Lauren Boswinkle. All right, so I'm gonna do a brief rundown on Ruby and polymorphism, so there's my information. But basic lessons that you learned in college, like cat, dog, and lion are all subclasses of animal. That's kind of not the full spectrum of what you can do in Ruby. Polymorphism in Ruby is not just that. It's a duct tape language, so that means that you can actually work around just objects. You can have things that simply act like objects. So again, what if you needed to handle different types of objects differently and you have no consistent API? I've seen this and I've done it myself. Do something, case statement, widget, sprocket, gizmo, gadget, whatever, otherwise raised an unknown type. And then you start seeing it somewhere else and at another place. But it works, you're good, awesome. Oh god, new requirement. It should be quick, right? So this is logical branching. Methods now have two or more functions. Code is more brittle and difficult to make quick changes. And really, this just makes Happy Cat sad. Happy Cat has run out of happy. Polymorphism doesn't necessarily mean subclasses, in dynamically typed languages. Interfaces, APIs, et cetera, are a fantastic way to deal with this. You can call the same method regardless of the type being handled and compartmentalize special cases to the classes and modules concerning the behavior of those types. What I mean by that is you can build these APIs into your objects. But sometimes our objects don't really want to follow that one specific standard API, like they're often used for different things in different places. So you can just build some adapters or interpreters and build those with the API in mind so that you can use them together. And you can utilize namespaces if you need to. So modules or just wrapper classes are fantastic for that. This was written on Y days, so it's a little weird. But you can just throw a method into a module that actually just, you can just call without saying anything and then have these adapters in that file or in their own files or whatever. And then this is what that code turns into. The case statement is in one place so that when you need to add something else, you can just add it in that one place, add a new adapter, you're good to go. There's plenty of ways to do this, it's just one. Like really, Ruby is fantastic that if you can just think of a way to do something, chances are it's gonna work. It's kind of wonderful like that and kind of horrible like that. And really, temperance is key. If you've only got one case statement or one nested if or something, don't worry about this, just do that. If you start seeing that case statement or if statements start appearing more times, try thinking about a different way to do it. And again, this is a suggestion, it's not the right way. Look, a puppy, that's my contact information. All right. I want my lawyer, hi everybody. I wanted to talk about being social, not living social, being social. And I originally wanted to talk 45 minutes, very long conversation. My wife suggested that I give this a talk to all of you because she thinks I'm a very social individual that I talk to a lot of people. And it's sort of the reason why I've lost my voice now because of the GitHub drink up yelling at random people that I had never met before last night. And I spent a lot of time talking to people. I've done it most of my life and it terrifies me, probably like it terrifies most of you. I don't, I'm the one in the middle. I'm wearing the same shirt to help you out. I'm wearing the jacket solely because I have some pitting going on. That's the one tip that I've learned.  It's also a good social tip to like, you know something about yourself, like you're pitting right now, people feel more comfortable about you. But that's not one of our two tips. That's a little side. I'm Franklin Lover, I work at Jumpstart Lab. Ow! Jumpstart Lab, come. So the scenario is you wanna meet some people. You're at a conference or some brilliant presenter or some intelligent people. There's some of your heroes that perhaps you read their book and they changed the way that you did Ruby or worked with Ruby. And, or maybe there's just some sexy men, am I right? That last one on the end there, that's a sexy man. Maybe you wanna just talk to him. I'm gonna say, hey, so I was like, here you are, guys. What do I say to this guy? He is so gorgeous and you're uncomfortable about what you wanna do and how you wanna express yourself. And so, Mike, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You got a preview. Most people say or suggest perhaps like, think about people in their underwear. It might be awkward, even more awkward. You might come back and be like, oh God, I really don't know what to say to people. My suggestion is I look at everybody and I think about them as if they're my grandmother. This is my grandmother right here. What I mean to say is I look at people that I don't know and I imagine that they're actually someone I do know. I pretend, when I talk to every one of you, that we're cousins or you're my uncle or I'm your uncle or we're weird second cousins in its Christmas time and we haven't caught up in a while. That works really well, I think, for a lot of people. You can't say be comfortable, be relaxed. What I do find comfortable is using some way of tricking your brain into thinking, oh, I know what this speed is. And so that's what I suggest. That's my biggest tip. Right there, if you're comfortable and you're easy with other people, everything else usually comes much easier after that. Because it's very awkward standing there talking to awkward people. I just wish I was once. Yeah, so here's me and I'm thinking about Randall now but I'm thinking about him as my grandmother but I still don't know what to say and maybe he starts thinking about me and Drax and that way, okay, now we can talk to each other. That's not a question at all. And so usually I go, we ask these questions like where are you from? All these things that don't go anywhere. Like, oh, you're from California? Where in California? Oh, I lived in Sonoma. Oh, that's great wine there, I've heard. I haven't had that conversation. Like, you've actually gone and then you just the conversation usually didn't even go anywhere. The other questions you might ask are something like, I'll share a story about a trip to a vacation and then you'll share a story about a trip and vacation and we sort of just talk at each other and that's something that happens a lot too. And what I suggest really is that you ask more questions. Martin alluded to this, if you pretend to be interested in people by asking questions or if you actually are interested in people, just asking questions would make it so much more a better conversation. And what I mean by asking questions the same way from some of those dead-end ones where you expect a particular answer. It's kind of like interviewing people the same way. You don't want those dead-end questions because then the interview turns awkward. So, believe it or not, practicing being social. So besides those two tips, there's two things or there's three things I thought about earlier. I'm not suggesting that you join the pickup artist community but they go into a lot of detail about this stuff and there's some amazing, interesting things that they've done because they're looking at some of these social areas. They're really these really bad nerds doing these things but some things are good about that community and what they're looking at. I don't mean what they're trying to do with the necks and all this other stuff but I'm really interested in them. Take improv classes after Jesse and other people. It's amazing because you just play and you learn how to play with people.  So remember my grandmother, think about her and ask questions. So I really enjoyed that talk by Martin Atkins and one of the things he said was be grateful and I really am grateful that I'm not following him directly after his presentation. So he also mentioned building your own Great Wall of China and I kind of consider this project to be my Great Wall of China and I want to share it with you and see how you can help and if you want to do something similar. So I have this technique, a systematic technique for dramatically improving your knowledge of a topic or just achieving a goal and I call it one up. So it's applicable to any goal. My goal is to become a world-class developer in one year but it's not necessarily just for this kind of guy. It's really just like for anyone. So the general overview is you pick a goal. It's you give yourself like a year. You break down the year into intervals. Like for me it's two-week intervals and you pick some topics that you want to hit within one topic for two weeks. You practice to liberally get mentors and teach others and if I break that down, go to his upside down. I don't know if he likes that but he says, he says on a house owner it's like without haste without rest. It's like a star moving across the sky and it gets there because it's going consistently. I guess we have the tortoise and the hare so the Germans have nothing on us but so I think make your goal really impressive. You've got a year, so don't let me down. Break it down into two-week intervals. What's nice is it's small enough to stay urgent. If my goal is become a world-class web developer and a year is going by, it could be like it's Saturday, I'm tired, whatever but if it's like this is the end of my two weeks and I haven't written a blog post yet, you got to get on that. So it's really helpful to do it like that. So the new intervals absorb all the ones as well. So if you have something you don't like you'll get past it, you'll get to the next thing. Intervals are cool because pre-planning them helps you achieve balance. It's really easy to go down some kind of rabbit hole when you get into a topic, like I definitely get into topics and it would go way beyond two weeks but if I have the chance to plan what I want to hit I can definitely hit it as long as I plan ahead and I can share my list of topics with other people who are experts and they can help me out and say that's not relevant. Just being able to show other people yourself helps them to help you and it helps you time, timing, timing, the shorter feedback loops and then looking ahead for applicable conferences, meetups, whatever so that when you think, I thought to myself, the Git workshop's coming up. I'm gonna be learning Git, that's one of my things. And so I'm gonna time it so by the end I'll kind of know Matthew McCullough a little bit and help out with his stuff and it's good timing. You don't learn it if you can't teach it and I find that what I do is I just sign up. I'm gonna give a talk at a bar camp or whatever it's gonna be and when you sign yourself up, like here I am, you have to describe it and it's gonna make it really more clear and consistent in your mind to be able to explain it better. So just the order and clarity. Another thing is not just giving talks but writing and I call it fighting the ruler because when you have a big blank page in front of you, you gotta fill it up and just that empty writer's blocky feeling shows that I mean beyond the practice of learning how to write, it shows how much you know about a topic. If the words are just spilling out, well you know a lot and it kind of gives you some more feedback that way. So another thing is you change. This is really, this is Bruce and he was all about, when he wasn't writing about cross-dressing sadistic dukes, he was talking about how people change and when your life is changing, you don't know it after a while. There may be inaccessible job or inaccessible romance but once you're there, it feels totally normal and that freshness is gone. So the time you wanna write, the best time is when you know the topic but it's still fresh for you. So write at the right time like I said in transition. The thing about writing that can trip me up and some people gave me some good advice about this. They said, you don't have to write for your ideal future self. That's someone who knows all this stuff. Oh man, that's too easy. You can write stuff that's easy to you. Totally easy, it's whatever. It's kind of boring almost but for some people that's vitally important, vitally interesting.  This one's tough. Be the worst in the room. There's several difficult things about it. One is getting other people who are the best to allow you in the room so you can be the worst there with them. But I think people like to help from when I show people my list of things and they know about a topic, they seem really genuinely ego to help me so I really like that. Yeah, bring an empty cup. This is a pseudo Eastern story. Every software talk needs some kind of Zen story. So this is this one. There's a monk that goes to a new monastery and he's like, he's a novice. The master shows how they meditate. He's like, oh, we do that kind of differently. We stand up and blah, blah, blah. He's going out with his stories. By the end of this thing the master brings them to the tea room. He puts down the tea cup, he starts pouring it and he just keeps going and starts going all, it just flows all over the floor and then the novice is like, what are you doing? And the master's like, if you don't have this empty cup it's just gonna flow out. So that's that story.  You know, they don't want you to, I mean, obviously there's some learning with every project but for the most part they want you to be pretty good and know what you're doing. So I, I mean, I'm working on like a client project. It's like a chess clock has started in your mind.  If you're getting too deep you gotta kind of pull up and say how can we change these requirements or what's necessary, how can we do things differently? But we're gonna pull a nooth when we're doing this. Someone said, why don't you use email? He said, well, because you guys are trying to stay on top of things. I'm trying to get to the bottom of them. So that's what Knuth is all about. So get out and co-work. I think it's important because you don't even know the questions you don't know enough to ask. So like when I started working at Bendyworks I work at Bendyworks here in Madison. I didn't know their workflow with like get and the way they do things like adding things bit by bit. Anyway, they do it surgically and I didn't even know enough to ask that. So it's important that you get out and be immersed. And telling the world because when you work secretly it's less fun and I think it amounts to less. SeekReceived is like the dev null of life. Whatever you put in there just kind of goes away. Like it's way more fun, you get more out of it if you're sharing it. So the detail intervals pay off. Like I said, people, you can say specifically I'm working on this, this and this and people can connect on that. So like I said, real quick story. I spent some time on a failed startup. By some time I mean several years and it's one thing coding and coding and feeling like you know what you wanna make but until you go out and do the hard thing and talk to the audience, talk to the businesses, you don't know what really counts in the world. And so I think it's the same thing with your own personal goals and learning too. It's not gonna be as good unless you like get out there. Be prepared, make some like business cards you can give out.  This is my one year goal. If you guys wanna have your own, tell me about it. That's cool. If you go to oneup.begriffs.com that's gonna be my list of things that I wanna learn and you can help me out. Thank you. Hey guys, my name's Steve Balkner. That's the helpful Steve on Twitter. I work for murphy.com. Quick pitch for that. We're a startup here in Madison. We're actually hiring. We're looking for two Ruby devs. So if you're looking for a job and you want an awesome job to start up, come talk to me. Just about a block away. My claim to fame is I went to the South Pole once. So that's me, near the South Pole. So this talk is meta, meta programming. A few years ago when I started Ruby I had been programming for about six months. I had no idea what meta programming was. And then some people at a Ruby meta were like you should check it out, it's really cool.  And it was definitely one of these big kind of moments. It was like whoa, this is so cool. And I had no idea what to do with it, right? It was one of these things that I could see the power but I absolutely had no clue how it was gonna help me. So fast forward a few weeks later I finally found an area here at murphy. We needed some analytics done, right? So basic web app, we need all these analytics for all these different things. And they kind of are all a little bit similar. They have similar properties but they apply to lots of different models and lots of different areas in our rail stack. So I decided to apply meta programming to this although there's probably definitely other ways you could do it. So for murphy, our music startup, we have albums, right? So I was kind of sketched out this meta programming idea and I'm actually gonna walk you through how I did it real quick for anybody that's not ever seen any meta programming before. I said I wanna write a module that I can just plug in that's gonna be my analytics module. And I wanted to find methods on that module that will define analytics. And then I wanna very easily take all those methods and run them and package it up on JSON and send it to our analytics server and it's gonna be amazing. So this is kind of what I wanted to do. I also wanted to do time-based stuff. So the previous one was account. This is an account based on time. So this is what I wrote. I basically started with creating a hash that's kind of infinitely nestable. There's like gems that will do this for you. Don't worry about it, if that's, don't know what's going on. And then this is the first thing I did. I was like, let's take this analytics module and let's look at all the constants that exist inside it. So this is every model that will be in my Rails app. And then for each of those classes, we can actually create a string and constatize that string and create a new instances of that class, all right? So this is, this was like the first, like everything I'd done with Metaprogram and I thought it was so freaking cool. So now I have these basic collection of new objects. And then for each of those objects, I'm gonna look at all the instance methods. That's that count method I was talking about before. And then for each of those methods, I'm gonna look at the number of arguments in that method. So if it has no arguments, it must be a count. If it has some arguments, then it must be some time-based metric. And you're gonna do some stuff with that. I'm gonna downcase stuff and I'm gonna intern it and turn it into symbols and send it all into a hash and it's gonna be amazing, right? So this is what I wrote. This is the actual code. And the cool part is, is then it got really easy to write metrics because it was like, same thing. I just was like, I wanna do a genre metric, right? So let's create a method in genres and I wanna do a time-based metric on artists. And so I just wrote this and it was dead simple. It packages all this stuff up into JSON and actually sends it to a server. And then I actually took it, make sure I don't have time off. I took it one step further. I actually, on the other end on the server, wrote metaprogramming there that would look at the JSON and figure out how it should display the metric based on how many parameters it had. All kinds of cool stuff. The truth is it was terrible. So basically this is my first foray in metaprogramming and the meta-meta on metaprogramming is be careful. So the system I wrote that you just saw is not flexible whatsoever. It's extremely difficult to maintain. As soon as some of the other programs on the project started poking at it, they were like, what the hell is going on here? They couldn't understand it. And basically nobody had any idea how to use it and so we ended up throwing it away later in favor of some other methods. So that's kind of my warning for metaprogramming. But I highly recommend checking it out if you've never tried it before. It's actually really, really cool. This book is really cool. Where is he? Is he in the room? Oh, hey, what's up? It's kind of cool how stuff like that happens with these things. But yeah, so this is the book on it, right? If you want to learn how to do it, you should go check this out because it actually really is interesting and it came very helpful. The other last thing I'm gonna leave you with is that it really will help once you start looking into actual source code for gems. I really didn't understand any gems or even their Rails internals until I learned how to do some metaprogramming and then I was able to actually go in and look at Rails and say, okay, I can understand what's going on here because Rails itself uses a lot of metaprogramming. That's it. So this is a lightning talk I've done a couple times and every time I change the slides around and try to make it funnier, I'm pretty sure that it's gotten less funny over time because I'm less drunk each time I do it.  That's all right. So I quit my job and I started a consultancy that does Ruby and kind of .NET even though we're kind of done with that mostly. This is a hilarious slide. I actually just wanted to see a picture of my baby that was 15 feet tall so hold on a second. That's fantastic.   This is a picture of the day that I left Madison Ruby last year. I got in that car, drove home for three hours, really hung over and got sunburn. The beginning of it seemed nice though. So let's think about all the reasons that we might quit our jobs. One is that you might be underpaid and underpaid is kind of a relative thing because of where you live and all that kind of thing but none of that really matters.  That couldn't have happened without being tortured badly at Redbox for a year. This is a view from our office. It's sick. The slides really don't matter. I mean, the pictures don't. So let's say that you have a commute. For somewhere to the tune of eight years, I was driving an hour each way to work every day. For a while it was an hour and a half.   This is a website that we put together, styleseek.com. It's got a lot of really cool stuff in the back end. We put it together, delivered it. It's awesome sauce. Let's say you don't have enough vacation. I worked somewhere for four years and they gave me a third week of paid time off which is just kind of sad when it comes down to the fact that that's what we should be living for. We should be rating great software and then getting out there and relaxing and having an okay time. This is something that's timeless. It's the exact opposite of timeless. It's a boom box with a tape player and a radio thing that's actually a PA and it's awful. As previously stated, picture slides aren't really that cool. So the other thing is the market is sick. Every single person that comes up here is gonna say, oh yeah, and by the way, we're hiring. Oh yeah, and by the way, we're hiring. This is a combination of pictures of this guy who built this entire circus out of paper mache. It's at the Museum of Science and Industry. It's totally ridiculous, but it's amazing that he did that. It's clear that he's absolutely insane. One of my jobs actually made me work all sorts of overtime and I came to find out that I was actually worse at my job because I was working more hours because I was just less happy and I didn't have enough time to kind of fulfill my life of drinking too much and that made me unable to release and have a good time. If you haven't seen this photo, then I don't believe that you write software for a living. Another good reason to quit your job is that you are the best person at your job or you're just cocky and maybe you need to quit your job so you can have somebody that's really awesome to learn from, but the main part is is that you should always be learning from someone above you and having those kind of mentor relationships. This is a 27 pound gummy bear that we gave away in a raffle. It's disgusting. It's 27 pounds. What do you think you're really gonna do with that other than freeze it, pour vodka through it and get drunk? One of my favorite reasons to quit your job is that you get to stop staring at that code you've been staring at for so long. That's one of my favorites and it's one of the reasons that I've always liked consulting is because sooner or later I'm gonna go, okay, I need to get out of here. I'm burning out. Please remove me. And then I can leave that meta-meta-programming behind for other people to deal with. Subtle callback. This is another picture of my progeny saying no you didn't about a carrot. Sometimes it's good for a change. We're a small company. We came from the enterprise and it's an amazing change. We learn a lot about ourselves and about our employees and we can expand and we can do startup work which is really rewarding. Here's another 15 pictures of my child. One with Kenny G. If you work a place where all your friends work then you should probably quit there too because you're gonna find better friends somewhere else. Pictures of shot glasses and a fisheye. Benefits aren't that big of a deal. You can find insurance, ehealthinsurance.com, do some freelancing, have a good time, enjoy your lives. I'm Brad from DevMind. It's not Comic Sans. It's the default one for this theme. It's called Chalkboard. Yeah, so I had to include the Twitter logo because I don't wanna be in violation of their new terms. So I wanted to talk about Objective C. So starting out with memory management because you still get to do that with Objective C. So there's the rules of C memory management. If you don't know them, you allocate memory and you deallocate it when you're done with it basically. The base class that you use in Objective C is NSObject. It's used in both Cocoa and Cocoa Touch for Mac and iOS development.  So the memory management in Objective C is you allocate your object and then you can retain and release it. So it's a reference counting language. Yeah, or you could use ARC. If you want the object, you need to take ownership by retaining it or allocating it. And when you're finished with the object, you release ownership. It sounds really simple. It's not, which is why we have ARC. So the point I was going to get to is object orientation is a complete lie.  So this is some Objective C syntax if you haven't seen it before. Objective C uses dynamic dispatch, just like Ruby does. So that means that you can change methods around at runtime. Not to the extent that you can on Ruby, but kind of because it has to run through a compiler also which kind of makes sure that things are there. So dynamic dispatch is a lie. It's just a nice wrapper around a C function. It's the same thing in Ruby, at least as far as I know, I could be wrong. Superclasses are also a lie. The super keyword just points to self but sending a message to super will reorder the list of methods to put the methods that are inherited above your own methods. So if you actually check self equals equals super will be true, they'll be the same pointer. I'm not sure if I got the apostrophes right because it's possessive plurals.  Just kidding, superclasses are real. Every object has a is a. It is a object of its class and every class struct has a superclass. And you can look at your superclass as superclass is superclass and then get its superclass. I don't know what happens. Yeah, I think they made a movie about that. So this is the structure for an object. It really weird. So any instance variables you have in your object actually changes the size of the struct which for my experience in C is something that you should not do but apparently they do that. And here is the structure for a class. So it has its is a, it's superclass. It's weird that a class has is a also. So you can take the class and look at what class the class is and also what class it's superclass is. That makes no sense to me but they probably did it for a good reason. And you can get its list of instance variables, its protocols, you can get a list of the method lists. Implementations aren't real. Implementations are actually just a type def of a function pointer. I copied from the docs there. I could read it, but I only have 50 seconds left. I guess I, you can read it. There you go. Got the timer started? Okay. All right, so my name is Aaron Kalin. I work at Treehouse. We teach web design development, iOS, all that stuff.  I was having some trouble figuring out which lightning talk I wanted to give but since we're all gonna be going out drinking or at least I'm assuming that. I heard there's gonna be whiskey and cheese tasting. There may be alcohol involved in that. So that's my Twitter handle up there if you want to follow me. But so and also my awesome ideal bar. I've got a hot bartender. Before he went crazy.  My family owns and runs a lot of restaurants and bars in Chicago. So I, you know, it almost set up for me to be like a third generation owner of that but I wanted to do this computer thing.  So I just went and worked for hash rocket and now Treehouse. So I learned a few things about the bar and restaurant business and I try to share those at conferences I go to because they have these huge drinkups. Apparently you guys like drinking. You know, it's a new thing to me but it also makes me feel more at home with all of you. So let me show you just a few things at a bar that you normally see. This is typically how they're set up but believe it or not there's some advertising going on here. And up here, the top shelves and everything next to this hot guy is the call drinks. So these are what you might hear is top shelf liquor. It's also the higher price. So there's pricing going on here. And if you want the cheap stuff or if you call out like a type of liquor like I want vodka or gin it'll come from down below or the wells as they call it. So it's much cheaper. And it's also much cheaper to drink up here. I love that. But there's also some ordering lingo. There's like Starbucks aficionados here. I'll admit it. I'll happily admit it. Like I know how to order a ground able blah blah. Oh, come on. First step in admitting you have a problem is to admit you have a problem with that. So let's start off. So we got shorter tall drinks but they can also be rocks or high ball glass. If you go with an up drink it's my favorite, martinis. Oh yeah, there we go. That's also why I go buy martini soft. But I have a feeling with the whiskey thing you guys will be ordering it neat which means don't touch it throw it into a nice small glass. Don't put any water in it. You know nothing I don't want ice in it. Don't care. So how about this? Is there any home brewers in the house? Yeah? Do you guys know how to pour a beer? Do you? Well this is fun at a party. So if you wanted to learn how to pour a beer let me give it to you in less than two minutes. So start off at a 45 degree angle. Make sure the glass is clean like wash it out on the inside. Aim for the bottom third of the glass because your object here is not to create any agitation because you don't want to start making the, you want, you know, get a little bit of agitation going but not too much.   It's that good part of the beer that everyone loves. So make sure when you get to that full part back away from the tap, turn it off. You don't want to over pour it and you want about two fingers length of head. You don't want to go too high or too low then it won't be just right. But the big thing I'm trying to get across here too is there's customer service involved with being at a bar. So it's a two-way street, okay? So when you're a customer, like the two best tips I can give when you're there is introduce yourself to the bartender. So when you order a drink before you really get into that, like shake their hand and introduce yourself.  And then when you come back or at least when the bar gets packed by all the people wanting their free drinks from the sponsored drink up, you can call out that bartender's name and say, hey, you know, Bob or Steve, you know, can I get another drink please?  And then along with that, if you, especially if you are going up there for a lot of whiskey or whatever, make sure you tip well. It's a two-way street. So if you tip well, generally the service will get much better towards, you know, towards if you don't tip at all on anything, I know some of these events, the tips are pre-arranged but still giving a little bit extra helps. But that's all I got. Thanks.


I've been doing a bit of digging online for the past few months, finding interesting content to create videos on. One channel I came across that struck me in particular was What If Alt Hissed. Watching a few of his videos, I saw that he discussed Turkey a lot, and stated that it had great potential to become a global, or at least great regional, power. Turkey being a great power is one scenario that never really crossed my mind, as after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the Republic of Turkey was in a precarious situation, bringing neither a great power or a colony throughout the first half of the 20th century. It was surrounded by much more powerful countries like Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. Today things are different, none of these states are in the area anymore, the Soviet Union isn't even a country, and most of Turkey's neighbors either failed states, very weak countries, or Iran, which is neither. In this week's video, I will look at why all of the cards are in Turkey's favor to become a regional or global power, and what this will mean for the world. The stage is set for a new Ottoman Empire, at least that's what some are saying about Turkey's current president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. He is known for being much more conservative than much of the previous liberal leaders of the Republic, Erdogan is significantly more authoritarian than his predecessors, and much more religious. Since 2003, he has expanded the role of Islam in the country, including reforming the church-turned-mosque-turned-museum Ayya Sophia back into a mosque. Also, Turkey under Erdogan's leadership has been expanding its role as a defender and patron of Sunni Islam. In 2015, construction of a brand new mosque capable of holding a four and a half thousand worshipers in ex-communist Albania began. Albania experienced severe religious oppression during the late 20th century as a result of communist leadership, and Turkey is trying to bring Sunni Islam back. This move is just one piece of Turkey's strategy for regional hegemony, but I'll get back to it soon. Let's talk demographics for a sec. Turkey has a population of 84 million, growing at a rate of 1.5% each year. By its own government estimates, Turkey will reach 100 million people by 2040. The country also has an average age of 32 years. This is very good. With a relatively stable growth rate in young population, Turkey will not experience the demographic crises facing much of its neighbors in the Caucasus or Eastern Europe, at least not for a while. These neighbors have rapidly aging populations which are also shrinking due to low birth rates and high emigration. Turkey's geographic position is also very desirable. Istanbul has always been one of the most soft-forced cities in history due to its importance in the Pan-Eurasian trade, but that's just one piece of the puzzle. Sitting on the Eastern Mediterranean, Turkey as a whole is at the crossroads of Europe, Western Asia, the Middle East, and to an extent Africa, as it is not far across the Mediterranean. Switching to political geography, Turkey borders Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Greece, and Bulgaria, and to be honest, Turkey is truly surrounded by countries that are not even close to having its military strength. They either have decreasing and or small populations, or are war-torn failed states. Iran is the only neighbor that doesn't fit either of these qualities, and frankly it's the neighbor that Turkey should be most concerned about. The two countries may have conflicting interests in dividing in the Middle East, and I'll get to that later as well. Anyways, it's time to look at what Turkey is already doing to push its foreign agenda. Only behind the United States, Turkey has sent its forces overseas to the second highest number of countries. All the countries on screen have some Turkish military presence, either as part of NATO missions, bilateral agreements, or troops placed there on their own accord. This is one of the staples of Turkish foreign policy, as placing their troops in either allied countries or countries where they are supporting an allied faction is obviously going to increase their influence in those countries. Now since I have established why Turkey can become a regional power, it's time to go into greater detail, on a region by region basis, to see where exactly Turkey will expand its influence. In the western Balkans, Turkey is already making moves to secure its influence in the region, especially within the Islamic parts of Bosnia, Albania, and Kosovo. There is something important to note here, the presence of NATO. I predict that there will be some sort of rift in NATO within the near future, as Turkey will eventually try to pursue its own goals, independent of NATO. Oh wait, that's already happening, in places like Syria and Libya. Anyways, the more westernized countries of the Balkans will probably align with the Euro-American camp within NATO on the sole basis of not wanting to be under Turkish influence. However, it would be much harder for a country like Albania to escape Turkish influence, and it's likely that Turkey will only try harder to pursue its goals in the region. Albania and Turkey have historically been friendly nations, and as a result, Turkey may try to aid Albanian interests in the region so they can keep their foothold there. I see an independent Kosovo probably emerging, because there really is not much Serbia could do against Turkish troops in the region. This would certainly strain relations between Serbia and Turkey, and as a result, Serbia may try to seek better relations with Russia to ensure its independence. Despite its geographical proximity to NATO, Serbia will most likely not look to them to protect them, since they have had a rocky relationship with the alliance. Russia is much closer culturally anyway, and this may be just one theater of a possible Turkish-Russian Cold War resurfacing in the next few decades. Anyways, Turkey may also seek to expand its influence in North Macedonia, due to its large Albanian and Turkish populations, both of which are Muslim. Though most of Turkey's work will probably be in the Albanian populated areas, I see it is likely that they will also try to gain influence in Bosnia-Herzegovina, a NATO candidate whose application is mainly supported by, you guessed it, Turkey. There is also the matter of the EU being in the region. Many of the countries I've mentioned, including Turkey, are applicants to join the union, but it's looking less likely that Turkey will do so. Turkey would actually be better off if it completely abandoned its application and started its own regional union. This would probably include all the countries in the Balkans I have discussed, and more nations that I will cover as I get to different regions. Basically, the Balkans will be divided between European, Turkish, and Russian influence. I don't know what will happen to Montenegro. They recently elected a government that is anti-NATO, so they may return to Serbian-slash-Russian influence, or if Turkey is ambitious enough, it could gain influence in the country to create a contiguous landmass of its allies in the western Balkans. North Macedonia may also face pressure to join the union, or do so on its own accord if EU refuses its entry. And then we have EU member Cyprus. Turkey could easily take over the island, and Europe would do nothing. They may send sanctions to the country, but I don't feel there will be any serious action taken by the European powers to defend it. Cyprus joining the Turkish Commonwealth on its own accord is also very unlikely, considering the strained relations between the two countries. However, an invasion like this may not be the wisest move for Turkey if it wants to have a stable sphere of influence. This move would put Turkey at odds with Europe, and by extension, all of the west, for much longer than it would like. If Turkey cooperated with the west, it would kind of mutually guarantee their maintenance, as they would be allied against common rivals like Russia or China and their satellites. However, if Turkey invades all of Cyprus, this alliance is unlikely. And this is where I'll end today's video, on a cliffhanger, yes. In part 2 of this video, which will come out next Sunday, I will cover the rest of the regions that Turkey is interested in expanding its influence in, and what a Turkish powerhouse would mean for the rest of the world. Thank you all for watching. Be sure to like, subscribe, and share this video with all of your friends. Thank you to everyone who has helped me get to 1,000 subscribers. This is a huge milestone, and I couldn't have done it without all your help. Look out for the Patreon in the coming weeks in a Q&A 1,000 subspecial. I'll see you guys then.


New research suggests that a low-calorie diet might help reverse symptoms of type 2 diabetes in men with obesity. The findings of this study add to a growing body of evidence indicating that diabetes is a reversible condition. Authors of this study looked at 18 men in South Africa who were over the age of 35, had class 3 obesity, and were on insulin treatment for diabetes. The participants were randomized into one of two groups. One, followed by a commercially available low-fat, low-calorie diet, consisting of vegetables and a vegetable soup-based meal plan, while the control group received a calorie-restricted meal plan. All participants were encouraged to engage in physical activity according to their abilities and to visit a counseling psychologist at least once a month. Over the course of six months, the team tracked the men's levels of blood glucose and glycated hemoglobin, or HBA1C, using those measures to establish diabetes status. By the end of the study period, one participant's readings indicated complete remission of diabetes, while another suggested partial remission. Overall, the test group showed a significant increase in HDL cholesterol levels, greater weight loss, and lower HBA1C levels than the control group. The median daily dose of insulin for the test group decreased to less than half of what it was at the start of the trial. The results fit into a broader stream of evidence, hinting that substantial weight loss can reverse symptoms of type 2 diabetes. But the findings are not definitive. More studies on a larger, more varied sample population monitored over more than six months would help build a stronger case for the benefits of the nutrition intervention applied in the study. Still, the implications are encouraging. For at least one subset of patients with type 2 diabetes, the specially designed low-calorie diet could be safe and effective in establishing a healthier lifestyle.


This episode was prerecorded as part of a live continuing education webinar. On-demand CEUs are still available for this presentation through all CEUs. Register at allceus.com slash counselor toolbox. I'd like to welcome everybody to today's presentation, Adult Education and Teaching Skills to Improve Treatment Planning and Service Planning. Now obviously if you work with kids, this isn't as applicable. We're really talking about working with older adolescents, those that are 18 and above, but especially those in their 20s and above and helping them develop their service plans, treatment plans, goal plans, whatever you want to call them. And we're going to examine how adult learning theory can help us create more individualized plans and objectives. So what are treatment plans? They are not just a pain in your neck that you have to do in order to get reimbursed. That is part of what they are. They're a requirement for reimbursement, but they're supposed to serve as a roadmap and it's an opportunity to use it as a clinical tool. We can help teach clients problem solving skills. If you write the plan for them, they don't learn how to set smart goals and break it down into specific measurable objectives. And if you do it for them, you can't help them learn how to think, all right, here's this problem. How can I identify and use personal strengths? How was it that I've solved similar problems in the past? Or how is it that other people that I know of have solved similar problems? What resources do I have that I can tap into already instead of having to reinvent the wheel? They're dynamic documents. So you write it the first time or you and the client work together to write it the first time. And then you figure out, you know, a period for which that you're going to reassess treatment plans. Now, if you do IOP or PHP or even residential, some insurance companies require that you update treatment plans on a weekly basis and some people may be going, oh my gosh, I can't imagine doing that. It's not so hard. Where I've worked in the past, you know, clients are always given a copy of their treatment plan and I have a worksheet that they fill out at the end of every week. And when I was in residential, they would bring it to our team meeting. We had a meeting of everyone that was on my caseload once a week. They would bring their treatment plan summary to my meeting and they would identify what goals they worked on, what they did to work on those, how successful it was and if there were any needs for any changes in their treatment plan. And we would talk about that in group because then the group members could, you know, give support to people who are making a lot of progress and give them encouragement and for people who were stuck for some reason, you know, they could give them also support and encouragement, but maybe offer, you know, help with some brainstorming and do a sort of a group problem solving thing. Obviously, not every problem is appropriate for covering in sort of a group treatment planning review session, but a lot of them are and were because these people were in groups with one another. They were in therapy groups. They were in trauma groups. They were out there. So, you know, there was a lot that you can't there is a lot that you can do to review treatment plans and help people stay motivated. And that's the other thing we would look at in these groups and doing the treatment plan reassessment. I would listen and to how far people were going and how much progress they made and I kind of listen for the enthusiasm in their in their voice. And if I didn't hear it or if they seem to be stuck for some reason, we would talk about whether they were stuck because they didn't have the tools or their motivation was waning or kind of what was going on. And that was a place where we could intervene. The treatment plan occasionally needs to be updated or changed in order to address clients current functioning and needs. If you have a client who is going through treatment and then all of a sudden they have a death in the family. Well, you might need to adjust the treatment plan to address the grief issues or you have a client that's going through treatment and all of a sudden they're in a car accident and have to go to physical therapy for six months. Obviously, there are going to be a bunch of things involved with that that may need to cause you to alter the treatment plan. So we don't want to look at a treatment plan as one and done you do it and then you reassess it periodically at least every 30 days and make sure that you don't need to add or subtract any problems or maybe even break down some of your objectives a little bit smaller to make them doable for people. Treatment plans are great for evaluating clients progress towards specified goals and objectives. You know, I like to give my clients again, their treatment plan that they can look at and they can cross things off as they get them done and they can see how much work they've done. It guides treatment for identified problems or issues so they don't wake up and go, well, you know, I need to work on my depression. I guess I'll read a book on no, you know, you have goals and objectives and you have a clear plan just like you wouldn't decide. Okay, we're going to go on spring break and we're going to go for on vacation and just get in the car and start driving and who knows where you're going.   You would want to at least have a destination in mind, you know, a state if nothing else. Maybe you're going to Florida. Okay. Well, so how do you get to Florida? There are incremental steps to get there. You have to pack the car. Put gas in it, start driving and there are steps to get to the state and then, you know, once you get there, you can reassess what you're doing and make another plan for whether you want to go to Pensacola or Tampa or where, what beach you want to go to. But we want to be able to make sure that it provides a map for clients and treatment plans enhance multidisciplinary team communication. Cause when you work with a client, they're not going to have all the skills, tools and resources in themselves.  They need to go to their physician to get a physical and rule out any physiological issues. They need to go to the psychiatrist to get their meds adjusted. They need to go to vocational rehab. You know, there may be different places they need to go and the treatment plan helps them identify what they need to do, where they need to do it and who's responsible for what? I mean, they're responsible for getting there and then, you know, such and so doctor is responsible for giving them a physical and doing their drug test or whatever the case may be. So we want to make sure that everybody on the team knows who's responsible for what. So there's no, well, I thought you were going to do that. And that's one of those things that happens a lot in co-occurring disorders treatment with drug testing. People start thinking, oh, well, the doctor is going to do it and the doctor thinks, oh, they're doing it over at IOP and the probation officer thinks, well, generally the probation officer is like, well, I'm doing it anyway, but it's to reduce redundancies in treatment. It's really important to have the treatment plans out there so everybody knows what their job is. Treatment planning is also a process in which the counselor and client identify and rank problems needing resolution. When clients come in and please share, but, you know, my experience has been that when clients come in, they don't just have one problem.  Okay. So let's start talking about that. But then we'll figure out along the way that there are things that are precipitating that depression. So we identify those, you know, three, four, five things and we say, all right, you know, which ones are you most motivated to work on? Which ones are most important right now because you can't do five, six treatment plan problems at one time. It's just not possible. In Florida, we always use if we had somebody that was on TANF, which is Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, their treatment plan had to have three problems in it. And that was about the most that anybody could really expect to focus on and do a good job accomplishing in 30 days. You know, three problems is a lot, especially, you know, depending on how big you write the problems, but there was a lot for them to do. Think about yourself when you try to change something.  That's all well and good.  It's a lot more effective if you can focus on one or two things, but three if you have to and really get those under your belt. That gives them a sense of self efficacy. That gives them a sense of hope and faith in the process. It gets the momentum going and any positive change in their existence, physical, cognitive, emotional, social is probably going to have significant positive changes on the rest of them, which means, you know, you're going to have a better mood, which is going to improve energy and, you know, yadda yadda. It's a wonderful spiral upwards effect, if you will. During treatment planning, you work together to establish agreed upon immediate and long-term goals.  That's good. So do you know what career you want to start? All right. If you don't, let me refer you to these websites or go down to workforce development and figure out what you want to do and then you need to find out, you know, where you need to get the training and then sign up for the training and break it down incrementally. What exactly they need to do and you talk through it and I usually don't tell clients what they need to do. I say, okay, what's the first step you need? You think you need to take and then the second step and if they start taking steps, they're too big. I might suggest, you know, breaking it down a little bit. So they can accomplish whatever it is they're setting out to do in a reasonable period of time, especially at the beginning of treatment. I want them to have successes every week, preferably every day, but definitely every week where they can say, all right, I knocked something off my list. You're going to decide on treatment methods at this point. You know, some clients are going to be great with individuals. Some clients are going to prefer group. Some clients are going to want art therapy. Some will need workforce development, vocational rehabilitation. This is where we start deciding what types of services you need and are going to work best for you. If they've got trauma issues, they may want to be referred out to an EMDR specialist, for example. And then you identify necessary resources. You know, what you want to do, how you want to do it, the way you want to go about doing it. Now, what resources do you need to accomplish that? So the foundation for your treatment plan is always your biopsychosocial assessment.  We're going to figure out, you know, what is causing their main presenting issue? What is contributing to it? I mean, when you think about depression, lots of stress can contribute to depression. Maybe they've got 17 things going on. Poor coping skills. Can contribute low self-esteem, mental health issues, pre-existing depressive episodes. You know, they've got, you know, maybe they have some sort of biochemical imbalance that's also contributing to it. That's organic, not caused by stress or diet or anything. Substance abuse. We know that that can muck up the neurotransmitters and lead to depression. Their social network. Good social support usually buffers against depression. Poor social relationships may contribute to it and physical health, poor nutrition, lack of sleep, pain. Those are the big three that tend to contribute to depression. So we want to look when we do the biopsychosocial assessment and you're doing your integrated summary. You want to help clients see all these things and tie them together. You want to help them see how each one of these things may be contributing to their depression. So then they're like, oh, it makes sense why I feel pretty worn out and hopeless and hopeless right now. Makes sense why I have no energy. Yeah, it does. So let's figure out how we can start improving that. Where do you want to start? The individualized treatment plan. We use it. Some people call it service plans, whatever you call it in your facility. It's structured. You know, it's kind of like an outline.  You have your goal statement. Jimmy will be happier or will report being between a three and a five on the happiness scale. Six out of every seven days as evidenced by mood reports and energy levels. You know, however you want to define it. Then you have sub goals. Just like when you're driving somewhere and Google gives you directions. It tells you drive 2.1 miles then turn left. And then stay on this road for a little while and drive 3.4 miles and turn left again. So we want to make sure that they've got the instructions. It has a schedule of services so they know when things should happen. Many of our clients, you know, if they come and they're depressed, they may not have a lot of energy and they're looking at it and it feels overwhelming to see all this stuff they've got to do or they just look at it and go. I don't even know where to start. Well, we need to help them make sure they know how and where to start. You know, what are you supposed to do this week? What are you supposed to do next week and break it down for them so they can see. Okay, I can do this a little bit at a time and too often we hand clients treatment plans and we say, okay, over the next 90 days, you're going to accomplish this stuff and they may not get started right away. I've also seen people and you remember grad school. You'd get your syllabus and there'd be a lot of stuff on there and you'd be really enthusiastic and you'd start out and then you kind of get into it. It seems pretty easy. So you start slacking off and then you get to the last month of courses and all of a sudden you've got 820 page papers you need to write or maybe that was just me, but clients are the same way with treatment plans. If we don't keep them on schedule, keep them on task give them a guide. A lot of times we don't need to micromanage, but checking in, which is why the weekly treatment plan updates can be really helpful to see the progress they're making. Even in individual, I have clients sit with me. I do the therapy 45 minutes 45, 50 minutes with them and then most of my clients don't have a problem staying the extra 10 minutes, which they would normally I would reserve it for documentation, but we do the progress note together and we talk about all right, what did we talk about this week? What did you work on last week? What goals did you accomplish according to your treatment plan? And a lot of times I will give them depending on the client. If they are really a verse to paperwork, I won't but a lot of clients I will give that same treatment plan review sheet that I give to my group people. So they're looking at it and making notes about throughout the week about what they're working on and how it's going. I can put that as an addendum with my progress note in there, but it helps them kind of really revisit where they're at, how far they've come and where they're going. It's a written document with treatment related goals and measurable objectives. Happy is not measurable. You know, I can look at Jim Bob over there and my impression may be that he's happy. You may look at him and go no, I'm not thinking so. So we want something observable. Now, a lot of times we do use Likert scales. So for happy on a scale of one to five, one being miserable, five being elated, three being content, four being happy and two being, you know, kind of blue or blah, where are you on that? And I always try to anchor it with words or pictures for clients so they can have pretty good test, retest reliability. So each day when they come in and they rank their mood, we're getting about the same, you know, scale that we're looking at. So you can use Likert scales, but I also encourage you to have them look at objective things too, because sometimes they'll have a difficult time figuring out where their mood is. So we want to look at did you feel rested? Did you? How many hours did you have energy for, you know, identify some things that are more concrete and interventions need to be grounded in the client's learning style. It drives me crazy and it breaks my heart at the same time when clients come in and we're trying to fit them into this little pigeonhole here. And they don't fit. I've had clients before when I worked at in Florida who didn't know how to read and that was not an uncommon situation in the facility that I worked at. So telling them that they had to read the big book and giving them a workbook to work out of. That was not culturally sensitive. That was not therapeutically appropriate and that's not how that client learned. So we wanted to figure out how to make it oral. And interactive because so adult learning, we're going to talk more about learning styles in a minute. Adults need to be involved in the planning and evaluation of their instruction. So when we use it in treatment, we want to make sure that they're involved in the treatment planning. Treatment planning is like making a syllabus for class and it helps the adults know where they're going and what they're going to be working on. Adults are most interested in learning subjects that are practical and have immediate relevance and impact to their job or personal life. So there are things we can have them work on like self esteem. That's one of those things that over the long haul is really going to help them. But we also need to be able to give them tools like cognitive behavioral or journaling or something that can help them or even experiential therapy that helps them grasp a topic in of to help them deal with whatever they're struggling with. But they need to be able to walk out and say, I got something out of that. It's immediately relevant. One of the things that I do at the end of all of my sessions is I have clients identify what is one thing that you got out of the session today that will be useful for you in the next week or that helped you make sense of something. So it gives them a chance to reflect on the immediate relevance. I have clients do the same thing if they're going to support group meetings. You know, when they get out, they need to think about what was one thing that they can take from it. That's relevant because too often I hear them belly ache and I don't want to go to that meeting. It's it's useless. It's pointless and it may be but at least for a couple of weeks. Let's try having you go and see if you can pull one thing out of it. That's useful to you. Let's see. Adults are more engaged when there's a presenting crisis. No, we don't want to throw our clients into crisis, but they are more engaged when they first come in and they are dysphoric for sure. So along the way, we want to be able to remind them about that crisis. Just like people are more motivated to stop smoking. If they're presented with evidence as it pertains to them, you know that says this is what's going to happen. We had a great film that we used to use that showed people when they were, you know, in their 20s and they started smoking and then it age enhanced them to 50 and it showed the effects that smoking has on physical appearance in addition to the it would show the lungs and everything else too. But for a lot of my clients, physical appearance, the outward physical appearance was more motivating to stop smoking than the lungs and everything else. So whatever it takes, but that created a little bit of a crisis for some of them. So you want to present the information in a way that triggers something meaningful for them, whether they're concerned about their appearance or their health or their finances. Those are usually the three big ones. Adult learning is problem centered rather than content oriented, which means, you know, we can teach content until the cows come home.  How does this particular subject or group or topic help me solve my problem? How does it apply to my problem and helping me get to my solution? We need to explain the reasons specific things are being taught. So they get that problem centeredness or solution focused part of it. An instruction should be task oriented instead of promoting memorization. So we want to make sure we engage clients and memorization can also be just have it standing there and lecturing. So they learn stuff. We want to get them task oriented, have clients do role plays have them do skits have them do activities have them, you know, go around the room in small groups and fill out flip chart papers. Whatever it takes so they're talking about it and they're kind of applying it to their life if nothing else instead of just speaking at them. Adult learners prefer collaboration and the ability to think critically.  I would rather be in a class where I'm able to talk with other people. When when I taught at UF my final exam, well, all my exams instead of having this closed book, you know, scary final, it was closed book, but I would break people into groups of four and I'd give each person a test and they were able to choose their own answers. They didn't have to choose the group answer, but they would go through each question and talk about what what the right answer would possibly be and some of them were multiple choice. A lot of them were short answer, short essay, but it gave them a chance to really flesh it out and see if they were thinking along the right lines. Instructions should take into account the wide range of different backgrounds of learners. It always flustered me because statistics and math is not my strong suit and I would go into a class and the instructor would just assume that you had a really good grasp of the basics and jump right into it or when I would take a class that was taught by the professor that wrote the textbook and they just assume that you know a lot more than than you really do and some students may and some students may not. So it's important to especially when we're dealing with clients. You know, some clients may be experts on nutrition and fitness. Others may not know a thing about it. So we want to find that happy balance and find a way to use the strengths. The people who do know stuff. Let's have them promote into some sort of a leadership role and the people who may not know as much, you know, so they can learn from the others. We can pair them up. We can do gamification is huge in adult learning because it makes it a little bit more fun and you can you can apply it to their particular situation. Since adults are self-directed instruction should allow learners to discover things and knowledge for themselves without depending on people. We want to encourage them to be able to go out and find the answers, not just spoon feed it to them. So ask them, you know, where would you find this information about treatments for depression or treatments for anxiety? Where would you find? How would you find support groups? Sometimes that can be homework and they the people can bring it back to the group and say, you know, one person's assigned to find support group resources another one's designed to find food food and housing resources or whatever. So people start learning how to navigate the system. And adults are juggling multiple responsibilities, especially if you're working with somebody who's in outpatient or IOP.  So therapy that day not may not be the center of their universe. So we need to be flexible and recognize that people have other competing priorities and talk about, okay, how can we make this work for you this week? I hear that you've got all this other stuff going on and that helps them learn to be better better jugglers, so to speak. Adult learnings, adult learning methods, concrete learning. So role play or do an activity where somebody practices doing it, fill in the blank and worksheets, role play assertiveness. That's very concrete. Hands on. I got it. Reflective observation is when you do activities or you show them a movie or something and then you say, you know, what did you glean from that? How does this change your perception of communication or how do you think this will change how you interact with your boss in the future? Abstract conceptualization applies it to the life and other situations and I usually go further and say, okay, how could you teach this skill or concept to your kids or to the next group that's coming in to make sure because I find that you don't know what you don't know till you try to teach it. And I found that in psychology and I found that working, you know, with my kids and trying to help them with their homework. Just, you don't know what you don't know. And active experimentation is another method where you have clients apply what they're learning in a variety of texts and then contexts and then discuss it with the group. So they learn thought stopping for example in group and then over the next week they're encouraged to use thought stopping in different situations and then come back the next week and talk about how effective challenges they had with it, etc. You can also before you send them out into the into the world with it, you can role play a variety of situations and have people say, you know, stop the role play in the middle of a argument or something and say, okay, what skill should this person use in order to defuse this this conflict or in order to best approach this conflict. I obviously like using time out in role plays a lot. Because people are in engaged in it and then you say, all right, now in real life, you don't have time to stop and think, but right now you do. So they're frozen. What do you think this person should do next? Learning there are three parts to the learning process cognition, how you acquire knowledge through seeing it. So if you read it and I always say think about when you either get a new computer program, new computer program, computer, VCR, DVD player, whatever they are now. How do you learn how to operate it? Do you read the directions? Do you have somebody tell you how to do it? Or do you just start pushing buttons and see what happens? I'm a button pusher. I'm also a reader to a certain extent. It depends kind of depends on what it is, but I am not one that's purely auditory. That's probably my weakest learning style. My daughter on the other hand, that's one of her stronger ones. Conceptualization is how people process information. Once they get it in their brains, what do they do with it? Do they relate it to something abstract? Or do they relate it to something really specific? Depending on how they think about things, whether they think of things in terms of meta concepts or specific problems. Those are the memory pathways they're going to activate. So we want to encourage people to relate stuff to things that they know. And and consider, you know, if people want to relate it to a bigger global problem, or they want to relate it to something specific that happened last week. And affective. So they can get it in their head. They can figure out what it means, but then affective means do I really care about remembering this? And if we want them to remember it, it needs to matter to them. So we need to make sure what we're teaching matters. We've all had classes where the stuff we're listening to just didn't matter. I remember introduction to Greek Archaeology. It was a requirement to graduate and I just kind of sat there and I remembered it long enough to pass the test because it mattered to pass the test. And I don't remember darn thing about it now. So we want to make sure people are constantly telling themselves why whatever you're talking about or presenting matters. Active and reflective learners. So we're kind of building so seeing, hearing, doing. They've got to care about it. Active learners tend to be extroverts, not always, but they tend to be and they process information as they go along. Extroverts tend to talk things out and think at the same time. Those people do really well in group. Reflective learners take information in and they tend to be your introverts not always take information in mull it over, piece it together and then they have that aha moment. So your reflective learners probably take in what you're saying during the class or during the segment and then during break time they put it all together and they go, okay, I get it now. So we want to give people time to think. I usually hand out worksheets or note paper at the beginning of class and then every 10 minutes or so after every section of whatever we're going over in psychoed classes, for example, I have them stop and reflect on what they learned what how it might be helpful and paraphrase it on their on their paper. So that helps visual learners that helps kinesthetic learners because they're manipulating the information going okay, there's this information how does it relate to me and they're processing it. So try to give people time for reflection if. They don't seem to be as engaged. They're not always having their hand up or always wanting to talk. It may be because they need that reflection time not because they're not interested. Auditory hearing seeing and doing so we want to provide options for people to get that information in if you can record your psychoed groups so people can listen to them. If you can have a PowerPoint or outlined that they can look at that helps the visual learners and kinesthetic help them manipulate the material help them apply it to something so they're they're working with it and seeing how it fits into their recovery scheme. Attitudinal or emotional refers to how they conceptualize information. One of the ways to make sure they care about it is to tap into that and if you think about the Kyrsi or the MBTI thinking or feeling thinkers tend to go with what's logical what's right what's just feeling people tend to go with things that make them feel better and keep other people from feeling bad they want everybody to to be happy you know I tend to be more of a feeler and I think most of us in this field are probably more feeling we want to help people feel happy and feel their best and optimize themselves so we depending on what's you may need to present if you're doing a group you may need to present it in both ways why is this a logical thing to learn and how is this going to help you feel better and improve your relationships with others for example and global versus specific parts versus whole some people and I'm one of those I can't go to a movie without reading what it's about first I need to have this kind of global thing to put what I'm getting ready to watch in I need to have a structure other people can just go into a movie or turn on a show and start watching and put the pieces together as they go along another example is putting a puzzle together my grandmother always used to say it was cheating if you looked at the box while you were putting it together I on the other hand I need the box I want to see the box and I do the frame first and then I put the pieces together in the frame so I've got the global framework and that's how I learned that's how I think so it's important to know how your clients think and when you're presenting information in individual or group you know maybe you start out the session saying today we're going to talk about the ABC's of cognitive behavioral this technique is designed to do XYZ to help you deal with cognitive distortions or however you want to put it less jargony than that hopefully and that gives the if they're global that gives them an idea about okay what we're going to talk about today so then they can start sorting within their great big frame people who are specific they don't really care about the frame it doesn't bother them but they don't really care they do like to have an outline that they can follow that has the details about what bullet points you're going to hit so reflective learners think it through and often prefer working alone so if you can let people have in group have some alone time two three minutes it doesn't have to be huge where they can think about something instead of having to talk it over with somebody else active learners have difficulty sitting quietly through lectures love group work and need discussion and problem solving activities so you may be able to put active learners together in a group a subgroup of your group and reflective learners together in a subgroup where they're all contemplating the same issues but the reflective learners are doing it independently and then they talk whereas the active learners are going to gab the whole time if you have action without reflection you can be in trouble so if people are just talking as they work things out and they're not stopping to go okay let me think what I'm doing here you can spiral out of control and reflection without action those people who just think about things and don't actually take steps get stuck so we need to encourage people once you learn it you know active learners need to stop and go okay I've learned it now what do I do with it reflective learners need to say okay I've learned it let me get started on it kinesthetic learners like to mentally or physically work with material auditory learners need to hear it there are a lot of books on tape the big books on tape like I said if you can record any of your psycho educational lectures some people will prefer to listen to it while they're on the treadmill or driving or even just prefer being in a lecture type group visual learners need to see the material if for some reason you can't or won't print it out and you can't or won't have a PowerPoint up there encourage them to bring paper so they can take notes because at least they can see it as they're writing it down to meet different learning needs present material using notes and graphs talk about it and ask questions and have group activities periodically for thinkers and feelers present compelling information that appeals to their emotions and answers the question why do I care we want to create an emotionally and objectively meaningful attitudinal and global statements in them if we want them to use cognitive behavioral therapy to address their depression okay emotionally why do they care it's going to help address their depression and cognitive behavioral therapy is a technique which is objective and it's something we're giving them to address their depression to be happier we want to create steps and objectives to achieving that goal so make sure you have the sequential stuff out there write steps and objectives in a positive knowledge skills and abilities format you can't do a skill until you have the knowledge so for example learning to use a circular saw I couldn't learn I couldn't use it until I first had the knowledge about how to turn it on what it did and how to use it and then the ability is going on and actually using it after I've learned it learned the skill and then I can go on to use it on my own so you want to have statements like John will learn will practice will gain an understanding of you want to avoid the negatives not John will not smoke anymore well that's a problem statement that's not a goal the problem is you're smoking the goal is to do something besides smoking we need to put something in there a sub goal provide written information about it you know if smoking cessation is the key right here we're going to stay with that for a few minutes provide written information about techniques for smoking cessation discuss it with John what do you think might work for you what are your concerns about each approach and what can you do to help yourself stop smoking from what you've read and learned about smoking cessation techniques what will help you and then regularly address how each goal builds on the last so after the initial meeting with clients we know who they are we have a general idea about their issues and their learning style but we still need to know why they're motivated to change so we want to select the problem which is generally the is alcohol dependent as evidenced by yada yada is has major depressive disorder as evidenced by always have as evidenced by especially if you're in an accredited facility or you get audited because that's the objective information that tells the auditor or the reviewer how it is you came to this conclusion step two goal development what are you trying to achieve what does it look like when this problem has gone away John will be happier John will be a non-smoker and will have developed with his stress step three is the problem definition well that's actually step two sorry and objectives you want to look at now that you know that John's going to develop alternate skills to deal with stress and stop smoking then we need to look at the objectives what's the first objective go to his doctor to get medication or the patch or whatever that he needs to help him stop smoking step two get rid of all the cigarettes and nicotine products in the house step three yada yada so it's broken down very slowly and then interventions are what you're going to do the objective is go to the doctor ideally to get medication the intervention the doctor is going to give you medication the intervention or the objective go to counseling to learn improved coping skills the intervention to participate in group activities to develop coping skills so we want to look at motivation motivation is changeable you may be motivated to do something on Monday that you're not motivated to do on Tuesday when when I exercise you know some days I'll just be like I don't feel like going but if I get a new pair of running shoes I am chomping at the bit to get to the gym so motivation is changeable and it's variable depending on how you do things I mean you've only got so much energy and like today would I have like to go to the gym yeah but I have other things to do so I wasn't as motivated to get to the gym because I had other obligations the components of motivation emotional cognitive social physical and situational what about this is going to help me be happy what about this is the right thing or the logical thing to do what about this is going to help me get my social needs met or is going to help me meet what other people think I should do whether you think that's a good thing or not is sort of irrelevant we all do it we say what a society say we should do what is what are our parents or our loved ones say we should do physically how's it going to help me feel better have more energy sleep better be less stressed whatever it is and situationally is it going to improve the situation at all and sometimes you can put interventions in there that will improve motivation so for example socially that's one that's easy to do if I didn't want to go to the gym and or I didn't want to work out and I needed some social motivation then I would encourage a friend to go with me one thing I do now is I'll post on Facebook if I'm having difficulty getting motivated I'll start posting the results of my work out on Facebook in my work out group and I get a lot of feedback from that and then if I stop posting people start going where'd you go so social motivation can help keep you going cognitively you can make a list of all the reasons why it's something you need or want to do emotionally try to do things or try to do it in a way that's going to make you happy physically pay attention to how it's helping you feel better problem selection needs to be meaningful the reward must be worth the effort so create mutually beneficial goals with the person and make sure that those goals in their mind are worth the effort you know maybe losing weight really isn't that big of a deal to them but their doctor wants them to lose 30 pounds because they their blood pressure is too high okay so we need to look at what's the reward you know do you care why do you why should you or why do you care about your blood pressure you may not care about your weight but why do you care about your blood pressure and why does the doctor want you to lose that so creating mutually beneficial goals helping the client identify motivations and corresponding goals so if getting healthier and losing 30 pounds is the doctor's goal and the person's like you know I just want to get my blood pressure down well to get your blood pressure down you're probably gonna have to lose some weight so let's instead of focusing on 30 pounds let's focus on five let's see how you feel after that and start working at whittling down towards something that is seemingly more doable to the client and that there may be more motivated to do prioritizing goals somebody that is in pain exhausted malnourished and homeless is not gonna give a rat's patootie about developing self-esteem it's just the way it is so the foundation of our treatment plan we need to look and make sure they're getting their biological physiological needs met we need to make sure that they're getting medications that they need we need to make sure that they have safety and security both physically as well as mentally they need to be secure and safe from that internal critic and a lot of my clients that's kind of where I start is safety and security because they have a really wicked internal critic and once they're safe in their own head then we can often move to love and belonging once they silence that internal critic and quit hating on themselves they can start to like themself then love themself and then develop healthy relationships so writing the plan it is individualized it uses positive language you can't just eliminate stuff if you have kids and you're working with them and you're constantly telling little Johnny that's bad don't do that that's bad don't do that that's bad don't do that eventually Johnny's just gonna sit there and go well what can I do I can't do anything so we need to put in positive behaviors to replace unpleasant behaviors and so thinking with kids for example when a child gets angry and starts throwing a temper tantrum and wants to hit obviously that's not appropriate so what else could the child do when they're feeling angry my son when he was about 23-24 months old maybe a little bit older than that you know initially he had started out he developed a little aggression and he didn't want to go to the grocery store with me and he was sitting in the in the buggy he just hauled off and punched me in the shoulder and I looked at him and I'm like I know you didn't just do that but you know okay you know he didn't he was clearly agitated for some reason and didn't have the emotional vocabulary so we talked about it and you know long story short he learned how to when he started to get angry to communicate to me that he was angry and he was getting ready to get you know fired up and I remember taking him to work one day and we were doing something and he's walking down the halls with me just kind of toddling along and he goes I so angry and he just clenched his fists and his face turned beet red and I was like okay well that's much better than punching me so helping them figure out what to do and for him you know we taught him he needed to tell us how he felt he would also do the same thing when he got overstimulated he was a micro-premie and had some stuff you know ADHD type things and he'd get overstimulated and start just feeling really anxious and you know true kid of a therapist I remember him walking up to me again about three years old right around that age he was still had a pacifier and walked up to me and he said mommy I'm overstimulated and went to his room sat down on his bunk on his bunk and we had one wall in his room that was just pure white and he just sucked on his binky and stared at his white wall for a few minutes and when he was better he came out and told me he was fine you know helping people figure out okay when I feel this way when I want to do this what can I do instead so develop positive coping skills to deal with stress instead of eliminate drinking for example goals am smart they're assessment based we need to look at when we're setting our goals we need to look at what did we see that might be triggering this problem and these are the goals these are the things that we're going to work to correct it's actually the problem statement but it has to be meaningful to the person so I can talk until I'm blue in the face about interventions for depression and needing to get enough sleep and proper nutrition and if that's not meaningful to them they're just going to be like when can you refer me to a doctor and give me a workbook to work in so you need to focus on what's meaningful they need to be specific written in the KSA progression measurable so anybody can look at it and go yes he did it no he didn't achieve given skills and resources they need to be achievable given their skills and resources so you know for me you know if I had the goal of becoming an astronaut that is not achievable I am too old to go back and get another PhD and something that would get me up into the space program and I don't have the resources available to it it's just it's never going to be achievable so I need to look at a different goal so we want to make sure it's something that's achievable if we have a client that has three felony convictions for you know aggravated type persons crimes if they want to get into becoming a lawyer or join the CIA that's not going to happen once you have that there's no wiping that away so helping people realize what's achievable it needs to be results focused we want them to Jim Bob to be happier you know a three to a five six out of seven days of the week on the Likert scale when he's finished with treatment now whether that means he completes every single activity on his treatment plan is kind of irrelevant we want to see the results and sometimes the activities are less important and it needs to be time limited we need to have reinforcement and our behaviors need to be reinforced periodically we want to make sure that clients are getting those behaviors reinforced at least weekly preferably with some sort of small accomplishment and then the goals that they're working towards no longer than six months preferably three months and once they accomplish those goals okay we can set more goals that build on those so maybe the first goal is getting a bachelor's degree alright once you accomplish that and that's obviously not six months but once you accomplish that then working on figuring out you know what graduate school you want to go to that's another goal we want to define the problem is how is evidenced in the client how is affecting their overall functioning the client's perception of the problem and the client's strengths that will be used to mitigate the problem and that's a lot I can tell you treatment plans I've written I don't usually include all four of these things you should in best practices but goal development we want to look at the broad goal for the resolution of the problem start by asking what's the absence of the problem if you wake up tomorrow and you're not depressed what's that going to look like how are you going to know that you're not depressed what's going to feel like what's your energy level going to be like etc and that is the goal the goal is to wake up six out of every seven mornings and have the desire to get out of bed the goal is to have energy for at least 12 hours a day every day or however the client defines it so your objectives are steps toward the goal they're smart specific because Rome wasn't built in a day measurable attainable results focused and time limited pitfalls in goal setting failing to consider why we do or do not engage in certain behaviors if you don't go to the gym you know why don't you go to the gym you know if you don't consider the reasons why you know you have other things to do you've got children to toad around you've got this or that it's expensive whatever the reasons are that you don't do it you need to address those because just saying why you should do it doesn't make those go away so we need to address the reasons why you don't do it setting goals that are too big if you set this huge goal of you know I'm going to be CEO of a company well that's great however that's going to be a while unless you just start your own company and you're like I'm a CEO but if you want to advance in a company that's a huge undertaking so it's important to have smaller goals in there so you can get a sense of accomplishment and forward movement setting goals that are too hard you know and I think we've all done that occasionally we've kind of cut the time a little shorter than we should have setting goals without sufficient rewards and I know it sounds silly but we do need rewards we need to be able to look in the mirror and go I did that so make sure that clients are thinking about how can they reward themselves when they accomplish X goal when they do Y and you know if they're in treatment we can offer certain rewards we can give social feedback we can also maybe cut some of their time down and reduce the number of hours they're coming to treatment or something but we need to make sure there's sufficient rewards and setting goals that are too specific can also backfire on you like saying I want to be CEO at XYZ company that's my goal well I may be able to be CEO at some other company eventually but I may never be able to be CEO at XYZ company because that CEO is not going to retire you know he's going to stay in there until he dies so make sure that goals are broad enough that it gives people a little bit of wiggle room common issues so anxiety and depression and we're just going to talk about applying stuff now identifying the sub goals looking at specific measurable achievable results oriented and time limited ask the person what would it be like if you weren't anxious or depressed anymore the statement you know as I have been talking about instead of saying Sally won't be anxious we're going to say Sally will be calmer or happier resulting in improved concentration increased energy improved sleep and reduced headaches so that's the goal statement and you can put numbers in there it would be ideal if you did like you know having no more than one headache a month but the knowledge and skills okay this is what she wants to do this is where she's going so how do we help her get there well first she needs to learn develop the knowledge about her anxiety and about anxiety in general what causes it and then look at her life and look at what's going on in her world and say what's causing anxiety for me then Sally needs to look at her skills and she needs to say what have I done in the past that's helped me deal with my anxiety or my depression well let's build on those those are the skills you have what resources does Sally have that she's used to deal with her anxiety or depression or that she's willing to use maybe she's got a new friend that you know she could reach out and call on when she's feeling bad so identify what skills and resources she has and then identify what skills she needs to learn you know what else does she need given her skills what she's always done and her resources you know how can we bolster that to help her deal with her anxiety or depression and she may need to learn some stuff from scratch but she may only need to learn a little bit about other things teach, discuss, role play, practice and report so you want to make sure that you get her the information you help her manipulate and process it you practice it through role plays you have her practice it in the outside world and bring it back and talk about it in session okay couple things about goal statements and then we'll wrap this up we'll refrain from all substance use now and in the future well that's great but it can't be accomplished by program discharge it's not time limited it's time unlimited now and in the future and it doesn't identify other alternatives so a better goal statement would be we'll develop alternate skills and tools to deal with stress and peer pressure in order to remain substance free for the next 30 days so she can remain in compliance with her performance improvement plan and keep her job so we're identifying what she's going to do why she's going to do it and why it matters to her that is a good goal statement the objective statement is your smaller goals here steps to get to your big goal but a lot of times I see Sally will participate in an outpatient program why to what end that's an intervention Sally will learn about coping skills to deal with distress that's the objective by participating in an IOP program that's the intervention and which will help her reduce the desire to drink that's why she cares so by working with clients to develop goals they're going to determine how they learn best how to identify appropriate sub goals and how to create an effective change plan for themselves use coupon code COUNSELOR TOOLBOX to get a 20% discount off your order this month