Episode 66 of the Becoming Centered Podcast presents four major parts to a residential treatment program’s House Meetings (a regularly scheduled meeting of staff and clients).  Each part, (1) check-ins, (2) announcements, (3) group discussions / agenda items, and (4) wrap-up provides a forum for promoting resilience, self-regulation, social skills, and team-building.

Regardless of the specific content of any single meeting, staff focus on four aspects of resilience, four aspects of self-regulation, and four aspects of “meeting behaviors” or social skills. 

Resilience is promoted through encouraging the kids to experience, due to their participation in House Meeting, a sense of belonging, purpose, agency, and meaning. 

Improved self-regulation is promoted through encouraging emotional sensitivity, through presenting evidence to support positive beliefs, through discussing values, and through giving the kids opportunities to practice their executive skills.

The “meeting skills” of respectful listening, stating opinions appropriately, giving and receiving feedback, and negotiating and compromising are taught and encouraged through every part of the House Meeting.

By using House Meetings to provide treatment aimed at improved resilience, self-regulation, and social skills the residential counseling staff will guide the kids through the forming, storming, and norming phases of team development to turn them into a high-performing team that provides each client with a transformative residential treatment experience. 

Skillful facilitation of House Meetings is one of the most challenging, but also most impactful, aspects of providing a treatment experience.  Developing a group of troubled kids into a high-performing team, that absorbs each other’s misbehaviors and promotes maturation, is a difficult task.  Storming behaviors are common among kids in residential treatment.  In House Meetings, a significant number of kids will deeply struggle with inappropriate meeting behaviors – ranging from aggressively menacing the whole room to simply not paying attention or actively distracting others.  

However, storming behaviors, that sabotage team-building efforts, can be leveraged by staff to actually speed up the team-building process.  One of the best ways to do that is to focus not on the misbehaviors, but on the impact of those misbehaviors on team-building.  That is greatly enhanced by repeatedly explaining to the kids the purposes of forming a strong team, the purposes of House Meetings, and really the purpose of their entire residential treatment experience.  

Running a residential unit for children and youth that goes beyond providing quality Care to also delivering an impactful Treatment experience requires staff to constantly focus on team-building.  It’s as a high-performing team that the kids develop their own self-regulation and resiliency; through helping their team-mates manage their daily emotional, cognitive, and behavioral challenges.  One of the best structures in which to develop a residential unit into a team is the, at least weekly, House Meeting. 

House Meetings have several parts, such as announcements, group problem-solving, feedback, celebrations, and team-building exercises; however, the heart of House Meetings, at least in my mind, is the structured check-in.  This episode focuses on using check-ins to encourage kids’ skills at emotional sensitivity which then leads to consideration and cooperation.  Unlike empathy, emotional sensitivity doesn’t require feeling what someone else is feeling.  Instead, it refers to consciously perceiving another person’s feelings and moods, potentially simply because they have told you how they’re doing.  Emotional Sensitivity is then taking that knowledge and modifying your interactions out of consideration for the other person’s state of being.  It’s being a good housemate, a good friend, and a good team-mate for experiencing residential treatment.

Episode 63 of the Becoming Centered Podcast focuses on how to facilitate Check-ins as part of a residential treatment program’s House Meetings. Check-ins are an excellent way to start House Meetings.  Literally, people take turns giving a brief report on how they are doing that day. 

Structured effectively, the practice of conducting Check-ins can become a foundational technique for a program providing a treatment experience for the kids. When used in a group setting, Check-ins are steered by the facilitator to focus not so much on the kid doing the check-in, but on how everyone else on the team can support that kid in having a good day and a good week. In this way the check-in structure supports the development of a high-performing team and supports the kids improving at emotional sensitivity. Emotional Sensitivity is taking other people’s feelings and moods into account for how you interact with them. Improved Emotional Sensitivity helps kids be successful in any shared living setting, and with all the important relationships in their lives.

Episode 62 of the Becoming Centered podcast is the second episode in an arc focused on House Meetings.  In my experience, House Meetings are the single most effective group structure in the residential week for promoting team-building and for developing the kids into a high-performance team.  When that happens the entire residential experience shifts from having to spend an excessive amount of time on behavior management to a treatment environment that promotes mental health. 

Developing that kind of positive peer and staff culture takes time.  It also takes solid strategy and understanding of team development.  This episode blends together the basics for resilience (a sense of belonging, purpose, agency, and meaning) with a well-known model for understanding the phases of team development – forming, storming, norming, and performing.

This episode also presents a way to understand four major ways in which our brain’s regulate our emotions, thoughts, and behaviors.  With time-tested structures like check-in’s, House Meetings  become a time for practicing executive skills, learning emotional sensitivity, acquiring prosocial beliefs, and healthy values.   

At the same time, House Meetings can become an effective way to teach listening respectfully, stating opinions appropriately, giving and receiving feedback maturely, and learning how to negotiate and compromise with others.      

Episode 61 of the Becoming Centered podcast starts an episode arc focused on the use of House Meetings in residential treatment programs.  House Meetings are a structured meeting of all the residents and available staff that are part of a residential unit at a treatment program.

House Meetings are the single most powerful structure for building a positive unit culture that supports the formation of a resilient residential team of staff and clients.  This episode arc starts out by presenting a vision for how House Meetings can contribute to team-building efforts and especially to the kids developing a sense of belonging, a sense of purpose, a sense of agency, and a sense of meaning to their residential experience.  At the same time House Meetings also provide an effective forum for encouraging the development of social skills and executive skills in the kids.

This episode also addresses the first step in developing House Meetings to meet their full potential; creating a shared vision among all the staff involved in the residential unit.  This requires aligning the development of House Meetings with the mission and vision of the residential treatment agency, creating a shared understanding of the purposes and goals of House Meetings, empowering direct-care staff to take an active role in developing House Meetings, and helping people find meaning in putting work and effort into the design and implementation of these meetings.  

Episode 60 continues along the Group-Level Interventions Pathway.  Building on the last episode, other foundational perspectives for going beyond only providing quality Care to providing transformational Treatment are presented.  These include making a distinction between Care and Treatment, and understanding that behavior management techniques, while often times essential, are part of Care and not Treatment.  Several organizational traps of becoming too focused on behavior management are explored, including the key distinction between interventions that inspire mindless compliance and interventions that inspire thoughtful cooperation.  The importance of respect for a transformational treatment experience is also highlighted.  

Episode 59 of the Becoming Centered podcast marks the start of Season 3.  This Season will contain two learning pathways.  One series will focus on working with kids in varying size groups.  Group work ranges from simple interactions in a living room or classroom to managing various activity groups to running group meetings focused on various aspects of team-building and congregate living.  Another series will focus on physiological centering by presenting a program for listeners to gain a basic level of competence at mindfulness / relaxation / meditation; in preparation to teach these techniques to kids.  This episode will also touch upon one of the foundations for forming therapeutic relationships – explaining your intentions.  It ends with a brief pitch about the importance of kids having fun and of you having fun with the kids.   

Episode 58 of the Becoming Centered Podcast provides a vision for how to design and facilitate an extremely challenging structure in residential treatment programs – the weekly unit staff meeting. 

This episode covers a lot of ground.  Along with presenting a general team-building strategy, an outline is suggested for how to do simple case presentations, for how to organize an issues agenda-driven portion of the meeting, and for how to deliver trainings specifically geared toward the needs of direct-care staff. 

In addition, a general model for how to develop your program’s existing staff meeting design to a more sophisticated approach is presented.  Guidance is also given to listeners to help adapt this material to fit the size of your agency, your program, your number of staff, and the average length of stay of your clients. 

The weekly residential unit staff meeting is likely the largest, longest, and in the sense of staff hours, one of the most expensive structures in your program.  The more effective the design and facilitation of this meeting, the better your agency will be able to provide quality care and treatment to children and youth.

I’m very excited about Episode 57 of the Becoming Centered podcast!  It provides guidance in an area that most human service agencies simply can’t fit into their training programs; how to design and facilitate internal staff meetings. 

Middle managers, such as Unit Directors, are tasked with running some of the most technically difficult meetings.  With only the training provided by their own experiences, they are responsible for a program structure, that if you were to add up the hourly wages of all the participants, is an incredibly expensive use of time for agencies that typically run under very tight budgets.    

In addition, this content area strongly illustrates how the Meta-Compass Model can be used to integrate diverse perspectives.  This podcast explores the profound parallels between fostering resilience in clients, working effectively with groups of kids, how to structure internal staff meetings, and how to develop high-functioning teams.  These strategies are a blending of teachings from psychology, social work, and business administration.