The Choices TA Center

Continuing our video series on “What does (insert program here) do?”, we bring you another short overview of one of our programs: The Choices Technical Assistance Center:

Choices TA Center from Choices Inc on Vimeo.

Youth Emergency Services

Choices is often asked “What does (insert program here) do?”. Now, we could tell you, we could send you to our web site, or we could post a blog entry. But we are excited to offer something new! Check out this very short overview of one of our programs: Youth Emergency Services:

Youth Emergency Services from Choices Inc on Vimeo.

The Problem with Positive Thinking

From Seth Godin’s Blog

All the evidence I’ve seen shows that positive thinking and confidence improves performance. In anything.

Give someone an easy math problem, watch them get it right and then they’ll do better on the ensuing standardized test than someone who just failed a difficult practice test.

No, positive thinking doesn’t allow you to do anything, but it’s been shown over and over again that it improves performance over negative thinking.

Key question then: why do smart people engage in negative thinking? Are they actually stupid?

The reason, I think, is that negative thinking feels good. In its own way, we believe that negative thinking works. Negative thinking feels realistic, or soothes our pain, or eases our embarrassment. Negative thinking protects us and lowers expectations.

In many ways, negative thinking is a lot more fun than positive thinking. So we do it.

If positive thinking was easy, we’d do it all the time. Compounding this difficulty is our belief that the easy thing (negative thinking) is actually appropriate, it actually works for us. The data is irrelevant. We’re the exception, so we say.

Positive thinking is hard. Worth it, though.

Incremental, not Instantaneous

It’s an old favorite told to impatient children by their parents – “Good things come to those who wait”. You, our faithful Needs Aren’t Services blog readers have been waiting for a few months, but we hope you find the wait has been worth it.

In our fast-paced society, we want it now; we don’t want to wait for anything.  Change and progress is not usually so instantaneous. Incremental, not Instantaneous reminds us to be patient and to recognize that individuals can change and do so at different times and in their own way. It’s important to remember that change happens slowly, but if we pay attention we will see the small, incremental changes that will eventually lead to monumental changes in the lives of children and families. It may sound easy, but for many it can be a difficult behavior to pick up and practice.

As with any of our Phrases that Pay, patience, and the understanding that change is incremental and not instantaneous, doesn’t come easily. In Chinese, the word (or symbol) for patience is an amalgam of two other symbols – one representing the word “blade” and the other representing the word “heart”. Patience can be a painful virtue to learn and practice and can feel impossible to many.

For the helper, it’s not only important to practice patience, but also to impart that wisdom on the individuals receiving the help. Demonstrating to an individual the value of taking manageable, incremental steps towards self-directed recovery is a key element in leading to a successful transition away from system support and into self reliance.

The ancient Greeks also had a firm grasp on the virtues of patience. Aesop’s famed fable The Tortoise and the Hare is the childhood favorite of many for alluding to patience – slow and steady wins the race is now part of most everyone’s vernacular when it comes to speaking on being patient.

As we all work to enhance the lives of youth and their families, it is vitally important to always keep in mind that every individual has a different pace towards their own success. One can never “take too long” when it comes to striving towards improvement; a strong dose of patience will always be a cornerstone of success.

- Andrew Shapiro, Director, Hamilton Choices

Change Agents Change First

Reflecting Upon Change

Change…..what a wonderfully charged word! It conjures up thoughts of “the change we can believe in” and the beautiful, dramatic and historic events of January 20, 2009.

It also brings to my mind a fine book called Changing for Good by Prochaska, Norcross and Diclemente that has helped many people overcome difficulties, from smoking and alcohol abuse to emotional distress and weight control. For me this book on the importance of moving in an orderly fashion through the six stages of change was a catalyst for quitting smoking after many years of precontemplation and contemplation.

Change also makes me think of a book with a horrible title: Change or Die by Alan Deutschman. By no means as depressing as the title suggests, Deutschman contends that some people will never move out of the precontemplation stage when they are denying that they need to change…not even to save their own lives! Instead, this author suggests that many people need hope, belief and inspiration, new skills and ways of thinking, not to be given facts or frightened into change. His method for motivating people to change involves just three key steps: Relate, Repeat and Reframe.

An important phrase that pays used often by those of us at Choices who are responsible for training and coaching staff and clients is CHANGE AGENTS CHANGE FIRST. We exhort care coordinators to model the changes they want to see in their communities and the families they serve. After all, if we are unable or unwilling to change, how can we demand it of others? Nevertheless we soon learn in life, change is not easy – not for individuals and especially not for systems. However our inspiration to change may be the hope and belief that we can and must change for the better, both individually and collectively as a nation, as our new President has so eloquently challenged us to do.

- Janet McIntyre, Director, Choices Technical Assistance Center

Needs Aren’t Services and the Phrases that Pay

Needs Aren’t Services is one of the most powerful practice guidelines known as the 18 Phrases That Pay. It brings to life other phrases like LISTEN, LISTEN AND THEN LISTEN! When families are truly listened to, they are more likely to join with the members of their child and family teams because they don’t feel that others are there trying to “fix” them. When the needs of the youth and family are the goals of care, the wraparound value “Needs Driven” comes to life.

Needs Aren’t Services challenge us to embrace the essential family needs before we offer the categorical array of services. And this in turn also opens the door to an appreciation of family strengths. Listening to youth and families articulate their needs can’t help but grow the team member’s awareness of the wealth of hidden and untapped strengths. Listening to the family’s needs is the key to helping teams become active participants in families developing their own solutions. Needs based services emerge from these solutions. Needs based services differ from traditional services in that they focus on the need first, not fitting the family’s needs into the traditional menu of services. The most evidence based practice comes when the family says, “Yes, my needs were met.”

And perhaps, within the layers of needs for learning, safety, a place called home, meaningful work, health care, benefits and necessary skill sets, there is the need for relationship and community. I frequently hear families saying, “If I had your supports I wouldn’t be here!” The needs for community and natural supports are not just powerful, they are the ultimate classroom in which successful outcomes grow and flourish. These needs aren’t services, they are the window to yet another phrase that pays: No Families no solutions – Know Families Know Solutions.

- Craig Andler, Director, Families Reaching for Rainbows

What are the Strengths, the Strengths and the Strengths?

The Strengths Model

The strengths model was born over a quarter century ago as a demonstration project at a Lawrence, Kansas Community Mental Health Center.  The idea was to provide outreach and community-based services with persons we now refer to as suffering from severe and persistent mental illnesses. Staffed by students (who were not given any diagnostic information),  the Resource Acquisition model was established using principles previously applied in the Child Welfare system in Illinois. The two basic premises of the models – - as outlined by William Davidson and Charles Rapp — were that behavior is, in part, a function of the resources available to people and, second, that our society values equal access to resources.  An understanding of these principles is vital, because from the beginning this model has focused on the person in environment perspective, and has underscored the vital role of advocacy for disenfranchised populations.

The strengths model has certainly enjoyed wide application in clinical practice – at times this practice is consistent with the basic tenants of the model – sometimes not.   Too often strengths-based practice is viewed as a creative way to address the problems consumer’s face, rather than a collaborative method to help people work towards the goals they define as important to their life.   Many children and adults must confront significant challenges to reach their goals.  The challenges are far ranging, from those rooted in biophysical processes, to others that are the result of social forces like stigma, or discrimination.  In the most tragic cases hope has been replaced with despair.  Hope and life goals are intertwined – goals suggest a forward view, and their accomplishment inevitably pivots on the recognition and use of individual and environmental strengths.

Strengths practice begins at the first encounter with an individual or family.  The process of the strengths assessment — or strengths discovery — should be decidedly different than a standard intake or diagnostic process.  Here the effort is to determine those facets of an individual’s past and present that have helped them to survive to this point, interests  either dormant or active that provide a sense of satisfaction and meaning, and those abilities and aspects of human capital that can be nurtured or developed.  Likewise, the environment should be scanned for community collaborators, resources that all citizens use, and naturally available supports.  Too often helping focus solely on the deficits and problems people face, and likewise, their surrounding environment is viewed as toxic to their well-being.  When helping springs from this worldview it is inevitable that individual needs will be met with a specialized social service.  In the end people ended up labeled, sequestered, and segregated and, in the end, effectively excluded, emotionally and spatially from community life.  From the strengths perspective the intent is to meld individual and community strengths.  The focus is on inclusion, not exclusion – and it is wholeheartedly felt that communities are stronger with the table is enlarged.

This work requires professionals who take consumers seriously – and recognize that those seemingly the most compromised will recover, grow, and develop when they are afford more, not less choice in their life.  It requires the basic recognition that goals most people hold dear are the very goals that most people value: a home, a work and activities, friends and family.  Most of all, it takes practitioners who truly care.

- Patrick Sullivan, Professor, Indiana University School of Social Work

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Needs Aren’t Services

At the Georgetown Training Institutes, Choices, Inc. launched the Needs Aren’t Services blog to give systems of care communities across the country a place to share their thoughts about the Phrase that Pays Listen, Listen and then LISTEN. More than 150 people commented on our first post, a testament to the importance of providing families and professionals alike a place to have a meaningful discourse.

This month we are inviting you to join in a discussion about the Phrase that Pays – Needs Aren’t Services. This phrase has historically created controversy around what services are needed in a continuum of care.  

Needs Aren’t Services begins at the most rudimentary level of knowing that we all have basic needs and the culturally sensitive understanding that we all meet those needs in our own unique ways. How would you react if someone came into your home and told you what you will eat, how you will clean and how you will relate with family members? This is sometimes how well intended services are perceived by the family. 

When I think of Needs Aren’t Services and what helping families means, I am reminded of this story: Following a child and family team meeting the care coordinator was taking the mother home and while driving asked the mother what she thought about the meeting.  The mother reflected and then replied that she was glad people came together to meet and that she appreciated their good intentions of thinking about what they thought she and her family needed. She also understood how, from their point of view, they thought that her son should have not one, but two hours of therapy a week. However, when the team enthusiastically added another hour of family therapy once a week and knowing she didn’t have transportation, the burden of these activities hit her. It was in that moment she exclaimed to the care coordinator, “… to be honest, I don’t need any more therapy, I need HELP!”

To do this line of work, it takes a lot of listening, a healthy dose of creativity and a strong desire to keep an open mind. When you finally discover the core of the actual need, services become the after thought.

We recently asked our staff to share their stories or thoughts about Needs Aren’t Services. Here are two examples.

“The soon to be sweet 16 year old female asked me if there could be something special done for her birthday. The need is not to buy something or have a service done for her, but it is the acknowledgement of her status as a wonderful, intelligent and empowered 16 year old who needs the support and acknowledgement from her caregiver. She is desiring someone to say “Happy Sweet 16″! Jay Harpring, Dawn Project employee since 2007

“When considering the focus of treatment, I try to think of things that could be done to help meet the family needs so they live together successfully, without even thinking about interjecting services. I think we have all failed in this area at one time or another, and that’s okay. It’s important to regain your focus and not lose sight of what the family says they need. I also think it’s important to continue to have conversations with your team about this so they can learn not to be so eager to request a service. Remembering needs aren’t services causes you to think more and work harder, but it really is worth it in the end.” Nikki Woods, Dawn Project employee since 1999

Please share with us your Needs Aren’t Services story. Just click on the link that says “Comments” and post your thoughts! Next month we plan to highlight the Phrase that Pays What are the Strengths, the Strengths and the Strengths. If you’re interested in being a guest blogger, please email us at Choices@ChoicesTeam.org.

- Knute Rotto, Chief Executive Officer, Choices, Inc.
 

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Listen, Listen, and then LISTEN!

Welcome to the inaugural post of the Needs Aren’t Services Blog by Choices, Inc. We are the gatekeepers, so to speak, but this is YOUR blog. It is our goal to provide you with a venue to discuss the Phrases that Pay, wraparound values and systems of care topics. We plan to bring together a diverse group of guest authors to share their ideas about these topics and we invite you to visit with us, collaborate, network and share successes of your own. Each post will include an option for you to post “comments” to each other, to Choices, or to the story’s author. Our first post focuses on the Phrase That Pays Listen, Listen and then LISTEN.

Learning to be a good listener is the most basic skill required for the helping professions. In practice, we often see well-meaning helpers politely listening until the client’s first pause. When the client stops to take a breath, the helper often jumps at the opportunity to tell the client how they might fix their situation. This Phrase that Pays is to remind us to first listen to be a successful helping professional.

As a professional it is important to resist the urge to “fix” people and instead devote our time and talents to listening. Even when you feel the impulse to talk, resist doing so and listen some more. Remember, that listening is an aquired skill that requires you to tune out all the self talk inside your head and consciously pay attention to what the client is saying, how they are saying it, and all aspects of the message delivery.

When this happens the listener is not just hearing with the ears and mind, they are listening with the third ear – the heart. And when that happens people move from telling you their problems to telling you their solutions. This is also where Needs Aren’t Services begins to be understood.

Doing what is most important upfront will pay off in the end: smoother transitions and success for clients and professionals alike!

- Brent Matthews, Chief Operating Officer, Choices, Inc.

The Phrases that Pay
This blog is dedicated to the Phrases that Pay; we’ve called it Needs Aren’t Services because it’s a concept that even the most seasoned professional must constantly work to achieve. It is one of the most uniquely challenging Phrases that Pay to learn and can be equally difficult to “live” as well.

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