go through the process as the kids. You have to show it by your example. The second thing is that the whole foundation of the process is parents and family. In character development, parents are the primary teachers and the home is the primary classroom. I learned that in 1974, it was a big step back for me to realize that if we were really going to prepare kids for life, we had to start and work with parents and family and we've been doing that now for 42 years in both our boarding schools and our public schools and that's been the big change. The idea that if you're really going to help kids, if you're going to prepare kids for life, you need to work with parents as primary teachers. In other words, their growth is very important and you need to work with families and make this connection between family and schools. You've always said sometimes the kids don't, when they graduate, they don't really have a deep seeded understanding of the direction that their character needs to take them, but you've always said that if the family gets it, if the parents get it, the kids will eventually get it. Right, yes. That's deep within us. What I've learned, particularly over the last 42 years working with parents is this, we're all born with a unique potential, a spirit and a natural capacity to love. Those are natural things that we're born with. However, with the attachment theory, all of us imitate our parents from birth. That's our survival, we realize that if somebody doesn't take care of us, we're not going to survive, so we imitate our caretakers, parents, guardians, whatever. In that process, you see, the character, and the values, and the purpose of our parents become a way of expressing our unique potential and our character and our sense of purpose. On the downside, our parents were imperfect people, just like their parents were imperfect people, do that we have these imperfections that don't express our unique potential. You might call these imperfections, distractions within ourselves. That's the downside. You go ahead and unfortunately, we as human beings, those distractions that we have within ourselves, whether it's we imitate the anger of our parents or the alcoholism in our families or all these things, these are all distractions. They're not part of our unique potential, they're something that we imitated when we were children, little children. They become part of us and it's human nature that the distraction becomes stronger within us than all these good things that we've done. It's like, you go out and you do 6 good things and then something bad happens and unfortunately, we humans, we focus on the bad thing. That's the way we see ourselves, through the bad stuff. We get distracted. That's the problem we have, is we get caught in these distractions and that's where people, they feel shame because of these things, the distractions they feel within themselves and that takes them so that that's the way they look at themselves. The addictions that you see in people, all this kind of stuff is almost trying to escape all that stuff. When really, within them, are all these positive things waiting to express themselves, but we get caught in these distractions and that's the problem we have is to get beyond these distractions. When you work with kids at the school, at Hyde, I don't think I've ever heard you talk

3 about them in terms of distractions before, is this a new concept? Actually, I picked up that concept from the Dalai Lama, he says it so well that I hadn't quite seen it the way he had seen it. I've always seen that these, I had called it sort of a dark side, but I think he sees it much more clearly that we have these distractions and I think that's a much better way to put it. I really like the term. I mean, Joe, when I go back to our time at Hyde and how uptight I was as a mother because of the problems that my son was having, if I'd known they were simply distractions, if I'd been able to accept him in that light in that term, it relaxes me. I feel like, "That would have been a lot easier to accept than a character flaw in him, or in me, or a not a disability but something more permanent." Distraction holds kind of temporary. It really is. You see, the point of the distraction is really, if you look at the root, the root is something that you internalize when you were a little child. You internalized it from your parents. Great parents, they gave you a lot of great stuff, but they weren't perfect and they gave you these distractions, but a few distractions along with many good things that they gave you and unfortunately, the way we are as humans, those distractions really distract us. The shame when you feel from those distractions, those really distract us and take us away from who we really are. They're not our distractions and if we could just begin to look at them that way and begin to get help with them that way, to see them as distractions, I think we would be so much better off. Right. Are you, in terms of your work with the kids at Hyde now, are you using this term distractions with them? No, I haven't yet. You haven't. The big thing is to get the parents to use that because the point is that they're the primary teachers and it's not a matter of when I work with kids, I try to get them to see it that way and they'll say, "Oh yes, that's right. I had that with my parents." They see that the distractions, what I'm calling distractions, I used to call them negative emotional dispositions in my court. I remember, yes. I call them negative emotional dispositions, that's what they are, but they're better called distractions. The kids can see that their parents have the same thing, so they've copied them from their parents, they've imitated their parents. Wow, I didn't know you were working on this. Like I said, I really like the term distractions. It's much more palatable. It also seems to me that, I've known you since 1987 and it seems to me that as our family has been in Hyde and I've worked at Hyde that a lot of the rest of the world, and I know this might sound kind of arrogant, but it seems like a lot of the rest of the world is now catching up to our philosophy. For

4 instance, David Brooks wrote an article recently that I read about if you really want children to learn, you need the cooperation of the parents and he described it in a way that was very similar to the way that Hyde does it and then Carol Dweck with her Growth Mindset, and Renee Brown with her Vulnerability, you know the ability to be vulnerable and certainly at Hyde I realized, "It's not about your image anymore, Pam, it's about being real and being able to be vulnerable." Do you feel like this was all out there at the same time or it's just now coming into fruition or what would you say about that? I think everybody's going in that direction, they're beginning to see it that way. You mentioned the people, Renee Brown, her whole concept of vulnerability as she says, the shame feel doesn't allow us, the shame keeps us from sharing our deeper selves with other people. We share our public self, but not our private self, you see. Such an important point is when you can really have the courage, she says this with the courage, the courage to share our authentic self with everybody else and that's who you are and not to be afraid of what you are and once you feel that acceptance of your authentic self, now you've connected to your unique potential. Your authentic self expresses your unique potential, so your power is coming from this great power you have within you, your creativity, your unique potential has this tremendous creativity. As long as you let your public self control you, then other people are controlling you. The control is not coming from your deeper self. I always look at myself as a kid, here I am, I'm this very naïve kid. I say these things and I get laughed at. At least I am closer to my authentic self as much as I'm sort of a jerk, but it is authentic. As I finally, when I grow up and I start to become successful, it's more connected to who I am and so my creativity really comes out and really helps me in what I do in my life. I think so many people are afraid of their inner selves because of the shame. I never felt the shame, I just thought I was just not much of anything when I was a kid and nobody ever took me seriously, but I didn't feel shame. I think that's the important thing for people. Thank you. I wanted to ask you, as you work with families today, Joe, what would say parents are most worried about with their kids? I realized you've explained very well that we let these distractions, both in ourselves and our kids take us off track, is there anything besides that? I think today parents are too worried about the job of parenting and in that process of worrying about it, the worry really takes away their strength and the point is this, their kids want to grow and they want to help their kids grow and they have the potential to help their kids and their kids have potential to grow and there's just a natural connection there. It isn't a matter of how their parents raised them or of the mistakes their parents made or anything else. It's just a matter of their connecting with their kids, recognizing that their kids do want to grow and they want to have somebody help them grow. That's the key. Once again, I can't believe how long I've known you and I'm still learning from you. I'm sitting here taking notes. Kids want to grow and they just want someone to, what did you say?

5 Help them grow. Help them grow. Parents are too worried about the job of parenting. Yes, exactly. It fits. It really fits. What's your recommendation then? All parents have to do is just two things. Number one, help kids do their best, okay? No matter what kids say or anything else, just help them do their best is number one. Number two, prepare them to be self-sufficient. You do those two things and they'll love you for their lifetime. That's great advice. Tell us about some of your writings, the books that you've written. I think the last book I wrote, which is What Kids Want and Need From Parents, really expresses a lot of what I've said, and of course I've updated things a little bit here in this talk, but the essence of what I'm talking about is in that book. It is on Amazon for people who want to follow up on what they hear here. I think, I don't know how to say this, I think the book is ahead of its time unfortunately and as a matter of fact, I think that's what Raz Ingrasci of the Hoffman Institute said in his recommendation, that what I said about parents in the book about this whole thing about the role of parents is a little bit ahead of its time, but I think what Renee Brown is saying and Carol Dweck and some of those people, I think is now catching up to what I'm saying. I hope people will follow up on that because I really think it's the key to helping parents really become effective with kids. Great to talk with Joe Gauld today. I love that he used the word distractions with our kids. When we go off track or our kids go off track to just consider those as distractions, not a flaw in our character. He also said that if parents prepare their kids to be selfsufficient and just to do their best, that that's the real job of parenting and that kids will love us forever if we do that. He also said that he feels that parents are too worried about the job of parenting and that this worry takes away their strength. I asked Joe at the end of the conversation if people could get in touch with him if they wanted to. You can reach him at jgauld@hyde.edu Thanks everybody.

Pastor's Notes. Hello

Pastor's Notes. Hello Pastor's Notes Hello We're looking at the ways you need to see God's mercy in your life. There are three emotions; shame, anger, and fear. God does not want you living your life filled with shame from