Innovation by SIT

Those of you who have kids in school have experienced the following phenomena. You want your kids to tell you about their day when they come home from school, but they have completely different intentions. When you ask how their day was, they usually say, ‘It was OK’ and go back to staring at the TV.

I, too, have been faced with this situation. I’ve often felt frustrated that I don’t share a big enough part of my son’s experiences throughout his day. One day, while we were eating a meal at Macdonald’s and my son was trying to put the toy together that he got from the kids meal, I decided to try my luck again and ask how his day at school had been. As predicted, I got the usual, ‘It was OK’ answer.

But this time I was determined not to give up. I’m often asked if SIT can be used to solve day-to-day problems or family issues, and my reply is always a confident yes. Here was an opportunity for me to put my money where my mouth is!

By the way, it is important for me to point out that in order to activate SIT, there has to be a ‘conscious’ decision to use it. In fact, the decision to use SIT is perhaps the most important stage in the method. After the decision has been made, the thought process almost always changes.

(This is somewhat similar to something that I once read: the most important stage in psychological treatment is the decision to get treatment. Apparently the decision itself reduces considerably the symptoms that cause the need for treatment).

Let’s return to our story.

After I decided to activate SIT, I made a mental list of all the objects: my son, his events of the day, the story of his events of the day, Macdonalds, myself.

I had a feeling that the solution may come about by using the Multiplication technique, and so I decided to duplicate the story. According to the Multiplication technique, adding to the problem world a new story that is different in some way from the original can solve the problem. ‘Aha,’ I thought, ‘I’ve got it!’

So I said to my son, ‘Instead of you telling me what happened to you today, I’ll tell you a story about your day,’ and I started telling the story (as if it were coming from him). The story I told him began like this: ‘As I got off the school bus today, this kid came up to me and started asking me questions…’ This, of course, was a wild guess based on a few details that I had already picked up about his life at school (he once told me about a kid that annoyed him when he got off the bus).

‘No, no, it wasn’t like that’ he interrupted. ‘It was like this: I got off the school bus and then…’ And so he went on to tell me what really happened to him at school. I continued the story and he continued excitedly to correct me as we got into more and more detail. It proved to be successful beyond all expectation! (I could have written a diary, stating minute by minute what happened to him at school)

This is an example of using SIT’s Multiplication technique. The problem was about the story that my son didn’t agree to tell me. It was solved by a story that I invented about his day.

See you all in my next post,

Roni

Visit Roni at the start2think website