Welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me, Kim John Payne, and this small series on emotional self-regulation. This week, I wanted to take this next important step into how to stay better regulated, more centered with our kids. I'm tempted to say calm, but that's a bit overstating it.
Centered would be good enough, right? Calm would be fantastic. But one of the things that I've heard so much over the years, I've certainly experienced myself, is that when we become emotionally reactive and not at all at our best, is when we're doing too much. When our personal cup is just overflowing, you know, I can imagine a tap flowing into a cup and that tap, all the water that's coming into that vessel of ourselves, much of it might be okay-ish, you know, good even, but it's too much.
And that tap, the volume of that tap is just overwhelming and there's spillage. What I mean by that is just there's, life is moving too fast, you know, it's just too much stuff to do, where we're doing all kinds of things that are extraneous, things have built up, have become normalized, and it's just, we're living life at quite a pace that really is unsustainable, and it's unsustainable to our nervous systems, it's unsustainable to family life in general, and there's spillage, right? That tap has turned up too high and there's all this spillage. And that spillage is usually our dysregulation.
That spillage is usually us getting angry, us getting frustrated, us getting steely, whatever it is, whatever our sort of go-to overwhelmed place is, it is not the way we want to be at all. And so it's important to understand the spillage. We spoke about that in just this previous week's episode of understanding where is the spillage, or another way that I put it is, you know, what is pushing our buttons, getting under our skin.
It's all kinds of metaphors, isn't there, interestingly enough, but to understand what's getting under our skin, what is the spillage, so to speak, it's good, it's really important, and I hope, you know, you had a chance to consider that. Now, taking another step, is this overwhelm, this flooding we're experiencing, it's almost a decision as do we want to spend our life mopping up the spillage, or feeling guilty and ashamed or frustrated, and just furiously mopping up the spillage, or do we want to turn down the tap? And this week's episode is all about turning down the tap, so we don't have to mop up so much spillage of us losing it, us shouting, or us getting naggy, or, you know, just speaking in a voice we just don't want to speak in, you know? So how do we turn down the tap? A lot of this, you know, it's multi-layered, and of course, a ton of the work in the Simplicity Parenting book, the chapters are all about this, but overall, it's about sitting with looking at your week, you might even just write down like, here's all the stuff I've got to do on Monday, right through Tuesday, okay, I've got a soccer practice on Monday for her, I've got, okay, I've got to drop them off at school early because they've got robotics club, and then Tuesday I've got to do this, and then Wednesday I've got to somehow get some food in, and you've just got all this stuff, and then there's parties, and there's childcare, and then there's, you're just organizing and holding a lot together, and if you've got, you know, children who are in travel teams, you're driving them here, you're driving them there, you're doing this, you're doing that, and, ah, you know, there's volunteering for the fundraisers at school, there's, it's kind of endless, right? My advice would be to write it down, it would be just to write down in the last week or month if you want to expand it out to that, just sit down, take a moment, write it all down, just do that, just get a list of all the stuff, just do a whole sort of dump of all the things that you're responsible for, and don't hold back, you know, write fast, because there's a lot, there's an awful lot, and anything to do, you know, with the way you live in your life, particularly in relationship to the family, but there could be other things too that just come up that you think, this is way too much, all right, so that's the first thing, then take a minute, look at it, and, you know, be a little, a little shocked at, oh my goodness, I'm doing all that, all right, and it could be little things, you know, it doesn't have to be big and sort of noisy and noticeable, it's a lot, family life is made up of a lot of little stuff that has to be achieved through a day, you know, look, write down the little stuff too, and then start to order it, and order it in a way that is sort out what is absolutely essential, I mean, there is this essential things, and what is sort of on the edge, borderline, it's important to do, but it's not essential, column number two, column number three is what's inessential, really, that could be dropped, I don't really have to do that, our life would go on if we didn't do that, or if we gave it a rest for, you know, if your kids are at school, if for this term, we pull, like next term, we're going to pull back on basketball travel team, we're only going to play rec, or whatever it is, like no matter where this takes you, what is inessential, life would go on without that, your kids would miss it, maybe you would a little bit, but honestly, it's not essential, and be a little bit hard edged with this, because we have often come to normalize all this stuff, like it all feels important, and there can't be that many things that are essential to living, it wasn't a hundred years ago, it's like that saying, if it wasn't food a hundred years ago, it's not food now, you know, and people point out the weaknesses in that argument, but it's still a pretty good one. But if it wasn't essential, a hundred years, it's not essential now either.
Now there are weaknesses in that argument too, but it's still a pretty good one. And go through that, and of course, the keepers, the essential things, you know, keep the essential things, keep them in place. It's fine, it's good.
The ones that are borderline, have a real close look at those, because the ones that are inessential, they really can be dropped. And even if a plan into the future, like even if you have to plan two, three, four, five months ahead to drop that stuff, to slowly just weed it out of your family garden, you can do that. Some of the stuff can just be dropped right away, like just accepting too many party invitations, just drop it, just, we're not going to go there.
Or you say to the kids, we are going to have one play date a week at each max. And on some weeks when we have got afterschool activities, all right, so it doesn't only have to be play dates, anything after school, you get one. And more than this, I'm quoting a parent who did this.
So, you know, she said to the kids, think carefully about what you ask for, because there's one. And we are going to spend more time just hanging out, decompressing, just being at home. We don't have to be doing this stuff, it's just gotten crazy.
But then look at the middle column. And that's the one that's a little bit harder to sort through, because it could be essential, and kind of edge it in that direction. But you know what, we could drop that, and it might take a little more time.
And it might take a little more negotiation, or a bit more nuancing. But we could leave that, we really could do it. And just one of the ways that I find quite effective is to sit with it, and imagine in that, you know, maybe column, that's that middle column, just sort of close your eyes and imagine your life without it.
You know, just sit with it. Imagine what it would be like to not do that. Right? To sit with it, visualize it.
And if it gives you a feeling of uplift, you know what life would be a whole lot better without that, go for it, put it in the inessential column. If you get this feeling, when you're visualizing, dropping this thing, whatever it is that's in that middle ground, and it gives you a sad feeling, like you, the boat kind of goes low in the water, and it doesn't give you an uplift, then it, you know, there's an argument to putting that in the essential column. When I've done this exercise with parents, sometimes they turn to the essential column and do exactly the same thing.
And some things move from essential, like they imagine it, like it's totally essential that Miguel has travel team soccer, and that Andy has piano and ballet lessons. Essential. It's essential.
And they imagine their life where that's dialed back. And sometimes that ballet lesson, it's like a lot of pressure, because she's in a, she's in a performance, and there's a lot of pressure, you know, you've got to be there four or five times a week. And I'm not kidding, that is, for those of you involved in performance ballet, or dance, you'll know this is true in many, in many troops.
And the coach will drop kids who don't, the instructor will drop kids who don't turn up three, four times a week, and then on Saturdays for performance. But imagine your life without it. And if you if you just get this feeling of breath, this feeling of, oh, then I think that goes in the maybe column, or even, even the the digit column, even the inessential.
So, you know, just just think of your week, go through it in this way. Now, I wanted to wrap up this week's, this week's episode, by going back to time during COVID times during the epidemic, super hard, super hard time. And this is not universal.
This is a little bit general, generalized feedback I got, but a lot of parents who had kind of sorted out what was essential and inessential. In other words, they lived a life prior to COVID of the tap being turned down fairly low, when this really awful lockdown happened. And we just it was such, such tragedy in the world.
And many parents have said to me quietly, and they've always prefaced this saying, I know this was awful and tragic and horrible. We know that. But in our home, it wasn't all that dramatic, because we'd already sort of worked this one out, and weren't living life at a pace that was unsustainable.
So when this came, we still had to make some adjustments. But the adjustments were there. Now, this is again, I want to labor the point, this is not the case for all people.
And it doesn't apply to everyone in any way. But I did hear that comment an awful lot. Now come in full circle, just as we wrap up.
This is one of the things that makes us better emotionally regulated, because it means much less running around. It means much less that we're sort of the unpaid taxi service, where we're living life at a breathless pace. And we're living life right up to the edge.
And then when our kid gets a bit fresh with us, a bit disrespectful, as any child will, we were, they will, you know, it gives us a little bit of soul flexibility to not snap. It gives that little bit more of being able to deflect, being able to move, being able to, you know, say to a child, whoa, that was really harsh, we're going to come back to that. That was not okay.
You don't always speak like that. We're going to find out what all that was about later on. No, no, no, not now.
And there's this crucial little piece I just mentioned, not now. We've got the space to actually sort it out when we choose, in our timing, right? And not the snapback. You will not speak to me like that.
If I had have spoken to my father like that, and then you're into it, you know, and the child's nine, and you're not, and it's just an unattractive look. And we, you know, later that night, we think, oh my goodness, that was not good. Well, dialing life back, slowing down, turning down the tap, and working out what's essential from the inessential gives us that, just that little bit of space.
It's not magic, but boy, is it helpful. Okay. And remember, this, all these themes are tied together in the simplicity, parenting, care professional, emotional self regulation, kind of being at your best seminar that we have coming right up.
And you can find out a ton of details about it on the link below. Okay, bye bye for now.
