Ch. Master Greg Moody, Ph.D.

The Podcast:

Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D., LAC:

All right. Welcome to Bullying Prevention Podcast, Part 11. I’m Dr. Greg Moody, and with me is Senior Master Laura Sanborn. Thanks for being here today, ma’am.

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

Thank you, sir.

Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D., LAC:

Okay. We last time talked about when bullying happens what to do to teach your kid, or what to do to teach your kids about when bullying does happen. So last time we talked about how to think and how to put the better thoughts in your head, how to decide ahead of time what to do so that when a bully comes up or somebody’s bullying you, how to think the proper things so you make the right decisions, first of all. And next, how to have the right thoughts in your head so that it doesn’t give you as much anxiety, and you can do the proper things. Instead of fight or flight response, you can make good decisions. What we’re going to talk about today is, and let me go through our slides here to give you some idea of who we are and everything today. So, this is me and Master Sanborn and some of our different backgrounds, but what we’re going to do today is talk about how to act.

Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D., LAC:

So one of the pieces of how to act is your stance, and we talk about this in martial arts as a stance, so we’ll talk about that here whether you’re in martial arts or not. Stance in real life is when you’re in school, your stance is sitting down, or when you’re taking a class, your stance is sitting down. When you’re teaching a class, your stance is standing up. When you’re at work, you sit at a desk, so your stance and how your body acts is what we’ll talk about today. What we know is the kids that get bullied more are ones that are going to project an attitude of low self-esteem. Now, this isn’t kids who bully, but kids who get bullied are going to project an attitude that they’re better targets, that they’re kids who would not have as good as self-esteem, that would be more susceptible to getting bullied.

Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D., LAC:

So, what does that look like? Well, it looks like somebody who looks down, who has their shoulders in a weaker position, and we see this with kids. If we just tell kids to stand up and show us a weak position, they immediately know what that looks like. It looks like shoulders slumped, head down, not looking ahead. Well, when we practice this with kids and what we encourage parents to do is let kids literally practice this. Show me what a weak position is. Show me what a strong position is. And they’re looking up, their shoulders are up, and they’re able to see what’s going on, and they look at other people in a confident way. You want to expand anything on that, Master Sanborn?

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

Yes, sir. A lot of is how they present themselves to other people, so it’s just their physical aspects on how they are and their awareness of their surroundings. As you said, when they look down, they look weak, but it’s also putting them in a position where they’re not aware of what’s happening around them because they can’t see it. So it’s not just a weakness of appearance, but a weakness in what can happen to them and what is happening and what they’re doing.

Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D., LAC:

Yeah. It’s literally a poor defensive position as well, so if there was going to be … In the future parts of this, we’re going to talk about what happens if somebody does push you or does some aggressive behavior. It’s also a poor position to be in. If you’re looking down, if your shoulders are slumped, you’re going to be in a bad position. When we practice this with kids, we also … and parents, this what we want you to encourage your kids to do. We also want to talk about where their backpack goes, and most kids would have a backpack or something they carry, and typically people carry it in their dominant hand or their right hand. If they’re left hand, in their left hand. What we want them to get used to is carrying it, and I even do this, in their left hand or on their left shoulder so that their right hand’s free.

Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D., LAC:

This is good for a lot of reasons. One is you can use your right hand to do things like open doors or grab stuff, but in a defensive position, now they have their hand available to do things, so this is a much better position to be in and much better thing to get used to. Now I’m completely used to this. Whenever I grab my backpack, I put it on my left side, but it gives you a much better way to protect yourself and do other things in the future. It happens to also be an advantage for lots of other different activities that you might need to do when you’re carrying your backpack around. So we want our strong side up and our hand up and books in our weak hand.

Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D., LAC:

So here’s the exercise you do with your kids; you can have them walk around in a strong position, backpack on, hand up, and if you say the code word … Now, you could use whatever code word you want, but in our class we use the code word “bully.” And if we say the word bully, then they’ll put their hand up and they’ll keep their backpack shoulder back. Why do we want their backpack shoulder back? Because that way, the backpack can’t get grabbed and they can’t get pulled around by their backpack, just like a kid with long hair could get grabbed by their long hair. I don’t have any hair, so it wouldn’t work on me. But a kid that had long hair could get grabbed. Their backpack is a really good thing to grab, so now their backpack’s back, their hand’s up, and they can say, “Hey, leave me alone,” which would be what would come next.

Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D., LAC:

So their stance and their physical position is what we want to worry about first, so first thing to deal with is physical position, which is their stance. Parents, this is a good thing again to practice. That’s your activity. That’s your assignment as a parent. The next thing to practice in terms of stance is, and we have this here for physical is maintaining distance. So the first thing is how you physically operate, having a strong posture, looking ahead. The other byproduct to this is going to be that people will notice you more in a positive way. We know that when people look at each other in their eye … Now, this isn’t true of all cultures, so certain cultures, that’s not respectful if you look at somebody in the eye, so we have to be sensitive to different cultures and different situations. But in general, in United States culture, when you look at somebody in the eye, then that is a sign of respect and you’re paying attention to them.

Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D., LAC:

The second thing is maintaining distance. So if I know I’m in a situation where I’m around a lot of people, and even if I don’t know if they’re necessarily dangerous or they might bully me, I want to make sure that I maintain distance. So, maintaining distance means I’m going to be at least two arm lengths away from somebody. In a class, what we would do … Well, why don’t you go over what we do in a class to make sure we practice that, Master Sanborn?

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

Yes, sir. So we’ll have an instructor with a target that’s another arm length, so that they have their arm and the target that’s arm length and move that around in front of the students, and the students have to back up and make sure they understand what that distance is and stay out of that distance. They’re not running around, they’re not playing, and it’s not a game. They need to be able to visualize that distance and know how far away to stay. So if you’re at home doing it, you would want to pick up something, maybe a yard stick or something that’s about your arm length and you just slowly … It’s not something we do super fast.

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

It’s something that they need to be able to visualize what that distance is and what distance is going to keep them safe. And you move it around, and the children have to move, keeping their eyes up, keeping their eyes on you the entire time. Again, not looking down, not turning their back to you and running away or playing. It’s eyes on whoever is the bully at the time and learning what that distance is and getting a feel for how far away they need to stay from somebody.

Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D., LAC:

Yeah. So, that’s a great example of it. And parents, you can do this by just saying, “Okay, we’re practicing now, so how far away would you need to be?” If this is a group of people that you don’t know, it’d be two arm length away. Now, that’s not always possible. Let’s be realistic. Sometimes you’re in a situation, you’re at an event or you’re at a festival and you’re not always able to maintain certain distance, but this helps you learn to be aware of what distance you are. If you are closer to somebody, then you just need to be paying attention that that’s somebody who could grab you.

Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D., LAC:

We don’t want to create an environment of anxiety. We don’t want to create an environment that we should be scared of everybody. That’s certainly not what we’re trying to accomplish. What we would do want to do though is understand that if we are close enough, that we’re within two arm lengths distance, that somebody could take a step toward us and grab us, so we just need to be sure that we keep our eyes up and pay attention and know that puts us a little bit more at risk than if we can maintain distance from other people.

Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D., LAC:

If we are in, as we talked about in our last module, in a scenario or in an area, let’s say on the playground if we’re a kid that there is more bullying going on, then this would be even a more important time when we need to maintain distance. If you don’t practice this with your kids, they won’t understand the spatial distance. Some kids naturally might, but not all of us do, and so we need to understand how far away two arm lengths is. That doesn’t come naturally to everybody, so it’s important to practice it.

Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D., LAC:

The next piece that we talk about is face, how we look, how we keep our facial expression. We’ve practiced how our body shows a confident look, but we need our face to show a confident look. And what does that look like? Well, for the most part, if we ask kids that are over the age of about six or seven years old, to practice a confident look, then they know what that looks like. It looks like their face is staring straight ahead, confident, not looking mean, but confident. When we do this with kids, sometimes they decide that it’s a mean look. It’s not a mean look. It’s a confident look. It just means that I’m looking at you correctly, in your eye. Again, in some cultures that feels a little bit different or that looks a little bit different.

Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D., LAC:

Their eyes are going to be straight ahead, and they’re also scanning the room to make sure that they know what’s going on. Again, we’re not trying to create anxiety, looking for trouble. We don’t want to train our kids that you’ve got to be watching around looking for threats. That’s not what we’re talking about. It’s just looking around to make sure we know what’s going on. This would help them in sports or other things that they do, so that they’re always aware of what’s happening in the room around them, aware of what’s going on, and start building awareness of what their environments, what their surroundings are. Anything to add there, Master Sanborn?

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

It is good training, like you said, for other sports and things, but it’s also good training for leadership and the ability to get in front of people, because if you’re up there and you look confident, that translates into any presentation that you might have to give or anything like that. So, it rolls into just farther than I’m safe from bullies, but now I can present myself to other people and later in life as a salesman or anything like that anytime when you have to present yourself, knowing what a confident look is. If you have the confident look, it builds into your confidence automatically.

Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D., LAC:

Yeah, so that’s a good thing to anchor in. When you show confidence, then you feel more confident, even if you originally didn’t feel confident in the first place. So if you feel a little timid, you’re in a new environment, you’re in a new school. A lot of times, kids that are in a new school, they get bullied a little bit more. The one thing you can help them with parents is, if you’re a parent of a kid, is to help them with these things, then they’ll start projecting a little more confidence. They’ll start feeling a little more confidence earlier than they would have before.

Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D., LAC:

The next thing we’re going to talk about is their voice, which goes along with that. So voice is really important and paying attention to how they talk. Now, in martial arts, we do something called the kiai. That means they yell, “Yah!” They yell, and they sound strong, and they practice it. When we do classes with kids, we have them practice it, whether they’re in martial arts before, and they practice loud yells like I just did or weak ones. “Yah.” That doesn’t sound very confident. And if they practice a loud one and a weak one, they know the difference. You inherently inside of yourself, know the difference. The other thing that we’ll practice, and again, we can practice this with our kids. Anybody can practice this if you’re helping professional is you can practice saying, “Leave me alone,” or “Just stop.” “Just stop” in a confident way. I said it confidently.

Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D., LAC:

If I practice, “stop,” “stop,” and I do it low, it doesn’t sound confident. So “leave me alone,” “stop,” or just the word “enough,” that’s enough to make sure that somebody else knows that you’ve had enough. “That’s enough.” Then, they’ll stop if you say it in a confident way. This is good for parents helping professionals, people to work with kids to practice. If you don’t practice it, then they won’t learn it. If you practice it, then kids will learn it. Now I’ve had parents ask me, “Well, if I do practice this, then won’t my kids say that to me?” They could, but that’s not an appropriate use of “stop.” Maybe they tell you to, if you ask them to take the trash out, they say, “stop,” or they say, “leave me alone.” When you ask them to take the trash out, then you have to have a different conversation with your kid about when that’s okay and when it’s not.

Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D., LAC:

I would invite those conversations. We wouldn’t want to teach them something that’s useful and then have them use it in ways that they shouldn’t, so we want to invite all the different conversations around those types of skills that we give them. Anything to add there, Master Sanborn?

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

Yes, sir. So on voice, when we’re talking about using your voice appropriately, it includes no baby talk. Don’t take it. Don’t let them, if you’re practicing this for real, and you want your child to be safe, don’t let them get away with baby talk on it. Don’t let them be giggling and laughing when they’re doing it, because that doesn’t project confidence that’s, “Oh, it’s a game,” and they won’t translate that into seriousness. We also don’t allow screaming. It’s not, “Leave me alone,” and they’re screaming wildly. It’s a confident voice that somebody will listen to, not blow it off because kids are yelling and screaming all the time.

Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D., LAC:

Yeah. The question would be is if you heard your kid say that, would you think they were being silly, would you think they were being nutty, or would you think they were actually being confident? Would they be confident if you heard them say that. Now, that goes for you too as parents, or again, as helping professionals, as educators. Are you talking to the kids in the tone of voice I’m using now? Are you talking to them in a confident voice, or when you talk to those kids, are you talking down to them? Are you talking in a silly voice? “Okay, Johnny, let’s get started and let’s practice now.” If you talk to them in that way, actually I would say anytime, not just when you’re doing this kind of work, then they’re going to learn those types of skills. We would recommend in all cases talking to them as if they’re adults, because that’s what you want to teach them to be.

Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D., LAC:

That’s how we always talk to kids, and that’s how we recommend talking to kids in all cases, because there’s no downside to this. There’s only teaching them by modeling how a confident, strong person is going to talk. That doesn’t mean you’re not going to have fun times with them. It doesn’t mean that they can’t play. In fact, we encourage them to have fun times and play, but that doesn’t restrict them from having fun times and play if you talk to them like adults. Adults have fun times in play too, I hope. Those are important things to make sure, and that’s a great point that you do. That’s a great point.

Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D., LAC:

Okay, so sounding confident. Couple things. If you’re lacking confidence, couple pieces that you want to make sure you do is look people in the eye or at their forehead if you’re really not confident, if there’s a big imbalance of power. Remember, bullying has an imbalance of power as one of its characteristic features, so if there’s an imbalance of power, sometimes it may be very, very difficult to look somebody in the eye. So one trick for that is to look at their forehead. Then, you won’t lose. It’ll feel easier to keep your confident tone up. Role play strong and weak tones for all the helping professionals that are working with kids and role play different scenarios, talking to teachers about homework, talking to your parents about how you would do different things. What if you made a mistake? How would you talk to me if you broke something in the house? How would you come to me and talk to me about that?

Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D., LAC:

Imagine that, parents, if you actually role played and talked about how would you come to me if you broke the lamp? And you talk to them about how you would like them to come to you, so they don’t hide and hide the lamp and put the pieces of the lamp under the table and hope nobody notices. How would you like your kids to talk to you so that they would know what to do in those situations, what to do if they made a mistake? Role playing those situations would allow them then to learn some confidence, so that is voice. So we had three big things here: stance, making sure you control your own physical posture and distance; face, showing a confident look; and then practicing voice, how to say, “Leave me alone,” “Stop,” “Enough,” talking in an adult confident way. And you can do that. If you’re three years old, you can learn how to talk in an adult confident way. So, that’s this chapter of our podcast.

Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D., LAC:

Now, what comes next is after. What happens after bullying goes on? So this is one of the most important pieces. So bullying might have happened, you might have thought the right thoughts, you might have had the right stance, you might have had the right voice. What happens after bullying happens? What do you do if you’re a kid, and how do you as a child, as a caregiver, as a helping professional, as a parent, how do you help a kid learn to know what to do? So you have to tell somebody, but kids get caught up a lot in one big, huge conundrum, and that’s tattling versus telling. The problem is that teachers or even parents, they have kids telling them all the time, “Johnny did this, and Sally did that, and Billy did this, and they did that, and they did this,” and there’s kids descending upon them all the time telling them all kinds of things. So if a kid is getting bullied and they go to the teacher, sometimes the teacher says to them, “Hey, quit tattling on the other kid.”

Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D., LAC:

Or the teacher may just be so inundated by all these messages from the other kids that they’re not going to listen to them, and I don’t blame the teacher for that, and we shouldn’t blame the teachers for this because teachers have a very difficult job in sorting out what’s right and wrong. So what we have to do is teach the kids what the difference between tattling telling is and how to make sure you know how to put the message into a format that the teacher or, frankly, your parents can hear in the right way. If you and your sister have been fighting all day long, and you’ve been complaining about her, and she’s been complaining about you, and you’ve been complaining about her, and she’s been complaining about you, and then something really happens that you need to tell your parents, well, it may sound like all the other things you’ve been complaining about.

Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D., LAC:

So, what’s the difference? So, tattling is when you’re trying to get somebody else in trouble or get attention. So that’s the definition of tattling, and if you’re a teacher or a parent with a bunch of kids or work with kids all day long like we do, you hear this all the time. They’re trying to get somebody else in trouble or get attention for yourself. That’s tattling. Telling is when you’re trying to get protection for yourself or others. So you’re trying to get protection for yourself or someone else, usually if somebody’s hurting somebody else. So, telling applies if somebody’s getting hurt. That could be hurt in all the different ways that we’ve talked about in terms of bullying or violence, so you’re trying to get protection. Tattling, you’re trying to get somebody else in trouble. So tattling would be, “Hey, I saw Johnny pulled his backpack off the shelf.” And you say, well, is somebody trying … If you’re a teacher or parent, you need to be really good at identifying is that telling or tattling? That’s your job as a teacher or parent.

Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D., LAC:

So kids’ job, your job is to decide is this tattling or telling before you go talk to the teacher? So how can you as a kid or how can you as a parent teach your kid, or how can you as a teacher or a helping professional with your kid help kids tell versus tattle? So the idea is to help them put the message in the right format, and it’s important to be specific. So for example, it’d be something like, “I saw John bullying Sally in the hallway. He knocked her books out of her hands, and he got her friends to laugh and call her names.” That’d be one example. “I saw Billy bullying John on the playground. He pushed him and he fell down, and I’m really worried about him.” That would be something that likely a teacher would pay attention to.

Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D., LAC:

Now, they may or may not, and you have to decide as a kid whether or not you’re going to get in trouble with the other kid that was bullying, and you have to be strong enough to stand up for yourself and for the other kid if you’re going to make sure you tell the teacher. Or if it’s for you, you could say, “I got pushed in the hallway by John and I fell down, and I’d like some help.” So putting the words in, “I’d like some help,” or, “they need some help,” makes it sound very different than you just telling about something happening. So adding those words, what you need, what you need for help, what you need in some other way, what you need will help make it come across like a telling message instead of a tattling message. So parents, helping professionals, teachers, that’s one thing to work with kids on, and you have to role play lots of different messages.

Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D., LAC:

Now, the good news is you’re going to have lots of these messages to help with because they’re tattling and saying stuff to you all the time. Hmm. Did you ask me for anything that you need, or were you just telling me about somebody else? Did you ask for something that they need? Do they need protection? No, I guess not. Okay, so that’s tattling. Working through these definitions will help kids get the message and help kids learn the message really, really well. So this is a critical part of the skill of learning the difference between tattling and telling, but you have to tell a parent and adult, if somebody’s bullying you, and that’s got to be the message that we give to the kids.

Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D., LAC:

Okay, so that’s our podcast number 11, and we covered what to do if you’re being bullied in these last couple podcasts and what to do after being bullied. Next time, we’re going to cover how to be a protector, and that’s going to be the most important thing that we learn in all of these podcasts, how to teach your kids how to be a protector. We expect that when kids do martial arts. That’s one of our big focuses. We know from our research that doing martial arts over a two or three year period of time and getting a black belt is the number one thing you can do to help your kids be safe from bullying, and so we’re not that worried about our kids that do this getting bullied, but what we want them to do is go beyond that and learn to protect other kids that they see being bullied. So that’s really the next level is to move kids a step forward so that they help other kids from being bullied, and that’s the next stage that we’re going to talk about in our bullying prevention podcast number 12.

Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D., LAC:

Thanks a lot, Master Sanborn, for being here.

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

Thank you, sir.

Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D., LAC:

Okay. We really appreciate everybody’s attention, and we’ll see you on the next podcast.

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Dr. Moody is also a licensed psychotherapist and maintains a practice at Integrated Mental Health Associates (IntegratedMHA.com) where he specializes in couples therapy and mens issues.