About 30 years ago, I went out with a few friends to a honky-tonk bar in a southern town. The unique feature of this bar was a mechanical bull ride in the middle of the place. I had no intention of trying it, but one cowboy after the next was taking a turn–it seemed easy and fun. Everyone was having a good time, so I got on the mechanical bull expecting to be a natural like Gene Wilder trying it for the first time. Unfortunately, I wasn’t. I fell off quickly, which resulted in a trip to the hospital with a busted ankle.
Riding a mechanical bull is a skill that has to be developed. The problem is that it sure looked pretty easy. Some skills don’t look easy. No one without training expects to be able to replicate what a skilled gymnast can do. Most people see the incredible flips and assume it would be impossible to replicate those moves.
When skills look easy, it encourages people to be overconfident and take a turn on the mechanical bull. It seems to me that Applied Behavior Analysis is more like riding a mechanical bull than being a gymnast. People observe what the BCBA does and immediately think, “I can do that.” The problem is there is usually no busted ankle to let them know they have no idea what they are doing. It is easy to fool yourself into thinking you are doing great when you aren’t. A major cause of failure is that people assume they will be able to do it with minimal training – it just looks easy.
In a way, that’s positive. Sometimes parents and teachers are so frustrated that even after they watch you successfully work with a child, they still think it won’t work for them. That’s usually fairly easy to overcome, though. The person harder to train is the one who thinks they already know everything.
Another problem I’ve run into is sometimes the parent or teacher we are training acts super confident. That will sometimes fool me into thinking that the full training isn’t needed. Most of the time, the skills we teach are hard enough to require some practice, and without sufficient practice, failure is likely. But most skills are not so hard that the average parent or teacher can’t acquire them in a reasonable amount of time.