Use the Difficulty

Photo by Andrey Metelev on Unsplash

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A Simple Idea

The Boss recently shared with me a short clip from a 2018 Charlie Rose interview with Michael Kane about "using the difficulty."  His anecdote from early in his acting career is quite humorous, but his acting philosophy has not wavered since: any time we are faced with a difficulty or problem, we can use it to our advantage.

Although Sir Michael was speaking about the craft of acting, he dropped into the conversation that he uses this philosophy in his personal life and in raising his children! 

Wow.  Can you imagine how resilient, how creative, how strong our children would become if we purposefully modeled this simple idea?

"No" becomes "Yes, if..."
"I cannot" becomes "I could if..."
"They told me no" becomes "What can I do to get a yes?"
"It's in my way, so I'm stuck" becomes "How do I go around the obstacle?"

Yes, sometimes a No is a No and there's not much we can do about it; but, even then, we can try to learn something advantageous or beneficial about the particular No.

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Frazzle!

Just this last weekend, Little Guy and Noodle stayed overnight with us and while not our first foray in watching both overnight, definitely the most rewarding for everyone involved - the kiddos slept through the night and MamaDad celebrated their anniversary with alone time together!

While here Little Guy discovered our board game Frazzle! under the bed in the guest room - why was he looking under the bed? It's a longer story... 

Anyway, he was fascinated with the bopping gavel and wanted to play the game. If you remember the Frazzle! rules, you know coming up with words that start with a specific letter for a specific category in a one-minute interval is beyond a pre-schooler's word skills.

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The Boss to the Rescue!

And if anyone knows The Boss, you know he rarely takes a "no" at face value, even when it comes to games. So, rather than tell Little Guy we couldn't play the game because it would be too hard for him, we talked about the rules and Little Guy's new rules are as follows:

• The one who holds the bopping gavel, known as The Bopper, would pick a category around the board and the other players needed to act out one word which fit the category.
• Similar to charades, The Bopper would figure out the word and decide if it fit the category. If the word fit, then the player moved their colored cube one space forward. If the the word did not fit the category, the player did not move their cube forward.
  
• All decisions made by The Bopper were final.
• The Assistant to The Bopper - always Noodle - kept track of the Frazzle! letter cards because even if we wanted to use them, we could not get them out of her hands.

It was a great game!  But Noddle decided she needed ALL of the colored cubes on her side of the game board and Little Guy figured out you could bop The Boss - gently - to get an oversized response. Amidst all the chaotic hilarity no one seemed to mind we didn't finish the game.

It was a simple idea - how can we change the game rules so that we get to a Yes! for Little Guy?

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Thank you, Boss, for rarely taking No as the final answer - even when it sometime makes me crazy!  It was a good example for our Daughters and I love seeing our Grandchildren learn similar lessons about life. You are the best,

Nonna