Alicia Like: Are we drawing the line in the sand where we absolutely need to draw the line in the sand? Or are we doing it just because that's the way we've always done it?
Welcome to the Misfit Behaviorist Podcast. Join your hosts, Audra Jensen and Caitlin Beltran, here to bring you evidence based strategies with a student centered focus. Listen weekly for practical and functional advice, along with actionable tips tailored for ABA professionals, special education teachers, and anyone dedicated to supporting students with diverse needs. Ready? Let's get started.
Audra Jensen: Welcome back to the Misfits. We're very glad to have you here. We are actually having our very first guest speaker today. Very excited about this. I invited my old colleague, very old, Alicia Like here today to chat about the power of letting things go. It's a great behavior strategy. She is here to talk about it. Sound good?
Caitlin Beltran: Perfect.
Audra Jensen: Yay, excited. Anyway, I met Alicia a number of years ago. she and I met very briefly back in education, very briefly. I don't know if you remember this, Alicia, but you and I, you remember you and I applied for the same job way back. Yeah, we played, applied for the same job in, at special ed preschool back in early education many years ago and you got the job and
Alicia Like: I didn't know.
Audra Jensen: You don't remember that yes I ended up working in a different school and then I left there and went and opened up the ABA clinic and then I pulled you away and hired you to come and be one of my program managers and became BCBA and one of my clinical directors.
And then you worked with me in the ABA clinical field. And she and I worked together in the clinical field for, I don't know, 12, 15 years, and then both of us also left the clinical field, went back into the education field where she also has been. She's briefly on hiatus as a new mama, which is very exciting.
And is currently still in education now. Does that about sum up what you've been doing?
Alicia Like: Yeah.
Audra Jensen: Okay, well, shifting to what we want to talk about today, which is letting the little things go. I know Alicia has a great story that we shared together. A number of years ago, we had a case, we were serving a student at home. It was a clinical case that we had. We had to have multiple staff with him at home. It was a highly volatile case. And it was, a case that I will let Alicia tell you a story because I wasn't even there, so. And I brought her on to tell this great story that she's told a number of times over the years that I think was good to share.
Alicia Like: So we'll preface this by saying this story doesn't make me look great. But I think that, that's part of it, right? Is being able to reflect on what we do. We're not, we're not perfect humans. We're humans and we're going to make mistakes. And I always teach staff that if you can reflect on it and see what you can do different next time, that's all that matters. You're going to make mistakes.
It's totally fine, but you want to learn from those mistakes. So we'll call this little guy, Joe. I think he was very little at the time, and to say he had aggressive behaviors is really downplaying it. I would say they were more violent than aggressive. Unfortunately he had, autism, very high functioning, very verbal kiddo.
He had also a lot of mental health going on and, you know, he could kind of switch. In moments he was the sweetest, such a lovely Lovely little boys, so much fun, great sense of humor, though he had, a lot of control that we see, right? He wanted everything his way, he didn't want to do anything, and so, you know, we had his program designed that way.
There were two of us there, both managers, both highly trained, and, we were doing all the things that you would do, right? We had a structured schedule, we're offering choices, we're working on communication, all of those things. So it was time to do chores. So I thought I was doing the right thing. I gave him choices and, you know, do you want to do this chore, this chore?
And he says, I want to water the plants. Great. Okay, fantastic. Let's put your shoes on. So then, you know, these behaviors begin and, this lasted, I want to say hours, at least an hour, but I want to say hours. There, at one point, he locked my colleague and I out of the room, he broke a bunch of picture frames in the living room, this is a house, so there's, you know, stuff everywhere that can be potentially dangerous.
So now we're in a situation where there's broken glass, and this is someone who does not shy away from threatening us, nor does he shy away from attacking us, you know, he, those things have all happened many, many, many times. And, I remember with this case in particular, we all were trying to figure out what was going to work.
This was. The state had brought us in and you know, this was a really tough situation. And so I remember anytime we had big behaviors, a lot of times we'd call each other on the way home and we debrief them and you know, we'd cry and we'd, you know, have a moment and, try to decompress before we got home.
And I remember the next day going into Audra's office and she says, tell me what happened I said, you know, Joe had these huge behaviors last night and Audra says, you know, okay, tell me what happened. So I tell her the story and I get to the end of the story and Audra says, you, you happened. It was you, you did it.
And I was like, I was a young BCBA, very cocky. I was like, Oh, it wasn't me. Are you kidding? Are you crazy? It wasn't me. And then Audra proceeded to explain to me exactly how it was me. And, she says, so I, I tell her the story while I was giving him choices. I'm doing all these things. And then he wanted to water the plants.
So I said, put your shoes on. And Audra says, why did you tell him to put his shoes on? we wear shoes outside. I said, and she said, well, Do his parents make him wear shoes outside? Is there broken glass all over the backyard? No. So then why did he have to wear shoes? And I hadn't ever thought about that.
I was like, why does he have to wear shoes? Maybe she's right. Like, I, my rigid adult brain said, we're going outside. We put on our shoes. It didn't occur to me that there could be another way about this. Right. And That, that's what I thought was a simple demand was not a simple demand for him. And then it became this big safety situation, all because I said, you need to put your shoes on.
And so it really caused me to reflect on some of those adult rigidities that we have, these preconceived notions of I wear shoes outside. Well, let's, let's look at that though. Do I need to? And maybe yes, maybe his backyard is full of glass. And the answer is yes, as the adult, I need to protect him, but maybe not.
Maybe I know that it's safe and it's grass and his parents let him run around outside. And so that's the big thing that I took away from this story is. Before we draw the line in the sand, ask yourselves, is this a line we need to draw? And if it is, you have to draw it. If not, where can we be flexible?
And so the next time I went into this situation, I had this knowledge, right? So, simple, I said, what chore would you like to do? He says, I want to water the plants. Fantastic. Would you like to water the ones on the deck with no shoes or in the bark dust with your shoes? And he says, on the deck without shoes. Problem solved. Right? Again, antecedent modifications. Me as the adult, I can't let him run around in the bark dust without shoes on. That's negligent in my opinion, you know, I don't want him to get hurt, but could he be on the deck? Yeah, of course. And that way he got to make that choice and he was in control, no behaviors.
So for me, it was about like, just when you think you've broken it down enough, Could you break it down more? Could you offer more choices? And, yeah, and are we drawing the line in the sand where we absolutely need to draw the line in the sand? Or are we doing it just because that's the way we've always done it?
You know, first I brush my teeth, and then I floss. And I had a three year old, this was long before I was in ABA, I was working as a nanny, and I remember, was very young, and he wanted to floss first. Well, now, today, I would say, of course, knock yourself out, but 22 year old Alicia got into a power struggle with a three year old and said, no, we brush our teeth first and then we floss.
Why did I do that? I don't know. But we all do that, right? And so it's kind of looking at that and saying, Would he be fine if he flossed and then brushed? Yeah, of course he would be fine. So why am I picking a fight with a three year old? I don't know. But, you know, sometimes we do.
Audra Jensen: That's funny. It's funny. And now that you're a new mom, I think a lot of those preconceived notions that you've had over the years are going to change, too. You're going to find a lot of those are going to go right out the window.
Caitlin Beltran: A lot of lines in the sand, I'll be inched forward.
Audra Jensen: Yeah, whatever. Forget that. Do you want M& Ms for dinner? Sounds great. Great.
Caitlin Beltran: I love that story as the first time hearing it. And when you started telling it initially and talking about, does he have to wear shoes or not? Like, I mean, I'll admit my first thought was like, I think he does, because if he's going outside, like, you don't know if there's glass or not.
But then hearing like, oh, there's another option. Like, you can easily water these plants without wearing shoes, or maybe, you know, It could have been whatever, like a little corner of the grass where you knew was safe. and then even thinking, like you said, self reflecting to the next opportunity where you were able to present the choice or thinking, you know, if you had just said, do you want to water the plants or do something else?
And he said, I want to water the plants. And then started having the behaviors over the shoes, you could have, you know, I'm sure you would have prompted that language and that in itself would have been such a meaningful teaching opportunity for him too. So, looking at it from so many different ways makes us feel like we can be so flexible in so many different ways, like you mentioned, that we don't always think of.
Audra Jensen: Well, that in this particular case and with kids with ADHD. In particular, oppositional disorders and disabilities, I mean, those are the ones you really want to be mindful of, even those small little lines that you draw, because they're going to look for those to create that power that they're seeking. So, whenever you say, do this, they're going to automatically say, no.
So, when you're constantly, you know, for, for example, Typically developing students, or even your regular students that have, you know, any sort of disabilities or whatever, those are fine, you know, put your shoes on, whatever, that's not going to matter, but for these students who have heavy backpacks, or they have, you know, they have other stuff going on, some of those little lines that we draw that may seem very meaningless, you know, not any big deal, those are really Impact those are an opportunity for them to assert their power and then you're gonna run into yeah, you may have just asked me to put my shoes on but i'm gonna assert my ability to say i'm not going to. And then you run into that power thing. And so that's kind of what I wanted to talk about in the podcast really quick.
So I wanted to talk about my three tips for how to kind of let, don't sweat the small stuff, let some of those things go, especially when you have those students who like to get into those power struggles. So these are my quick tips this week. The first thing. To keep that true goal in mind when you're, addressing any sort of skill set or behavior that you're working on, what is the goal of the task? So if you're working, for example, on a writing task, so is the writing task a penmanship goal? You know, is the writing actually a writing, handwriting goal?
If that is, then it's going to be important that you're actually handwriting. But if it's you're wanting to generate content out of their brain, then does it really matter how much they're writing? Are they writing out of their hand? You know, could they be generating it, dictating it? Does it matter if they're using a crayon or a pencil? It doesn't matter if they're sitting on the floor or the desk, you know? Does all that other stuff matter if the goal of the task is what they're generating out of their head? So thinking about what the goal is. If the goal is to sit at circle time for five minutes, does it matter if they're sitting on the chair or the floor?
Does it matter if they're sitting forward or backwards? What is the goal that you're really looking for? So once you keep in mind what the actual goal is, then does the other stuff around it matter as much? So that's the first thing.
Tip number two is that frame that I've brought up before, having that frame in my, Alicia, I can't remember if it was you or somebody else that came up with the idea of tHe frame..
Alicia Like: I'd love to take credit for it, but you told it to me. You taught it to me. Was it me? Yeah.
Audra Jensen: I thought it was you. Yeah, I mean I It came from our years together, but I can't remember who originally came up with the idea.
Alicia Like: I remember you teaching it to me.
Audra Jensen: Okay, well then I'll take it. I came up with this wonderful idea that I've taught for many years. I know I've taught it for many years, I just couldn't remember if I came up with it. Anyway, the idea is that whatever is around the frame, the stuff that is the most important, those non negotiables, those are the things that are solid, the things that are most important.
Then everything in the middle is fluid. So if the things that are non negotiable say, You know, we have to brush our teeth. That is non negotiable. But whether you brush your teeth sitting on the bathtub, if you brush your teeth, you know, sitting in the sink, or you brush your teeth with the red toothbrush or the blue toothbrush, all that stuff doesn't matter.
So keeping that frame concept, the, the, keeping in mind what is the, the non negotiables on the outside and being more fluid on the inside. Tip number two.
So the third thing is to avoid when you can saying no. It is possible to twist things around to avoid saying the word no whenever possible. And here's some tips. If you're watching on YouTube, here are some tips that you can use to avoid saying no to help reduce anxiety and challenging behavior. So here are some things that you could try. You can use the term as soon as.
So, if it's something that needs to be done first, you could use yes, as soon as we get this done. So, a student asks, you know, can I have some more goldfish? You could say, yes, as soon as we get this done. Or I've used like, you know, as soon as the rest of our friends are done with this, then we can get this.
So, we're using as soon as. So, that is one way that you could use an alternative to no. A second one you could use is no but. So maybe that's something that you could use when something needs to be done instead of. So, no, but we can totally do this instead. So that's a way that you can use something different.
And the third alternative to no, you could use no, not yet. So something that, when something needs to be done later. So not yet, but we could do this at a later time. We could put this on your schedule. So those are just things that I was thinking about. We could use alternative ways to use the words instead of no. Does that make sense?
Caitlin Beltran: Yeah, I love that, and I feel like I use these a lot, especially the first one, because I feel as if most times when learners are asking for things, I mean, sometimes they'll say, you know, I want to go home, or I want a, you know, ice cream sandwich, but a lot of the times they're asking for things that they actually can have, just not at that actual time, so it's something that I am going to give them, so I always try to say, like, yeah, you can, as soon as we're done with this, And bringing it back to what they need to do.
And also if I'm constantly saying, no, you got to work first. No, not until later. And I noticed that that's triggering to them. Like it's on me if I'm not changing that language. So like Alicia was saying before that self reflection is so important.
Audra Jensen: I actually, this really came to me the other day when I was, I was in a classroom and this is exactly what I saw is a student, a teacher was working with a student and the student was asking very kind of benign questions and the answers were always no when they could have been any one of these. And they weren't big questions, but the answer was always no, no, no, and it was could have been, you know, hey, that's something we could, we could totally do that at recess.
Oh, that sounds like a great idea. Let's put that here. Or you know what? Let's, I'm really excited to do that. Let's get this math done first and then let's look at that. But, and every time it was, no, we're not going to do that now. No, we already talked about that, you know, and it was just like, and I could just see the, the poor kid was just like, you know, just like, let's find some other ways to make you in
Caitlin Beltran: such a negative mindset.
Audra Jensen: So, and obviously there are times where you have to say no, I'm not saying don't say no. Just kind of make it a more positive incentive and more happy environment. but some of those positive responses are going You know, change kind of that, that environment around your students to be a happy place for them to be. And some of them, when they come to school, may be the only positive environment they have. And so, keeping that positive environment is going to be really important for them to have.
Caitlin Beltran: Absolutely.
Alicia Like: The other one that I really like that goes along with this is not a choice. Because that also reminds them like, Ooh, that's not a choice, but these are choices. So if they're going for, you know, they want to play with the phone, for example, Ooh, that's not a choice, but look, these are all choices. So it's another way you're, you're kind of saying no, but you're not really saying no. And I think we, Do that a lot. Like, no, you can't have that. You can't have that. You can't have that.
But what can they have? Right. Surely there's something they can have. And so let them know, like, Ooh, that's not a choice, but all of these are choices. Do you want any of them?
Audra Jensen: There's always a choice.
Caitlin Beltran: Always.
Audra Jensen: Alright, so that is just about wraps this up for today in Don't Sweating the Small Stuff. This week my one thing for you is to see how often you can turn a no into a no but or an as soon as or a not yet or that's not a choice but we've got these other choices.
Those are great ideas and we are very excited to see you again next week. Don't forget to like and subscribe and do all that stuff that Keeps our algorithm happy. Thank you. We're very happy that to have Alicia come and be our first guest and figure out how to do it. Thank you so much, Alicia.
Alicia Like: Thanks for having me.
Audra Jensen: All right, we'll see you next time.
Caitlin Beltran: Bye.
Alicia Like: Bye.
Thanks for listening to the Misfit Behaviorist. And be sure to tune in next week for more tips and tricks. Don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss an episode.