Self-Regulation Podcast Mini-Series with Brad Chapin
An overview
Jenny and author, international speaker, and educator for Self-Regulation and Intentional Stress Management training, Brad Chapin co-hosted an 8-week podcast miniseries using his journal and program (available through AccuTrain), with collaborators in Alberta and abroad. Brad participated from Kansas and even New York City, where he presented his book and discussed our program!
Participants received a hard copy of Brad Chapin’s Self Regulation Skillset for Educators journal. One concept (chapter) was covered per session, meeting online weekly to discuss the lesson and our ongoing practice.
Stay tuned for the release of our 8 sessions with Brad over the next couple of weeks, and for your opportunities to participate here or in upcoming sessions!
In the meantime, please check out my two episodes with Brad in Season 1: Episode 2 via Clubhouse (audio only) and Episode 25 in-person (audio/video).
Program Introduction By Brad Chapin
Brad:
Good to see everyone. I was just telling Jenny, I think you started something here with this. I got here (New York City, at conference for teachers) and talked a little bit about what we were doing, meeting weekly and practicing skills together, and developing this community of support around a pathway of skills that we have in common and applying it to some of the challenges that we have in our lives and supporting each other. I wrote this as a self-regulation journey, but really seeing the benefits of the group as far as the practice and support and ideas and learning from other people and the validation and some of the other pieces that come along with that. They gave everyone here at this conference a copy of this book, \1500 of these going out to people from all over the country in the world! I told 'em what we were doing, and they made this slide.
They put it up on the big projector in front of everyone. I'll be starting another book study for anyone that was here and got the book starting in March. They'll be doing the same thing that we're doing here with another group of people.
Lesson 1
Brad:
I've been in mental health for 25 years in the clinical side as a director of inpatient and outpatient services for a large healthcare system, and everybody has their challenge story carrying around into every zoom meeting, into every meeting, into every interaction relationship.
When an organism or human is balanced, we have the best chance of managing that challenge in a successful way.
If balance helps us be most effective, what keeps us from being balanced reactivity really gets in the way of a human being, being balanced and responding in a balanced way. What gets me excited about this is that skill development can lead to improved outcomes.
You only have so much capacity to manage challenge as a human being. If you're spending over half of that time on uncontrollable challenges, how much time and energy does that leave you to spend on the things that you actually can do something about? And then the next logical question is of the controllable problems, what do I do with those? How do I know how to manage those challenges? And that's where the skilled training comes in.
Lesson 2
Brad:
Why and how are we built to be so good at detecting threat or the negative or looking for problems in our environment? It's actually a survival mechanism. When you look at our fight flight or shut system, it's response to threat. It does not know the difference between an existential threat like a dangerous animal, 20 yards from you versus a social-emotional threat. The feeling of loss, for example, a conflict with a loved one, feeling left out, being late to a meeting, being cut off in traffic.
Someone disagreeing with you about a core belief that you have that you feel so strongly about that this is the right thing to do, and they're coming from a different angle that's a threat. And the body really doesn't have a mechanism in here that says, “Oh, that's this kind of a threat, or that kind of a threat.” It has, what we're finding is, more of an on off switch to different degrees. It can go up and down, but it's more like a dial. And once you hit that switch, it's on.
Lesson 3
Brad:
Almost everything we teach involves noticing first. That's why we do skill one. But as soon as you catch that early, doing this at an eight, somebody even trying to remind you to calm down at an eight is not going to go well. The work around skill number one is early detection for that reason, but it usually involves a pause, some cue word that you can say to yourself that whether it's, “I need to excuse myself from the meeting for just a second.” or “Can we take a break?”
It involves stepping away from the threat for a moment. You can't do a skill if you don't have time to do it.
One [opportunity] is freeing yourself up from this illusion of the pressure of time and space, because what we've found is there's very few times that you in a socially emotionally threatening situation that you can't take a break, that you can't take a pause.
It's just that when people are going at it or we're involved in this challenge, sometimes we don't think we can step away. And that's our own rule. It's no one else's.
Lesson 4
Brad:
These skills are in an order for a reason. I can recognize when my biological system's kicking in, I can turn it down a little bit, which allows me to use that cortex and that higher level thinking and creative problem solving more effectively. And now what else is going on with me when this challenge is here?
Well, we have emotions. We have feelings about the challenging events in our life. What this framework is to put it into three [emotional regulation] skills.
Label, we got to put some vocabulary around what we're trying to deal with here. We have words that we can use pretty descriptively and concretely, specifically describe what is this emotion that I'm feeling?
And then I'm previewing next week, but then who's in control of it? Who's dialing it up or who's dialing it down? Who has ownership of it? And then thirdly, what am I going to do with it?
Where's this energy going to go? How can I direct it? If I decide I can direct it? Where do I want to push it?
Lesson 5
Brad:
I hear people say all the time, “She makes me so mad. He makes me. They make me.” Human beings, whatever we attribute causation to whatever we think is making us a certain way, that's where we're going to put all of our energy. Do you think someone else is making you feel a certain way? Boy, your energy is going to go there. How much control do you have over that person? Zero. Right? We can't control other people. We try a lot and we fail miserably, right? There's this misdirection of energy and then you have failure. And then what usually happens after failure is this concept of learned helplessness. Some people hear this as blaming a victim, “I'm upset now, it's all my fault? You're saying that it's all my fault that I'm sad or I'm angry.”
What we're not doing is excusing bad behaviour. Whatever the trigger is, whatever's happened to you. We're not saying that's okay. We're not telling you what number to be at. This skill is this idea of being aware of where you're at and that you can have some influence over that, that no one else controls that. And to not give that away, we do it a lot.
Lesson 6
Brad:
Now we're getting into this fifth skill, which is, okay, this emotion stuff, it's energy. It's going to go somewhere. And you can be intentional about that. And that's our goal with self-regulation, is to be intentional with our skills. This is one of those things that I think it's interesting to reflect on your upbringing about what was anger like in my home as a kid? What was sadness? What was fear? Were they even talked about? Were they even acknowledged as different things? There's households where, “Hey, we don't get angry here.” “We don't do this.” “We don't talk about that.” “We're not going to be upset.” How does a person coming from that have any idea what to do when they feel angry or sad or scared?
I think this one in particular really hits on some things that are learned behaviors from our upbringing and models that we had in our life about what to do with this energy. What are healthy ways to express sadness? And what are unhealthy ways that we sometimes express sadness? What are healthy ways to express fear and sometimes unhealthy ways that we do that?
Lesson 7
This is our third and final domain gone through the biological, what's our body's response to challenge? And then separate out feelings and emotions about challenge. And then this week, this is the highest level of skill. This requires the ability to think about thinking, can I examine my thoughts? Can I notice what's going through my head? Can I pull that out? And then also, can I manipulate that? And what you choose to attend to is ultimately what helps build these patterns of thoughts and beliefs that you have.
To have joy you have to work to get it. You have to be intentional about cultivating joy. Then the question becomes, well, what can make that happen? How can we create that? And one of the things I hope you got out of here was the gratitude practice. One way that we can strengthen that muscle, paying attention to what's going well. What we've noticed is that the smaller sometimes things that people find, the more we're working that muscle. The other concrete skill here is the skill of reframing our thoughts and beliefs and examining those to be more moderate.
Lesson 8
Brad:
What motivates and drives our behaviour and competence, autonomy and relatedness seem to drive a lot of what human beings do. And one of these areas isn't being met that our likelihood for depression and anxiety goes up significantly. That first one, that competence. If we're not feeling good at something, when we're working with students, obviously they're trying to learn competencies in all kinds of different areas.
This is a super great leadership model, working with your team on competence. And then the second one, autonomy. That's the opposite of micromanaging people. You provide 'em enough competence, training and support, but also do you provide them enough autonomy to do the job on their own? Have freedom to choose and make choices. The last one, relatedness is just such a huge one. We know people don't do well in isolation. We're seeing the epidemic of loneliness. Be aware of if we're not feeling connected to someone, how do we go about establishing connection or reestablishing connection?
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