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"It's what's right with you that fixes what's wrong" ...continued

using the exercise that night and waking up fresh and strong in the morning.
Andy came back the following week and reported that he was sleeping much better, not worrying about his family so much, and taking
a keener interest in his appearance. "And I keep waking up with a strong desire to have a shower," he said. It seems the 'sponge' was having an un-
expected bonus effect!

Creating 'cool'

Andy placed a lot of importance upon being 'cool'. He liked my idea that he might become the coolest member of his group, because, if he were the coolest, he would not feel the need to be 'led' anywhere — instead he would be doing the leading and his mates would want to follow.

"Have you noticed that the coolest people do not seem to have to put any effort into it?" I asked. "Yeah, it's like people just want to be with them," agreed Andy. "I think this is because there is a big difference between attracting attention and seeking attention," I went on. "Do you know the old story about the Sun and the North Wind having a bet about which one of them could get some guy to take his coat off? Well, the North Wind had a go and blew his hardest, but the guy just clung to his coat with all his strength. But all the Sun had to do was shine and the guy took off his coat because he was too hot. Truly 'cool' people shine a kind of calm control that everyone else secretly wants, and so they find it attractive."

I introduced Andy to a social skills method I've named "The Art of Being Cool and Attractive," designed to help young people develop an approach to others that will attract the right amount of the right kind of positive attention. The 'art' is contained in ten 'laws':

1. Learn to do with less attention than you would like at the moment

2. Do not compete with other people for attention

3. Say less than is necessary

4. Learn to behave well from those who don't know how to

5. Do not 'freeload' or overstay your welcome

6. Never whine

7. Appear unhurried

8. Be different — but not too different

9. Appear not to want things you cannot have

10. Exercise courtesy and tact at all times.

Catching up at school again

Meg came for what was to be her final meeting with me, because she was well on her way to functioning in the world in the way she wanted to. However, she was now acutely conscious that she was a long way behind where she wanted to be academically, and she was finding it a struggle to concentrate in class — mostly because she was focused more upon being worried than upon what the teachers were saying.

I taught Meg a way of developing her memory skills. According to Dr John Ratey, associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, "The brain assembles perceptions by the simultaneous interaction of whole concepts, whole images. Rather than using the predictive logic of a microchip, the brain is an analog processor, meaning, essentially, that it works by analogy and metaphor. It relates whole concepts to one another and looks for similarities, differences, or relationships between them. It does not assemble thoughts and feelings from bits of data."[2]

The exercise I taught Meg was designed to be highly entertaining, to provide a vivid demonstration of how good everyone's memory can actually be — provided the information is put into it in the right way — and to show how easy it is to memorise even 'dull' information. The exercise involved learning to visualise a set of 10 objects that can be easily associated with a number from 1 to 10 (for example the number two was represented by a coin with two sides). These can then be connected to other objects or 'facts' in humorous or bizarre ways to create highly memorable pictures or mini-stories — the weirder the better! I quite often incorporate such practical learning skills into sessions, as they frequently promote other 'therapeutic' outcomes and a generally increased learning ability. This kind of method for enhancing memory is increasingly widely taught, along with techniques such as mind mapping,[3] as they have been found to be aligned with how the brain works best. My aim with Meg was to show her a reason to feel optimistic about her potential at school and to boost her self-esteem. It worked.

Professor Martin Seligman has long stressed the need to protect the future mental health of our children by cultivating optimism. Social skills training of the kind sketched in this article is aimed at doing this by proving the young person's own power to them — in other words, promoting an optimism based on self-efficacy. At the heart of this kind of work with young people is a key idea. It is not simply to undo the effects of an unhappy past, or to help them feel better, or to stop them from behaving in an inconvenient, self-defeating way. As Aldous Huxley once said, "There is nothing wrong with you that what's right with you cannot fix." To put it simply, the idea is to instil in them the knowledge, backed up by the skills, that "It's what's right with you that fixes what's wrong".

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References

1] Thomson, G and Jenkins, J B (2004) Verbal Judo: the gentle art of persuasion Quill/Harper Collins

2] Ratey, J A (2001) A User's Guide to the Brain. Abacus Books

3] Buzan, T (2002) How to Mind Map. Thorsons, London

© Human Givens Publishing Limited and Chris Dyas (2005)

This article first appeared in Volume 12, No, 2 (2005) of the Human Givens journal.

CHRIS DYAS is a human givens therapist working for a children's charity based in Newcastle under Lyme, which provides help for children who have suffered severe abuse, as well as consultation and support for their parents and carers. He also provides training workshops in understanding and communicating with traumatised children, as part of the local authorities' child protection training programme for professionals. He has been applying the human givens approach to his work for the past six years.

> More information can be found in the following book, by Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell

Human Givens: A new approach to emotional health and clear thinking

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