The Power of the Herd (57 page)

This inspires a clearer, more pointed conversation, resulting in several negotiations in which both parties are encouraged to contribute ideas and possible solutions. In this case, Greg and Shelia decide that the family car is completely off-limits, and that Greg can smoke in his truck when no one else is with him. The house is off-limits, except for Greg's office when the door is closed and the window is open. These are recognized as temporary measures, however, as Greg really wants to stop smoking. He discovers that Sheila will help him research the best course of action to take, and that if he slips he can count on even more support from her.

In motivating Greg to stop smoking, success is most likely achieved when both he and Sheila are committed to the plan. If Greg is overwhelmed by the twins, the economy, and stress at work, he may not be able to fathom undertaking this additional, notoriously difficult challenge. Sheila may feel frustrated and worried, but she also knows there's only so much she can do to change someone else's behavior. What she
can
do is uphold the smoke-free zones and, over time, look for ways to encourage Greg to pay more attention to his health, perhaps helping him to reduce stress so that he smokes less and finds the strength to quit later.

Here's another classic misuse of the boundary concept. Dominique says to her seventeen-year-old son, Eddie, “I need to set a boundary with you, young man. As a member of the Upton family, you will put these frivolous dreams of becoming a composer and recording artist aside. You will go to college and you will study medicine like your father, his father, and his father before him. Now
put that keyboard away and get back to studying for those SATs or you'll never get into Harvard.”

While Dominique presents this as a boundary issue, this is primarily a goal-oriented, motivational issue (and a one-sided, shortsighted one, at that). First of all, the Upton family is setting a very stringent boundary. They're telling Eddie that they will pay for college, room, and board only if he studies medicine, in which case the boundary is a wall that limits his access to moral support, approval, and money unless he pursues the one and only goal his parents choose to fund from their stash of physical and emotional resources. If Eddie is at all talented and dedicated musically, this tactic is harsh and may very well backfire, as it's really more of a bribe disguised as a boundary and will alienate him in the long run. Legally, they can't force him to study medicine. If he gets a scholarship or secretly decides to sell drugs to support his musical aspirations, the Upton family's influence on him lessens considerably.

In terms of motivating Eddie to adopt
her
wish that he become a doctor, Dominique's supposed “tough love” stance is likely to fail in the long run because the first ingredient, commitment, is seriously lacking in the person who has to pursue this complex goal that will take a decade to accomplish. (Remember, the formula we're exploring is: commitment + crescendo + immediate positive feedback = motivation.)

Commitment from an authority figure alone is effective in meeting only local, short-term goals, such as a rider urging a horse to move from a trot to a canter, or a parent pressuring a child to clean her room. Eddie's mother may be able to stand over him while he's living at home, force-feeding him commitment to the “doctor plan” while he's studying for the SATs and applying to Harvard. But if he's accepted, he needs some serious commitment resources of his own to make it though eight years of school, not to mention a grueling residency.

All kinds of things can happen as a result of Eddie's lack of commitment. Maybe he'll faint at the sight of blood and won't make it through his first year of medical school. Maybe he has a stronger stomach and loves his parents (and their approval or money) so much that he'll give up his musical aspirations, unenthusiastically earn his MD, and complete his residency. Maybe he'll lead a superficially successful life. Maybe he'll develop a reputation as a cranky, heartless doctor and later be sued for malpractice.

On the other hand, Eddie might stand his ground and break ties with the family who actively rejected his calling, resulting in several additional possible outcomes — none of which involve meaningful contact with his parents. Maybe he'll gloat when he becomes a famous recording artist, no thanks to the
Uptons. Or maybe he'll overdose in a New York back alley because, after he was accepted to Juilliard, he started using speed to boost his energy and deal with the high level of competition, and later began selling cocaine and crystal meth because waiting tables didn't begin to cover his room and board, much less his tuition. Or maybe he'll struggle in another way, taking six years to put himself through community college, becoming a high school music teacher with a modest yet satisfying life who builds a family, plays jazz on the side, releases a couple of regionally successful, self-published CDs — and encourages his own children to follow their dreams, whatever they are.

Of these three music-oriented outcomes, I find the last the most innovative from a cathedral-thinking perspective. The stardom option is impressive and perhaps a bit of a fluke; the second is a tragedy that could have been avoided. But the third is an act of revolution that anyone can perform with a reasonable amount of talent, courage, and endurance, in Eddie's case freeing future members of the Upton clan from the indentured servitude of becoming doctors whether they like it or not.

I've actually seen
numerous
cases of the same scenario in reverse, encountering musical prodigies who were pressured toward a performance career they didn't want, lessening the pleasure they could have received from playing an instrument well for the sheer joy of it while pursuing a humanitarian, research, or leadership calling their families refused to support. Come to think of it, I gave into social pressure to suppress a seemingly childish goal of working with horses, an attraction so foreign to my parents that majoring in music seemed practical by comparison. By the time I was successful enough to buy my own horse, I was too old to become an Olympic-level rider — though eventually the two streams of knowledge informed each other when I had the courage to step into the unknown.

Sometimes, no one is bribing you to go to medical school or forcing you to give up your dreams. At age eighteen, or twenty, or thirty, you simply lack the crucial combination of vision, experience, power, and communication skills to gather support for a goal that family, friends, and perhaps society can't yet imagine, which is why many innovators don't pursue their true calling until later in life.

When you work directly with horses, you realize that money and position are not actually forms of power at all. They're tools for organizing, modifying, and distributing resources, including land, water, minerals, food, human labor,
ideas, information, and the technology that arises from their coordinated use. Resource management also involves dealing with the noxious by-products of civilization, not just toxic waste but the hurtful, manipulative, vengeful, sometimes criminal behavior of people who essentially have one thing in common. Whether they're desperate housewives, callous social climbers, overcompetitive soccer moms, drug addicts, gang members, rapists, Wall Street swindlers, mean-spirited pundits, or oppressive dictators, these people haven't learned how to use their own power effectively. They, and everyone around them, suffer as a result.

But those of us who function according to currently accepted rules of social conduct also lack an understanding of power and how to master it. And those who enforce the law, well, let's just say we could all use a healthy dose of horse wisdom to get to the next level, no matter how accomplished we are and how honorable our intentions may be...

“Barbara Wilkinson,” a Tucson-based district court judge, came to study assertiveness and conflict-resolution skills with me, not because she needed help at work, but because her ex-husband, Henry, and her fifteen-year-old son, Michael, were driving her crazy. From nine to five, Judge Wilkinson flourished in the courtroom, handing down tough yet fair sentences, gaining the respect of everyone around her. But once she put that gavel down and removed her long black robe, the people she loved the most seemed to go out of their way to challenge her authority.

Henry and Michael undermined her in all kinds of irritating ways. Her ex-husband, a successful attorney, strategically altered the visitation schedule, seemingly to create additional stress for Barbara. At least, that was how it appeared to her. He also refused to back her up on disciplinary measures and sometimes paid child support late, always erring just this side of the law, deftly sending Barbara the message that “you're not the boss of me,” as he sometimes actually told her.

Partly because of his father's influence, partly because of teenage angst, and partly because of raw, still unresolved issues from the divorce, Michael was becoming increasingly dismissive of his mother, most recently finding all kinds of excuses to skip dinner and avoid cleaning his room. While these seemed like simple, childish ways to test the limits, Barbara was worried that if she didn't turn things around soon, six-foot-tall Michael would become uncontrollable. As a judge, she knew very well what kind of trouble he could get into once he passed his driver's test, not only as an instigator or careless driver but also as a possible victim. It didn't help that Henry had already promised to give their son his loaded Ford Expedition after buying himself a brand-new Lexus.

During our initial meeting, the judge gave me an earful about the infuriating nuances of the SUV issue. Barbara felt that Henry had purposefully crossed a boundary in their child-rearing partnership by telling Michael he could count on receiving the truck for his sixteenth birthday, before discussing it with her. She thought it was an obvious bribe for their son's affection and loyalty, that it was too ostentatious a vehicle for a teenager and, as a result, too dangerous in terms of its attractiveness to carjackers. She admitted that she “blew up” when Michael announced his excitement about the gift. Her response inadvertently helped her husband gain points in another way, bolstering a case that Henry was always making to her son verbally and in much craftier, underhanded, nonverbal ways: that she was an unnecessarily conservative, at times hysterical, overprotective mother who “didn't have a clue.” I could see that Barbara was still livid, hurt, and fearful for her son's safety. She also felt that somehow Michael always ended up being used as a pawn in ongoing arguments with her ex, and she didn't know what to do about it, adding intense frustration to the mix.

Talk about a conundrum. Teasing apart this rapidly expanding tangle of intense emotions and power plays could have taken years in conventional office-style counseling. But Barbara desperately needed to take constructive action immediately because Michael's sixteenth birthday was six weeks away.

Over the next month, she somehow found the time to study with me several times a week as we practiced skills related to boundary setting, assertiveness, emotional agility, and empowerment. Barbara was shocked to find that even my gentlest horses easily found all kinds of opportunities to take charge. She thought that Rasa was following her, when the mare was actually herding the woman all over the arena. Getting this normally considerate mare to back away from Barbara took an entire, hour-long session. It appeared that all of the judge's power was related to a socially sanctioned position. Without her robe and gavel, she seemed to actually attract subtle displays of disrespect, as if she had a power vacuum in her solar plexus, a black hole that would suck others right into her space.

Barbara's awareness of her own body language in relation to others was nonexistent. When learning to set boundaries, it took numerous tries for her to stand her ground rather than unconsciously back up. Teaching her the crescendo was also difficult. Barbara would wave the whip rhythmically at a “volume” of two or three, rather than progressively increasing the power and intensity, then get frustrated and explode up to eight or nine. And she initially seemed very confused by the concept of immediate positive feedback. Barbara was used to handing down punishments for serious transgressions, letting people know that “they should be ashamed of themselves,” often giving them lots
of time to think about it, depending on the sentence. When her husband or son offended her, she admitted, she would hold on to a silent, rigid, shaming attitude after they made the necessary adjustments. She actually laughed out loud and shook her head upon realizing she had been unconsciously sentencing them to a few hours or even days of emotional penance.

The horses had an almost magical effect on Barbara's ability to change this habit once she saw how ineffective it was. She felt they were innocent, pure beings, who didn't mean to hurt anyone. As a result, she didn't take their challenges personally and waste additional emotional and mental energy trying to find ways to punish them for insolence and disrespect.

As she learned to crescendo to get a horse to back off, she also realized that any effort to boost her power over a five or six was initially accompanied by rage, which is very common with people who think of themselves as cool, low-energy people.

“You
are not an energy level,” I emphasized. “Your comfort may be in the one to five range, but that's only a habit you learned somewhere along the way. You
have
an energy dial inside that can go from a one to a ten. As you exercise it, you won't need to use rage to get there. When increased progressively, thoughtfully, for a specific purpose, intense power does not have to be aggressive, resentful, or violent.”

“Wow,” she replied with a faraway look in her eyes. “I wish we could teach these skills in the prison system. Even better, preventatively, in schools...”

Because she had no previous equestrian experience, respecting the horses' boundaries wasn't a stretch for Barbara, and she quickly thought of all kinds of ways she ignored her son's need for personal space because she wanted to connect with him and gain his attention. Still, she had some difficulty learning the nonverbal protocols.