Relationship Matters Preview

0:02 thank you tim for your warm generous introduction and thank you for your welcome it's uh wonderful to see this this house from this end not just the other i'm used to being on the other side i must admit though that there was a part of me that was wishing for a really big snowstorm so that i could be delivered from this moment

0:32 but there's another part of me that would have been keenly disappointed because i am after 35 years of trying to join the dots a picture has emerged that that i need to talk about and so thank you for giving me the chance this evening to talk about that picture

1:03 i hope i can give you a glimpse of it put it into the into words it's always hard to put pictures into words and this one is particularly difficult uh and i'll go into this uh as we as we go further into this it's it's not that the knowledge isn't intuitive but intuition is knowledge without words and in our society that isn't enough to be able to inform our practice of parenting and teaching we need to become conscious now of

1:34 certain things that we never needed to become conscious of before culture was able to take care of a lot of things through its tradition through its rituals and now as we know society has taken an economic turn it serves the dollar rather than relationships and so we're left having to become conscious of things that our parents and grandparents never needed to and that's what i want to talk about tonight

2:05 this place obviously was designed for music and not words i won't indulge you tonight that would certainly spoil it but i i hope i hope that my words at least by the time we get to the end will be music to your ears although i'm sure at the beginning there'll be a discordant note or two uh or a melancholy note uh but it is it uh

2:37 it is what i'm sharing with you tonight i believe every parent and teacher needs to become conscious of if we're going to if we're going to be an instrument of change in our society what i am i'll introduce the topic tonight what i want to talk about is is context

3:08 the role of context in parenting and teaching now context is that which is usually invisible we don't think about it we don't necessarily have to be conscious of it but depending upon context it can very much change the response that is evoked in us now to put it simply the context

3:39 for parenting and teaching in most simple terms is a child's relationship to those who are responsible for them the whole context for raising a child this seems so simple when said this should be so obvious and yet it doesn't inform prevailing practice today in parenting or teaching you can read book upon book upon book listen to expert upon expert

4:12 there's not a course in our universities today in teaching that actually focuses on the student teacher relationship the single most important thing that we should be aware of somehow we are blind to i'm not sure what causes that blindness maybe we were never meant to know about this how do you spell out relationship it's very difficult maybe it's because

4:42 it's right underneath our noses and we can't see what is underneath our noses there's a blind spot there it's simply too close for us to be able to make sense of it seems to me that when we do see it becomes so self-evident that we see it all over the place it screams at us from the rooftops as i find it screaming at me i promise not to scream at you tonight but it becomes so obvious when you see

5:14 it now i know that i am in a sense preaching to the choir here this evening although i also am sure that some of you were had your arms twisted by well-meaning friends and acquaintances it's um what what i want to do is to be able to simply contribute to the opening of eyes to give words to that which is usually intuitive

5:45 uh to something that should resonate and that's what i hope to contribute to uh this evening uh let me go before i begin i'd like to just take a look at at the term context because i'm going to use it as a theme as i unfold the material this evening context literally means con with text the words what comes with the words

6:16 it's what comes with the words that can actually evoke the response in us it's that part again which we don't pay that much attention to but we respond intuitively to now i'm sure that we've all read a shakespeare play maybe back in high school and then we saw it professionally produced we saw the words in a context we had not imagined them before and those words when we heard them

6:46 when we heard them presented evoked a completely different response than we when we had read them macbeth julius caesar hamlet let me illustrate by a very common phrase i love you i love you said by a boy to his puppy said by a grandmother to her

7:18 granddaughter i love you said by a three-year-old for the very very first time to his mummy i love you said by one spouse in the midst of some marital conflict said by a high school coach to a 14 year old girl on his volleyball team

7:50 who said by a complete stranger you suspect of stalking you i could go on and on and on you get the picture right you get the picture it evokes a completely different response depending upon context i'm going to change it a bit instead of that which comes with the words we're going to look at that which comes with the child that which comes with the child to parenting to teaching to the action to

8:21 the scene of the action is is most important in determining the response of that child um and that's what we have no words for that's what we only have intuition for and i get i get told over and over again when i talk i knew that i knew what you were saying but i didn't know that i knew that i felt it intuitively but i had no words

8:51 and that's exactly what i want to share why do we need words now we need words because culture is not calling forth those intuitions like they used to it has changed and and without words we can't come to consciousness and without consciousness we can't inform practice and so the words become important and so it is that which i want to talk about it's that it's it's that which comes with the

9:22 words but not the words it's that part of the factor that that in the equation that is generally wordless and so that's my challenge my challenge is to find those words to be able to convey them to bring them out sometimes i have to invent them because again it's so close to us those words simply don't exist for us and so that is uh that is what i'm going to try again and i'm going to take three common actions

9:53 in parenting three common actions in parenting and teaching and take a look at those actions what those actions evoke in a child depending upon what the child brings with them and in this case we're focusing of course on relationship matters that relationship is the most important factor in the parenting equation in that illustration i gave you in terms of i love you the words were the same

10:23 in each case the relationship was different and it was the relationship because the relationship being different that would evoke a different response in the listener