2• Deeper Matters

Lou looked around the room. Ten or so chairs were arranged in a U shape. Lou sat in the first of these. Jenny’s father and mother were sitting across from him. The mother’s face was drawn tight with worry. Blotchy red patches covered the skin on her neck and stretched across her face. The father was staring vacantly at the ground.

Behind them, Elizabeth Wingfield (a bit overdressed, Lou thought, in a chic business suit) was helping herself to a cup of tea at the bar against the far wall of the room.

Meanwhile, Pettis Murray, the fellow from Dallas, was taking his seat about halfway around the semicircle to Lou’s right. He seemed pretty sharp to Lou, with the air of an executive — head high, jaw set, guarded.

The couple just to the other side of Pettis couldn’t have been more in contrast. Miguel Lopez was an enormous man, with tattoos covering almost every square inch of his bare arms. He wore a beard and mustache so full that a black bandana tied tightly around his head was the only thing that kept his face from being completely obscured by hair. By contrast, his wife, Ria, was barely over five feet tall with a slender build. In the parking lot, she had been the most talkative of the group, while Miguel had mostly stood by in silence. Ria now nodded at Lou, the corners of her mouth hinting at a smile. He tipped his head toward her in acknowledgment and then continued scanning the room.

In the back, keeping to herself, was a person Lou hadn’t yet met—an African American woman he guessed to be somewhere in her midforties. Unlike the others with children in the program, she had not been outside to see them off. Lou wondered whether she had brought a child, worked for Camp Moriah, or had some other reason for being there.

Lou turned to the front of the room, arms folded loosely across his chest. One thing he hated was wasting time, and it seemed they had been doing nothing but that since they’d arrived.

“Thank you all for coming,” Avi said as he walked to the front. “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you in person and to getting to know your children. First of all, I know you’re concerned about them—Teri and Carl, you especially,” he said, glancing for a moment over at Jenny’s parents. “Your presence here is a testament to your love for your children. You needn’t trouble yourself about them. They will be well taken care of.

“In fact,” he said after a brief pause, “they are not my primary concern.”

“Who is, then?” Ria asked.

“You are, Ria. All of you.”

“We are?” Lou repeated in surprise.

“Yes,” Avi smiled.

Lou was never one to back down from a perceived challenge. In Vietnam he had served as a sergeant in the Marine Corps, and the gruesome experience had both hardened and sharpened him. His men referred to him as Hellfire Herbert, a name that reflected both his loud, brash nature and his consequences-be-damned devotion to his unit. His men both feared and revered him: for most of them, he was the last person on earth they would want to spend a holiday with, but no other leader in the Marines brought more men back alive.

“And why are we your primary concern?” Lou asked pointedly.

“Because you don’t think you should be,” Avi answered.

Lou laughed politely. “That’s a bit circular, isn’t it?”

The others in the group, like spectators at a tennis match, looked back at Avi, anticipating his reply.

Avi smiled and looked down at the ground for a moment, thinking. “Tell us about Cory, Lou,” he said finally. “What’s he like?”

“Cory?”

“Yes.”

“He is a boy with great talent who is wasting his life,” Lou answered matter-of-factly.

“But he’s a wonderful boy,” Carol interjected, glancing warily at Lou. “He’s made some mistakes, but he’s basically a good kid.”

“‘Good kid’?” Lou scoffed, losing his air of nonchalance. “He’s a felon for heaven’s sake—twice over! Sure he has the ability to be good, but mere potential doesn’t make him good. We wouldn’t be here if he was such a good kid.”

Carol bit her lip, and the other parents in the room fidgeted uncomfortably.

Sensing the discomfort around him, Lou leaned forward and added, “Sorry to speak so plainly, but I’m not here to celebrate my child’s achievements. Frankly, I’m royally pissed at him.”

“Leave the royalty to me, if you don’t mind,” Mrs. Wingfield quipped. She was seated two chairs to Lou’s right, on the other side of Carol.

“Certainly,” he said with a smile. “My apologies to the crown.”

She tipped her head at him.

It was a light moment that all in the room could throw themselves into heavily, as heaviness was what had characterized too much of their recent lives.

“Lou is quite right,” Avi said after the moment had passed. “We are here not because our children have been choosing well but because they have been choosing poorly.”

“That’s what I’m saying,” Lou nodded in agreement.

Avi smiled. “So what, then, is the solution? How can the problems you are experiencing in your families be improved?”

“I should think that’s obvious,” Lou answered directly. “We are here because our children have problems. And Camp Moriah is in the business of helping children overcome their problems. Isn’t that right?”

Carol bristled at Lou’s tone. He was now speaking in his boardroom voice—direct, challenging, and abrasive. He rarely took this tone with her, but it had become the voice of his interactions with Cory over the last few years. Carol couldn’t remember the last time Lou and Cory had had an actual conversation. When they spoke, it was a kind of verbal wrestling match, each of them trying to anticipate the other’s moves, searching for weaknesses they could then exploit to force the other into submission. With no actual mat into which to press the other’s flesh, these verbal matches always ended in a draw: each of them claimed hollow victory while living with ongoing defeat. She silently called heavenward for help, as she had been taught to do by her churchgoing parents. She wasn’t sure there was a heaven or any help to be had, but she broadcast her need all the same.

Avi smiled good-naturedly. “So Lou,” he said, “Cory is a problem. That’s what you’re saying.”

“Yes.”

“He needs to be fixed in some way—changed, motivated, disciplined, corrected.”

“Absolutely.”

“And you’ve tried that?”

“Tried what?”

“Changing him.”

“Of course.”

“And has it worked? Has he changed?”

“Not yet, but that’s why we’re here. One day, no matter how hard a skull he has, he’s going to get it. One way or the other.”

“Maybe,” Avi said without conviction.

“You don’t think your program will work?” Lou asked, incredulously.

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“On you.”

Lou grunted. “How can the success of your program depend on me when you’re the ones who will be working with my son over the coming two months?”

“Because you will be living with him over all the months afterward,” Avi answered. “We can help, but if your family environment is the same when he gets home as it was when he left, whatever good happens here is unlikely to make much of a difference later. Yusuf and I are only temporary surrogates. You and Carol, all of you with your respective children,” he said, motioning to the group, “are the helpers who matter.”

Great, Lou thought. A waste of time.

“You said you want Cory to change,” came a voice from the back, yanking Lou from his thoughts. It was Yusuf, who had finally joined the group.

“Yes,” Lou answered.

“Don’t blame you,” Yusuf said. “But if that is what you want, there is something you need to know.”

“What’s that?”

“If you are going to invite change in him, there is something that first must change in you.”

“Oh yeah?” Lou challenged. “And what would that be?”

Yusuf walked to the whiteboard that covered nearly the entire front wall of the room. “Let me draw something for you,” he said.

THE INFLUENCE PYRAMID

“By the end of the day tomorrow,” Yusuf said, turning to face the group, “we will have formulated a detailed strategy for helping others to change. That strategy will be illustrated by a diagram we call the Influence Pyramid. We aren’t yet ready to consider the pyramid in detail, so I’ve drawn only its basic structure. This overall structure will help us to discover a fundamental change that must occur in us if we are going to invite change in others.”

“Okay, I’ll bite,” Lou said. “What fundamental change?”

“Look at the two areas in the pyramid,” Yusuf invited. “Notice that the largest area by far is what I have labeled ‘Helping things go right.’ In comparison, the ‘Dealing with things that are going wrong’ area is tiny.”

“Okay,” Lou said, wondering what significance this had.

Yusuf continued. “The pyramid suggests that we should spend much more time and effort helping things go right than dealing with things that are going wrong. Unfortunately, however, these allocations of time and effort are typically reversed. We spend most of our time with others dealing with things that are going wrong. We try fixing our children, changing our spouses, correcting our employees, and disciplining those who aren’t acting as we’d like. And when we’re not actually doing these things, we’re thinking about doing them or worrying about doing them. Am I right?” Yusuf looked around the room for a response.

“For example, Lou,” he said, “would it be fair to say that you spend much of your time with Cory criticizing and challenging him?”

Lou thought about it. This was no doubt true in his case, but he didn’t want to admit to it so easily.

“Yes, I’d say that’s true,” Carol admitted for him.

“Thanks,” Lou mumbled under his breath. Carol looked straight ahead.

“It’s certainly far too true of me as well,” Yusuf said, coming to Lou’s rescue. “It’s only natural when confronting a problem that we try to correct it. Trouble is, when working with people, this hardly ever helps. Further correction rarely helps a child who is pouting, for example, or a spouse who is brooding, or a coworker who is blaming. In other words, most problems in life are not solved merely by correction.”

“So what do you suggest?” Lou asked. “If your child was into drugs, what would you do, Yusuf? Just ignore it? Are you saying you shouldn’t try to change him?”

“Maybe we should begin with a less extreme situation,” Yusuf answered.

“Less extreme? That’s my life! That’s what I’m dealing with.”

“Yes, but it’s not all that you are dealing with. You and Carol aren’t on drugs, but I bet that doesn’t mean you’re always happy together.”

Lou thought back to the silent treatment Carol had given him on the flight the day before. She didn’t like how he had handled Cory, and she communicated her displeasure by clamming up. Tears often lay just below the surface of her silence. Lou knew what her silence meant—that he, Lou, wasn’t measuring up—and he resented it. He was having enough trouble with his boy; he didn’t think he deserved the silent, teary lectures. “We’re not perfect,” Lou allowed.

“Nor am I with my wife, Lina,” Yusuf said. “And you know what I’ve found? When Lina is upset with me in some way, the least helpful thing I can do is criticize her or try to correct her. When she’s mad, she has her reasons. I might think she’s wrong and her reasons illegitimate, but I’ve never once convinced her of that by fighting back.” He looked at Lou and Carol. “How about you? Has it helped to try to change each other?”

Lou chewed tentatively on the inside of his cheek as he remembered rows he and Carol had gotten into over her silent treatment. “No, I suppose not,” he finally answered. “Not generally, anyway.”

“So for many problems in life,” Yusuf said, “solutions will have to be deeper than strategies of discipline or correction.”

Lou thought about that for a moment.

“But now for your harder question,” Yusuf continued. “What if my child is doing something really harmful, like drugs? What then? Shouldn’t I try to change him?”

“Exactly,” Lou nodded.

“And the answer to that, of course,” Yusuf said, “is yes.”

This caught Lou by surprise, and he swallowed the retort he’d been planning.

“But I won’t invite my child to change if my interactions with him are primarily in order to get him to change.”

Lou got lost in that answer and furrowed his brow. He began to reload his objection.

“I become an agent of change,” Yusuf continued, “only to the degree that I begin to live to help things go right rather than simply to correct things that are going wrong. Rather than simply correcting, for example, I need to reenergize my teaching, my helping, my listening, my learning. I need to put time and effort into building relationships. And so on. If I don’t work the bottom part of the pyramid, I won’t be successful at the top.

“Jenny, for example,” he continued, “is currently outside on a wall refusing to join the others on the trail.”

Still? Lou thought to himself.

“She doesn’t want to enter the program,” Yusuf continued. “That’s understandable, really. What seventeen-year-old young woman is dying to spend sixty days sleeping on the hard ground and living on cornmeal and critters they can capture with homemade spears?”

“That’s what they have to do out there?” Ria asked.

“Well, kind of,” Yusuf smiled. “It’s not quite that primitive.”

“But it’s close,” Avi interjected with a chuckle.

Ria widened her eyes and rocked backward into her seat, trying to imagine how her boy would do in this environment. By contrast, her husband, Miguel, nodded approvingly.

“So what do we do?” Yusuf asked rhetorically. “Any attempt to discipline or to correct her behavior is unlikely to work, wouldn’t you agree?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Lou said, arguing more out of habit now than conviction. “If it were me, I would have gone over to her and told her to get her backside over to the vehicle.”

“Right gentlemanly of you, Lou,” Elizabeth quipped.

“And what if she had refused?” Yusuf asked.

Lou looked at Elizabeth. “Then I would have made her go,” he said, carefully articulating each word.

“But Camp Moriah is a private organization with no authority of the state,” Yusuf responded, “and no desire to create additional problems by trying to bully people into doing what we want them to do. We do not force children to enroll.”

“Then you have a problem,” Lou said.

“Yes, we certainly do,” Yusuf agreed. “The same problem we each have in our families. And the same problem coworkers and countries have with one another. We are all surrounded by other autonomous people who don’t always behave as we’d like.”

“So what can you do when that’s the case?” Ria asked.

“Get really good at the deeper matters,” Yusuf answered, “at helping things to go right.”

“And how do you get good at that?” Ria followed up.

“That is exactly what we are here to talk about for the next two days,” Yusuf answered. “Let’s begin with the deepest matter of all, an issue I would like to introduce by going back some nine hundred years to a time when everything was going wrong.”