Welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me, Kim John Payne. You've done it again. You've carved out a little bit of time, 10-15 minutes to listen to this little podcast episode or watch it, I guess, too.
So a few housekeeping things before we get started in this week's theme. We have one of these care professional seminars that we do, I think it's four times a year with various themes. It's this, the theme of this particular one coming up soon is on emotionally resilient tweens and teens.
And it does also encompass, it encompasses younger kids as well, I've got to say. That's coming up on Saturday, November 7th, Sunday, November 8th. And if you're watching this after that date, no worries, just sign up on the interest list.
Now the sign up is not open at the moment, but the interest list is. And so if this at all interests you, you can go right there, sign up and we'll get back to you. You'll the first to know, so to speak, when the registration opens.
These seminars are personally led by me. There's three hours on Saturday, three hours on Sunday. Again, the theme is working with tweens and teens and younger children as well, really, we'll be touching on that.
But how to help them be more socially, emotionally resilient, how to work with when our kids are being isolated, teased, bullied, giving up too much of themselves to fit into the group, all these themes. So yeah, that's coming right up and the interest list is open. Okay, so the theme for this week is about more being and less doing.
Now, this theme is, it's an over overarching sort of emphasis in society today, of us doing more, you know, doing, doing, doing, and we can so easily get caught up in that, in that doing, don't you think it happens? It happens a lot. And so what I'm really talking about here is holding back that tendency to, to do more, to always be busy and, and buy into that sort of Western culture of always having to, always having to do more. And what I'm suggesting is that from, is that we need to restrike that balance.
And the balance is, is for particularly when you're a parent, is just dialing back on the doing and dialing up on the being, just being with kids, little ones, you know, big kids, doesn't matter, that they just love it when we're around, when we're accessible, when we're just with them, where we're reading a magazine while they're doing a project of some sort, whilst a teenager is doing homework. And we're just, you know, sitting in their, in their room, writing on our, in our journal, I know, for our own kids, I made a habit, actually, of going into their, their room, when they were doing homework on the floor, I don't know why they had a perfectly good desk. But anyway, it was always on the floor.
And I would just take some mending with me, or take my journal and just be writing, as they were doing their work. And we would just be together. And it's really interesting, what happens when you can, when you just hang out, when you're just being rather than having that, and sort of, well, I guess, resisting that voice of I should be doing something, I should be doing something.
But just spending that 10, 15 minutes, 20 minutes, half an hour, an hour, however long you can sustain, you know, the itch to get up and do something, but just be. And it's so interesting that in those moments, this voice comes out of your child, your tween, your teen, of a little issue they're dealing with, or that it would often come up. And I kind of coached our kids up into accepting my presence in their space at a younger age.
So when they got to being teenagers, it was just normal. I was being, you know, I was being in in their space, it was it had been normalized, they didn't think it was weird. And, you know, things would come up, you know, like they're just without much to do, or fanfare, things would be said, like, I don't know why Sophie is just so sad these days.
What do you think? I don't know. Now, you know, that I'm not making that one up, actually. But that was after 10 minutes of silence, of, of me just doing my my mending, them doing their homework.
And we had, we had just this brief, but really good conversation about sadness, about isolation, and about, about what that must be what, you know, what that that person in their class must be experiencing, and what do you think they're experiencing, and, and then just back to being again. But if I had been busy doing, doing, doing that conversation about, actually, it was about pre-depression, would never have come up. And, and references to, you know, being isolated, being I called it being in the back of a cave, actually, over at Simple Steps, I talked about this in the last episode, actually, of children who self isolate.
And that was the Simple Steps podcast episode last, last week. The, but that would come up, and it would surface over the years, as our kids went through high school, about understanding isolation, understanding depression, and, and how hard that can be, and what are some of the things you can do as a friend to that person, you know, so much comes out of, of just being able to be with kids, and have that have that presence, where they can just slowly unpack their worlds, and what's going on for them. So less doing, or balancing it out with, with being.
And over this next week or two, I hope that that little message can, can come back to you as you're tempted to get up and do the next thing and do the next thing of no, I'm just going to be, I'm just going to sit, I'm just going to be with my kids. Okay, bye-bye for now.
