Exploring Unschooling

EU389: Foundations: Consent and Consensual Living

For this week’s episode, we’re sharing the next Foundations episode of the Living Joyfully Podcast with Pam and Anna, Consent and Consensual Living. Consent is really the backbone of everything we talk about. Everyone, regardless of age, wants agency. When we can shift away from control, because we truly can’t control other people, we move from a power-over dynamic to a collaboration paradigm, leading to more connected relationships. We hope today’s episode sparks some fun insights for you! THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE The Living Joyfully Shop – books, courses, including Four Pillars of Unschooling and Navigating Conflict, coaching calls, and more! Want the full collection of Living Joyfully Foundations podcast episodes as an audiobook (and the transcripts edited into an ebook)? Find them here in the Shop! We invite you to join us in The Living Joyfully Network, a wonderful online community for parents to connect and engage in candid conversations about living and learning through the lens of unschooling. This month, we’re talking about seasons—in unschooling and in life. Come and be part of the conversation! Sign up to our mailing list to receive The Living Joyfully Dispatch, our biweekly email newsletter, and get a free copy of Pam’s intro to unschooling ebook, What is Unschooling? Listen to our conversation on YouTube. Follow @exploringunschooling on Instagram. Follow @pamlaricchia on Instagram and Facebook. Check out our website, livingjoyfully.ca for more information about navigating relationships and exploring unschooling. EPISODE QUESTIONS What does consent mean to you? How do you see it weaving together with agency? Think about a recent argument you had and how you expressed yourself. Could you reframe/reword some of what you said as an “I” message? That can be both less confrontational and more accurate. For example, instead of, “You’re not listening to me!” maybe try, “I don’t feel heard.” Rather than getting stuck in an endless round of “Yes, I am”/”No, you’re not”, it encourages the conversation to go deeper. What barriers do you see to living consensually? How would it feel to just set them aside? This week, practice contemplating the underlying need that your friend or partner is trying to meet through their actions. TRANSCRIPT ANNA: Hello again and welcome to the Living Joyfully Podcast. We’re excited you’re interested in exploring relationships with us, who we are in them, out of them, and what that means for how we move through the world. So, in today’s episode, we’re talking about consent and living consensually, and I have to say, this is one of my very favorite topics. It is really the backbone of everything that we talk about. When we understand that everyone, no matter their age, wants agency, and that we truly have no control over another, we move from a power-over dynamic to a collaboration paradigm. And it’s interesting, because I think intellectually most of us would agree that consent is important, that we should never push past another person’s consent. And yet, in our desire to control outcomes, we often do, and this is especially true for children. And yet, how can we expect children to honor consent as adults if they have never experienced what it means to work together to find solutions to that feel good to both parties? And it comes into play in adult relationships as well, in subtle and sometimes not so subtle ways. We look to change people. We have expectations and agendas that we push without regard for who that person is and what they want and what they value. PAM: Yeah, exactly. And for me, consent and by extension, living consensually, was one of those ideas that once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it. I soon recognized how often I was trying to very subtly wield control to move through situations in ways that made sense to me, especially interactions with my partner and my kids. And looking through this new lens, I notice now how disconnecting those control tactics were for my relationships. Basically, someone was almost always disappointed or disgruntled in a family of five. But I also observed that many of our interactions were steeped in power. And at their root, they were about me, often very politely, but I was convincing, coercing, or guilting the other person into doing what I wanted them to do. Gee, that calls back to our last episode as well, doesn’t it? ANNA: Yeah. It does! PAM: And I realized how draining that was. My understanding of consent grew exponentially once I realized it wasn’t about me convincing someone to agree to do the things my way. That’s consent, right? Instead, it was so much more about seeing through their eyes and recognizing that there are many valid paths forward, not just mine. Consent meant working together collaboratively to figure out an often new path forward that made sense still and felt good to everyone involved. ANNA: Yeah, right. It definitely hearkens back to that episode and also to when we talked about how different people can be, because when we push our agenda without consideration of how the other person feels or moves through the world, when we have ultimatums or even just expectations that are kindly and politely put out there, we’re taking away that other person’s agency, and that is just not a solid place from which to build a strong relationship. Humans want autonomy. They want to have agency over their lives. So instead, we can learn about one another. We can commit to deeply understanding what makes each of us tick. We can set up an environment where we find solutions to problems together, trusting that we’ll keep at it until both parties feel good about the plan. And that’s really the core of choosing to live consensually. The process involves listening and validating, being able to clearly articulate our own needs, but in “I” messages, not demands. After everyone feels heard and seen, that’s where we can cultivate this open curious mindset, this brainstorming-type idea about how to solve the situation at hand. At that point, we’re all on the same team. We’re working together to solve for all the needs, instead of standing on opposite sides, defending and advocating only for our own needs. And a big part of this is understanding that there are almost always underlying needs at play. So, very often, a conflict is sitting at one level that can feel impossible to solve. One person wants to go out, the other wants to stay home. Where do we go with that? But if we peel back a layer to see the underlying needs, then we have more to work with. We have more options to consider. But we can’t get there if we’re stuck in that place of thinking their actions are about us, if we think our partner is just being difficult, if we’re taking it personally. There are needs on both sides of that argument and understanding those opens up the options. So, maybe one wants to just really see their friends. So, could the friends come over instead? The other had a long day and just needs some downtime. Is allowing a bit more time before going out the fix? Solutions are everywhere when we assume positive intent on all sides and start working together to understand each other and the situation more. That quick reminder that they’re just humans trying to meet a need helps us remain connected and curious. And now we have a puzzle to solve together, instead of two or more people digging in their heels on opposite sides of this surface-level disagreement. PAM: Yes, yes, yes. And, for me, it made all the difference in the world when I felt we were truly all on the same team, trying to figure out a way to move forward that met each of our needs. It was such a big energetic, feeling difference. So, we can just take a moment to envision what that might feel like. So, when each person feels seen and heard and trust that their needs will ultimately be met, it is so energizing. It opens up so many creative possibilities, rather than locking two people, as you said, into that battle until one comes out the winner. There’s a winner and loser in that situation. Who has the power? Who can convince the other one to do it their way? It definitely takes time and patience and practice to bring consent into our everyday relationships, but it really is life-changing. I do want to acknowledge the time that these conversations can take as you work together to figure out those underlying needs, to figure out a path forward that works for everyone. But the other path, which is the argument, the power struggles, and then the aftermath of needing to repair the relationship, that takes up time, too. So, which process feels better to experience with those you love, trust and collaboration or judgment and power struggles? ANNA: Oh my gosh, yes. So, that right there was really a big part of me wanting to move in this direction. It takes time and energy to argue one’s position and to try to win everything, energy that I found draining and disconnecting. And I knew I didn’t want to live in that energy every day. It felt very assaulting to me. What I found was how rewarding and connecting it was to live in a house with no top-down agendas, no punishment or control, just connection and collaboration, whether it was with David or if it involved our kids. We were all invested in helping each other meet our needs and do the things that we wanted to do. That deep level of trust that you will be supported and unconditionally loved is the energy I want to cultivate and bask in every day. And so, somewhat related, over the years, David has had a lot of hobbies that people would consider dangerous. They’re a part of who he is, and I’ve always wanted to support him in those pursuits, even when I didn’t understand it. And by putting that out there, what I found in return is someone who supports all my wild hair ideas and whom I trust will always be there for me. That is worth so much more than me trying to control who he is and shape him into someone who may feel safer and easier for me. That’s my work to do and, for me, it was rooted in gratitude for the time we have together and letting go of fear. Because fear is so often the root of control and letting that go allows us to find gratitude and connection to truly love those around us for who they are and how they move through the world. And that unconditional acceptance was what we both wanted to continue when we had children. And honestly, raising children in a consensual environment where we were all trusted and supported, where we learned to understand and express our needs and knew we would be heard and that solutions would be found, has been one of the greatest experiences of my life. PAM: It’s been a life-changing and amazing experience, and I wanted to take a moment to talk a bit more about unconditional love and acceptance. I love that phrase. And, for me, it doesn’t feel like throwing my hands up in the air and thinking, whatever! Whatever they want to do! I think when we hear unconditional at first, that can be what we think. Okay. No conditions. I have no input. Whatever they want to do, just off they go. For me, unconditional means without expectations, so without conditions, not withholding our love and affection if the person makes a choice that we don’t agree with, even more so not using judgment and shame as tools to try to get them to change their mind. But not having conditions doesn’t mean not trying to understand them as a person, like we have been talking about. If they make a choice that doesn’t make sense to us, unconditional love doesn’t mean we think, “Whatever. I still love you. Off you go,” and then burying our feelings of concern. So, instead we can be more open and curious. We can learn more. Maybe it’s in direct conversation with them or by paying extra attention to how the choice unfolds for them. How are they navigating it? What are they enjoying about it? I am so curious. What the heck do you enjoy? But either way, we learn more about them. We have a better understanding of who they are as a person. Because even if we often say, “I love you!” it is hard for someone to feel loved for who they are if they don’t feel seen and heard. They think, “Sure, they said they love me, but they don’t really understand who I am.” Being in relationship with a person means understanding who they are, which also isn’t a one and done thing. We all grow and change over time. To embrace consent and consensual living in our relationships with the people we love is to choose to be curious about who they are as a person, because that is a great place to start just right there. Like, who is this person? ANNA: Right. And like you said, when we say, whatever, I love you, whatever, do whatever. That doesn’t feel good. So, even if I don’t understand something, I can ask questions and just like we’ve been talking about over these last few weeks, learn more about them. And then as we leave ourselves open to that, we’re seeing through their eyes. We’re starting to see like, okay, it does make sense that they love this. I see how that’s feeding them. I see what they love about it. And so, that moves us from this place of, okay, I’m not going to stop them, to, I’m celebrating who they are. And that switch is so big, moving to celebrating. Even when it’s something we may not participate in ourselves or fully understand, we do understand through their eyes what they’re getting from. PAM: Yes. And we can connect. So, maybe it’s a thing that, “Yeah, I don’t want to join you in your thing. I’m glad that you love it.” But where we can also really deeply connect with them is thinking about something that we love that much. So, when we know that, it’s like how much I love this thing, then I can get a real feel and sense for how much they’re enjoying the thing we’re doing, and less about having conversations later about the facts of what happened. It can be, “I bet you had so much fun.” You can talk about the energy, you can talk about the experience. That’s where you can connect with them and share and celebrate them. I love that point that you shared about getting to the place where you can celebrate their love of the thing. You can celebrate their choices without having to make the same choice, without having to join them, but we can celebrate that energy and knowing how it feels for ourselves, too. ANNA: Yes. I just love how you’re saying that, because that’s the piece. We can celebrate how much joy it brings to them. We can celebrate their excitement about something, even if we can’t celebrate the individual piece of it, because we maybe don’t understand it or it doesn’t appeal to us. But that’s irrelevant. When someone you love lights up about something, be it a child or your partner or your friend, that’s energy we can get on board with. And celebrating someone for something like that, it builds this deep trust and bond, that I’m seen by this person that they really see me and it’s just really beautiful. So, I love that. So, let’s give a few questions to ponder as we’re thinking about consent and living consensually with your loved ones for this week. What does consent mean to you? How do you see it weaving together with agency? I think this is going to be good. PAM: Yeah. That is so interesting, that connection between those two things. And just thinking about agency, is that something I want to step on? How does it feel to have agency? To have choice? How does consent weave in with that. I think that’ll be really fun to play with. ANNA: Yeah, to peel a little of that back. Okay. So, think about a recent argument you had and how you expressed yourself. Could you reframe or reword some of what you said as an “I” message? That can be both less confrontational and more accurate. So, for example, instead of saying, “You’re not listening to me,” maybe try, “I don’t feel heard.” Rather than getting stuck in the endless round of, “Yes, I am listening.” “No, you’re not listening,” and we have this meta fight that starts happening, it encourages the conversation to go deeper. “Why are you not feeling heard? I don’t understand. I want to understand.” It just takes it to a different place. PAM: Yeah. And that’s a great example of getting to the underlying needs, because so often, we can take that need and jump to the solution and share the solution. Not feeling heard, the solution is for them to listen to me. So, I say, “You’re not listening to me.” But they feel that they are. So, that doesn’t click for them. So, if you go to the root, to the need, the need is, I’m not feeling heard. Then maybe there is a different way. It’s less confrontational and it’s also more fundamentally accurate. I’m not feeling heard. That’s where we are. If you can come up with new and interesting ways for me to feel heard or for me to see that you’re hearing what I’m saying, that’s where the rub is right now. I don’t need to give them the solution that I think they need to do. ANNA: Right, Exactly. Because again, that gets us in that meta argument, which just never ends well. Okay, so, what barriers do you see to living consensually? And how would it feel to set them aside? And I think this one’s important, because I think for most of us growing up, we may not have had choices and consent in all areas our life. So, it’s not necessarily something that we have a lot of experience with, but I think you can feel the difference. And so, I think even just the thought experiment of setting it aside, what would it look like to have this collaborative relationship with all the people that I live with? How would I feel? Think of the areas that rub or that feel draining for you in your day. Would changing that paradigm soften some of that? I think that’ll be interesting. And the last one is, this week, practice contemplating the underlying need that your friend or partner is trying to meet through their actions. I think write out some examples so that you can start to see patterns, because we can see patterns of, when they’re tired, they get a little grumpier. It can be hungry. It can be things like that. And it can just be, oh, okay, this one thing kind of triggers this same type of argument each time, so there must be something else under it. And so, I think when we start to look for patterns, when we start to think about it, for me, behaviors are always a reflection of a need. So, when we see a behavior, whether we like it or don’t like it, look at what’s the need that’s playing out here? And so, when this is not in a charged situation, as well, then we start to just be better at recognizing the behaviors as a reflection of needs. And then we get better at it. Like we said, it’s just practice and learning. And so, then we don’t get stuck at that rubbing point of the behavior. PAM: And I think it is so valuable for us to start with contemplating it, because if you all of a sudden start, when you’re having a conversation or conflict with someone, saying, well, what is the need underneath? Why are you asking for that? That can be off putting. And they’re not thinking in that way yet, so they may well not be able to answer that question for you. But when we start thinking that way, like that example that we just talked about, you’re not listening, but I want to feel heard, when we start practicing that, over time we get better with identifying those. And the other piece being, I also love your patterns note, because there can also be patterns to when those things bubble up for them and we can even play with addressing those needs. When somebody starts to feel a little bit grumpy and you’ve seen over time that it’s often when they haven’t eaten or anything, even if we just like grab a glass of water or whatever, bring a drink, bring a quick snack. Don’t say anything. Just hand it to them while you’re starting into the conversation and just see how that goes, back to the playing with it. But yeah, being able to contemplate it ourselves and start to see it without putting expectations on other people to meet us right there. When we start doing this, they will get curious. We will have opportunities outside of the charged moments to mention these things. So, it’s something we can all get to, but again, needs time to practice, needs time to just kind of soak in the ethos. ANNA: And having that self awareness piece. When when I make it have an action, what’s my driving need? What need am I trying to meet with this action? From simple things like I’m calling a friend. “Hey, I’m feeling lonely, or I’m feeling like I want to be heard by someone, or I’m just wanting to connect.” It can be anything. But if we start to just understand that the behaviors are always driven by a need, it just gets easier and faster to recognize them. PAM: It does. It does so much. Okay. Okay. Thank you so much for listening everyone, and we will see you next time. Bye. ANNA: Bye bye.

EU388: Bids for Connection

Join Pam, Anna, and Erika to talk about bids for connection. John and Julie Gottman from the Gottman Institute coined the term “bids for connection” to describe many moments through our days when people in our lives try to connect with us. In our conversation, we talked about what those bids can look like (sometimes it doesn’t feel connecting at all!), what turning towards, turning away, and turning against a bid feels like, and we shared lots of examples from our own lives. Getting curious and looking through this new lens can really help strengthen our relationships with the people we love. We hope you find our conversation helpful on your unschooling journey and in your relationships! THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE The Living Joyfully Shop – books, courses, including Four Pillars of Unschooling and Navigating Conflict, coaching calls, and more! We invite you to join us in The Living Joyfully Network, a wonderful online community for parents to connect and engage in candid conversations about living and learning through the lens of unschooling. This month, we’re talking about seasons—in unschooling and in life. Come and be part of the conversation! Sign up to our mailing list to receive The Living Joyfully Dispatch, our biweekly email newsletter, and get a free copy of Pam’s intro to unschooling ebook, What is Unschooling? Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube. Follow @exploringunschooling on Instagram. Follow @pamlaricchia on Instagram and Facebook. Check out our website, livingjoyfully.ca for more information about navigating relationships and exploring unschooling. So much of what we talk about on this podcast and in the Living Joyfully Network isn’t actually about unschooling. It’s about life. On The Living Joyfully Podcast, Anna Brown and Pam Laricchia talk about life, relationships, and parenting. You can check out the archive here, or find it in your your favorite podcast player. EPISODE TRANSCRIPT ANNA: Hello and welcome. I’m Anna Brown, and today I’m joined by my co-hosts, Pam Laricchia and Erika Ellis. Hello. And if you are here with us and enjoying the podcast, I invite you to join us at the Living Joyfully Network. It’s such a beautiful, supportive space filled with intentional people exploring ideas and sharing their journeys, and it just fills me up so much and I just want everyone to experience that. You can learn more about the network at the Living Joyfully Shop, which also has resources and support in the forms of books, courses, and coaching as well. You can find the link in the show notes, or you can visit livingjoyfullyshop.com. In today’s podcast, we will be talking about bids for connection. I love this reframe. It has helped me so many times, so I’m really looking forward to this discussion and I think Erika’s gonna get us started. ERIKA: I would love to. I just love this topic so much and I would like to give a brief introduction to the idea of bids for connection. Doctors John and Julie Gottman from the Gottman Institute have been studying relationships for many decades, and they came up with this concept of bids for connection as a way of viewing our interactions with the people we love as opportunities for validation and connection. So a bid for connection is just a little action. Something someone says that indicates that another person would like to connect with us. It could look like someone saying, look at this, or I’m exhausted. Or it could be a hug or a request for help, or a loud sigh. It’s basically an opportunity to make a choice in how we respond and the Gottmans describe three possible directions we could take. So the first is called turning towards, which means enthusiastically meeting the bid with connection, looking towards the person, responding with validation, increasing those feelings of connection. The person is feeling seen and heard, and the relationship is strengthened. The second is called turning away, which could look like just staying mostly unengaged by the bid. So maybe just continuing to look at whatever you were already working on. Glancing up for a second to say, mm-hmm. Or wait a minute. Something like that. Sometimes it feels like this is the best that we can respond in this moment, but over time that type of response will lead to disconnection in the relationship and the person can feel rebuffed or like you’re not very interested in them. And then the third is called turning against, which is usually the result of being in a state of overwhelm. So turning against would look like aggressively rejecting the bid for connection. Like, can’t you see I’m busy? Or, oh, here we go, what now? Or rolling your eyes. So turning against damages the relationship and makes it more likely that the person is not going to make future bids for connection. So I found some examples of what these three options might look like with a couple different bids. So if someone says, can you come here for a minute? Turning towards, might be, sure what’s up? Turning away. Might be, in a minute. I’m almost done with this. And turning against might be, can’t you see? I’m watching the game here. You can imagine how different those three responses would feel. If someone says, whoa, check out that view. Turning towards might be looking at the view and saying, whoa, that’s amazing. And turning away might be like not really looking up at all and saying, mm-hmm. And turning against might be really, you had me look up for that?! I thought that one was kind of an obvious example. But this next one was super interesting. So say if someone says. I’m exhausted. Turning towards might be. Is there anything I can do to help you feel more rested? Turning away might be, I know me too. And turning against might be, you don’t think I’m tired, and so I thought the turning away was more subtle in this case, since basically saying “me too” might feel validating in some ways. But I think the point in turning towards is really to keep the focus on the person who’s making the bid and making sure that they’re validated in their experience first. And so rather than turn it around and immediately make it about both of us being tired, validating them first may feel the most connecting. And one of the aspects that I find so interesting about this topic is just how varied the bids for connection could look like. That sigh just walking in the room and sitting down, getting louder and louder, which some children will do or asking for help. The possibilities are really endless. And there was a great network thread about bids for connection that looked like requests for help getting food, which I think we see a lot with our kids. So anyway, I love this topic and I’m super excited to dive with you both. PAM: Yes. I love this topic too, and I remember so many conversations over the years and the big aha moment for me when we first started using this lens of bids for connection was that defining things that felt like an upset kid or that felt like more of a challenge, right? Just seeing it as the challenge, but then realizing, oh, really, I can frame it as a bid for connection because they’re wanting help with it or maybe they’re expressing more frustration than they really feel because they want to make sure that the bid connects. They’re just trying to get some interaction. So I found that to be a super useful way to look at it. And also, if I ever in the back of my mind said they can do that themselves, why are they asking me to get them a drink or make a sandwich or, pass me that thing that is like five feet from them that they could get up and get, reframing that and understanding that really so often it is more about connecting and interacting with me than it is about the thing. Because they could just get up and get it if it was just about the thing. And just through the experience of responding as it was a bid, turning toward it and seeing how fruitful choosing that action was. The connection that actually followed, just reinforced the idea that so often these really were bids for connecting with me or with someone else. Right. So I think it’s such a useful lens to bring to our days. ANNA: Yeah. I love that point, what you just were talking about there, because I think sometimes people will ask and wonder, how do I cultivate these close, connected relationships? Or we’re not in a good place and what do I do? Or it’s a teenager and it’s feeling harder. This lens is so helpful because it is so rare that a teen is going to come up and say, Hey, I want to talk to you and have some attention now. Let’s make a connection. It is going to be sitting in the room, walking in, and in my case, she’ll come sit and sit. Just sit. And so, then it’s like, oh, okay. She’s wanting a little bit of connection with others. Or It can feel like a demand. Like why? You’re right next to the water. I’m way over here. Why can’t you get the water, you know? Oh, they want me to look up from what I’m doing. So, I think there are a couple steps that were helpful to me when I would hear something that kind of plucked me the wrong way, you know, something that maybe felt like a demand. I would look at the whole context, am I present with them? Am I busy with something else? Is that something they feel like will get my attention away from what I’m doing? And so then I can check in and make a choice. But like you said, what I loved about what you just said, Pam was when we choose to lean into these bids, even when they feel a little unconventional or not like what we’re expecting. It’s so fruitful. You just see it opens up or the energy changes or a conversation that maybe wouldn’t have happened unfolds. And with my quiet one that comes and sits down, it takes a long time, but then she gets to what she wants to talk about. And if I short circuited that, because I’m like, why are you here? You’re not saying a word, then I’d never get to, I’m worried about this thing or this thing happened and I’m kind of excited about it, or whatever the thing is that she wants to share. It’s just a really fun lens to bring to all of these interactions and because my kids are older now, but when you have little kids and you’re doing all the things, it can be really hard when there are lots of bids for connection coming at you. And so I tried to be mindful. I knew that every second I couldn’t drop everything and turn towards them. That sometimes that just wasn’t a reality when you had a baby with a diaper, you’re in the middle of changing. And so instead of that, like you were talking about earlier, Erika, In a minute, I’ll be there in a minute. That kind of has a rushed or hurried or annoyed tone to it. Even if my hands were deep in something, just making eye contact, smiling and, oh my gosh, I cannot wait to see that. I will be right there. I need to do X. Give them more information. That narration that we talk about. So that they know, okay, it’s not that I’m valuing this thing, I’m doing more. It’s that I’m in the middle of it and I need to finish it to get it to a place where I can stop. But wow, am I interested in you and what you’re bringing to me. And I think that can make it feel so different. So don’t be hard on yourself if you can’t just stop everything and turn straight into the bid, but you can do that little tweak of the eye contact, the smile, the turning towards, even if you have to finish something. ERIKA: Oh yeah. I love that slight adjustment to make the turning away feel more connecting as well, because it’s in between turning towards and turning away and then making sure to follow through when we do have time. That follow through is like a mini repair that improves the connection again. So maybe I couldn’t immediately do the thing. But if I’ve had a pattern of turning away and being busy and being busy, then making the repair of, and now I have time and I’m going to do it, it can help. But also noticing if we have a pattern of turning against, if things have been really hard, and then making that repair and watching for opportunities to turn towards. I think that’s what it’s all about. Just noticing. And I love what you brought up too, about it being a good place to start when you want to improve your relationships. Just using this lens as a place to start. It’s never going to be a bad thing to assume that everything’s a bid for connection. You might as well just start there, and just see if maybe the more I turn towards all these little things, that I’ll just strengthen our connection. When I think about those ones that are harder, when someone’s being super grumpy, when someone is snapping at us, when someone is sighing or whatever the things are that can sometimes trigger us, when we’re busy ourselves, showing kindness and turning towards those hard moments for other people, I think it has so many positive outcomes to the relationship. I know when I’m having a hard time if someone can respond to me with love and kindness instead of getting irritated that I’m being snappy or whatever it is, it just feels better. These are just like little shifts that can make such a huge difference in our connection with our people. PAM: Okay, so two things. Number one, yes, understanding when it’s a much sharper kind of bid for connection back to then it’s just little reminders to help us process and move through. For me, it helps to remember that, okay, this is much more about them than it is about me. Something’s up, something’s frustrating, and if I can turn toward that and help them move through it, then that is relationship building. And then the piece you said Erika, about, just for a while, especially if we’re feeling disconnected, assume that everything is a bid for connection is brilliant. And then the following through piece, right? Because that’s where the trust is built. It’s not a dismissive statement when, maybe we connect, we’re excited about it. And we’ll be able to come when we’re finished. This thing, like narrating what’s going on and following through with that is again, connecting. Because that builds trust. It doesn’t need to be immediate, but that you can trust what I say. You can trust that I will follow through or I will come and say, oh, this thing came up and, but just keep following through. So keep responding to the bids, keep following through, and then the narrating piece. When we can’t turn toward it, in that moment, we can still make it a connecting moment. We can still look them in the eyes, unless we’re using a knife, but we can stop. Just stop cutting for a second. Because sometimes we can get so in our head and we’re wanting to, we’ve got this task that we’re doing and we’re wanting to finish it. But taking that moment, if that relationship is a priority, that can help us remember and remind ourselves, yeah, this is something that I want to do and life is not a race. I don’t need to be completely focused on one thing to the detriment of everything else. And then switch. It just helps me with so many layers of moments in the day. ANNA: I love it as a trust building piece, right? That this is how we do it. Because it’s work to build trust. Trust, and especially if it’s been broken or there’s been some kind of a rupture, this is such a great way to build that trust, to build that rapport. But I really loved, oh no, did I just lose it? I may have lost it, but it was about… I did. I lost it. I’m sorry. I’m gonna come back ’cause it was important. I’m going to get it again. ERIKA: Okay. One thing that popped into my head was that sometimes, especially when I had little kids, their request for help could also be an indication that something about the environment is making it difficult for them to do the thing. So even though this is not related to bids for connection, I wanted to mention it, just because it can be draining when kids are asking us for things all day, every day. And so I think it’s both like I’m always going to want to turn towards, but maybe part of what I’m turning towards is with curiosity to figure out is there a reason why getting water is hard for them? And trying to make those changes in the environment so that they’re feeling like things are doable for them if they’re wanting to do it. And so maybe they’re asking you for water all the time, but it’s because the fridge squirted water on them once and now they’re afraid to use it. There could be any number of reasons for an individual person. And so, figuring out a solution for that, being available, being curious, turning towards them, but then also digging a little deeper. I feel like that helps strengthen our connection and then also helps empower them if there are those kinds of things that are trickier. ANNA: Yeah, I mean I think that really changes, really enhances the connection, right? Because if it is a problem, something happens, you tuning in and showing them they are important to me. I want to understand why this is feeling hard. Is there something I can do that feels really connecting? But I did remember what I was going to say, which was when you were saying to look at everything as a bid for connection. What I think is so fun about that is we can kind of get in our head, or maybe it’s just me, but I think it happens to other people where we feel like they’re trying to thwart us, or why is everybody making everything so difficult? Why are there so many demands on me? Why does it have to be me? And that’s about me, obviously. What’s my capacity in that moment, but when I can change it to, they’re not trying to thwart me. They actually want to connect with me, and maybe I’ve made that hard because I’ve been busy doing other things, and so they’re getting a little grumpy and trying a couple different things, playing around with ways they can connect, but it has such a different energy to think, I don’t need to be exasperated here. This is somebody I love and they’re wanting to connect with me, and gosh, I’m going to take this opportunity to sit down and help them tie their shoes, even though they can tie their shoes. Or I’m going to get them that glass of water because I can use it as time for me to calm down and get a glass of water and then come back and give it to them. And so, I love that reframe. I think it can really help us when we get caught in our head thinking people are trying to thwart me. It can really help me just calm down and remember, actually these are people that I love and they want to connect with me and I want to connect with them. And yes, maybe we’re having a difficult day or we’re all at low capacity. And that’s okay.I love the narration reminder. Again, if we can narrate a little bit more about that, it helps. So, the bids for connections are not always smooth and perfect, you know? But they’re there. And when we look at them through that lens, I feel like we’re looking at the people around us with love. PAM: Yeah, I love that. And there was another piece too, as you were talking there, feeling all these bids coming in, bids coming in. And also remember that we can put out bids for connection as well. The thing that helps me anyway, when I think of it that way, through that lens is like, I am lightly putting out these bids, and for me it just helps not to have expectations attached to them. It’s just so handy and then handy and helpful for me to even notice like we’re talking about that capacity piece and feeling overwhelmed. We too get to notice when we might like to connect with somebody else when we’re in a space where it’s like, it would be nice to just go chat with somebody. Even change where my head is right now because maybe I’m having a hard time. Getting out of something that I was super focused on, et cetera, something like that. So to remember that it’s a tool that I can use as well is super helpful and helpful for me too when I know that I’m actively wanting to do that, to take that moment to see through the eyes of the person I’m wanting to connect with. Come to them because the goal is the connection. I’m not trying to accomplish anything in particular, other than that connection. So, if I’m feeling a little disconnected from my kids, it’s not inviting them to come do something that I like to do. My bid for connection can be to come and join in what they’re doing, because that’s what I’m looking for. I’m looking for the connection, and the easiest way to do that is to join somebody in what they’re already doing. Or offering up something that we enjoy doing together, et cetera, so that it’s about the connection, not about me per se. That was always a very useful kind of mindset shift for me. ERIKA: I love that it feels kind of like reframing all of that stuff coming at us in such a way that then you can feel almost excited about it. Because it’s going to build my relationship with them. This is something I can use to increase our connection. So, yeah. I love that. ANNA: Yeah. I love that. And really loved Pam, you talking about us putting bids out and I think one of the things of just recognizing this whole idea, because we do it almost unconsciously, right? Where we’re needing connection, we’re stuck in something and we do the, can you get me some water or can you do X, and maybe our partner’s like, uh, okay, but you’re next to the kitchen. And so what has been helpful for me, and this goes back to narration. Is to start using more clear language about it. Like, Hey, I’m just needing to be taken care of for a minute. I’ve had a really hard call, or something’s been going on. And what’s interesting about that is it can help give everybody that language. So it’s not unusual to just say, you know what? I just need to snuggle on the couch, or I just need your help with this or I need this. And so it’s interesting to think that we take something that’s kind of subconscious and we can bring it into the conscious with that narration and it really changes things. And so, I love that piece that you’re talking about, being aware of our own bids for connection as well. Okay, this was fun and I think everybody will be going, ding, ding, ding. There’s lots of things to think about in a new lens, to look around the house and into your relationships. I’m excited about that. Thank you so much to the two of you for joining me today and for everyone listening, and again, I would love to invite you to check out the Living Joyfully Network and just join the conversation because it’s so much fun. See you next time!

EU286 Flashback: Connect with Courage with Roya Dedeaux

This week, we share a conversation that Pam had with Roya Dedeaux in 2021, diving into her book, Connect with Courage. Roya is a grown unschooler, a marriage and family therapist, and an unschooling mom of three, so she has lots of experience to draw from as she considers how children learn and thrive. In her book, Roya describes the many benefits of supporting our children’s interests and the strong connections between parent and child that those positive interactions cultivate. She also details nineteen different barriers that can arise and walks readers through ways to find solutions. In their conversation, Pam and Roya talked about two of these barriers and how so much of it is our inner, emotional work to do to move past our fears and to a place of connection with our kids. The conversation was energizing! Connect with Courage contains some powerful, life-changing ideas. We hope you enjoy the conversation! QUESTIONS FOR ROYA As a quick refresher, can you share with us a bit about you and your family? What is everybody interested in right now? I’m thrilled to have recently published your book, Connect with Courage: Practical Ways to Release Fear and Find Joy in the Places Your Children Take You. I really love the book, and I think it may well be life-changing for many parents. Let’s start off with this: why is the connection between parent and child so important? When it comes to connecting with our kids through supporting their interests and passions, lots of things can get in our way! And that’s where our work as parents comes in, which is why the many exercises you’ve included to walk parents through these challenges are so helpful. In the book you work through nineteen common barriers, and I thought we could touch on a couple of them here. First, let’s dive into “I don’t understand why they enjoy it.” How can a parent work through that challenge? Another barrier I hear parents complaining about pretty regularly, especially with younger kids, is that the thing their child likes to do is messy. There are a couple of aspects to that, aren’t there? What do you love most about your unschooling lives right now? THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE The Living Joyfully Shop – books, courses, including Four Pillars of Unschooling and Navigating Conflict, coaching calls, and more! Roya’s book, Connect with Courage Roya’s earlier podcast episode, Growing Up Unschooling with Roya Dedeaux Roya’s website and Instagram We invite you to join us in The Living Joyfully Network, a wonderful online community for parents to connect and engage in candid conversations about living and learning through the lens of unschooling. This month, we’re talking about seasons—in unschooling and in life. Come and be part of the conversation! Sign up to our mailing list to receive The Living Joyfully Dispatch, our biweekly email newsletter, and get a free copy of Pam’s intro to unschooling ebook, What is Unschooling? Listen to our conversation on YouTube. Follow @pamlaricchia on Instagram and Facebook. Check out our website, livingjoyfully.ca for more information about navigating relationships and exploring unschooling. TRANSCRIPT PAM: Welcome! I’m Pam Laricchia from livingjoyfully.ca and today I’m here with Roya Dedeaux. Hi, Roya! ROYA: Hello, hello! How are you, Pam? PAM: I am very well. Thank you. And, Roya, you were first on the podcast back in 2016, right? We did a Growing Up Unschooling episode, and now I’m very excited to have you back to talk about your new book Connect with Courage. So, to get us started, I thought a refresher would be great. Can you share with us a little bit about you and your family? And what’s everybody into right now? ROYA: Yeah, absolutely. The first thing though, I have to say, is thank you for publishing my book! That’s kind of a big deal and I really, really appreciate not only the time that you spent on it and the editing and the publishing, but also the esteemed company I’m in. It’s very exciting to be up on that list. So, thank you, Pam. PAM: Oh, it was my pleasure. I love this book. I’m so excited to actually talk about it with you! ROYA: So, we are in an interesting transition phase. I’m just coming back from maternity leave. I have a four-month-old now, so I’ve got a seven-year-old, a four-year-old, and a four-month-old. And we’ve been diving into the world of finding babysitters and getting me back to work. As part of that maternity leave, we were able to go on a big, grand, 10-national-park RV trip, which was really exciting. We went to Dinosaur National Monument, because my son is super into everything dinosaur, wants to be a paleontologist. We also moved about five months ago and so, now we have a pool and a trampoline and a new neighborhood to explore. So, it feels like a lot of big muscle movement summer days down here in Southern California, lots of swimming, lots of trampoline, gardening, cooking things and taking them to our neighbors, paying attention to all the birds. We know all the bird drama in the neighborhood. And we downloaded the Audubon app to watch birds. So, some of you listening might be in rural places where this isn’t a shocker, but I’m in Southern California, very close to LA, and so, it’s really fun to have a barn owl swoop down while we’re eating dinner. Lots of that kind of noticing happening. PAM: Oh, that’s wonderful. That’s wonderful. So, dinosaurs, that’s a big thing. Paleontologist in action right now. ROYA: Oh yes. And he got to touch actual dinosaur fossils and talk to very knowledgeable rangers and we saw bison and went in a cave and, oh, it was just an amazing, amazing trip. So, my kids are just living their best little lives. And then, I am up to my eyebrows in getting back into the world of therapy and I also make and sell jewelry and I run online bazaars. So, I’ve been occupied with that in the best way possible. And then, of course, talking about selling the book and making a whole bunch of journals and publishing those on Amazon. PAM: Yeah. Yeah. We’ll definitely put links to that stuff in the show notes, as well. So, let’s dive into your book. As I said, I am really thrilled to have been able to publish that. It was so much fun working with you on that, back and forth, and back and forth, for what seemed like many months as we both had life things come up. It was awesome. That’s one of the reasons why I do love working with unschooling parents, because we have our priorities and yet when we have the time, we dive in deep. It is a lot of fun. But anyway, I think your book will definitely be very life-changing for a lot of parents. In fact, you don’t even specifically talk about unschooling in it, but why I was so excited to work with it is because so much of deschooling is our work to do, parents’ work to do, as they’re exploring what unschooling is and how to just cultivate that lifestyle, that learning lifestyle in their family. So, this book just meshes so well with that whole process. I wanted to start off with a bit about your background and why you wanted to write this book and why connection between the parent and child is so very important. ROYA: I’m the oldest of three girls. They’re three and then six years younger than me. And so, I finished out fourth grade in traditional public school and then I never went back to fifth grade. My parents decided not to send us back. There were lots of small reasons, but it boils down to they saw that our interest in things and our curiosity was being stamped out, whether by being forced to learn things we didn’t want to learn about, or by honestly other kids making fun of us that we wanted to spend all summer reading and that kind of thing. They just didn’t send us back to school. I never went back to fifth. Roxana never went back to second. And then I don’t think Rosie ever went to anything other than preschool. So, then we just did all the things we were interested in and we didn’t have a lack of that. I’m a combination of a deep diver and a dabbler. I dive in completely, totally all the way into something for like three weeks and then I go onto the next thing. And we were busy. We were on swim teams and in Shakespeare theater groups, and I was really involved in ceramics, and we did a lot of theater, and we did Girl Scouts and soccer. We did a lot of things. And that’s just the outside activities. I was also passionately interested in candle making and crazy quilt sewing and journaling and photography and all the do-at-home kind of things. My parents were phenomenal at supporting our interests and when I give parents examples now, I almost always can think back to an example of my parents helping me. So, I would be on hour 14 of making a zine, for example, in my bedroom. And I’d have just paper scattered out all around me and my mom would crack the door open. I’d be listening to the same Ani DiFranco CD on repeat for 24 hours. And my mom would crack the door open and slide a plate of food across and just be like, “Hi. How are you doing? Okay,” and leave. And I remember just being able to settle into that, like, this is what I’m doing and it’s what I love to do and it’s okay with everybody else. And so, I grew up with that very solid knowledge that what I’m interested in is valuable. They didn’t interrupt me. They bragged about the things I was doing to other people, even if there were no trophies for the zines I was making. There was no quantifiable success marker. PAM: Reward. ROYA: Right, right. So, it wasn’t like, “Guess what? She got first in the amount of time she spent cutting pieces of paper up on her bedroom floor.” But I knew for a fact that they valued the choices I was making. So, I had that experience. And then, fast forward, I go and I get a degree in recreation and leisure studies, which I used to tell people was like majoring in Girl Scouts. There’s the recreational activity side, like event management and outdoor recreation piece. But there’s also a philosophy side, the leisure philosophy, why play is important, why free time is important. All of those things that lined up so clearly with why we unschooled. And so, that just felt like, “Oh! There’s language for this.” Other people have been studying this, not in the guise of doing away with school. It’s so strange to me that people don’t make that connection. But given all of these parameters, this thing is also important. I was finding language. I discovered the world of positive psychology. I went back to school to get my master’s in counseling, thinking one day I would have an art therapy camp. And in that program, I discovered positive psychology and the theory of flow and Dr. Seligman and all of the actual research behind why play is important and why uninterrupted time is important and why settling in and being able to spend hours and hours of time on an interest is good for us. So again, I was able to put language to these things that I knew from my upbringing and watching my sisters and all of our unschooling friends. And then I started private practice. And although at this point, the majority of my practice, I’d say is homeschoolers/unschoolers, that wasn’t always the case, because at the beginning I was just casting a wide net, putting myself out there in Psychology Today, please come and see me as a therapist. And I was working in community mental health as well and even with some court-ordered families, things like that. And so, in my happy unschooling bubble, I had seen the positive side of supporting kids’ interests and what that can do for relationships and families. And then as I ventured out into the world of counseling, I saw the opposite and I saw all the places where struggles between parents and their kids could be traced back to not feeling valued or their interests being disparaged. And I saw people with addiction issues who, when we dug deeper, it felt like they’d never felt a connection to something bigger than themselves. They never felt like they had purpose or drive. And I saw self-worth issues and self-esteem issues, because when they were younger, all of the important adults in their life told them that what they were interested in didn’t matter. And they internalized, “If I love this thing and I’m wrong for loving it, and then I must be wrong.” And then straight up just terrible, awful, neglectful, abusive situations where parents were insulting their children and disparaging their interests and it caused a lot of barriers. So, in both places, I was seeing the importance here of a simple (but not always easy) solution to a lot of these things, which was when they’re young, start supporting them and support their interests. Be interested in what they’re interested in. And so, then I started paying more attention to why is that so hard? Why do we struggle so much when a kid wants to watch hour four of that YouTube unboxing video? Why do we not want them to do that? And why do we all get all our backs up when our kids want to spend a couple more hours by Minecraft? And what are the fears and what stands in our way? And that is the book. It’s the long story, but that’s the book. It’s, this is important. Here’s why. Here’s what happens when it goes right. Here’s what happens when it goes wrong. And here are ways you can deal with those things that stand in your way. PAM: Oh, I love that. I love that. That’s a great overview of why it’s so valuable to connect with your kids and to support their interests and their passions and even being okay. I think it can be hard to be okay with someone who’s a deep diver for three weeks and then comes back up and that it’s something completely different. It’s like, “Well, gee. I thought you wanted to a be a photographer!” And then all of a sudden you pull back out. ROYA: And I think that’s the unschooling piece. And yeah, I never mentioned the word homeschooling or unschooling in the book, very purposefully. But I think that’s the part where unschooling parents have a little bit of a head start. When you’re unschooling, you’re paying so close attention to your kids, you’re watching those patterns. You’re paying attention. Are their eyes lighting up to that? What can I strew in their path? It’s an active engagement thing. And so, I think that, for a lot of unschoolers, that piece of it, they don’t have to start from the paying attention part. They start from the implementation piece. The paying attention is knowing, okay, we’ve seen this tree before. Maybe I’m not going to sign my kid up for an 18-week intensive course, no matter how interested in it they are, because I know that in three weeks, they’re going to stop doing that. And one of the struggles I have is, we paid the money, so I want them to keep going. So, let’s not put them in that situation to start with. So, it’s that paying attention. PAM: Yeah, yeah. Paying attention to that bigger picture. A good lovely chunk of the book is working through these common barriers that come up for us. So, we could touch on a couple of those and just dive in with people. I thought first we could dive into the barrier of, “I don’t understand why they enjoy it.” So, the unboxing video example, right? Whatever it is, if we don’t understand why our kid is enjoying the thing, how can we work through that challenge for ourselves? Because it’s our challenge. ROYA: It is. It’s totally our challenge. And that’s one of the first things to do is to remember that we have however many years of messaging and bias and experience and baggage and all that stuff about that topic, perhaps, and your kid does not. Your kid comes to that thing pretty fresh. So, we need to just remember that. I’m thinking about people who’ve been upset with their kids for loving Nerf guns, for example. You have all this whole big, giant trash bag full of, “But it’s violence and it’s this and it’s that.” And the kid is just like, “I don’t know. I like to point and shoot at things.” So, it’s totally a different ballgame for them. So, that’s one thing I suggest to parents is try to really identify what’s your stuff and what’s theirs, because it’s probably yours. And you’re the grownup, so you have to do the work. So, the other piece if you don’t understand, and of course there’s that we fear what we don’t understand, and often it’s about a new medium for things. We are storytellers. We are storytellers as humans and I see video game play, hours spent on YouTube or TikTok or whatever, we are still storytelling in those media. But if they’re new and if you don’t understand it, then it’s not familiar and you’re worried about all the unknown things. So, you can make parallels. When people say, “Screen time is bad.” I require my clients that they go through and say, “Would I say the same thing of ‘paper time’? Would I say the same thing of ‘food time,’ ‘outdoor time,’ or, ‘inside time’?” And so, trying to find parallels can sometimes help you just work through some of that strange stigma that comes up in your brain. Get to know the thing. If you’re like, “Oh my gosh. All they’re doing is they’re on TikTok.” I say this because I was up until 2:00 in the morning on TikTok, so that’s fresh. But if, “All they’re doing is TikTok. All they’re doing is TikTok,” go get on TikTok. Go see what it’s about. Go find out. If you have an open relationship with your kid, I bet you could sit down next to them and say, “Hey, show me what you’re interested in.” So, asking them what it is about it that they love. Most of the kids I know who have a decent relationship with their parents are just absolutely dying for somebody to sit down and talk to them about the thing that they love to do. I remember when I started at community college, I was 13 and I took a writing class. And I came home like, “Oh my gosh! This person is just going to read all my writing and talk to me about it?” It was so exciting. So, you can be that person for your kid. Sit down and listen to them talk about why that thing is so interesting to them. And if you don’t want to interrupt their time, for whatever reason, you can also sit down and just observe. I very often ask parents to watch their kids and challenge them to make a list of 30 possible things that their kid might be getting out of whatever the activity is. And some, you might be able to see and some, you might have to go online and research or ask other people what it is. And, in that case, you might be guessing, but it’ll get the juices flowing for you to start thinking of these activities as beneficial. Kids are not always going to get the same thing out of an activity that you think they ought to be getting to. And they’re not going to get it in the same way. I was just recording another podcast where I was talking about how I did ceramics for years and years, and I didn’t have any interest in glazing. Once I finished throwing the piece, I was done. I didn’t care about the finished product. I just wanted my hands in the clay and I very often would even give away my pieces. I made hundreds of things and I’d give them away to other people to glaze and keep, because I was done with it. But if someone had forced me to do it, step-by-step, start to finish until it was absolutely over, and I had to pay attention to glazing and all that, I probably would have quit ceramics and it was a huge part of my life and I got a lot out of it. Part of it is remembering that people are getting something, be assured of that. They’re getting something. If they’re choosing to spend their time there, it’s valuable in some way. Your job as the parent is to look for what that value is, remembering that it might be different than what you would get out of it and how you would get it out of it. Talk to them about it. Be a detective, look for clues, and work through your own stuff. PAM: Yeah. Detective was what was coming to mind for me. Exactly. Because, for me, that was the fun piece. If you can start with knowing that they’re getting something out of it. Just as you said, they’re getting something. Something is drawing them to it. Something is keeping them there. And I just take it as my job as a detective, to be so curious and, “I wonder what it is!” I love your idea of trying to come up with 30 things that it could be. I love that so much, because it can be such a wide range of things for people and we don’t even need to literally know what the one answer is, because coming up with 20 or 30 helps you realize that there are so many possibilities. There’s something. And then when we realize that, we get out of the tunnel vision of the one horrible thing that we’re thinking. ROYA: Right. The one fear. PAM: Yeah. Whatever our fear is, it’s like, oh, it can be so many other things. That’s just one possibility. So, now all of a sudden, it’s not this huge weight. Then we can relax some more and we can actually start kind of getting involved and participating and having fun. ROYA: Yeah. And then it’s fun! Definitely. I get parents who are distraught and there’s always stuff going on and I don’t want to minimize that at all, but we get so wrapped up in that one potential, fearful place, that it could be leading to this bad thing. Or it could be preventing them from success. We get so caught up in that, that we forget that this process is actually kind of a delight and it’s really fun to be a part of that. And parenting is kind of a sweet gig if you can look at it in that respect. I just think about not just my kids, the places that we’ve been able to travel to, and the things that I’ve learned, and the projects we’ve done, and the joy that I get in them opening up and sharing their interests with me, is amazing. But also with my clients, I can’t even tell you the number of new TV shows I’ve watched, the number of awesome conversations I’ve had, the number of things I’ve tried, the number of connections they’ve made. It’s so fun to connect with people on that level. And it’s fun to watch, too, because if you can get past the fear, and especially for parents who are worried about their kids spending all their time doing something, your kids are expert level at that thing. And it is really, really cool to talk to people who are experts about the subject that they’re expert in. And what I want for parents is to be able to get that fearful voice out of the way so they can enjoy that and talk to their expert level kids who are invested and passionate and know the language and can teach you about whole new worlds. PAM: I know. I always felt like I was a student of life of my children. If I could get out of my head, that fear, that judgment piece, if I could get out and just be in the moment with them, oh my gosh. That is how I got experience with the lifestyle. And then, like you said, you bring that curiosity about the world and about other people and what they find interesting, you bring that with you to all the other people in your life and your world gets so much bigger. Literally, I joined TikTok a few weeks ago. My kids are adults now, but it’s fun. The world is fun. And my daughter was starting to post on TikTok and I’m like, “I’d love to see what you’re making!” I’m making an account. I’m exploring. It’s fun. And when you can come with that lens of fun and curiosity, the world is just so much bigger, I think. And we can connect. You have now a way to connect with people, rather than saying, “You guys are all adults. I’m older now. I’m in my fifties. I don’t want to learn any new tech.” No. That’s not the way I want to go through my life. ROYA: Right. And ironically, the fear is usually about a safety thing, that that thing is gonna end up hurting my kid in some way. But connecting with your kid, every single study, homeschooling-related or not, shows that engagement with parents is the thing that helps keep people safe into adulthood. It helps with substance use and it helps with risky situations and peer pressure and all of these things that we’re scared of for our kids, being able to have open communication with your parents is the thing that keeps you safe. And that’s not going to happen if you don’t find places to connect with them. Sitting on the couch and watching YouTube, I mean, physically they’re safe. They might be seeing something that maybe I would choose not to let them be exposed to at a young age or whatever, but it’s okay to think dangerous thoughts. Just because you see it or think it doesn’t mean you are it or will go do it. And that gives you the opportunity to have those conversations and the support that you give when you value their choices pays off so much later on when physical safety is what we’re talking about. So, it’s not just the fun piece and the exciting piece and just getting along better day to day. I get a lot of parents who come to me who talk about the struggle and the battle, and those kinds of words with their kids. So, not only is it just the light and fun and playful side, but it’s also actually safer and better for their success later when it is more serious and all the other pieces, too. We learn better when we can be creative and we learn better when we’re playful. We learn better when things are not being forced upon us. And we can take what we learn, even if it’s on Minecraft, even if it’s in a video game, the things that we learn there generalize to other things. And I think that’s a big part that parents are scared of. When they don’t understand why a kid wants to spend their time doing this thing, they’re also worried about all the other things they might be missing out on. And so, to that, I just like to remind parents, too, that just because you learned teamwork on a soccer field doesn’t mean you don’t use those things in other places. Just because you learned strategic thinking through Minecraft doesn’t mean you don’t use those abilities in other places. And far more important is learning how you learn and, again, keeping that relationship really open with your parents and then it’ll take you other places. But parents get like, “But right now it’s not working like that!” And you gotta take a big breath. PAM: Yeah. And you learn better when you feel safe. Because when you’re feeling safe in your environment, in your home environment, or with your family, you feel much safer to explore, to try things that you might not have tried before, because you’re less fearful of being judged, being talked down to, being told to stop. And when you’re comfortable, you actually feel much safer to explore and learn. When you’re fearful and you don’t know what they’re learning, coming up with all the different things that it could be, connecting with them helps you get a good idea of what it is that they’re enjoying. So, not only can you help by bringing in new things that are similar, like if they’re really enjoying the strategic aspect, if that’s what they’re loving in Minecraft is they’re loving figuring out strategy, somebody else is loving building things. If you just say, “They’re playing Minecraft for hours,” you don’t know what it is that they’re loving. And they could be very different things that you can bring into their world depending on what it is that they love. So, as you’re building that connection, because they feel seen and heard from you when you’re starting to see and ask them those questions. “Oh! What strategy did you use for this? Oh, how did you build that thing?” depending on what it is, they’re feeling seen, they’re feeling heard, they’re feeling connected with you. They’re building trust in you. And that is where you can help them when you start coming up on these things that you’re fearful about. Whether it’s time or whatever that safety aspect is for you, or where they’re feeling uncomfortable. They feel connected with you to have those conversations. ROYA: Right, right. And you just know them better and you know if they start to look around for what’s the next thing, “I don’t want to do just this,” then you can say, “Oh. Hey, I have this blah, blah, blah and it kind of reminded me of that thing.” Or strew it quietly or whatever it is that that you’re going to do with it. But then, yeah, you’ve got things up to bat that are in line with what it is that they’re interested in already. And again, when we look at it from just our perspective, we can miss the mark on that a lot. I was thinking about how my sister was really into baking and she was doing a bake around-the-world thing. And I made some comment about, “Oh, you should make cookies for the baby shower I’m hosting!” And I’m like, “I’ll pay you.” She goes, “I don’t want to decorate anything.” That was not at all what she wanted. It was not about decorating. And so, for her, it was just a pathway to learning about all these different places around the world. If she were my kid, that’s a really different world that opens than cooking and cake decorating. It’s very different. Like, I’m going to go in that direction, not this other one. And I would never have known that if I had not talked to her about it and asked her about it and been open to it. PAM: Exactly. And because we might not know, it doesn’t mean not offering up things or sharing ideas or thoughts, because that’s how you learned. You said, “Oh, hey, what about this?” But your connection and the trust, she was comfortable saying, “No, you know what? That’s not something that would be interesting to me.” So, that’s how we learn more. It’s not about stepping back and just observing and seeing kind of where things go and trying to put the picture together in our heads. It’s a dance of all of those things. We also connect. If your comments are always met with a “no”, or your suggestions are almost always met with a “no”, it’s like, “Hmm, I’m really off base here. I’m going to take a little bit more time to observe and figure it out.” Because then sometimes it can be our own baggage that we’re just not seeing a bigger picture. Or we have an expectation of where we think it should go. So, then we start trying to plant seeds that pull them in that direction. And so, then they’re always “no”. But engaging and just trying to have those conversations just gives us more information and helps us learn about each other better. ROYA: I think if parents are trying to engage and they’re being met with resistance, that’s a pretty good sign that in some way, even if it was an inadvertent, your kid has been feeling a little judged or they’re feeling protective of their interest and their time in that interest. And so, for those parents, I do suggest trying to switch your language around, trying to make objective statements about things and not subjective ones. I do a lot of art in my therapy practice. And if someone draws something with all the colors and it’s filling up the page, if I say, “Wow, that looks chaotic,” that is all about my interpretation. For them, that might be like busy and bright and dynamic. And so, what I say is, “I noticed you used all of the colors,” and then they can fill in the gaps about what that means. But if I start with the assumption, then that’s not about them. That’s about me. And so, for parents who are being met with resistance, I think it’s the same thing, where you can jump in, sit next to them, and make an observation as opposed to passing a judgment, even a kind judgment. “You chose that character three or four times.” Then you can leave that up to them to say, “Oh yeah, it’s my favorite one.” Now you know something. And now you have just one more little bit of a bridge. I use the metaphor of bridges a lot. And I think that every time you can make that kind of connection with your kid, it’s like a rope bridge. That’s one piece of fiber that’s been extended. And then the more of those fibers you get, they twist together until it’s stronger and stronger and stronger. And then, you’re just running across, back and forth together. And you can make those kinds of little fibery bridges out all over the place. What you don’t want to do is go through with scissors and cut those connections. So, making the observational statement or showing in other ways. It doesn’t have to all be talk. If you think of those love languages, show that you support them without making them discuss their thing. Sit next to them. Read your own book while they’re there. Bring them a blanket if it’s cold. Bring them some snacks. Take your noisy conversation somewhere else, help them clean up something that needs cleaning up if they could benefit from that, if they want that help. There are actions that you can take. It doesn’t all have to be interrogation-based. PAM: No, I love that. One of the kids wasn’t big into words, but you can show so much through your actions and the choices. I love the one that so many people don’t think of is taking your loud conversations to another space or something, just respecting their space, showing respect for the things that they’re choosing to do and the way that they do them, but just consideration as another human being in the world. You might be hungry, you might be thirsty, you might want some quiet, even taking siblings somewhere else to play when they look like they’re really focused on something that they’re doing, there is so much that we can do that also doesn’t need words. ROYA: Yeah. And I think we get this bizarre message from the mainstream world that we’re not supposed to factor kids in when we’re talking about our resource allocation. That it’s only adults who are supposed to decide where we spend the money, how we spend our time, what the house is set up like, all of these resources in our lives. But where we choose to put our resources says a lot about what we value. And that’s really what it is. It’s a symbol of our values. And so, if you’re trying to value your child and their interests and what is important to them, then you’ve got to take a really good look at where you’re spending your resources. Are you factoring them in and are you prioritizing them? And also, making rent and stuff. But I think a lot of families exclude their kids’ interests from the priority list. And very often, if we can work through the emotional side of things, then we can find the logistical pieces of where we’re putting our finite resources. We can look at that creatively. We can think about that. And this can also be a game. When you get started looking at things divergently, you keep going. It snowballs. So, your dining room doesn’t have to be a dining room and you can look at different ways to use space and different ways to get your kids access to stuff. And that can be fun and, if you involve them in that process, then they can trust that you are trying to do that for them. And so, when it is a “no”, they understand it’s a “no”. And you all can help come up with creative solutions to hopefully find the “yes”. PAM: I love that. And I just found that so fun when I could open up what felt like so many constraints and prioritize their needs. Because yeah, when you first come to it, it doesn’t even occur to you to think about it. But when I opened to unschooling and thought of that, it’s like, well, of course. And then it was just so much fun to play with. All of a sudden, rooms and what their functions were and how we used our spaces and the things we chose to bring into our lives and the places we chose, they are so capable of being involved in all of those conversations. And like you said, when that trust builds, they really do come to realize that when things aren’t going to work out maybe for now, or we have to wait a little bit, or whatever, they understand it’s not about them. It’s not a judgment about them at all. It’s us working together and something’s in the way right now, but we’re not going to lose it. When we’ve built that trust, they understand that. They know it might just be waiting. It might not look exactly the way they envisioned it, all those pieces, but we’re all doing our best. We just trust that we’re all doing our best and working together. ROYA: And side bonus, all those things are excellent learning opportunities. So, it’s a win-win. PAM: And they’re skills that are lifelong useful for everyone. I mean, we’re learning them and figuring them out now, but our kids are just getting that head start. They really can take those things and work with them and play around and then they’re bringing them with them. One more barrier I wanted just to dive into, because I do hear parents complaining pretty regularly, especially with younger kids, that the thing their child likes to do is messy. It sounds simple. It sounds simple, but is that how you feel right now, Roya? Things are a little chaotic right now? There are a couple of aspects to it, aren’t there? ROYA: There really are. And that’s the thing, too, that’s hard. And it was actually part of the challenge for me writing the book was I felt like I went back and forth a lot between the philosophy of things and then the, “Put your stuff in tubs,” the practical side of stuff. And that’s part of it is I think if the attitude is there and your own emotional barriers are dealt with, then you can think creatively about the practical solutions. I think there’s a lot of people who want me to just tell them, here’s the one magical solution or way to just switch how you think about it. But it’s not just that. It’s a dance. And it matters who’s in your house. That’s part of it. In the house I grew up in, the people cared about things differently than the house I live in now and the people I live with now. And so, part of it is factoring everybody in. The conversation about the resources and privilege that you have matters, too. I have to say, it’s a lot easier now. We moved to a place with a lot more space and I have a door I can close and I can leave a whole desk full of things. Because I don’t want to have to clean up my earring stuff every time. I keep working on it and keep going. And so, that was an issue both logistically, because I have little kids who would get into it and it’s not my husband’s favorite thing to have every single surface covered in play. And so, the fact that I have a room now with a door that closes is really helpful. I’m incredibly privileged to have that space. However, even in a place where I didn’t have that kind of space, there were creative things we could do. I used big tub lids a lot to work on, so I could pick it up and move it somewhere else or put it high on a shelf or cover it or things like that. But again, the desire for harmony in my life was there, which helped come up with those creative solutions. Well, I guess what I have to say, it depends on where you’re at in your parenting journey, too. So, glean from this what do you will, listeners, because you’re all going to be in different places. One thing to remember is that one person’s mess is not another person’s mess, right? If you can get down and look at it from the perspective of the kid in question, you might see things differently. I think back to doing those zines, someone else might look at that and see all these scraps of trash all over. But those scraps of trash were the material I was going to glue back together and use and produce from. So, if someone had come in and talked about it as though it were trash, I would have been furious. And if someone had come in and just swept it all up and cleaned it up, that would have been rough. Also, as I sat and worked, I sorted things. It wasn’t like I knew exactly what I wanted to cut and paste. It was trial and error and experimentation all over my floor and it would form something. And so, if I had to clean it up every 20 minutes, I would not have been able to make those connections. So, it was a magical little world of paper scraps down there. And I’m looking at my desk right now and it looks a lot like that, but it’s now pieces of clay. And I’m working on canes now and I’m saving all the little scraps, because they’re going to be turned into something later. And one thing is going to lead to that and that and that. So, if someone came in and just swept it all away or made me clean up in between sessions, that would really, really hurt my creative process. So, one big thing is, it’s not just trash. It’s not just a mess. There are worlds in there. The other thing is, everybody lives where you live. Everybody, I think, gets to be a factor in living in a happy, healthy, harmonious, rich unschooling life. Mess really impacts my husband, for example. I think, for him, looking at a cluttered surface is a lot, for me, like hearing somebody chew. It makes me do that little neck twitchy thing. And it’s not helpful for our harmonious life for him to come home and have a mess everywhere. And so, we’ve had to have a lot of conversations and a lot of figuring out. And so, I know that there are particular surfaces in our house that make a big impact. So, I try to make sure that those things, at least, get swept into tubs and put somewhere else for me to put away. I know that there might be days where it’s better to get the kids up and out so we don’t have a day where we’re making a lot of mess inside. There are different things to do. For me, putting everything that a project needs in a tub is really helpful. I have probably a hundred pairs of scissors in this house, because so many different projects need a pair of scissors. I don’t have a scissor tub. I have a pair of scissors in every project tub, so that everything can just get stuck back in that tub and pulled back out again. Clear boxes, things with labels, doing stuff on a tarp, so you can pick it all up. I sweep everything, toys, dust, trash, I sweep everything and then the kids and I go through the pile and pull up the things we don’t want to get thrown away. There’s a lot of that type of brainstorming. But our goal as a family is for the kids to have great tactile experiences and for nobody to want to bite somebody else at the end of the day. It’s a dance. It’s a combination. It’s valuing everybody. And it’s talking about how we can do this. And maybe that particularly messy thing doesn’t have to happen right this moment. Maybe there’s a day that’s better for it. Or maybe there’s a place. We designate a place in the backyard that’s the mud pit. That’s the mud pit. And we’ve just always said that doesn’t have to get cleaned up ever. That’s the place for it. And now we’re good, because we have a designated spot. So, just conversations, lots of conversations about how do we all function together and live together. Reframing, is it really mess? Remembering that mess is part of the creative process and that it’s actually healthy for our brains to make connections across things. So, it’s good for us to not just play with Legos, but to play with Legos and My Little Pony and Hatchimals and crayons and clay and sand all together. Having those kinds of connections, tactilely and across subjects and interests, it develops healthy brains. And so, if you’re hovering over all the time and you’re saying, “Okay, oh, did you stop playing with that Hot Wheel car? Okay, we’re going to put it away now,” it actually does that scissor thing. It cuts off the connections before they can form. So, as much as you can, if you can create a space where that can happen or create a way where you can spend most of your time doing that and the cleanup is minimal, go for it. I think it’s healthier. I run across a fair number of parents who are desirous of living a minimalist lifestyle. And while I think that can be great for you as the adult, I definitely want to impress upon you that not everybody wants to throw away all their things and things are important to people and some of your kids are going to be curators. I have a curator child. I have a collector child. He likes to collect things and sometimes he displays them and sometimes we leave them in a box for a year and he digs them out later and goes, “Oh, look at all those!” And then he’s interested in it again. So, we do a lot of tubs with a lot of labels and sometimes we rotate them and sometimes they’re all out on the floor all at once. And if I can pick them up, cool. I can help them with that. That’s the other piece is giving the gift of that to your kids can be a sweet and generous, wonderful thing. I have a lot of thoughts about mess too. It’s why I wrote a book. PAM: I just want to encourage people. All the stuff we’ve been talking about, it’s in there. It’s in there! I love your book so much. All these things are connected, right? ROYA: They are. And so, when I work with an individual family, we could come up with 50 solutions off the top of my head to that particular thing. But none of them are going to work lastingly or lovingly, unless you deal with the emotional side of it. Why does it bother you? What does it bring up for you? What’s your attitude related to it? Got to do that part first. PAM: Yeah. Yep. And that is the beauty of working through the exercises. There are so many exercises in your book and you can skip around, too. “What’s the one that’s rubbing on me right now?” And I can go and I can dig into that. You don’t need to dig into everything all at once, because it won’t mean as much. It is more helpful to dig into the thing that’s rubbing right now, because then it’s top of mind for you, and then you can really get into it and it’s helpful in the end. Okay. We can talk about that forever. But, before we go, there will be links to the blog and links to all sorts of things in the show notes. Everybody can find that stuff there. And I would like to know, what do you love most about your unschooling lives right now? ROYA: You know what I’ve been thinking about lately is how grateful I am for all of the people who love my kids. And we got them through our unschooling life. I’m just thinking about the number of random things we get in the mail from other unschooling families who know and love our children. My seven-year-old son’s favorite show right now is Brooklyn Nine-Nine and he loves it. And it’s like our special time. I love that show, too. And so, we try to get in an episode every day and he started talking about himself in the third person because of Terry on the show and it’s been leading to so many fun places and conversations. And the other day, a friend of ours, and by the way, of course their youngest kid is like 21. So, all ages are all loving on our kids. And they sent us a couple of Brooklyn Nine-Nine t-shirts just out of the clear blue sky. And we have another set of friends who stumbled upon some pretty cool little dinosaur, dig the fossil out of the egg thing. And they sent those to us. Or they send us TikToks for the kids. “Oh, I know Wyatt’s interested in this. Oh, this reminded me of Lilyanne,” and they would not have those connections if we hadn’t been going to unschooling conferences, if we were not in a group of people who valued supporting their interests and seeing the connections that the kids are making. And so, I think, yeah, right now I am absolutely just so grateful for the other humans who see and value the connections that the kids are making and their interests. I love them. PAM: That is so beautiful. Yeah. That community. Especially since you’ve grown up unschooling yourself, unschooling conferences. The connections that you make with other families who value their kids, their connection with their kids, their relationships. And like you said, grown kids. It doesn’t matter. That relationship, that connection is there for life. It becomes a lifestyle, not something that ends once our kids are 18 and now it’s like, oh, off you go. Yeah. No, that’s beautiful. Thank you so much, Roya. It was so much fun to chat with you about your book. ROYA: Of course, Pam! PAM: I am so excited for people to get that in their hands and just dive in, because that is really the most important thing. When you’re choosing unschooling is not just to stop there, that deschooling aspect, that work that we can do so that we can cultivate those strong relationships, those strong connections with our kids, because that is a foundation for our lives, to move forward. ROYA: And one of the interesting things for me, too, even though I grew up unschooling, grew up talking about unschooling, my mom spoke and talked about unschooling all the time. But now that I have kids, it’s so interesting to me, too, that at every new age and stage, I feel like I have to have some measure of that all over again. That when they’re three, I got it. We’re good. I figured this stuff out. And then they hit the next stage and I’m like, oh, it’s striking me in a different way, because I’m a different person and they are a different person. And so, I think that’s part of it, too, with the book. I wrote it hopefully for some replay value, as well, that you can keep going back, because different parts of it will hit you harder and different barriers will come up at different stages of life. And, so when people say, “I did the deschooling,” I’m like, well. Did you? PAM: I’m glad you’re feeling really good right now, but exactly. Things are going to happen from the outside. Your kids are going to hit different ages and things will come up. Things will bubble up. There’s kind of like the bulk of it, but the bulk of deschooling gets you to the place to realize, “Oh, this isn’t really going to end ever.” ROYA: Right, because we’re always going to experience it differently, too, because it’s not like we’re static and things are happening with them. We’re part of this process, as well. So, the book is geared towards parents of kids of all ages. You can pick it up and flip through the barriers and find the one that speaks to you the most. If you buy the book, there’s a workbook that you can actually write in and stuff that you can download and you can get access to that. And then, I’ve been doing these journals that if you go on my website or an Amazon, too, there are places to write and prompts for you to keep exploring and keep exploring. And then, I also have my practice. So again, if anybody is finding that they need some extra one-on-one time, I’m here. PAM: That’s lovely. That’s wonderful. We will have links to all that, too. Thank you so much, Roya. Have a wonderful day! ROYA: Thank you, Pam. I appreciate you and the work that you do so much. PAM: Oh, thank you. Talk to you soon. Bye! ROYA: Bye.

EU387: Foundations: Seeing Through Someone Else’s Eyes

For this week’s episode, we’re sharing the next Foundations episode of the Living Joyfully Podcast with Pam and Anna, Seeing Through Someone Else’s Eyes. “Seeing through someone else’s eyes” is a shift from the typical phrase, “walking in their shoes.” And it’s a valuable paradigm shift to consider when trying to learn more about the people in our lives. By considering people’s unique personalities, interests, and sensitivities, we can better understand their choices and avoid a lot of conflict and misunderstandings. We hope you find this conversation helpful on your unschooling journey and in your relationships! THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE The Living Joyfully Shop – books, courses, including Four Pillars of Unschooling and Navigating Conflict, coaching calls, and more! Want the full collection of Living Joyfully Foundations podcast episodes as an audiobook (and the transcripts edited into an ebook)? Find them here in the Shop! We invite you to join us in The Living Joyfully Network, a wonderful online community for parents to connect and engage in candid conversations about living and learning through the lens of unschooling. This month, we’re talking about seasons—in unschooling and in life. Come and be part of the conversation! Sign up to our mailing list to receive The Living Joyfully Dispatch, our biweekly email newsletter, and get a free copy of Pam’s intro to unschooling ebook, What is Unschooling? Listen to our conversation on YouTube. Follow @exploringunschooling on Instagram. Follow @pamlaricchia on Instagram and Facebook. Check out our website, livingjoyfully.ca for more information about navigating relationships and exploring unschooling. EPISODE QUESTIONS Take a moment to think about a close friend or loved one. How would you describe their aspirations and goals, their strengths and weaknesses, and their interests and passions? Pick an issue or challenge you recently navigated with family or friends. What did it look like through your eyes? Now try to see it through the eyes of someone else who was involved. How does it look different? How does it look the same? Why? Remember a time you judged someone else about their choice or decision. Where did that judgment stem from? If you released that judgment and got more curious about why that choice made sense for them, how might things have played out differently? Let’s explore the story of you. What are your current aspirations and goals? Strengths and weaknesses? Interests and passions? How do they inform the day to day choices you make? TRANSCRIPT PAM: Hello and welcome to the Living Joyfully Podcast. We are thrilled you’re interested in exploring relationships with us, who we are in them, out of them, and what that means for how we move through the world. And in today’s episode, we are going to talk about seeing through someone else’s eyes. This was another big paradigm shift for me in how I choose to be in relationship with others, because over the years, I have often heard the advice to walk in the other person’s shoes so that we can better understand them and what they’re experiencing. But I discovered that, for me, that didn’t go quite far enough. So, I put myself in my partner’s shoes or my child’s shoes, see what challenges and constraints they were facing, and come up with what I thought was a great plan for moving forward. And then they didn’t agree. And I was like, “What? Why not? This is perfect!” I just didn’t understand why they wouldn’t follow my suggestions and I judged them negatively for their lack of cooperation. Like, “Let’s move through this, people! Here’s a great way to do it. You’re just being stubborn.” They must see how well my plan would work out. So, when that wasn’t working, I dug into it more. And jumping off what we talked about last week about how different people are in so many ways, I realized that putting myself in someone else’s shoes meant that I was still using my experiences and perspectives, my ways of processing, and my preferred ways of engaging with the world. I was still filtering this new view of the world through the lenses that made sense to me. I discovered that beyond walking in their shoes, I wanted to try seeing through their eyes. Oh my goodness! The picture is so much richer. It holds their experiences and preferences, how they prefer to process information, and how they prefer to engage with the world. It holds their aspirations and goals, their strengths and weaknesses, their interests and passions. And their choices now made so much more sense to me, because I can see how they were the best choices for them. In the same situation, I, in their shoes, may well make a very different choice, but that is entirely because I’m me. Because people are different, when I want to connect with someone, when I want to more fully understand their experiences and support them as they move through their days, putting myself in their shoes isn’t as helpful as seeing it through their eyes. ANNA: Oh my goodness. Yes! I really loved when I first heard you talking about this, because it really puts this very helpful visual on why my attempts at solving things for everybody falls a bit flat. And I love to solve things. And in my early days, my inclination was definitely to look at someone’s concern and set about finding a solution for them. And it was often rooted in how I would want to handle it, how would I want to move through it? But like you said, as soon as you start digging into this, really even at all, you see why it doesn’t work. And, as is so often the case, turning it around really helps me see why. So, I have this close friend and she moves through the world in a very different way. She is a go-getter. She makes the call. She finishes the thing. She tells people what she needs in this very direct way. So, when I would share something with her, she would offer advice based on how she moves through the world and it would often just leave me feeling misunderstood, really. Disconnected. It wasn’t that her ideas weren’t valid or even amazing, but they were not likely to work for me, because it just isn’t as easy for me to make that call to someone out of the blue or to be super direct about what I need from them. But when someone understands those pieces about me, they can help me find ways to get what I want that feel comfortable. Maybe there will be some stretching and that’s okay, but it’ll be grounded in who I am and give me the best chance of actually being able to do it and to solve the problem that’s in front of me to begin with. So, that realization really helped me stop doing it to others. And instead, I focused on listening and learning and seeing through their eyes, helping them find ways that resonated with them and who they are and how they want to move through the world. PAM: Yes. And I think it is really important to just note that seeing through someone else’s eyes is a skill that we get better with over time. We need to practice with releasing our lenses. Sometimes we’ve got lenses in there that we really don’t know that we have until we start pulling them away. And how can we not value our way of seeing it and being in the world as better? It goes back to last week’s episode. We’re all different, and that’s okay. One way isn’t better than the other, except that that’s our natural tendency to do it. So, it can be hard to just release that valuing, because it really is better for us. And also, our relationships with our loved ones become more connected just because we come to better understand their aspirations and goals, their strengths and weaknesses, and their interests and passions, which means we can more accurately bring those aspects into the picture and vice versa. We are sharing ours and they learn more about us. It just takes time, doesn’t it? We always like to think, okay, this makes sense. I’m going to do this right now. Let’s go. ANNA: Forever more! But it does take time and I think with everything, be gentle with ourselves as we figure it out. And do little steps, like starting with, “Well, this is how I might move through that.” Just that little qualification, being clear about that as opposed to saying, “I think you should do this,” which is sometimes where we go, but that’s a great start. That little qualification, “This is how I might move through that.” It leaves room for connection and learning more, because at that point, they can say, “I don’t think I could do that.” And then you’re able to learn more and have more of that conversation. But dropping the judgment piece that you were just talking about, I think, is really the most important and sometimes the hardest. “Well, if they would just do it the way I want them to, it would be solved.” Well, if the “this” is not something that feels good to them, it won’t solve it and it actually will just leave the person feeling like there’s something wrong with them or that they’re completely misunderstood and it definitely can impact our connection and relationship. And there isn’t anything wrong with them. There isn’t only one way to do something. They just may not want to move through the world in the same way that I do. So, we can let go of that judgment and commit to learning more about who they are and what feels best to them. Sharing our ideas, absolutely, but with this open, curious mindset that they might be seeing it in a very different way. PAM: Yes. Exactly. This tool of seeing through their eyes, how it works, is also really helpful when we just want to understand a choice they’re making. Maybe they’re not looking for our input. So, when we see a choice and it doesn’t make sense to us, maybe it’s not a choice we would ever make, but when we take a moment to see it through their eyes, all of a sudden it can make so much more sense. And, that said, sometimes no matter how hard we try to see through their eyes, we just don’t understand why they want to do the thing they want to do. So, in those moments, what works for me is leaning on my understanding again, that people are different. And not taking things personally, like we talked about. They’re not making this choice to piss me off. They’re making it because it makes sense to them. So, that helps me move through any judgment of them that I might be feeling, and instead get curious. Because judgment is not only disconnecting, it’s often a clue that I’m just missing something. So, I might ask more questions to try to better understand and absolutely, sometimes that helps. Sometimes I was just missing this little piece. It’s like, oh, yeah, okay. Yeah, that makes sense. Sometimes they can’t explain things in a way though that makes sense to us. That again, doesn’t mean that they’re wrong. I can choose to trust them to make their own decisions, and we will all learn more as things unfold over time. That is beautiful. When we see how things unfold, when we see their next step and their next step, we see a bigger picture of what’s happening. And if things do go a bit sideways for them, when I’m not bringing that judgmental energy of, “I told you so. I had a better idea,” when we’re not bringing that to the conversation, we can support them as they tweak their path over time to get where they want to go. Or maybe I discover a new aspect of them that I didn’t know about. Maybe it’s a new aspiration that’s been bubbling up. Maybe it’s a fear, a new interest, a sensitivity, like we talked about before, that may be developing. So, when we’re open and curious about the people that we’re in relationship with, we all grow and learn and change alongside each other, which is so much more connecting and fun than trying to coax and control each other to do what we think is best. ANNA: So much yes. My goal is connection and part of that is understanding these differences and not only learning to understand, but the next step is really celebrating. And when we can celebrate even when we don’t fully understand, that makes such a difference. The world is richer for us all playing to our strengths and supporting one another to do that. This is especially true for the people we are choosing to share our life with. But, I mean, for me, it really goes for all people. It’s back to that generous assumption and cultivating an open, curious mindset, so that we can begin to understand why people are seeing the world differently. Why are they choosing differently? And knowing that those different ways of seeing and doing are not attacks on our way of seeing and doing. Both can and do exist. And to be in relationship with someone, celebrating that instead of judging helps us avoid conflicts and misunderstanding, and it really deepens that trust and bond we have with each other, because we feel deeply understood, which is so important to us as humans, often. PAM: So much. Just take a moment to sink into that and just feel, somebody knowing us to that level, which also includes us knowing ourselves. We kind of need to get there ourselves before we can even share those pieces of information with others. But, as you said, it does help us avoid so much conflict and misunderstanding and taking things personally and judging others and having expectations of others, and instead, deepens our connection, deepens our trust, deepens that whole bond that we have, within our whole family. And then, as you said, it’s our choice how deep and strong a relationship we want with anybody who passes through our lives. So many of these tools are also useful, at least I have found, in my extended relationships as well. So, here are some questions that you might want to ponder as you explore this really fun difference between walking in someone’s shoes and seeing through their eyes. So, the first one is, take a moment to think about a close friend or a loved one. How would you describe their aspirations and goals, their strengths and weaknesses, and their interests and passions? It’s really fun to do that. And then, you know what? It might be really fun to check in with them. And say, “Hey, this is what I’m thinking. This is how I’m seeing you. What have I nailed? What have I maybe gone a little sideways on?” It could spark a really, really fun conversation. ANNA: Yeah. I think that’s a great conversation. PAM: Yeah. Especially when we just come at it that way, rather than it coming out after a conflict or around a conflict or something. There is no energy and judgment in the air. It’s just like, let’s have this fun conversation. Okay. Next. Pick an issue or challenge that you recently navigated with family or friends. What did it look like through your eyes? Now try to see it through the eyes of someone else who was involved. How does it look different? How does it look the same? Why do you think that is? Just start playing with that, as well. Where are the the places where you see the same things and where might we see things differently? And then maybe play it through a little bit more, like the choices that people made throughout whatever issue or challenge it was, do they make more sense to you now that you’re looking at it through their eyes? ANNA: I think what happens when we do this piece, where we step back and go, how are they seeing it? It takes some of the charge out of it, because when we are only seeing through our eyes, we’re bulldozing down the tunnel to get to our end point. But when we step back and go, oh my gosh, I can see how they’re seeing that in a really different way, suddenly, the charge comes out of it and we can get on the same team. We can go, okay, I’m seeing it this way. You’re seeing it that way. Let’s talk about that. It just changes that whole dynamic of the head butting that can happen, you know? PAM: Yeah. And just think how that helps everyone involved feel seen and heard, no matter what the end path is. When we recognize how other people are experiencing it, that can be so valuable. All right, next. Remember a time you judged someone else about their choice or decision, and now let’s do a thought experiment with that. Where did that judgment stem from? If you released that judgment and got more curious about why that choice made sense for them, how might things have played out differently? One thing that’s important for us and why that playful attitude helps is it’s not valuable for us to judge our past actions and thoughts. We’re learning more now. We’re playing with things now. The stuff that we’re figuring out, we can bring with us into future encounters, future engagements, conflicts, choices, all those pieces. So we can, in our own thought experiments, play around with anything. It’s okay that, man, I felt really judgey about that person that day or this thing that I saw. Maybe I know nobody who was involved, but it’s worth it to think, okay, where did that judgment come from? What does that mean for me? Why is that important to me? All those pieces can be really helpful for understanding ourselves and for making maybe different choices as we move forward. ANNA: Right. That’s what I was going to say. I think when we play around with some of these ones in the past, again, this is not to judge how we handled something in the past. This is not to make ourselves feel bad. But it’s giving us a chance in a lower charged environment to look at that. And I think when we recognize where the judgment came in and recognize how it maybe didn’t serve us in that situation, when we feel it bubbling up when something comes up ahead of us, we can go, oh, okay, this judgment, do I want to look into this now? Do I want to dig back and peel some layers back now? And so, I think that practice can help us actually help in the moment or the things that are to come. PAM: Exactly. And lastly, let’s explore the story of you. What are your current aspirations and goal, strengths and weaknesses, interests and passions? How do they inform the day-to-day choices you make? I think sometimes we can kind of disconnect. We can think of these big things like, what are my goals? What are my strengths? How do I like to do things? What are my passions? And yet, we don’t bring those down into our day-to-day. Or we don’t make the connection. They may be subconsciously directing our choices throughout the day, because our mind knows these are the things that we value. But when we can recognize that, we can also notice that we’re making more progress than we think towards our goal, et cetera. So, understanding how all those pieces weave together can be so valuable for ourselves. So, it’s absolutely helpful to do this. ANNA: Yeah, and I think, too, it kind of reminds me of the priorities episode, too, with that intentionality we’re bringing it, but I think what I really want to say about this question, and we’ll keep talking about this, we need to develop our own self-awareness in order to be able to communicate with our partners. So, in order to be able to say what’s important to us and what we’re doing so that they can understand, because none of us are mind readers. So, this work of really digging into, what am I excited about? What’s making me tick? How am I looking at these things? is so valuable on so many layers for us and for those in our lives. PAM: Exactly. Yes. We hope you have so much fun with these questions and we would be happy to carry on the conversation, whether you want to comment on YouTube, whether you want to comment on Instagram. We would love to hear some of your processing through these questions if you’d like to share. And thank you so much for listening, and we will see you next time. Bye!

EU386: Building Confidence

In this episode, Pam, Anna, and Erika talk about building confidence. We had an interesting month in the Living Joyfully Network recently where we dove deep into this topic and it was fascinating how many layers we found to uncover. In this episode, we talk about letting go of comparisons, cultivating trust in ourselves and our children, remembering our ‘why’, and lots more. We hope you find our conversation helpful on your unschooling journey and in your relationships! THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE The Living Joyfully Shop – books, courses, including Four Pillars of Unschooling and Navigating Conflict, coaching calls, and more! We invite you to join us in The Living Joyfully Network, a wonderful online community for parents to connect and engage in candid conversations about living and learning through the lens of unschooling. This month, we’re talking about seasons—in unschooling and in life. Come and be part of the conversation! Sign up to our mailing list to receive The Living Joyfully Dispatch, our biweekly email newsletter, and get a free copy of Pam’s intro to unschooling ebook, What is Unschooling? Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube. Follow @exploringunschooling on Instagram. Follow @pamlaricchia on Instagram and Facebook. Check out our website, livingjoyfully.ca for more information about navigating relationships and exploring unschooling. So much of what we talk about on this podcast and in the Living Joyfully Network isn’t actually about unschooling. It’s about life. On The Living Joyfully Podcast, Anna Brown and Pam Laricchia talk about life, relationships, and parenting. You can check out the archive here, or find it in your your favorite podcast player. EPISODE TRANSCRIPT ERIKA: Hello everyone. I’m Erika Ellis from Living Joyfully, and I’m joined by my co-hosts, Anna Brown and Pam Larrichia. Today we’re going to be talking about building confidence, which was a really interesting topic of conversation on the Network recently, and so I’m really excited to dive into that. But first, I want to encourage you to check out our online shop where you can find more information about joining the Living Joyfully Network, a selection of unschooling and relationship courses, Pam’s books about unschooling, and a variety of coaching options. The shop has resources and support for every stage of your journey. You can find the link in the show notes, or you can visit livingjoyfullyshop.com. And now, Pam, would you like to get us started with our conversation? PAM: Sure, sure. I am excited to dive into this because confidence is an interesting topic and to see where it comes from and how we can build it and how it comes together. Because there are actually many different aspects to building our confidence. So, I thought I would start with one shift that I found really fundamental to building my confidence and that was letting go of comparison. Especially when we first came to unschooling, it was really easy to compare myself and my family to others and kind of find myself wanting, and what would happen each and every time is it would just send me spinning, right? I’d start questioning my choice. It’s like, why are we doing this and undermining my confidence in things working out, right? So as I came to notice that pattern, I dug a bit deeper. And soon realized that comparing myself or my kids to other people just invites judgment into the conversations that I’m having with myself. As I’m processing and trying to figure things out. It ended up being more noise in my head that distracted me and even sometimes drowned out my own thoughts and perspectives, they could get really loud and I learned, I noticed, I know that my brain needs some time and some space to think things through. I want to feel my feelings, want to understand my emotions, all those pieces. And I found I wasn’t getting to the processing pieces. I wasn’t developing that deeper level of self-awareness when I was staying stuck at that more superficial level of comparing myself to others and then just trying to fix those differences. That was very surface level. Here’s what they’re doing and I feel I’m not doing it, so I should do that thing, right? There wasn’t a lot of learning in there for me. And I came to see that part of building confidence in myself is better understanding myself. So that little interesting nuance for me is that it is not about forever shutting out what others might share with me. At first it just feels like judgment because I’m noticing it. But what I found in the longer run was that it was more about recognizing that what they’re sharing with me is merely information. I didn’t have to take that in as judgment. I didn’t have to compare myself immediately. I could just see what it was, because so often, as we’ve talked about before, that kind of information often tells us more about them. Then it tells us about us, and that’s that pendulum swing we have talked about before as well. At first, we sometimes need to swing all the way to the other side to spend some quiet time without other voices so that we can start to more clearly hear our own. And when I think back, I definitely remember that when the kids left school. We pretty much cocooned as a whole family basically for about six months. It was really helpful for me to remove myself from those outside voices for a while when I was so busy, learning so much about unschooling, learning about my kids, learning about myself. Because I noticed that when others expressed confusion, I immediately left to compare myself and my kids to them, and I immediately felt defensive and I didn’t yet have the language to express our new direction with any confidence. So, letting go of comparisons with others. Really was a big first step for me on the way to building confidence in the whole shebang. ANNA: In all the things. I think it’s so valuable to spend some time here thinking about what confidence looks like and feels like and how we can get there and cultivate it, because it really does change how you move through the world. When you’re feeling confident about your relationships, about your situation, about the decisions that you’re making, it changes everything. It just doesn’t invite all of that. It just doesn’t invite it all in. I think it really changes our experience, so it’s worth digging in. I’m glad we’re doing that and I think comparison is such a great place to start because if we think about it, that’s so external. And like you said, surface level, whatever we’re seeing from other people is a tiny slice of their life. Often what they’re choosing to put on Instagram, or even if it’s what they’re choosing to tell the story at Christmas, it’s very surface level. It’s cultivated to create an image and that’s great because I love them writing their story and feeling good about what’s working for them. There’s no critique about that. It’s just me recognizing, oh, okay, that’s what’s happening for them. That’s interesting for them. That’s what’s going on. But also knowing it’s not the whole story, but what I can do is focus on my kids and see what’s happening here. What do we love? What’s going on for us? And it really changes that piece because if I am out looking and comparing, I actually really am not present with my kids or with what’s happening in my life and in our home. And so that was the first thing for me, realizing just can almost energetically feel it pulling me away from actually where I want to be, which is present. Where I wanted to be at the time, present with my kids and looking at our life and enriching our life. So, I do love that we’re starting, with letting go of comparison. ERIKA: Yeah, I love this topic as a whole, this building confidence. It was interesting on the network to see people noticing it’s that lack of confidence that’s really causing a lot of the issues that are coming up in their unschooling lives. When you have that feeling of, I have to do things like this and then, oh, but I should be doing this. And just kind of flailing around with this kind of decision making and then thinking we’re doing it wrong. We need to do it differently. It’s that lack of confidence. And so the letting go of comparisons is such a great little place to start looking. Just because people are so different. And so I really think, at the beginning of my unschooling journey, I did not have that so clearly in my mind, this idea of people are different. But that’s such a huge paradigm shift that I think would’ve helped me with this earlier on if I had only understood that part because comparison doesn’t really make sense anymore once you realize how different people are. And so what works for one person won’t work for another person. Then when we’re looking at what other people are doing, it’s just that information. It’s just noticing, there’s one thing that’s possible to do and see how it’s working for them or not working for them. It has nothing to do with me, my kids, our family, or what’s going on with us? And so once we can tune in more to what’s true of my kids, what’s true of me, and really start making decisions that make sense to me, rather than trying to copy the decisions that someone else made that made sense to them. It’s like all of a sudden that confidence starts building because I’m listening. This makes more sense. It’s not just following these steps that logically don’t make sense to my brain. And so, I just love that and just remembering like what you were saying, Anna, what we’re seeing of other people is also just one story of their lives. That’s not the whole picture. And so yeah, that comparison is, it can really derail us along the path. I love the reminder to let go of that. ANNA: I love what you said there about it just makes sense and I would even argue that it’s easier. Because I think if we’re trying to do something that works for someone else, we can feel like, this is hard, this is not flowing. Why is this not feeling good? Why are we getting resistance here? What is happening? My kids don’t want to do that, or this is not happening. But when you’re really tuned in and doing what works for you, it’s like, oh, this feels easy. This feels fun. We’re still going to have our regular bumps, but it’s not going against the flow. Something else that’s a part of this is. A trust, right? A trust in ourselves, a trust in our children, a trust in the decisions that we’re making so that when we have that really innate trust, if we are confident, we project that confidence outside of ourselves. When we can think about it. How do we build that trust? A lot of that is really just being with our kids, just seeing what they’re doing, really bringing in what’s happening here. And look, they are learning, they are growing, we are improving our relationships. We are getting through hurdles. And I think one piece of this, I want to say that I think happens more at the beginning of the journey, sometimes we’re trusting in our decision. I know I’ve made the right decision and now everything’s going to be great. I’ve pulled my kids out of school, or whatever change I’ve made and now it’s going to be great. And it’s like, no, it’s not exactly that. We don’t get to do that. It’s more that we start building trust in our relationships. I think that’s why we talk so much about how to cultivate these relationships. Because the trust that I had was a very deep trust that we could figure anything out. It was not about school or not school, it was about how we could figure out how to meet our needs, how to work together, how to move through difficult situations, how to move through conflict, how to move through things that life threw at us, and that deep trust was just unshakeable. Then when people would come at me with things they didn’t like what we were doing or didn’t understand what we were doing, I was so solid that I know us. I know our relationships. I know we can figure out what’s best. So, it’s not about a particular thing. Again, unschooling, going to school, doing whatever. It’s really about that. We are so in tune. We figure things out, we know what’s happening. We work together. If we have found a need that isn’t being met. We’ll figure it out. So, that deep trust, I think, is a part of this too. PAM: Yeah, and I think that trust flows so nicely after you can let go of those comparisons because now, I can see, I can hear my own voice. I can now lean, as you said, lean into the kids and as you mentioned Erika, that realization that people are different. That just releases so much weight for other people’s, um, shares. And like you said, Anna, nobody’s trying to lie or fake things or anything. They’re just excitedly sharing what they’re wanting to share, et cetera. So yeah, that’s where we can now lean in and when we’re hearing our voice and now we can learn so much. We can learn so much about our kids, ourselves, learn the tools and the processes to be in a relationship with them too. Figure things out. Right? And that is where I remember, like you were saying, that’s where we learn the language. So, that we can not feel defensive and also have the language to share if people are interested in learning more. That confidence is building and building and building. When we’re shutting out those noises and now actually leaning in, hearing ourselves, our actual kids in front of us, and instead of just trying to copy other things, we’re actually in there learning these kinds of tools to be in relationship, to build connection. And that’s where the trust comes. It’s like, oh look, we figured it out. We figured it out. Things went sideways and the world didn’t end, and we figured it out. Just through that experience for me anyway, it just built more and more trust and the confidence came along with it. ERIKA: Oh, I really love the trust part. I’m just thinking, I think back in the old days, I would’ve thought confidence comes from thinking that I did everything right and so I can feel good about where I am and what I’m doing because I made all the correct decisions, you know? And so, trusting that there’s no one right way, and trusting that this is a long game, trusting that there’s plenty of time, those are the things that if I can trust in that, that’s going to be what builds my confidence because, there are going to be ups and downs. There are going to be things that we think are going to work and then they don’t work, or they work for a while and then they don’t work. And so that doesn’t mean my confidence should be shattered. That just means, this is life. And so being confident is more about trusting that we can make it through when things don’t go the way that we expect them to or that this kind of longer game and plenty of time view of childhood, which I think is really kind of a radical change from the way we grew up. A lot of us grew up in school. It makes it feel like there is definitely one right way and time is of the essence and you better check these things off in the correct order at the correct time. My trust in our unschooling journey has taken a lot of paradigm shifts in my own mindset in order to get to that place. I wanted to also bring us to the idea of understanding our why. Because I think that’s such a huge part of building our confidence too. It’s something that I love. Every time we talk about it on the network, it’s always such an amazing, fun conversation to read why people came to unschooling. What is the reason that they are doing this with their children? What did they see in their children that brought them here? What happened in our own lives that brought us to these ideas? And so I think when we really dig in and start asking ourselves these questions like, why is unschooling appealing? Why are we doing the things we do with our kids? What makes our kids tick? Who are we, what things do we like to do in our lives? Digging down to that, why gives us a lot more confidence and revisiting it can be a little confidence boost. When we are feeling a little bit shaky. That’s why we always go back to that, when people are feeling shaky, like what is your why? And that grounds you back into that confidence about your decisions. PAM: I think that has always been such a great tool. When I remember to do it, when I start getting knocked off, when my confidence is faltering, when I’m wobbling like that, once I remember that as a tool to help me rebuild things, it is always so valuable because fundamentally there is a reason for this choice in the first place. And revisiting that reminds me, right? Oh yes, this is why we are doing this thing. And even playing around with it like, so what if we weren’t doing this thing anymore? That helps me remember, because like you’re saying, as things are flowing before. It can start to feel easier. Right? And you forget how challenging things might have been before you made these lifestyle changes. And then if your confidence gets knocked for a bit and you kind of forget, go back to the beginning and really steep in that understanding why we made this choice. Even though this moment seems challenging, even though my confidence is a little knocked around right now, fundamentally, this is the life that I want to live with my family. This is the kind of person I want to be, et cetera. It just really helps me reground really. I think that’s what it is, and that helps so much with my confidence. ANNA: Yeah, and honestly that’s a tool we can use in any realm of our life. Because all of us are making thoughtful choices about how we want to move through the world. And so right when something knocks that confidence a little bit, we can sometimes throw the baby out with the bath water, and question the whole decision. But I think if we can pause and take a little bit of time to say, okay, but why did I make this decision? And I love the point that you made, Pam, that it can feel easier. So sometimes we forget because that is so true. And then it just takes that little bit of reflection to go, oh my gosh, we were living in a really difficult time before we made this decision. And look at all the things that have changed. So, this little bump is nothing compared to when we were kind of flailing around, figuring out what worked for all of the personalities and all of the different pieces and all of our brains. So, I love that point because I think, again, when we get knocked by something. It just shakes us. And so we just start, why did I change? I need to go back and just take that time, pause, really soak in why. I think it can be valuable to write it down, throughout the journey at different times because our whys can change, and even the decision can ultimately change. It’s not about you have a why, you make a decision, you stay with it forever. But as you tune into the why, you will fine tune the journey, which may involve changing parts of the decision. But it’s so important, I think, to just slow down when you’re feeling knocked by something, because then you’re going to get your confidence back and from that confident place you can all decide if this is still the path we want to take. And that just feels very different than deciding and then running. PAM: Yeah, I think so. I remember those moments, I was going to say, especially early on, but I mean, you still can get knocked. But that’s why, that’s why I liked understanding our why. Sometimes we talked about remembering our why, but I like understanding because like you said, Anna, it can definitely change over time as we learn more, as we gain more experience with it. It’s like, oh yeah, this is what I want. Revisiting it and like you said, even writing it down or wherever your brain likes to keep things. To just keep track or keep those things top of mind for a while. It is really helpful just to bring that back top of mind to help recover and build our confidence again. And I think when we bring all that together, I know in my experience, that’s when, as my confidence comes back, as I’m remembering why we’re doing it, as I’ve sunk back into that trust that we’ve cultivated, I’ve let go of the voices recognize that people are different and the things they’re sharing are great for them. That doesn’t automatically mean that they’re great for us anyway, through all that process, I really start to find my voice again because that’s one of the first things I lose when my confidence gets knocked, right? I can’t share with any enthusiasm because I am not confident in our choices or how things are going in this particular season. So that, for me, is kind of a sign that my confidence is coming back and just having these various tools to help me find my voice again. And it’s, I really like that image because it’s finding our voice with the other outside world, extended family, whatever, but it’s also finding our voice again, maybe within our family. That kind of knocked our confidence again. Knock our confidence so we can find ourselves again, ground ourselves again. And then that really does, at least for me, help me find my voice again so I can continue showing up in all the various moments of life. ANNA: Right. And now I’m thinking it’s almost circular in a way, and that if you find that you have lost your voice or you’re feeling shaky about your voice, then I’m wondering is that because maybe I’m taking on other people’s expectations, or I’m trying to present something that maybe I don’t fully believe or that doesn’t fit with my family, or I’m trying to perform in a way, that’s what I’m supposed to do. And so then that gets you to start the process again, letting go of the comparisons, letting go of the side noises. How do I build trust in myself and in my kids? And so I love that because I think from that grounded place of just trusting in your relationships and really understanding your family, you do have a voice. And whether you choose to shout it from the mountaintops or in a casual conversation or just your own self-talk, which is so important, you know that you have this strong self-talk of, like, look at this, look at what we’re creating. Look at what we’re creating together. Look at this life that we have. And so wherever it is, if you’re feeling shaky, then run through it again because you’ll get back there as you tune into your kids. I really love that piece. ERIKA: Yeah. Oh, me too. Finding our voice doesn’t mean we have to be going and telling everyone either. And so I think that’s a fun nuance that finding my voice, to me, really is that self-talk, inner voice, that to me is the most important one. And so, just clarifying for myself why I’m doing the things I’m doing. Gaining that confidence and trust in my ability to do things and having that be reflected in my self-talk, that is really where that finding my voice comes from. And then I feel like that grounded, calm, confident self can succeed in any interaction, right? It’s not like I need to share everything with every person I meet, but I’m feeling good about myself. I’m feeling okay and my decision’s feeling good. That grounded calm energy helps, Pam, like you were saying, in our own families, finding our voice in our own families. I think it makes such a huge difference. With all of the kids’ ups and downs, just being able to be to know that we’ve got this, that kind of energy just feels so reassuring to them as well. And it just helps me in conversations with everyone. So, I really love the finding our voice piece. This has been a really fun conversation and we hope you enjoyed it and maybe had an aha moment or picked up some new ideas to consider on your own journey. And if you enjoyed this type of conversation, I think you would love the Living Joyfully Network. It’s such an amazing group of people connecting and having thoughtful conversations about all the different things we encounter in our unschooling lives. And you can learn more at livingjoyfullyshop.com. You can just click on community at the top of the page, and we hope to meet you there. So thanks for listening, and we will see you next time.