I wonder if you can. Nothing to kill or die for. A brotherhood of man. Imagine all the people, living life in peace. You may say I’m a dreamer. But I’m not the only one.
Haters are gonna hate. Bullies are going to bully. There is nothing you can do about them but try to not let them affect you. Right? Wrong.
Bullying is a learned behavior. It can be unlearned. There are methods to stop bullies and essentially train them not to bully specific people. This is why some people catch bullies and others don’t.
But imagine if there was a vaccine for bullies. You would encounter them, but they wouldn’t attach themselves to you because you were immune. What would your life be like if you were immune to bullies? Pretty good I imagine.
At this point most of you are considering what sort of person you would have become if you had not been subjected to the trauma of another person belittling you and putting you down.
And yes, trauma is the correct word for it. We now know bullying can cause PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder!) So imagine a world of people who were never traumatized by bullies. What would the world be like if most sane people had been taught HOW to respond to the bullies of the world to shut them down and not let them get their way?
This is possible.
We know how to get bullies to stop using behavioral science. This is essentially an education problem. If we could teach people these skills then the world we imagine would be created.
All reputable anti-bullying programs teach these techniques. The reason they haven’t succeeded in getting bullying to stop is because – they only teach the first part of the technique. Getting a behavior to stop is the hardest of the behavioral techniques to make work. It can be done, but it’s difficult. If you don’t teach the entire technique, it won’t work. So – step one, we have to change what it is we are teaching!!!! And teach the entire technique, including what you do AFTER you stop rewarding the bully. That’s what I’m trying to do with this website and my book and my online programs.
But lets say for the sake of argument, we all got on the same page and were teaching the entire technique instead of just half of it. How are we going to train the world? We have over 300 million people in the United States and over 7 billion in the world. That’s a lot of people to teach.
This teaching problem is actually a logistics problem.
Pretty much the only way to reach that many people in the way they need to be taught and to provide them with the ongoing support they need to really learn this is through books. What if we gave everyone in the country a copy of my book, which, as far as I know, is the only book that teaches the entire technique and science of how to stop unwanted behavior like bullying? The cost would only be ~500 million dollars (assuming 1 book for every household in the USA).
That seems like A LOT of money. But according to the Association for Training and Development we spent over 164 billion dollars (with a B) training people in 2012. That’s over $1k per person. The cost of teaching everyone how to stop bullies in the US would be around $5/person or ~0.3% of our annual total training budget. (see: https://www.td.org/Publications/Blogs/ATD-Blog/2013/12/ASTD-Releases-2013-State-of-the-Industry-Report)
What I want you to do with this information?
Ask your training department to get my book and distribute it to all the employees. This will help them help their kids AND it will help the adults learn how to deal with bullying and harassment in the workplace. We can actually do two things at once. It’s possible. It’s doable and the rewards for taking this on are worth it! (For bulk purchasing information click here – https://bullyvaccineproject.com/about/bulk-purchase-the-bully-vaccine-book/).
If your company don’t want to give away books – then tell them they should switch to my harassment training program – which includes the book free as part of the course! Then they can do 3 things at once (do a compliance training, actually teach their employees how to stop harassment in the workplace and help parents teach their kids how to stop bullies). Details at: https://humanistlearning.com/?p=2267
We don’t just have to imagine a world without bullies. We can create that world. But it won’t be easy. We have to invest our time, energy and money into the project. But it can be done. And it’s worth doing. So please help me and get the word out and let’s make this a movement!!!