Practice Making Good Choices, But Learn To Accept All Consequences | Clips | Dad Saves America

0:00 - The learning philosophy that we use is that clear thinking leads to good decisions, good decisions lead to good habits, good habits lead to your character, and character leads to your destiny. - Maybe that's obvious, but why is that true? - We believed that what, our children's life would be an accumulation of their choices, their decisions. So being able to be a good decision maker, that's the first thing we care about. And that's still today, what I care about, is my children being able to make good choices and to be faced with a lot of choices often.

0:37 So choices and consequences, but you have to think clearly to understand what's the decision I'm making. - What is a good choice? - A good choice leads you further down a path that is a good path for you. Let's say you wanted to learn to ride a bike. You decide to start in the middle of the street or on the sidewalk. That seems really basic, but it's kind of a big decision when you're learning to ride a bike.

1:00 So you weigh the pros and cons and you make a choice. The sidewalk had a bunch of bumps and dips and grooves. The street was a very closed street. My son chose to ride in the street. That was a decision that helped him a lot. You talk through that decision, pretty soon, he's learning to think through clearly what the options are. - Yeah. - Weigh pros and cons and then make a decision and live with the consequence.

1:22 Not every decision's gonna be great but you learn to live with the consequence. The idea is that each decision is a process that you take intentionally and your day is filled with a million little decisions and they end up adding to what your life is. So your decisions become your habits. That's the next thing. So pretty soon, you're developing a lifestyle based on your decision. So those are your habits, your habits ultimately then become your character.

1:47 Are you telling the truth a lot? Are you doing things that you're scared about doing but you're doing them anyway so you're becoming more and more courageous? Are you getting back up every time you fail? So you're becoming more and more resilient? And those character traits end up deciding your destiny. So from the very basic things, we were talking through decisions when they were two years old, like, "Sam, would you like milk or orange juice?" And he would rebel.

2:16 He wouldn't want either. And so it's a really interesting thing. You can talk about decision making with really young children. So we started with that template and we knew the Socratic method back to the tool we were using. - And explain what the Socratic method is. We have had other guests on the show talk us through the Socratic method, but. - Yeah. - How do you understand what that means? What does that mean- - For us, the Socratic method is offering choices, asking a question.

2:42 It's not an open ended question for us. I think that's a misunderstanding some people have that it's just asking questions is a Socratic method. To us, it's a very skilled discipline of not having an agenda when you ask a question, creating a scenario, a situation, a moral dilemma, for example, and giving options as answers The reason we give options so that it really zones in the listener's thinking. So if you wanna, rather than an opened ended question where you start daydreaming, going off into your own world.

3:14 If you have to think of the choices, the options that are given, you're really listening hard and it's concrete. We then either have them define if there's a question about a term, go back and define a term. So everyone's clearly talking about the same words. - Yep. - And then you have to take a stand. You can't say, "Well, I wouldn't wanna do A or B. I do really kind of wanna do C." Kinda like Sam was doing with the milk and orange juice.

3:37 No, it's milk or orange juice. - That's it. - But these moral dilemmas. So it's really hard because you have to really take a stand and then say, why, give evidence for why you took that stand. Then the next person can respond. And in our Socratic dialogues, the facilitator just sets that up. And the young people end up calling on each other. So they're listening to each other responding to each other. And they have to either say, I agree or I disagree with John, with the person who just spoke, and why.

4:08 So pretty soon it just becomes responding to each other but you have to give evidence. The facilitator has a really important job. If the energy starts to lag, they force a question that deepens the scenario, turns up the heat or calls for a vote and see who's where and then keeps the question going. So it gets deeper and deeper but everyone's having to take a stand. So it's not talking about knowledge necessarily. It's not debating facts.

4:32 It's really taking a stand on a situation. Very often, there are moral dilemmas but that's what history is made of. So we knew that the Socratic method is what we wanted to ground everything on. So we don't have teachers. We decided we only wanted guides. So any adult that's in the room, we have a lever of control that you are not allowed to give lectures. You are not allowed to answer questions or basically you'll be fired because we really wanna push that envelope.

4:59 We wanna push it far, further than any model I've ever seen, really. So that was where we started was the Socratic method. - If you enjoyed this clip, be sure to check out the full conversation with Laura Sandefer. And if you want more insightful conversations like this, be sure to like this video, subscribe to our channel and hit the notification bell. This way, you won't miss our interviews and short videos as they come out each week.

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