People do well if they can

Holiday greetings to you!

As usual, I’ve been learning a lot lately and boy do I have some good information for you! This comes to you from (Harvard) Dr. Stuart Ablon on the Mel Robbins podcast. I’ll break it up into 2 inSights for the sake of your time. You can relate this to anyone you have a problem with. Kids, employee, partner, friend. Anyone.

People do well if they can. Not, they would if they wanted to. This isn’t a lack of motivation. Something is getting in their way.

People who struggle to manage their behaviour, don’t lack the will to behave well, they lack the skills. People are often very misunderstood.

If you struggle with any of the skills below, you might:

• Have a hard time meeting people’s expectations

• End up doing things people don’t like, that they don’t want you to do

• You don’t do things people want you to do

• People get frustrated with you and then assume it’s a lack of will and they try to motivate you to try and behave better and it doesn’t work because you’re already trying hard

THE SKILLS: (these skills have nothing to do with intelligence btw)

1. Language and communication

2. Attention and working memory: keeping a bunch of stuff in your head and balancing them

3. Emotion and self regulation: to control your emotions, impulse control issues

4. Flexible thinking: ok with change, unpredictability, ambiguity vs. concrete, literal, rigid, black/white thinking

5. Social thinking: how you join a group of people smoothly, how you come across, how you start a conversation, empathy, perspective taking (can you understand where someone else is coming from)

If you lack these skills, you’re actually trying harder than anyone else to behave well. He says, you know who’s not trying to behave well? Well behaved people! Because it comes naturally to them.

Dr Ablon’s grandpa (or dad I forget) taught him - “If you give a dog a name, eventually they’ll answer to it.” Ooof. (Let's try not to label our loved ones).

Research in brain scans shows that what causes these lack of skills is... (you guessed it) trauma or chronic toxic stress in childhood. This changes the brain and delays these skills. So behaviour is about skill not will.

What I like about this approach is that it's not about healing the trauma, it's about how to understand what someone is actually going through.

Next week I’ll continue with some options on how to solve these issues. Or you can watch the full episode yourself!

https://youtu.be/j6sSGT30WEg

Happy learning! 😍

All my love,
K 💛