Make A MESS – Self-Soothing – Mitch and His Tutor
Let’s return to Mitch to see how his tutor helped promote self-soothing. Chambers introduced the idea of self-soothing by talking about his experiences as a baseball player. Mitch would impulsively swing at every pitch when batting instead of waiting for the best pitch. He would get upset with the umpire when he thought calls were unfair. Chambers had helpful strategies for calming himself in those situations, involving deep breathing, self-talk, and rehearsal. But the self-soothing necessary to sustaining engagement with math went beyond behavioral strategies. As you will see in the following example, the self-soothing Mitch needed to succeed in math was much more cognitive and required the development of a growth mindset for him to persevere.
“This whole plan sucks!” Mitch exclaimed as he threw his pencil across the room.
“What plan?” Chambers asked.
“You know. The whole, ‘get caught up if you want to come back to school plan,” Mitch whined.
“You sound pretty frustrated,” Chambers observed.
“Dean … told me last week, I have to be caught up in order to play spring baseball,” Mitch said. “He keeps piling on the pressure. No way I’m getting caught up in time.
“You have learned a lot of math since we started working together,” Chambers reminded him.
“Lot of good it has done me. I’m still stuck at home. My friends think I’m sick or something. They aren’t even calling me to do stuff as much,” Mitch complained. “Last week those guys worked out at the gym and didn’t even call me.”
“That does suck,” Chambers agreed.
“This stuff keeps getting harder and harder. There’s no way I’m going to get it all done,” Mitch worried.
“Are you feeling pretty overwhelmed?” Chambers asked.
“Seriously, Alex?”
“I’ll take that as a ‘yes’,” his tutor responded. “What do you do when you feel overwhelmed?”
“Play video games,” Mitch said, without needing to think.
“So how does that help?” Chambers asked.
“It calms me down,” Mitch said.
“Ok. So what is it about playing video games that calms you down?” Chambers asked.
“Well. I get totally wrapped up in the game and I don’t think about anything (that was worrying me),” Mitch answered.
“That’s great. So you have a good strategy for soothing yourself,” Chambers observed.
“Alex. Seriously? You are the first person I know that has said video games are good for me,” Mitch said.
“I always like to start with what works, and go from there,” Chambers said.
“Well, I can’t exact play video games the rest of my life. Oh, @#$%, now I sound like my mother,” Mitch said.
“Let’s analyze what parts of video gaming are helpful and then we’ll see if we can create that effect …”
“Without having to run to my room and find my computer to do it?” Mitch said
“Exactly. So, when you are playing, you aren’t worrying about other stuff, right?” Chambers asked.
“Correct. I’m totally focused on the game,” Mitch said.
“Locked in, like a good athlete,” Chambers said.
“There are dudes on the Internet making big bucks playing those games,” Mitch added.
“And how many hours do you suppose they put in to get that good?” he asked.
“More hours than you and me spend practicing baseball … combined,” Mitch guessed.
“Do you ever get anxious or frustrated while playing video games?” Chambers asked.
“Sure. When I am playing someone better than me,” Mitch said.
“So how do you handle that?” Chambers asked.
“Well, first off, I don’t reveal my real name. Second, I tell myself that I can break off the connection anytime I want. And (lastly), I replay the games I lose and make sure I fix my mistakes for the next time I play,” Mitch summarized.
“So you get better by playing guys better than you are?” Chambers asked.
“Not just guys, Alex. There’s this eleven-year-old girl in Korea who kicks my ass every time. But, yeah, I get better,” Mitch agreed.
“So how long have you been playing?” Chambers asked.
“Two years, this summer,” Mitch answered.
“And what level are you now?” Chambers asked.
“I play in the gold league. That’s two steps from the highest,” Mitch said, proudly.
“So, you have already risen to playing double-A ball, in the video game world,” Chambers observed.
“Yeah. I guess I have,” Mitch reflected.
“That’s cool. There are far more gamers than ball players in the world, too,” Chambers said, admiringly.
“True. But what does this have to do with me getting caught up?” Mitch asked.
“Here’s a piece of graph paper …
For the next five minutes, Alex and Mitch plotted a graph of his video gaming progress with time (in months) on the X-axis and mastery (gaming level) on the Y-axis. What appeared was clear evidence of Mitch’s steady progress over the past two years of gaming.
“That’s pretty impressive, fella. You should be proud of yourself,” Alex said.
“Tell that to my mother and grandfather. They think it is a total waste of time,” Mitch said.
“So to get that far, you had to put in a lot of hours,” Chambers observed.
“Yeah,” Mitch agree, slightly embarrassed.
“And … you had to tolerate a lot of frustration. How many times did you lose during that time?” Chambers asked.
“Seriously Alex? It used to feel good to beat other kids. But then I realized I had to start playing people who were better so I could learn how to get better,” Mitch observed.
“And how did that feel?” Chambers asked.
“Well, at first, it felt like @#$%. But I kept reminding myself that if I could put up with losing, I got to steal one new trick, each time I played,” Mitch said.
“Yeah. I know what you mean. I played in the Cape Cod summer league and got rocked almost every time I pitched. But by the end of the summer, I was so much better. Plus, this dude I roomed with taught me how to throw a cutter,” Chambers recalled.
“Mariano’s pitch,” Mitch observed.
“Exactly.”
“So how did it feel getting lit up every day,” Mitch asked.
“Probably the same way you feel when get a new set of math concepts thrown at you every week?” Chambers reflected.
“That bad?”
“Yeah. It was pretty humiliating for the first month,” Chambers said. “I’d be in for half an inning and then the organist would start playing the theme from ‘Jaws’ and the manager would come out to the mound and ask for the ball,” Chambers said.
“Ouch.”
“But then after the game he’d sit and watch the video of me pitching and point out all sorts of things I never even thought of,” Chambers recalled.
“You had a pitching tutor? Ha. Did they threaten to send you to the Alternative Baseball League if you didn’t learn fast enough?” Mitch asked.
“Well, getting overlooked by scouts is always a threat in the back of my mind,” Chambers admitted.
“So how do you deal with that?” Mitch asked.
“Well, I try to ask myself if I am getting better every week. I can’t control what other people do or think, but I can control getting better,” Chambers summarized.
“So, what’s that got to do with me and math?” Mitch asked.
Once again, Alex pulled out the piece of graph paper and handed it to Mitch.
“Look at the y-Axis! And you did that in only two years, pointing to the x-Axis? You totally rock as a gamer! Who says you can’ do the same with math?” Chambers asked.
“Me, that’s who,” responded Mitch.
“Take this piece of graph paper and put the number of chapter tests you passed on the y-Axis and the number of weeks on the x-Axis.”
After Mitch had completed the task, Chambers asked, “What do you think?”
“Yeah. I’ve accomplished a lot. But I’ve got so much more to do,” Mitch whined.
“Draw a horizontal line from the point on the y-Axis that represents the number of chapters you have to complete. Ok, now take your ruler and extend that line showing your progress out into the future, assuming you keep going at the same rate. Good. Now, what does that tell you?” Chambers asked.
“If I keep up this pace, I will be caught up in three or four weeks,” Mitch observed.
“Yeah, if not sooner,” Chambers said. “Now that was the best application of math yet, wouldn’t you say?”
ANALYSIS
Self-Soothing was not a skill Mitch was familiar with, or so it seemed. ‘Engage if you can dominate, avoid if you can’t’ seemed to be his modus operando. Although that may be one of the principles taught in the Art of War, if Mitch wouldn’t engage in the uncomfortable process of learning from mistakes he was never going to improve in school or on the ball field. Mitch impulsively avoided loss and humiliation, rarely stopping to analyze before acting. Instead of self-soothing, Mitch chose to avoid.
Did you notice how his tutor didn’t start with the avoidance behavior? He started his enquiry with what works. By asking Mitch how he soothed himself, he quickly learned about an area of great interest and relative strength that most people were unaware of. Within the realm of video gaming, Mitch willingly went to war, tolerated defeats, and learned from them. He avoided humiliation by remaining anonymous, yet he still had to suffer the frustration of losing – repeatedly. Within the gaming world, the (I want) and (I can) of motivation worked well enough that he willingly engaged and self-soothed and gained significant mastery as a result.
So, to repeat Mitch’s common question, “What does this have to do with self-soothing?” Chambers embodied a bridge between baseball and math, which made him an ideal person to relate to Mitch. Yet, when it came to helping develop self-soothing, it was his tutor’s curiosity about what worked for Mitch that led to a model Mitch could build upon. Finding the helpful components of video gaming helped them build an approach to could be useful with math.
Instead of trying to teach Mitch a self-soothing process that seemed foreign and uninteresting to him, Chambers helped him realize that he already possessed many of the skills, as a gamer, necessary to be successful as a ball player and a math student. He realized that Mitch often avoided discomfort before allowing for any kind of analysis and problem solving. What he found with the gaming was an (I want) great enough to stay engaged and tolerate the frustration of losing, knowing that this was a strategy that improved the (I can) belief/confidence necessary to engagement.
Mitch had internalized that belief or confidence when it came to gaming. He knew that after losing, he could analyze the game and come away with knowledge that would make him better the next time he played. The vignette above was an example of the adult (Chambers) holding a clear vision of Mitch’s potential, even when Mitch was unable to do that for himself, yet. Mitch drew strength from the relationship through Chambers’ confidence that he could be successful and from Chambers’ clear reasoning of how that could happen, similar to Siegel’s definition of a charismatic adult.
Did you notice how Chambers showed Mitch how the process involves one small step at a time? Mitch was overwhelmed with the immensity of the task and Chambers constantly returned it to a simpler process: one test, one concept at a time. And then he showed him visually and tangibly how that approach leads to the end goal. He gave Mitch hope, but hope based on the hard earned work that he had already achieved. Kids often think in the here-and-now, while lacking perspective. The graphical charting of Mitch’s progress was tangible proof that the way he felt, in the moment – helpless and hopeless – was a feeling that could be tolerated and managed with a course of action. When Mitch felt truly overwhelmed, Chambers would give him an old chapter test from an earlier date (when Mitch had also felt overwhelmed). The realization that the test was now easy was proof of the progress he had made and served to calm his worries.