Why Behaviour Charts, Rewards, and Consequences Stop Working Over Time

Summary

• Why Behaviour Tools Lose Their Impact: External controls work briefly but fade when internal structures haven’t formed.

• Behaviour Is an Output, Not a Lever: What we see on the surface reflects what’s organised underneath.

• Sustainable Change Is Developmental: Long-term regulation emerges when foundational skills are integrated, not managed.

They Seemed to Be Doing OK, And Then…

Summary

• Why the “Sudden” Collapse Isn’t Sudden: Burnout, withdrawal, or behavioural shifts are rarely abrupt — the conditions build quietly over time.
  

• Coping Isn’t the Same as Readiness: Functioning on the surface can mask systems that are working far harder than they should.
  

• Development Breaks When It’s Rushed: When children are pushed before their systems are ready, the cost appears later — not immediately.

Why Motivation Fails And What Actually Creates Momentum

Summary

• Why Motivation Is Unreliable: Motivation fluctuates because it isn’t designed to carry long-term growth.
  

• Momentum Is Structural, Not Emotional: Real movement comes from internal systems being organised, not from trying harder.
  

• Development Precedes Drive: When foundational skills are in place, action follows naturally without force or pressure.

It’s easy to think the answer is more.

More support. More activities. More diagnoses. More interventions.

When a child struggles, parents naturally want to add something - another program, another strategy, another way to help them keep up. The intention is loving. But it often misses what’s actually needed.

Growth doesn’t come from addition, but from subtraction.

There’s a particular feeling many people struggle to describe. Life isn’t falling apart, but it isn’t moving forward either.

You’re functioning. Doing the right things. Showing up where you need to. Yet something feels strangely repetitive.

The same reactions. The same internal conversations. The same effort, without traction.

This isn’t laziness. It isn’t a lack of insight. And it isn’t a failure of will.

Most people think life changes through determination. Push harder. Try again. Tighten the system. But that only works when you’re already in rhythm. When you’re out of rhythm, pushing just creates more resistance, inside you, and inside your family.

Human beings run on cycles. Expansion and contraction. Clarity and confusion. Energy and depletion.

Your nervous system knows this instinctively. Your children definitely know it. The only one who learned to override it, out of necessity, is you.

There’s a moment fathers rarely talk about, the moment you walk into a room, try to start a conversation with your son, and he barely looks up. The silence hits harder than any argument. And if you’re honest, it’s not just silence. It’s fear. Fear that you’re losing him. Fear that you don’t know how to bridge the distance.

But here’s the truth most fathers like you were never told: You’re not disconnected because you failed. You’re disconnected because you were never shown how to connect in the first place.

The answer is simple. Like many seemingly difficult questions, it eludes most people because of its simplicity.

Why don't most people see it? We tend to look for complexity, because if there was a simple solution we'd have to ask the difficult question:

"Why did we keep doing it the hard way for so long?"

I got confirmation of my views in a session with my Creative Development guide William Whitecloud a few months ago. There's nothing like having your own experience to give real felt insight into a topic!

The reason most approaches (educational or otherwise) eventually fail isn't because they're "wrong," but because they're built on formulas instead of structure.

After 30 years of working with children and adults, witnessing countless seemingly-magical transformations, I've discovered that there's a fundamental difference between structure, models and formulas and understanding this difference is key.

While the world scrambles from one educational trend to the next, searching for the perfect formula that will finally "fix" learning challenges, the answer hides in plain sight (always!). It's not in the latest methodology or innovative program. It's in understanding how structure (real, living structure with flexibility built in) creates the foundation for all learning and success (naturally!)

If we all agree that the school system is #$%&! , why are there still so many people in it?

Why are there still teachers teaching “as-told” and completing ridiculous reports, even though they see the pointlessness of it all and the effect on their emotions and health?

Why are so many parents crippling their finances to pay for private schools that may have given an advantage in the 1800’s (maybe), when better resources are available to anyone who bothers to look?

There’s a growing number of parents, teachers, leaders — smart, successful people — realising they’ve done everything “right” and still feeling a gap in knowing what to do when it comes to the children.

How do you make sure they'll be OK in life? Or rather, better than OK:

how do you give them a great start, without the pressure and push that this has involved in the past?

Focus is a hot topic, with good reason: like all foundational skills it isn’t innate, we're not born with it, so it must be learned - and it cannot be taught.  So what can you do?

You can’t tell someone to focus more or better and expect they’ll be able to do it. You can’t tell them what you do, because your path and is unique to you - and more to the point, you probably don’t even know how or why you focus, what makes the difference between doing it or not. You just know that you get better results when you’re able to do it, and that you’re more frustrated and time-poor when you don’t.

So how do we help someone learn this Seed Skill that we all know is key to a successful, easy and fulfilled life?

There’s a common misconception that raising children is hard; that teaching and “getting” them to learn is hard.  Bull crap. We make it hard.

The more this idea spreads, the harder things seem to become. 

Perception can have a lot of power, if we give it the power, as we have been.

I see it: parents exhausted, teachers stressed, children anxious. This isn’t how it’s meant to be. So what have we created? And how do we create something different?

This is about responsibility: we've created a culture of taking responsibility for the wrong things, and it's ruining our people.

Leveraging laws of nature to make life easier is something I love to talk about.  The Law of Rhythm (described in The Kybalion and other Hermetic texts) is a Universal Principle that we should all be aware of. It needs to form the foundation of education, as it’s one of the gateways to the freedom and ease that most people want in their life.

Imagine going through life knowing that you can use natural cycles - the ebbs and flows, the fact that everything is either growing or dying - to support any result you’re heading towards. It’s the equivalent of surfing a wave instead of fighting a tide.

Wouldn’t that be a good thing to learn early in life?

There's an interesting trend I notice in conversations about education. It quickly becomes obvious how synonymous "education" and "learning" have become with "schooling". This confusion is causing much of the stress rippling through the world: parents, children, teachers, students, employers, employees - suffering unnecessarily because of a misuse of words.

Someone I once knew said "If only someone had told me it was a game and that I was supposed to play it, I would have done really well at school." Seeing the insanity and incongruence of what was being offered, they rebelled against it, screwing up their life in the process.

We humans do everything for a reason, but we’re also great at hiding the truth even from ourselves, and it’s costing a lot of pain, stress and time.

I saw a post in a teacher group. A class was asked to write about their day for homework. The picture was of one child’s answer, scribbled in uneven letters, something like “Today I helped humans summarise documents, write emails and make decisions”.

The teacher wrote “obviously AI” in big red letters under the child’s handwriting.

I could feel the charge in the situation. A child reluctantly, mindlessly completing a task; an exasperated teacher marking homework when they’d rather be doing something else; the child receiving their homework back with big red marks shouting they did it wrong.

Can you feel all the emotion in this?

Imagine finding yourself on Earth right here, today. You’ve arrived from somewhere else and you have no idea how things work. As you look around, you notice things that people that have always lived here, don’t.

You wonder the streets of the place where you are and you notice that there are no children, anywhere.

“Where are all the children?” You ask a passerby (who magically understands you).

“They’re at school, of course.” She replies, giving you a strange look.

You’re curious and ask the next person where you can find "school".  They direct you to a building on the other side of the road.

Have you ever watched a toddler take their first steps? It's a wobbly, triumphant moment filled with intense concentration and a whole lot of falling. But did you know that this seemingly simple act is a testament to the incredible learning power of the young human brain?

I've had a profound realisation lately, like peeling back a layer of my life and seeing the intricate gears and levers that drive everything. It's both simple and complex, hidden in plain sight until now: the undeniable truth of how my childhood wounds have shaped everything I do – every decision, every reaction.

We all carry wounds from childhood, no matter how idyllic or challenging our upbringing. These experiences leave us with beliefs about the world and the emotions attached to them, guiding our every move. Let me share some of mine, and how they've played out:

I challenge the traditional narratives around ADHD and dyslexia. In my experience, those labelled with these conditions often possess remarkable brilliance. While labels can offer understanding and validation, they can also create limiting beliefs.

Take ADHD, for example. I recently saw a post from someone diagnosed with it who effortlessly organised festivals but struggled with paperwork. Is this truly a deficit of attention? And dyslexia? I've met countless dyslexic individuals who are incredibly creative. Shouldn't this be celebrated, not labelled as a lack of ability?