Many moons ago, I was a director of a girl’s leadership program that worked with teen girls in rural northwestern Minnesota. It was a fantastic program that provided teens with life skills. One of the skills we taught was reflective listening. I still use this important communication skill today.
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In the language of adoption, Gotcha Day is when your children arrive in your home. This week, 18 years ago, Gotcha Day happened for us. We adopted our four children from the foster care system 18 years ago: all siblings and all at once. We essentially became parents overnight!
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Resilience is the key to hope and strength. Resilience is the ability to withstand adversity and move through complex life events to adapt, change, and grow. Learning about resilience has given me hope.
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You can help a child or another adult heal trauma by being a trusted, calm, competent person through listening, holding space for emotions, and turning them towards the strengths in their lives. There is true power in a relationship between a trusted adult and a child. It can make all the difference in a child’s outcome in life.
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We never really get over the hurt of the word “No.” However, what if the word “No” can lead us to a “Yes”? What if the word isn’t rejection, disappointment, or fear of keeping up with the Jones? What if a “No” is really a “Yes” to something else?
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Simple strategies you can put into place that will shrink your stress level and boost your health at home and work.
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I want to introduce you to one of my closest friends, Kim Hruba. Kim is an author, book coach, speaker, and mom to five children. She often writes about her family’s adventures on her weekly blog published Saturdays on the Wannaskan Almanac site.
She recently posted a blog that so fantastically illustrates the 4 C’s – Create Your Calm, Co-regulate, Connect and Change, that I immediately asked if I could share it with the Wildewood Learning readers. In her post, she shows how to use the 4 C’s when her daughter felt anxious and nervous about the upcoming piano festival.
I created a video explaining the 4 C’s for this month’s post and sharing Kim’s post to demonstrate how the 4 C’s would work in real life. I would suggest you watch the video and then read Kim’s post to see if you can identify the 4 C’s in action.
After learning about the strategy and reading about how a parent used the process, I would love to know about your 4 C’s experience.
You can find Kim’s blog post on the Wannaskan Almanac HERE. Plus find out more about what Kim does at her business website Redshoes Writing Solutions.
If you want to know more about the upcoming classes in 2022 for Strength-Based Resilience, click here!
What happens when your expectations are high, but the reality is much lower?
Change!
The idea of having a family did not cross my mind until I was in my mid-thirties. My husband and I were not sure we wanted to have children. However, as we both grew older, the idea of having a family became more and more prevalent in our life. We were not able to have biological children and looked at other options for creating a family. We chose adoption through the foster care system. We wanted to adopt two children; we were blessed with four.
In our minds, we had expectations about what our family life would be like: Days filled with joy and happiness, rainbows, and tripping through snowdrifts (it was January in Minnesota when they came to our home). Oh, we knew there would be times where we would struggle. I had read many parenting books about adopting children from hard places. I was prepared! Yeh right!
I am glad my husband and I didn’t realize how little we knew at that time. Our expectations of parenting did not match our reality. Not even close! There have been times of tremendous joy and happiness, countered with times of overwhelm, worry, and struggle. It’s not easy going from 2 to 6 people in a house, literally overnight.
I had to let go of the expectations of a perfect family. However, in letting go of those expectations, I gained so much more!
Grace can mean courteous goodwill and can be challenging at the best of times. One of the changes I gained was to practice grace. I needed grace for myself before I can have it for others.
There have many times I have practiced grace for myself. One such instance was when my son had a minibike accident.
“What did you do that for?” is what I blurted out to our 10-year-old son after his mini-bike accident. He was riding his mini-bike in the yard, Racing faster and faster around the lilac bushes. I could see the deep path in the dirt around the bush. He cut a curve to close, and slip went the bike out from under him, slamming into the sharp, newly pruned branches.
After I asked my blunt question, he lifted his pant leg and displayed a deep puncture wound in his leg. Tears started to roll down his dirty cheeks. You can imagine the disappointment in myself for not showing empathy when my husband brought him to the hospital for nine stitches.
In this instance, I had to allow a little grace for myself. The words slipped out of my mouth before I even thought through the impact of those words. I have done this more than once, not considering the effect of my words.
Our children came from a hard place. Their early childhood was less than idyllic. In listening to the podcast interview of Oprah and Dr. Bruce Perry by Brene` Brown, the question to ask about a child’s behavior is not “what is wrong with them” but “what has happened to them.” Early childhood trauma can have a lasting effect on a person’s health, behavior, and learning.
When looking at a child’s behavior, ask yourself, what has happened to this child? What is the child’s story, and how can I give them some grace in this past stressful, overwhelming year? The act of grace comes in all forms, saying sorry, smiling at a child that has just made a rude comment, or taking a deep breath (or two) before you consider what to say.
Take the time to give yourself, your family, and others a bit of grace in your life. Interestedly the word grace has increased in use over the 20 years – maybe because we need to show more of it. We all need it.
Stress, overwhelm, and anxiety are the words I use to describe my emotions during a time of crisis. What are the words that come to your mind when we talk about the current world situation?
Luckily for me, I can reach into my toolbox of resilience tools and pull out one of my favorite tools, strengths! My resilience tools are tools I can use to help myself and others bounce back in times of crisis.
In the last video, I shared about the four areas of strengths (Relating, Thinking, Executing and Influencing) and how you might see one or more of those areas in yourself. If I can see my strengths then I can also be intentional about calling upon one or more of those strengths to see my situation differently.
Today I share a short exercise for you to call upon your personal strengths and focus on using them throughout your day.
Our refrigerator has more uses than just keeping food cold. It’s my billboard for reminding me how to keep sane with all that goes on in my life. This makeshift “board” in the kitchen holds various reminders that keep me from losing my cool and help me stay focused on what is important in life.
My life can feel like chaos theory in action. I’m involved with our two active teens at home, helping our two young adult children navigate life, teaching, and trying to have some time with my husband. With all that’s going on in my life, here are my top three secrets on how to create mindful moments for myself. Mindful moments allow me to have the energy to support others in my home and my work.
The first secret is to know the definition and feeling of Peace. I have the following quote on my fridge door:
Peace – It does not mean to be in a place where there is no noise, trouble or hard work. It means to be in the midst of those things and still be calm in your heart.”
This simple refrigerator magnet reminds me to be in the moment. I need to stop and breathe, recognize that the only moment I have is this moment. Then ask myself, “how do I want to spend this moment?” The practice of mindfulness has helped me to pay attention to the heartfelt intention toward myself and others. I say practice because that is what it is, doing the same thing over and over within myself.
This morning I noticed that my son was very slow in getting up for school. In the past, I would have been loudly encouraging them to “get a move on and daylight is burning.” I would yell this up the stairs. This morning I reminded him of the time and when his friend was coming to pick him up. Then I went about making my breakfast. It was hard to not keep reminding him to hurry, but I stopped myself, took a breath and ate my eggs. He made it on time!
There are days when I can’t calmly take in the behaviors of my teens. This is when I use my second secret, giving myself an Adult Time Out. When the kids were younger, we had a “time out” chair for them. Out-of-hand behaviors got them a few minutes in the “time out” chair to calm down. Now they are a little big for the time out chair and yet there are moments I wish I could return them to that spot. I am now the one that takes the time out.
In moments when my emotions are so heightened, I grab my journal and my needs and feelings cards off the top of the fridge. In a state of heightened emotions, I head to our bedroom for a little Adult Time Out.
What do I do there? I take out my feelings cards and go through them searching for the feelings I am currently having in my mind and body. I lay the cards out and ask myself, “What was I needing at that moment from myself and from others around me?” I quickly shuffle through the needs cards to search for those needs that resonate with me. Then I journal.
Sometimes my handwriting is large scribbles and heavy-handed. As I exhaust my emotions onto the page, my energy changes and so do my words, taking me to a place of calm. Calm enough to move from the bedroom into a discussion with those around me, I share what I needed and was feeling in the moment.
For times when I am not able to get away, I use another form of the Adult Time Out. I hum upbeat songs under my breath and busy my hands washing dishes or with some other task. This helps me to check in with myself and allows me to take a step back from the problem.
My final secret is the process of stepping back and taking a view from the balcony. I keep a poster on the front door of my fridge: “Not My Circus, Not My Monkeys”. The poster is a reminder that many of the conflicts and problems my teens encounter are not mine to own. The problems are theirs, and they need to solve them. Sometimes the solution comes through the valuable lessons learned from making mistakes. They will fail, begin again to become resilient adults.
We were at our lake cabin this past summer and I was walking with my sons in the woods. They were ahead of me arguing about something. At one point I wanted to step in and beg them to stop. Instead, I hung back on the trail and watched the conversation. Recognizing that this conversation was not “my circus,” even though they were “my monkeys”. Finally, the discussion ended and we were back on the trail heading for home with a whole new topic of discussion. I allowed my teens to come to the conclusion that they can agree to disagree.
Being a parent and teacher has been a journey of self-discovery for me. I have found myself learning more about how I want to show up in the world, My three secrets of being mindful, Adult Time Outs and removing myself from the circus have helped to keep me in the present moment. Knowing that all I really need is right here and right now.
