Hello and welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me, Kim John Payne. This week, to begin with, I wanted to tell you about our Simplicity Parenting Care Professional Seminar for Emotional Self-Regulation. It's coming up on July 27, 28, and anyone who is working with adults in their community, with the parents in their school, or with clients in their practice, who wants to take another step in helping parents come to better terms, be better emotionally regulated, and be at their best when their kids are at their worst.
That's a wonderful starting place. You can see a link to that right below here in the show notes. Anyway, to a theme for this coming week.
This is a theme that a good friend of mine, Steve Bidoff, who wrote the book Raising Boys, Manhood, Raising Girls, many beautiful books. He and I were on a long road trip once, doing some workshops, and we got to talking about parenting from the past. We got to talk about how much does our own, the way we were raised in our own childhood, influence the way we're raising our kids.
We came up with this picture, a metaphor, I guess, of how when you're growing up and you're raised up in the way you are, you develop a certain sort of shape, and that's your metal, to use that play on words. You're a certain shape. Your background definitely shapes you.
We of course would all agree on that. And when we live our lives, and then along come our own children, it's a chance to almost like reforge ourselves. It's a chance to almost like thrust ourselves into the blacksmith's forge of our newly discovered baby and parenting and kids as they grow up.
But it's almost like we take our metal from the past and we put it into this furnace of modern family life, and then we get to make ourselves the shape we want to be. We get then to form ourselves, to shape ourselves, and we really don't have to accept what came towards us only and what happened to us in the past. Now, you could say that some of those shapes are hard to change, and of course I get that.
If there's been a lot of stress and anxiety, even trauma in your own background as a parent, that's never going to be easy to do. But it is our chance to raise our kids in a way that's different to the way we were raised, and keeping what was good about the way we grew up, and getting to make ourselves the shape that we want to be. It's almost like when you have a family, you're presented with a development opportunity, a growth opportunity, almost like no other.
Because the children are so dear to us, aren't they? They're so very, very dear, and we'd do anything for our kids. And of course, that seriously involves developing ourselves and not ending up sounding like our mother or father or guardian when they were having a really bad day, and we were pushing their buttons when we were 14 years old. No one wants to end up sounding like that.
We'll talk about that a bit more in the future. But this is a chance to forge ourselves anew. Now, there's something about watching a blacksmith forge that is just so interesting.
Because in the movies, we see blacksmiths, big burly blokes with big black beards and great big leather aprons, wailing away on pieces of metal and the sparks flying. And I guess at times that is needed. But when I've watched blacksmiths, what I see is a much smaller, much more refined, just tap, tap, tapping, tap, tap, tap.
And then they'll look at the metal and then cool it and then maybe back into the forge if needed, back into the fire. They pull that out of the fire, the metal, put it on the anvil and tap, tap, tap, small little taps, shifting the shape, shifting, changing, shifting, changing. And that always puts me in mind of working with children, is that it's not so much the great big, you know, like wailing on pieces of metal that change ourselves.
It's the small daily reactions. That's in a sense the key to making ourselves the shape that we want to be, not just accepting the past, but is to do it in small little doable steps and then stand back and look at it. Because it's exactly what a blacksmith does, right? They stand back, they look at this, they consider it, and then back into the forge.
Out it comes, red hot, tap, tap, tap. There's this considering, you know, where we do this all the time. We're out with friends.
We're talking to a partner. We're just at the end of the evening if we're a solo parent and we're considering, we're thinking where, ugh, that didn't go well. I want that to go better tomorrow.
You know what? I'm going to get the lunches set out on the counter so we don't have that great big rush. You know what? I'm actually going to speak to my son, my daughter, my child tomorrow about, and I'm going to do it in a better way. Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.
That's what that is. It's all the small steps and it requires that kind of consciousness that whilst we might not be the shape we want to be, like on the day our children are born, there's a journey we go on with them and it's the small little things that we do that will eventually change us. We don't need to beat up on ourselves that we're not the person we want to be right in the early years of raising a child.
We're going to forge ourselves into the shape we want to be as our children grow. The beauty of that is that they're growing outwardly and we're growing inwardly and we're making ourselves the shape that we want to be, albeit with the help of others, you know, but that's that small little consideration and the tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. Okay, that's it for this week.
Again, the Care Professional Seminar on Emotional Self-Regulation coming right up in July, July 27, July 28. Do go online, have a look at it right at the simplicityparenting.com website. Click on that link.
You'll see it right there. It's very prominent in trainings and it's a small little three-hour training on a Saturday, a three-hour training on a Sunday that is recorded and the feedback has been wonderful over the years of how this has helped care professionals in turn be able to help parents who are trying to just do that transformation of themselves and their emotional dysregulation is getting in the way of that and how to help a parent be better centered and oriented. Okay, that's it for now.
Hope that's helpful. Bye-bye.
