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Poor Dell.. He has had a marathon weekend of trying to figure out how to organize his life.  It's tough being a 13 year old boy who still wants to play army men for hours and be the older kid.  He is sweet.  He is kind.  But he would not know where his nose if it weren't already on his face.

We set out for goal setting and trying to understand that a goal cannot be pie-in the sky.  Reaching a goal involves series of steps.  We talked about the marshmellow experiement and delayed gratification.  He took a few guesses as to how he would react (eat the inside of the marshmellow).

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/18/090518fa_fact_lehrer

Managing big ideas and making them practical is not an easy skill for anyone and after a day Dell and I felt relaxed and good about what we had discussed and shared knowing that today would be the nitty gritty figuring out how to make those goals happen.

I started our conversation referring to Glasser's choice theory.  I got the wild hair and ran with it classroom style by asking Dell to tell me as I was using the wipe board what each human needs.  He named two immediately without knowing what I was searching for and it provided a nice segue into a theoretical reason being organized will help him.

http://raider.mountunion.edu/~schnelpl/control%20theory%20-%20overhead.html

As the next slide shows we then applied his goals to the five tenets.  It was interesting to listen to him notice how each need depended on he other and almost all his goals were either supported or enhanced by the needs (and the converse being what detracts from achieving his goals).

We ended up discussing the tenets:

After a long session, he had a break for an hour and we came back to the toughest work of all -- calendar.  I am introducing him to google calendar and how he can use it to help him have the time he hopes to have to do the things he hopes to do.  Yesterday one of the things we discussed how in 168 hours of a week, he can do all the things he wants to do including sleep, hang with friends, tennis, swimming, soccer, guitar, and the down time to strategize another chess move or build another battlefield or even do a puzzle. 

He does not like being specific and is tapping his foot in hopes that he can get to the keyboard to finish the calendar.  Ha!  Won't he be surprised when he sees how long it takes to log it in but how much time it will truly give him.  Here's to hoping the summer gives him what he wants most -- personal management freedom.

Hi, this is Dell.  I guessed that it would at least take me an hour to plug-in all the things I need to do on my new Calendar because when it takes 20 minutes for me to make a 5 minute instant-made salad dressing you know I am not hasty.