Abbie: Hello and welcome to the CosmoParenting Podcast brought to you by the CMM Institute for Personal and Social Evolution. In this space, we invite you to see yourself as someone who is curious about and actively participating in creating your own meaning around parenting.
This is our “Animate” episode, where we offer some strategies to integrate into parenting so you can bring to life the things we talk about here on the podcast. Let’s begin.
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Abbie: Today, I am joined once again by Stephanie Higgs, who is a current gifted educator with 15 years of experience teaching students as young as Pre-K all the way through fifth grade, and she is here to offer us a best practice from a teacher’s perspective. Hi, Stephanie.
Stephanie: Hi, Abbie.
Abbie: So, Stephanie, you joined us last month and we discussed a practice of noticing and wondering in our relationships. Share with us the practice you are offering related to this month’s theme of patterns.
Stephanie: Sure! I am so excited to join the conversation with you as you reflect back on the discussions that have already occurred earlier this month.
I’m going to share a simple strategy that I love using in the classroom when I'm working with children to think about goal setting, mindfulness, and envisioning a brighter future! A quick strategy that I'd love to share with you today involves the simple concept of “Keep & Release.”
I invite caregivers to pose the question to themselves and any other family members to think about the patterns currently existing in your life that enhance or improve your situation that you would love to keep. When you think about life a year from now, what are the things that you want to stay the same? What patterns are enhancing or improving your current lived experience that you hope to keep consistent?
Conversely, what patterns do you observe in your life as it stands today that you would love to release or to change? When you think about your life a year from now, where do you see patterns that are leading to negative outcomes? I invite you to apply this simple rule of thumb to your parenting toolbox as you think about goal setting, envisioning, and creating a mindful future. It's as simple as asking yourself, your children, your partner, or any other friends and family members what patterns in their life they want to keep and where they see patterns that they'd like to release.
This concept of keeping and releasing is a question I love to think about in the New Year. As we are in the early stages of kicking off this podcast series and thinking about how life looked previously and how we would want it to look at this time next year. I love to think about ‘Keep and Release’ in terms of birthdays, too! That is always such a fun time to do some reflecting and looking back, as well as envisioning a bright future ahead based on the observations of patterns we love and hope they remain, as well as those we’d love to adjust or change.
Abbie: Stephanie, I think this is a great practice for this month because, you know, the foundation we have laid is really about becoming aware of patterns and acknowledging them, which is an important place to start, and then this helps us to kind of transition to that next step of acting on that new awareness because once you are aware of the patterns in your life then the question, like you are saying right now, really does become- do you want to break or repeat them?- or in your words- keep or release?
And I really do encourage people listening to embrace these practices from your classroom. I keep thinking about how the social-emotional learning that kids get in the classroom, the people parenting them and their caregivers didn’t get the same thing because we just didn’t have this language to talk about it then. But, I don’t think it’s ever too late to engage with these practices. And I feel like that is something you will probably agree with.
Also, I can imagine that a lot of people feel like they don’t know where to start when it comes to evolving in their parenting, but this is really it. This is where you start. Enough small practices like this overtime and your parenting will change. So, thank you so much for joining me today, Stephanie! And thank you to everyone listening for joining us as well. You can connect with Stephanie on Instagram @littlemissgifted and you can check out our other CosmoActivities and additional resources all for free at www.cosmoactivities.com. We are so grateful to be on this journey with you. And we will see you next week for the final episode of the month where we will talk communication on the theme of patterns.
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