Welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me, Kim John Payne. Again, it's so great you can make time to tune into these little 10-15 minute episodes. This week, I've been thinking about how to actually use the learning that athletes know all about in terms of success and being in a good flow when they perform on the sporting field in one sort or another, and how that relates to us, and how that relates to our kids when we're actually directing them to do something that we potentially know could be difficult.
So, this is a little bit personal as it starts off for me, a personal learning, because as a child and then as a teenager, I was a so-called youth elite athlete. And I would always practice. At practice, I would actually do quite well, and I'd get this sense of flow.
But then when it came to the games, I didn't do so well. You know, it was, how can I put it, suboptimal. It was okay.
Still held my place in the team, kind of, but it wasn't going so well. Now in the, well, actually, and because I was distracted, there were sometimes tens of thousands of people. As a youth team, we would play before the adult teams, you know, the big national teams.
And there were lots and lots of people. They hadn't necessarily come to see us, but we were a part of that club or a part of that state or country or whatever. And so we, you know, there were lots of tens and tens of thousands of people screaming and shouting.
And, oh, it was, it was hard to take. Some kids could stay focused and I wasn't one of them. Now, the senior team had a couple of sports psychologists, and one of them noticed me and approached me and taught me about visualization.
They taught me of what I came to think of even back then, all those years ago, as picturing forward, as actually picturing forward, not getting caught up in the moment, but being able to actually see where the pass was going to go and then placing the pass there. You see athletes do it all the time. They're on the starting blocks, the swimmers and runners, and they're picturing the race and they're picturing it forward.
And when I learned to do that and it became somewhat second nature, gosh, I got back to having fun again. You know, my game definitely improved and I rose through the ranks even a bit more. But, but really parenting is, I don't know, it's so much harder.
Playing in front of tens of thousands of screaming people is just easy compared to when our kids are screaming or our kids are defiant. So much more challenging. You know, I'm reminded of a very well-known baseball pitcher a few years ago, who clearly was using, you know, visualization and picturing forward.
And an interviewer asked him, are you, you know, picturing inwardly the perfect, perfect pitch? And he said, no, no, no. It was in a World Series. It was the final game.
He said, I'm picturing the champagne in the locker room. And I thought that is, that is really something that he's actually picturing so far forward. And he's just, and, and he seemed, I watched, someone sent this to me and I watched him just relax.
And there was almost like a smile that crept over his face. And I thought, so that's what he was doing. He was picturing success.
Now, in our parenting, right? If we can focus beyond the instruction to having, having a small success, and more than that, just feeling connected to our child. So we're about, for example, to ask them to clean up the lounge room, right? Because it's the end of the day and supper's coming and, and we know that this is sometimes or often a point of contention. What I'm suggesting is taking a few moments.
I mean, it's just a few moments. One doesn't have to sort of, you know, smudge the room and assume a lotus position or anything. Just a few moments and just pause and picture forward.
Picture getting to the, you know, like obviously doing the cleanup, maybe, but particularly at the end of the cleanup, being connected to your child. You know, you've helped a little bit and then you're coming to the table and just get a good, cozy, connected picture inside yourself. It just takes two or three seconds, you know, just a quick, I'm picturing forward.
It's, it's very similar to what athletes do. You focus forward. It's almost like you're throwing a grappling hook forward and then pulling yourself towards it.
And picture not so much the small details of the cleanup happening well, but the feeling of connection with your child. Now, this is a little bit of a brain switch going on here. I've got to admit it.
It's a trick because it tricks the brain into going into the more connective centers of our being. What it does is it settles us on down and it takes us out of our hesitant brain. It takes us out of the, of the, of kind of the edges of our fight or flight brain.
And it, rather than focus on potential refusal and feeling an abject failure and then being disconnected with our kids. And even if we're not picturing that, you know, like it's, it's in us, right? We're about to give an instruction that usually gets a lot of pushback. Picture forward, pitch beyond, picture beyond the pushback to where you're connected.
Now, children, they, they sense it. They have, I've talked often about the mirror neurons in their brain. Involuntarily, they pick this up.
They know it. They sense it. They internalize it.
Our kids do, they can sense when we're connected to them. And more importantly in this, or as importantly, we're connecting to ourselves. We're connecting to our, our own surety, our own authenticity, whatever we call it.
But we're, we're centering ourselves by that picturing forward. Now, this is not magic, you know, you still get the pushback and so on and so on. But you've, you've set yourself off on a little bit of a, of a different trajectory because you've gone forward and you're not ready to react.
You've given yourself a bit of space to just a little bit of spaciousness because you've, you've actually pictured the child connecting with you. And let's say you get pushback. It's much more likely that we as parents would be then able to, to say something, you know, words to the effect of, oh, you know, it's hard, isn't it? Yeah, we cleaned up pretty well yesterday, but it's hard today.
Oh, dear. Well, you know, I'll give a bit of help. That's all right.
But, but we can do this because, because you know, you can do it. You know, you're connected, you've connected inwardly, and you're not at the edge of your reactivity. So if you want to become a parent athlete, you know, and use all the wisdom of athletes, why, why shouldn't we? It's much harder than, you know, than representing your country.
This is the real stuff. Now, again, a quick reminder, just at the end of this, of this little podcast, we have a Simplicity Parenting Care Professionals seminar coming right up on February 4th and 5th. If you're an educator, an early childhood care professional, a counselor, therapist of any stripe, a nurse, doctor, we have, we've been running these care professional seminars for years now, and they're specifically designed for you bringing the simplicity family life, the simplicity parenting book right into your practice so that you can flow that into what you're already doing in your day to day work as an educator and care professional.
And that's coming, and you can go right to the website because it's coming right up, and you'll see it there. You'll see trainings and it's, it's featured. And if you're listening to this after this has happened, then still go to the site and get on the, on the interest list.
And we'll let you know, because these come around three, four times a year, actually in the different, the different books that I've written. We base care professional trainings on those. Okay.
So anyway, that's it. Hope that was helpful about the parent athlete and picturing it forward. Okay.
Bye bye for now.
