Tag: personal power

BLONDIE, DAGWOOD AND THE NATURE OF PERSONAL POWER

Post author By Dr. Jeffrey Rubin
Post date December 15, 2013
No Comments on BLONDIE, DAGWOOD AND THE NATURE OF PERSONAL POWER

We find a charming illustration of Dagwood utilizing a simple source of personal power below:

These three frames are just the beginning of a very early Blondie comic from 1932 that I found in The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics. At that time Blondie was depicted as coming from the lower classes who had recently married the wealthy Dagwood Bumstead. Many from his social circle believed Blondie married for money.

I have discussed sources of power quite a bit on this blog. The simple source of power that Dagwood used to get Blondie invited to the party is often referred to as offering a fair exchange. That is, Dagwood offered to give his mother something that she wanted, but only if she gave him what he wanted. She wanted Dagwood to come to her party, he made it clear that he would come, but only if Blondie would also come.

As we will soon see, there are six more panels to this Blondie-Dagwood comic strip. But before we get to them, let’s use the DIG Conflict Model to quickly conceptualize the events that are taking place in the first panels of the comic.

Using “DIG” to Briefly Describe a Conflict

Those who have been following this blog know that when we seek to briefly describe a conflict, the letters in the word DIG help to remind us to look for the three conditions of a conflict–DESIRE, INTERFERENCE and GUILT.

During the first frame, Dagwood clearly desires that Blondie join him at his mother’s party, but interfering with this, his mother indicates she is refusing to invite her. To be a conflict according to the DIG Conflict Model, in addition to a desire and an interfering condition, there has to also be a guilt condition as well.

In the second frame of the comic, Dagwood says to his mother, “Remember, after all she is your daughter-in law.” This suggests that Dagwood believes that his mother is guilty of being wrong for not inviting Blondie.

There are several ways in which this apparent conflict can be resolved. To illustrate some essential points, let’s first look at a couple of examples that do not actually occur in the comic. As we look at these examples, please keep in mind that when we describe resolutions using the DIG Conflict Model, we are instructed to consider not only the short term quality of the resolution, but the long term quality as well.

First Example

Here is a different outcome to Dagwood’s conflict with his mother than what we will be seeing in the actual Blondie comic strip. Take special note that this different outcome leads to a couple of post-resolution regrets.

Dagwood talks to his mother and she convinces him that because of the way she was brought up, and because of the way the other party guests might react, she is not wrong in wanting to keep Blondie from attending her party. Dagwood ends up agreeing with his mother and he does not bring Blondie to the party.

From Dagwood’s perspective his conflict with his mother was resolved at the point when he came to believe his mother is not guilty of doing anything wrong when she insists Blondie is not to come to the party. The plan that was used to resolve the conflict was his mother persuading Dagwood that she is right.

Now, let’s look at the quality of this resolution. By resolving the conflict in this way, Dagwood ends up not having his desire to have Blondie join him at the party fulfilled. Because Dagwood wants to do things more with Blondie than his parents, he begins to see them less and less. When he looks for job opportunities he feels little desire to remain close to his parents. One day he sees an opening with the Dithers Company several thousand miles from his parents. He applies and lands the job. When Dagwood and Blondie start having children, his mother begins to wish she had been more accepting of Blondie early in their relationship for Blondie has turned out to be a wonderful wife to her son.

Oh, how Dagwood’s mother regrets antagonizing Blondie during their early marriage. And that’s not all. Dagwood’s mother is often heard wandering around her luxurious home moaning. From time to time she can be heard crying out, “If only I could be closer to my grandchildren! How this would give so much meaning to my life!”

Dagwood also feels that raising children with their grandparents close by would have been a good thing, but he reluctantly feels that, with his mother so rejecting of Blondie, it wouldn’t be a good thing for the children to be exposed to such rejection of their mother on a regular basis. And Dagwood really cares about his mother who has become increasingly depressed over the years. Both he and his mother have some post-resolution regrets about how things have turned out.

Second Example

Here’s another scenario that according to the DIG Conflict Model would lead to this conflict being resolved, and this one also leads to some post- resolution regret.

Dagwood decides that there is nothing he can do about bringing Blondie to the party, and so he just doesn’t show up. The party comes and goes without his desire being fulfilled. But in time, he forgets about it. When he forgets about it, the conflict has been resolved. As for the quality of this resolution, Dagwood finds that, since the party, he frequently has waves of anger overtaking him. When he is with his mother, he treats her with little respect. This leads to angry outbursts between them. Their quality of life has thus been diminished.

Now let’s look at what actually happens in the 1932 comic.

Dagwood resolves the conflict as follows. In an effort to achieve his desire, he tells his mother that he refuses to come unless Blondie is invited, too. His mother offers a compromise; he can bring Blondie if he promises to keep her in the background. Dagwood doesn’t explicitly say that he agrees with the compromise, but by thanking his mother it appears he has tacitly agreed to her stated terms. The conflict Dagwood was having with his mother is resolved at the point Dagwood realizes his mother will no longer interfere with his desire to bring Blondie to the party.

How about the quality of this resolution? In the short run things look pretty good. Although Blondie expresses some concerns about going to the party because Dagwood’s mother is so against her, Dagwood expresses optimism when he says to Blondie, “Now, don’t worry Darling — in time she’ll learn to love you just as I do!” The comic strip goes on from here to provide us some additional information. When they arrive at the party…

In this scenario Dagwood has used some skill that leads to his specific desire being fulfilled—Blondie gets to go to his mother’s party. He has a related desire as well—that his mother will learn to love Blondie. As things worked out, this desire takes a beating.

**Contrasting the Blondie Example with the Pygmalion Example**

People who are powerful at achieving their desires tend not only to develop a plan to achieve some obvious desire of a conflict, but they pause to consider how each plan that they consider would impact the achieving of other desires that are associated with the obvious desire. Consider the story of George Bernard Shaw’s great play, Pygmalion, which was later turned into the magnificent musical, My Fair Lady.

There are some similarities to My Fair Lady and the Blondie story we just discussed. One of the chief characters is Liza Doolittle, who is about Blondie’s age. She too is from the lower classes.

Professor Higgins desires to bring her to a party where the upper classes will be in attendance—the royal ball. But the good professor realizes that getting Liza invited is a relatively small problem for him. What he wants additionally is that she is a success at the ball. He and his friend, Colonel Pickering, pause to consider what being a success is.

They decide that to be successful, Liza will have to improve her speech, be able to move gracefully around the ballroom, and to learn to dance as the other ladies do. Once they understand this, both gentlemen devise a rigorous plan involving training for six months before they take Liza to the ball. Although their plan doesn’t come off entirely without hitches, the viewers of the play clearly come away understanding that the thoroughness of the planning and the practicing of the skills were enormously helpful.

Now, what have we learned from these scenarios? First of all, when you try out a plan that has promise to fulfill your desire, you are attempting to increase your power. If your plan is well designed and skillfully carried out, it may succeed in fulfilling your specific desire. However, short term success of a plan to achieve a specific desire might be offset because it ends up interfering with the likelihood that other desires will be fulfilled. Dagwood fulfilled his short term desire of getting Blondie to the party, but by putting her in a situation where she had a large chance of embarrassing his mother, he may have hurt his long-term goal of getting his mother to like Blondie. If you want the quality of your resolution to be high, increasing your power requires that you become skillful at fulfilling desires in the short and long term.

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Some people will enjoy reading this blog by beginning with the first post and then moving forward to the next more recent one; then to the next one; and so on. This permits readers to catch up on some ideas that were presented earlier and to move through all of the ideas in a systematic fashion to develop their emotional intelligence. To begin at the very first post you can click HERE.

Tags ABCs of Power, Blondie, Blondie Comic Strip, conflict, conflict management, conflict resolution, Dagwood and Blondie, dispute management, free social intelligence and emotional intelligence curriculum, personal power, psychological maturity, respect, sources of power, wisdom

child discipline conflict resolution criticism emotional intelligence free social intelligence and emotional intelligence curriculum Hope insults interpersonal conflicts intrapersonal conflicts Name calling negative criticism parenting teasing wisdom

The ABCs of Power: The Letter “A”

Post author By Dr. Jeffrey Rubin
Post date March 17, 2013
9 Comments on The ABCs of Power: The Letter “A”

Power, in one sense, is the ability to achieve your desires. In another sense, it is the feeling you get when you have mastered a skill that increases the probability that some desire of yours will be fulfilled. And in yet another sense, it is the feeling that you get when you come to believe that you have the ability to master any skill that will be necessary to achieve your desires as you go along your life path. When people feel confident, they feel powerful. When Lucy steps up on the mound in spring, perhaps she feels that she can take on anything and achieve greatness!

Power and its Connection with Name Calling, Insults and Teasing

The reason that people use name calling, insults and teasing is to try to achieve their desires. In my blog post titled “Insults: A Comic Strip Lover’s Guide,” I provide readers with eight typical desires that people seek to achieve by using name calling, insults and teasing. One example that we covered is the desire to get someone to improve. Consider a mother who sees her young boy misbehaving. She desires to get him to improve, so she yells at him, “You little brat, stop that right now!” If the plans that she uses typically achieve her desires, we say that she is a powerful person, or she has a great deal of power. If the plans that she uses make it harder for her to achieve her desires, we picture her as weak and ineffective. Readers of this blog have been learning plans to increase their skill when they are tempted to launch insults at others or when they find that someone is trying to insult them. Learning the sources of power will greatly enhance these skills.

Power and Plans

People who are powerful at achieving their desires create effective plans. They consider multiple options and how each option would impact the achieving of not only the most pressing desire, but their other desires. They consider not only the short term effects of the plan, but the longer term effects as well.

A mother who brutally beats her son to get him to do as he is told may find that in the short term this plan works, but as the boy becomes older, counter to the mother’s long term desires, he rebels, turns violent towards her, and then runs away, never to be heard from again. The mother comes to feel that what she thought was a powerful way to bring up children was her biggest mistake.

Power Plans versus Sources of Power

The term, “plan,” when used here refers to a series of steps that are described in enough detail so that any reasonable person can immediately implement them. Because there are so many different types of situations in which you find your desires popping up, at times you will feel stuck in coming up with a plan.

A “source of power,” as used here, refers to an idea that can help you to come up with a plan even when you feel stuck. Such sources of power, although not specific enough to implement without some creative problem solving, are helpful in fulfilling a wider range of desires than specific plans. Knowledge of the sources of power can turn a feeling of hopelessness into a feeling of challenge.

The “ABCs of Power” List

In the following weeks, we will begin to build a list of sources of power. They will be placed in alphabetical order, beginning with the letter “A.” Once we are done, by keeping the list readily available whenever you feel stuck about how to achieve your desire, you will be able to retrieve the list, and as you go through it, you will find that it can often serve as an aid for creating a promising plan. By spending time familiarizing yourself with the list, you will find that even when you don’t have the list at your fingertips its alphabetical arrangement will aid your recall.

Today, we will cover the first source of power on our list.

“A” is for Advancing Skills

Consider the following Peanuts comic:

Here we see that Charlie Brown insults himself by stating “Rats! Nobody is ever going to like me.” When he says this, he has three related desires—not being lonely during each lunch hour, getting the little red-haired girl to come over and join him for lunch, and getting people to like him.

Charlie Brown, in this example, tries to come up with a plan to fulfill his desires but the only ones that come to him is to insult himself, and going over to the red-haired girl and trying to talk to her. The first of these two plans doesn’t seem to be much help, and the other seems to Charlie Brown to be too likely to make a bad situation even worse. He seems to have fallen into a state of hopelessness.

But let’s pretend Charlie Brown has a list of the ABCs of Power. The list doesn’t supply him instantly with a specific plan, but he can use it to help create a plan. Today he looks at the first item on such a list, and sees it is Advancing Skills. Next to the item is a little description of how it can be used. Thus, it says:

“Advancing skills” as a source of power will refer here to working toward developing a talent that people you care about value. For example, consider the following comic.

Dagwood seems to recognize that making something with his own hands for Blondie has the potential to fulfill his desire that his wife will appreciate him. But we can see from Blondie’s reaction that his current skill level is far from what it will need to be before his desire will be fulfilled.

In contrast to Dagwood’s failed efforts, in the comic below Linus has figured out a way to fulfill his desire that his teacher appreciates his work.

It’s important to recognize that “advancing skill” as a source of power does not require that you have some inborn talent. In most domains many characteristics once believed to reflect innate talent are actually the result of individuals’ prolonged efforts to improve performance.

Dagwood’s efforts to create woodworks of art by going into his basement once a year and sloppily throwing something together for Blondie, is not what I’m referring to here. The results of such efforts are unlikely to be truly appreciated.

Spending at least fifteen minutes a few times a week may enable you to develop a set of skills that can help to position yourself as being respected for that skill among the people you know.

Now how might we apply “advancing skills,” as a source of power, to Charlie Brown’s problem?

Well, when I was about Charlie Brown’s age, my family moved in January and I had to start a new school in the middle of the year. Everyone there had already formed into groups of friends and I felt lonely not only during the lunch period, but during much of the rest of my days as well. One day, just so that I would have something to do during the lunch period, I brought three balls with me. I had been practicing the art of juggling for a weeks and had managed to reach a point at which I could get three balls going pretty good, but after a few seconds, I’d usually drop one. I felt that with a little more practice, my performance might become smoother.

Very shortly after I began to practice during the lunch period, some kids came over and watched. Before long they asked if they could give it a try. I obliged. A few began to bring some balls with them to school and during the lunch period we began to practice together. As we did, we began to talk about other things as well and I learned their names, and the place began to feel less lonely.

At the same time, I noticed that quite a few kids liked to play basketball in the schoolyard as soon as they finished their lunch. Up to that point, I hadn’t developed my basketball skills.

Rather than to dive right in and ask to play with the other kids during the lunch period, I began to practice after school at a nearby playground. And even before I was ready to get chosen into games, the fact that I felt I was heading in the right direction by working on a plan made these days far more tolerable than if I believed that I was doomed to be lonely for the rest of my life. It gave me a sense of power, in contrast to a sense of feeling powerless.

When I did venture into some basketball games during lunch, I found that because of the way sides were chosen, I didn’t have to be the best player on the court to be a valued contributor to the team. The players just wanted to be challenged enough so that they had to work to get a basket and to win a game.

“Advancing skill” as a source of power can be used in many ways to achieve your desires. If juggling and basketball don’t interest you, maybe acrobatics, chess or something artistic will.

In addition to helping people who find themselves dealing with the kinds of problems Charlie Brown faces in our example, “Advancing Skills” can be enormously important in other settings. Millions of people in the workforce, for example, have had desires to improve their salaries or the type of work they do and found that advancing their skills led to their desires being fulfilled. And whether you are in a school setting or in the workforce, if you have a desire to improve your interpersonal relationships or your intrapersonal relationship, you can advance your skills for free by following this blog.

In our next blog post, we will look at the second item on the list of the ABCs of Power. Until then, have a great week.

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Some people will enjoy reading this blog by beginning with the first post and then moving forward to the next more recent one; then to the next one; and so on. This permits readers to catch up on some ideas that were presented earlier and to move through all of the ideas in a systematic fashion to develop their emotional and social intelligence. To begin at the very first post you can click HERE.

Tags ABCs of Power, advancing skills, challenge, conflict, criticism, emotional intelligence, insults, name calling, negative criticism, personal power, psychological maturity, sources of power, wisdom