Camp that Improves Attitude and Motivation

Improving attitude and motivation is what we do best at Summerland Camps.  Imagine yourself riding down a whitewater river bouncing from rapid to rapid with your new friends on a hot summer day; or preparing to see the inside of a mountain, exploring the depths of nature that few people ever see.  Simply put, we get young people excited about all life has to offer.  From our challenge course to team activities in drama, fitness, and sports, your child will sample some of the exciting possibilities for hobbies, sports, and career pursuits.  We are a camp that improves attitude and motivation.

Your Attitude Determines Your Altitude

We are a camp that improves attitude and motivation.  At Summerland Camps we remind campers, “It’s your attitude that determines your altitude.”  As part of our curriculum, we demonstrate how the meaning you assign to interactions determines how you respond, and it’s your actions in life that determine how high you go.  Campers that are always negative and think it’s always someone else’s fault get nowhere in life, and we have a set curriculum to demonstrate this fact.

On the other hand, Campers that learn to accept responsibility know that the sky’s the limit on how far they can go in life.  A positive attitude means you also chose to surround yourself with other positive people, and that you focus on positive outcomes and not everything bad that could potentially happen.

Our positive peer culture at the camp helps even the most resistant campers get on board with the therapeutic process.

Don’t Forget Your A, B, C’s

At Summerland Camps, your “A, B, C’s” mean your “Attitude, Behavior, and Consequences.”  We show campers how their attitude determines their Behaviors, and their Behaviors determine Consequences.”  Campers complete worksheets to illustrate this fact.

Finally, we introduce “D- Disputes.”  The final activity in the A, B, C worksheet is to add Disputes- meaning if you go back in time and offer a Dispute to your attitude, how would that affect your behavior?  And if your behavior was different, what would your consequence have been?

According to Pew Research 92% of teens report going online daily — of that 24% go online “almost constantly.”

According to research in the Journal of Mental Health and Addiction 41% of people who play online video games do so as a, “escape from the real world.”

According to the U.S. Department of Education, 40% of college students never earn a degree. Many drop out due to a lack of self-regulation abilities.

Here is an example:

A- Attitude: I was in a bad mood, and my mom told me no more video games today.  I took this as her attacking me and I responded back verbally.

B- Behavior: I got upset at my mom and yelled at her.

C- Consequence: My mom grounded me, and now I have no electronics for the week.

D- Dispute: I should have known my mom loves me and just wants the best for me.  This is a better attitude.  I should have said, “Okay mom, I understand.  Why don’t we do something together today?”  If I would have done this, we would have had a great time, and I would not have been punished.

Journaling is an important part of the behavior change process.

Being Genuine

At Summerland Camps, we also teach how a positive attitude is not about putting on a phony smile, and having a perky social disposition.  More accurately, being positive is a way of responding to life in a manner that allows us to accept the duality, the contradictions, and the contrasts of our experiences.  A positive attitude helps campers make a difference in the world.   When a person is able to see things in a positive light, this influences and shapes other people’s attitudes as well.

Motivation

Building motivation is fun!  We use systematic self-monitoring techniques to guide campers to better habits that also build motivation.  Systematic self-monitoring is just a fancy term for carefully planning your daily behaviors, in addition to setting up support plans to ensure planned behaviors are executed.

Self-monitoring most frequently includes scheduling important items including:

• When you wake up and when you go to bed
• When and how long you study
• When you clean out your backpack or locker
• When you exercise and how much exercise you plan on exercising for
• When you clean your room at home or do other chores around the house
• When you go online or play video games, and what limits you set on your online or gaming activities

But self-monitoring is more than just writing down a daily schedule.  It also involves setting up a plan for what to do when you get off track, and setting up controls so we don’t get off track, including:

• Setting up online limits for what websites we can visit (we encourage Campers to do this for themselves, not to have their parents do it for them)
• Setting up time limits for their computer or gaming system
• Setting up rules for other electronics, such as “no devices at family dinner time.”