Sometimes You Have to Be Your Own Hero. Here’s How

Adolescence can be fraught with difficult friendships and difficult people. Sometimes you’ll need to be your own hero – but that’s okay because you are brave, brilliant and you have everything you need to do that. 

Transcript

During adolescence you might feel a real pull to experiment with your independence from your family. That doesn’t mean you wont’ need your family – you’ll always need them, but you will be looking at who you are as an independent adult, and you’ll start experimenting with that and exploring that. As you do that, you might start to feel the need to start looking for connections with a peer tribe. Social connection during adolescence feels really important, but it doesn’t always happen smoothly. Sometimes those friendships can be fraught with heartache, sadness, anger or grief.

During adolescence you’ll be confronted with all sorts of challenges – and peer challenges can feel like some of the worst. You won’t even realise how strong or brave you’re being at the time because it will just feel normal. But through this, you will discover your own resilience and resourcefulness.

What you need to remember is to take care of you. By that I mean inside all of us a small child – that part of us that just wants to be loved, reassured, nurtured and feel safe and secure. When friendships are tough, if you’re being teased or bullied, or finding yourself in these friendships that don’t make any sense and seem to change from one day to the next, try to keep that part of you safe and solid. Look after that small child in you. It needs to feel safe and protected.

It’s one thing for bullies or people who don’t understand you to give you the messages that they’re giving you. Be really careful about picking up where those people leave off. You wouldn’t hurt a small child. You wouldn’t tell a small child that they’re fat or ugly or stupid. You wouldn’t tell a small child that they don’t deserve friends, or that there’s something wrong with them. You are brave and strong and resilient. Own that.

Of course you get sad sometimes or exhausted, and of course you just wish sometimes it would be easier. It will get to that. People change. People grow up. But until then, there’s a part of you that really needs to feel the security of you, and that self-love, and that self-compassion. Because adolescence can be hard and sometimes they only way through is straight through the middle – and you’re doing that. In the meantime, keep that part of you safe – the curious, generous, exciting, resilient, part of you that looks at the world with an open heart and an open mind and is able to embrace things. Don’t let other people change you. Take that small child in you, and love it, nurture it, and be kind and gentle with it – because it will be an important part of the healthy, amazing adult that you will be one day.

 

 


 

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Far from being ‘another anxiety workshop’, this comprehensive approach will draw on neuroscience, evidence-based strategies, and highly respected therapeutic models in developing a fresh, impactful approach to working with anxiety in young people.

We will explore anxiety from the ground up, developing a ‘roadmap’ for a therapeutic response to anxiety that will include key information, powerful strategies, and new responses to anxiety to effect immediate and long-term change.

This workshop is for anyone who works with young people in any capacity. 

Includes full catering, handbook and PD certificate.

For the full range of workshops in Australia and New Zealand, see the link in the bio.♥️
Relationship first, then learning and behaviour will follow. It can’t be any other way. 

Anxious brains can’t learn, and brains that don’t feel safe will organise young bodies (all bodies) for fight, flight (avoidance, refusal, disengagement, perfectionism), or shutdown. 

Without connection, warmth, a sense of belonging, feeling welcome, moments of joy, play, and levity, relational safety will be compromised, which will compromise learning and behaviour. It’s just how it is. Decades of research and experience are shouting this at us. 

Yet, we are asking more and more of our teachers. The more procedural or curriculum demands we place on teachers, the more we steal the time they need to build relationships - the most powerful tool of their trade. 

There is no procedure or reporting that can take the place of relationship in terms of ensuring a child’s capacity to learn and be calm. 

There are two spaces that teachers occupy. Sometimes they can happen together. Sometimes one has to happen first. 

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There is an opportunity cost to everything. It isn’t about relationships OR learning. It’s relationships AND learning. Sometimes it’s relationships THEN learning. 

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The great teachers already know this. What’s getting in the way isn’t their capacity or their will to build relationships, but the increasing demands that insist they shift more attention to grades, curriculum, reporting, and ‘managing’ behaviour without the available resources to build greater physical (sensory, movement) and relational safety (connection, play, joy, belonging).

Relationships first, then the rest will follow.♥️
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It doesn’t matter how small the steps are, as long as they are forward.♥️
I'm so excited to be speaking about separation anxiety at the Childhood Potential Online Montessori Conference. 

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I'd love you to join me. See more here 
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3. Help them understand why they feel the way they do when they are anxious, otherwise they’ll interpret sick tummies, sore tummies, racy heart, clammy skin, big feelings as a sign of deficiency or potential disaster. It isn’t. It’s a sign of a brain and body trying to protect them, at a time they don’t need protecting. 

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