Oct 20 • Parenting
✈️ Ridicule, Criticize, Patronize, the Top Gun Way!
I was a Top Gun instructor in the Royal Air Force, if you have seen the film Top Gun you will know that all military aircrew are steely-eyed ice-cold killers who have no emotions, because "up there if you think, you are dead!!"
As you can imagine, everybody thought they were the best of the best and did everything perfect.
So, when we had the next Maverick, who turned out to be more MiddleRoad, we had to bring them down to earth gently as taxpayers had spent $millions just to get them to that stage.
Now to let you understand, military flying training is a SAVAGE environment to an outsider, where all students are basically 5 flights away from being permanently cut from training with debriefs being very direct and hyper-focused on what seems like minutiae.
To that end, we had to debrief in a way that never crushed a students spirit but allowed them to learn from their mistakes and come back stronger next time.
To do that we used the RCP framework, which officially stands for:
- Recognize
- Cause
- Prevention
or unofficially: Ridicule, Criticize, Patronize 😆
So we break it down like this:
- Recognize the problem
- Find the root cause
- Explain how to prevent it
That might look something like this...
"Your missile wouldn't launch as you could not get a lock on the other aircraft (Recognize), this was because you were too close for missiles (Cause). Next time you need to monitor your distance and when too close for missiles, switch to guns (Prevention)" 😎
"Yeah, yeah... cool story Dave... whatever!"
Well.... this works sooooo well with children (and spouses 🫣).
Here's a real world example from my house this morning. Emily was trying to sweep the floor and not doing a great job.
"Hey sweetheart, great effort but there are a few little bits that escaped in the corners, can you see it? (Recognize). This is normally because the broom is not really great for corners so you never managed to get it right into the corner (Cause). Let me show you how to get fully into the corner by turning the broom on it's side like this. (Prevention).
One key point: Make sure when using this that the other person can actually see the error and try to ask them for the solution rather than give them the answer as it helps with longer-term retention if it is their answer.
Give it a try and let me know how you get on.
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✈️ Ridicule, Criticize, Patronize, the Top Gun Way!
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