Musings on Soft Strength, MOE and Motherhood: Part 2

This is the 2nd post in the series of "Musings on Soft Strength, MOE and Motherhood." The first one is HERE.

Singaporean society is big on Hard Strength. Managers are given KPIs. Children are given grade targets. Consequences are meted out when these KPIs and targets are not met. In organisations that use people and then throw people, inflexible KPIs drive effort but also cause employee burnout. Most organisations don't care very much. They can use them and throw them.

Parents who manage their children similarly...
- ... meet with Bad Attitude
- ... meet with Outright Rebellion
- ... meet with Fake Incompetence

10+ years ago, I met with some VP in an organisation to sell consultancy services to improve employee morale and motivation. At that time, I was transiting from consultancy to housewifery. So, at the end of my meeting, the VP and I chatted about my plans to make a career in housewifery. What the VP said then, I will never forget, "I am more interested in learning from you how to motivate my children to study than in motivating my employees to work. Employees are easy. If they don't meet their targets, I cut their bonuses. The lousy ones, I sack. I cannot sack my kids." Here was a man whose nickname in the organisation was, "血魔", helpless in the face of his 3 children's Bad Attitude.

To cope with Bad Attitude, Outright Rebellion and Fake Incompetence, some parents go to extremes of Hard Strength. They punish. They yell. They beat. Invariably, the day comes when they admit that none of the punishing, the yelling and the beatings worked. The child became more and more intransigeant. Grades did not improve. Worse yet, a heavy price was paid in damage to the parent-child relationship. In some cases, when a parent set a Hard Target of 70/100 for the child to meet, and the child failed to meet the target, the child committed suicide.

I know because I have coached enough parents to see how the inevitable happened. In some cases, when the parent realises early enough to seek my help, some key changes in approach can turn kids around within a month. In other cases, it is simply too late for me to help in any meaningful way.

What Is Hard Strength Here?
Hard Strength here is in the inflexible KPI or grade target. The child is given a target and knows what the consequences will be if he/she fails to meet the target.
- shame
- removal of privileges
- a bad scolding
- caning
- parent disappointment

The combination of target and negative consequence is designed to bash through all resistance and every obstacle to achieve the end result.

The Husband is big on targets. When we first got married, he even set targets on exactly when we should leave house to go somewhere. When The Daughter was born, The Husband would frequently get angry with her and me. Babies don't care about your targets. When it is time to go out, and babies need to nap, pee or poop, you simply need to wait. The Husband would fly into a rage every time this happened because he had so many things to do that he simply could not WAIT.

The Husband was big on targets. If X amount of work was assigned to The Son, he would get angry if the work was not completed. The Husband's mindset was that a set amount of work was needed to get to mastery and the time to PSLE is limited. If The Son did not get enough practice, he would not achieve mastery and his PSLE results would suffer.

Hard Strength: Set the target and push through with brute force.

What is Soft Strength Here?
Soft Strength takes into account all obstacles. Soft strength chooses to...
- USE obstacles OR
- flow around them.

I set targets but on a daily basis, I would assess the obstacles...
- The Son's tiredness
- the environment
- the difficulty of the work assigned
- any other obstacle

I did have targets but what mattered to me was The Son, not the target.

Avoiding Obstacles
The Son's wellbeing came FIRST. I made a qualitative assessment of every work session and adjusted my targets accordingly. For example, when we first moved into this house, The Son could not focus. The environment was strange. The ceilings were too high. The rooms were too large. I could see that The Son could not focus as well as in the old house. I simply deleted 2 pieces of work already planned for that afternoon. I told The Son that in about 1 week, we would all get used to the new environment and then we could do more work in the same amount of time.

I avoided the obstacle presented by Strange Surroundings Interfering With Focus.

Using Obstacles
I also made use of obstacles. No child likes to do a lot of HW. That is an obstacle. So, I would plan, for example, in 3 hours...
- 3 chapters of a Math Assessment book.
- since each chapter had 3 sections, there were 9 sections in total
- since each sub-chapter had 15 questions,
- there were a total of 135 questions in 9 sections (or 3 chapters)
... to be completed in 3 hours.

Next, I showed The Son 135 questions to be completed. Then, I told him that if he could pick the most difficult questions in each sub-chapter to practise on, and he could show me that he could do them well, I would let him skip the other 12 easier questions in each sub-chapter. This reduced his workload to 27 (instead of 135) problem sums.

How many of you dare to set 27 highly challenging problem sums in a 3 hr slot? So you see, when Petunia sets targets, they are frighteningly scary targets. I am no softie when it comes to target setting.

Each time The Son completed 3 of the most difficult questions, he felt so happy that he had earned the right to skip 12 questions that he was motivated to move on to the next 3 questions. In 3 hrs, he completed 27 highly challenging problem sums. In this way, we covered in 2 weeks, the material in 1 book that took St Andrew's Primary an entire year to teach.

Which kind of employee would you prefer? The one who sits down ONE afternoon with a client and achieves his/her SGD$2 million annual target, or the one who works 12 hours a day and still cannot meet his/her SGD$2 million annual target?

Which is smarter? To budget USD$500,000 for electricity to pump water to feed all the fountains in a garden, or to build the fountains halfway down a hillside and let gravity provide the power to make fountains spurt, like in Tivoli HERE. In the past, when electricity had not yet been discovered, we had to work with nature to make fountains spurt. Nowadays, we can impose our will on nature and make fountains anywhere and everywhere using electrical water pumps. That is Hard Strength.

I have the misfortune (and good fortune) to be the wife of a strong-willed man. I also have the misfortune (and good fortune) to be the mother of 2 strong-willed children. Every single time that I have tried to IMPOSE my will on them, I have never achieved anything. The Husband does not take well to being forced or nagged. The Husband can only be charmed into submission.

Very likely, I will get broken before I break any of them. My only way was to use Soft Strength and work with my husband and children's strength of will. Harnessing The Son's own strength of will, I was able to get him to complete 27 highly challenging problem sums in 3 hrs. This is no different than ancient Roman architects harnessing the power of gravity to make the fountains of Tivoli spurt water.

This is Soft Strength.

Don't Underestimate Soft Strength
In the past, Chinese Emperors could simply send a silk rope on a tray to a wayward subordinate. Said subordinate would then use the silk rope to hang himself. Hundreds of years of Chinese history shows how Soft Strength can be used to deadly effect.

There really is no fabric softer than silk.

Summary of Learning Points
(1) Soft Strength does not mean Soft Targets.
(2) Soft Strength respects and cares for loved ones.
(3) Soft Strength engenders less pain and less stress.
(4) Soft Strength is not weakness.
(5) Soft Strength requires less effort because it avoids/uses obstacles.
(6) Soft Strength is kind.

By the way, if your child is autistic, you have no choice but to use Soft Strength.