Hello, and welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me, Kim John Payne. I wanted to just give a last little mention of our Simplicity Parenting Seminar for care professionals, educators, on the theme of emotional self-regulation and helping those people we work with who want to be better parents, but their emotional self-regulation is not as good as they want to be. And this is just a six-hour seminar coming up on July 27, 28, three hours on both days.
I'll be facilitating it. It's a live Zoom-based seminar, and if you're at all interested, go to Simplicity Parenting. You'll see it right there under trainings, click, that's it.
If you're listening to this podcast after that time, then you can always join the interest list as well. Okay, so on with the show. This week, I've been thinking about a metaphor that I talk about in the Being At Your Best When Kids Are At Their Worst book.
And I'm particularly thinking of it because I was doing some teacher training in a center that has a balcony, has a lovely balcony that overlooks the auditorium and a sort of a big floor, a flat floor below with a raked seating as it goes up from the stage. And I was on this balcony and I thought, gosh, this is just like the metaphor in the Being At Your Best book, because so much of our parenting is we strive to be on the balcony. We strive to be in our frontal cortex, in our executive brain, in our neocortex, in that upper part of ourselves, our higher transcendent being.
We all want to be there, right? We all want to be on the balcony and have that good overviewing, objective, objectivity. Okay, but then there's the dance floor, then there's the stage, and then that's this sort of dance floor or the actors on the stage. That's the action of day-to-day family life.
And often that can get very buffeting and we lose the ability to be on the balcony because the dance floor is somewhat an overwhelming experience. It's the rush and the pressure of daily life. And it can feel not so much like a dance floor, but a punk concert mosh pit.
It's just like a lot is going on. Now, that's partly the benefit of simplifying and balancing and slowing down life. So many of these podcasts and books and such are all about slowing down.
Okay, we all get that. But a really big benefit of being able to balance family life, dial it back, slow it down, is that it enables us to be on the balcony much, much more. The energy, so to speak, is not drawn onto the dance floor and away from the balcony.
We can now, if things slow down just that tick or two, just that little bit, just that beat. If we just slow down our movements, if we just clear the table up just that little bit slower, if we slow our speech down just that little bit, if we just slow down at dinner times just that little bit. If all the things we can do to slow it down, to balance, to simplify on a small scale and even on a larger scale when we're choosing, do we do that extra travel team, do we go to that party, do we, all these choices that we have.
When we're at our best is when that can slow down and the more, and this is the thing really, the more it slows down, the more we're on the balcony. And the more we're on the balcony looking down at our life, the more we can see the perspective that we need to make those decisions, right? So it's cyclical. But as we slow down more, our objectivity increases and the upstairs brain starts to become activated and the downstairs brain of the brainstem of the fight, flight, freeze, flock, flop, fawn, all those Fs, the downstairs brain of just getting through a day, just getting through a day starts to be able to come, starts to be able to soothe a little bit more.
And our upstairs brain of being objective and making close to good decisions is much more intensified. And so a lot of this has got to do with giving ourselves the space and the grace of daily family life that is not rushy-rushy as one, as one mom said to me once in Asia when I was traveling, I've mentioned this before in the podcasts, I still smile when I think of it where she says, Kim, when rushy-rushy come in, peace go out, I just thought, beautiful. But what also goes out is our ability to be in our frontal lobes, in that higher part of our brain, in that more executive overviewing brain.
That's what rushy-rushy starts to affect. It also starts to affect the whole of the adrenaline, of course, cortisol, and now we're into it, the kids are elevated, they're dysregulated, we're dysregulated, and it's just not going well. And it's not going the way you want it to go.
And you're thinking to yourself, why does everything have to be so rushed? Why does everything have to be so hard? And I think, honestly, the beginning point to getting at least a foothold on being the parent we want to be, and speaking with the voice we want to speak with, is to be able to take a good look at life and say, how is it we can dial this back? How is it we can, and if you are dialing back already, how can we maintain it? So we don't get back into that kind of survival mode, that it's not just surviving, it's really thriving in a time where we can be on that balcony looking down and simultaneously be on the dance floor, rather than having those two things split. Because when life is balanced enough, it's not like you're getting through the morning, you're rushing around, you're feeling harassed, you're driving the kids, and then in the evening you sit and you contemplate the day, that's okay too, that's helpful of course, but being able to actually be, I guess the word is mindful, of course, but mindful right in the hurly-burly of daily life. Because no matter how much we simplify and balance, things are going to get busy a little bit, it's just the way it is, just getting out the door in the mornings, it's going to get busy a little bit, but the more we can be in those two places simultaneously, so when we're starting to get frustrated with our kids, if we've had a day where it's been relatively balanced, and we've got a little bit of space within our inner being, within our soul, then when we're starting to get frustrated, you can almost from the balcony look down at yourself, interacting with the kids on the dance floor and think, huh, I'm not doing well at the moment, if, yeah, I need to just calm it down a little bit, because otherwise I'm going to say something I'm really going to regret, and I'm going to lose it a little bit, I'm going to raise my voice, I'm going to be sarcastic, or maybe I'm even going to shout.
When we've had a balanced enough day, and those difficult moments inevitably arise, we've got enough space in our vessel, within our soul, to not go into spillage behavior, not to have just, it's all too much, it's like there's too much water, too much fluid, too much content coming into my cup, I've lost it, and then you get cold and steely with the kids, or frustrated. The trick to this, really, is not dealing with that moment only, it's dealing with the day and the week and the month that come before that, and having enough spaciousness within ourselves, so that when those inevitable moments come up, we're not in survival mode, we're not in brain stem mode, we're not being dominated by our amygdala in the brain stem. That is the key to being on the balcony much, much more.
It's not a magic thing, it's something that builds up over time. I sure hope that was helpful, because it's a big deal, really, isn't it? Don't forget, Care Professional Seminar, coming up really soon, it's right in the show notes, you can click on that, and again, if you're listening to this as a recording, go to the waitlist, because we run these every year, we run a bunch of Care Professional Seminars, these six hour seminars all through the year, on some of the major themes of my books. Okay, thanks for listening in, bye bye for now.
