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Right About Now - Legendary Business Advice
Alyssa Campbell: Emotional Regulation, Resilience, and Proactive Behavior Support for Children
00:18:19
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- [00:00]
A
On today's episode of Right About Now, a little bit of a different episode, I talked to Alyssa Campbell. She's the author of Tiny Humans, Big Emotions. It's a New York Times bestseller, and she just released Big Kids, Bigger Emotions. We talked about releasing the book everything that goes into raising kids today and some of the insights that we can use to better train our kids to adapt and deal with today's challenges and some of the triggers that happen. We're all different. I think this is important in today's society as we talk about raising good human beings, good people, good people that go on to be good business. I also brought in perspective, my wife, who is a principal at a middle school. It's a fascinating discussion with Alyssa Campbell about all of these things. Enjoyed this talk and I know you will too.
- [00:42]
B
Right now, we're not saying that we're going to snowplow obstacles out of their way. We're saying how do we teach them what it really looks like to cultivate resilience, to know what it feels, to be in a hard feeling, to experience something hard and move through it and process it and come out on the other side instead of just bearing it down or building resentment. This is Right about now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network production. We are the number one business show on the planet with over 1 million downloads a month, taking the BS out of business for over 6 years in over 400 episodes. You ready to start snapping next and cashing checks? Well, it starts right about now.
- [01:25]
A
Hey, guys. What's up? Welcome to Right About Now. We're always talking about what's right, what's now, what's here today. And it is here today, folks. I'm telling you. Literally here today. A new release we got Alyssa Campbell. She's author of Big Kids, Bigger Feelings and the book just came out. So here we are. What's up, Alyssa?
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B
Hey, I'm excited to get to hang with you today. Thanks for having me.
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A
I know you're on the book tour. It just came out yesterday. I know we're recording this be a few weeks from now, so it won't officially be one day. We'll ground this in a little bit of reality. Of your reality today.
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B
Yeah, for sure. Yeah. It's a whirlwind today, that's for sure. I started pressing media yesterday at 5:30 in the morning and ended the day at 11pm we're in it.
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A
CEO of Seed and so collaborative Emotion Processing Method. That's a mouthful, but it's an important one.
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B
That's Right. We call the step method for short.
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A
Talk to me about Seed and so. And then we'll get into the book.
- [02:19]
B
Yeah, for sure. Seed is the company that created and we work with schools and childcare programs and teachers and then organizations on how to understand, how to actually create spaces that are calm and regulated. And we use it, I mean we're a team of 12 at this point and we use it in our workspace every day to know how do you work best, how do you function, how does it work within teams and the mismatches of teams and being able to navigate really just being a human on planet Earth is the work that we do.
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A
Ah, how to be a human. We need more of that. Sometimes it sounds basic, but like sometimes I do worry that we've lost our humanity, especially with AI and everything else a little worrisome and just overall development. I'm a father of four boys and it's not lost on me the role that I play in bringing them up. But as parents, it's. You don't feel like you always know every answer. And I don't know this about being perfect, but we do want to raise good human beings.
- [03:12]
B
That's it. And there's so much information out there right now, it can be hard to know like what actually to pay attention to. So we're just here to distill, basically get nerdy with you, but make it make sense.
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A
Yeah. Talk to me. Your second book.
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B
It's my second book, Tiny Humans, Big Emotions was a New York Times bestseller and hoping to bring this one to the list as well.
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A
I know who's our target for the book. Obviously I go parents and all that, but sometimes it's a little deeper than that.
- [03:38]
B
Yeah, this one is for the 5 to 12 year old age trained to those elementary school kids and it's parents, it's teachers. The bulk of what we do at Seed as a business is working with schools. That's our biggest revenue driver really, coming in and working with schools and through schools, also working with families. So the book's designed to be able to serve families and schools and teachers. In fact, one of the coolest things we've seen so far in this pre order season for books was schools doing like bulk orders for families to have access to it or for their teachers to have access to it, to dive into work, look like to do in tandem with each other.
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A
It's interesting you say that. My wife is a principal at a middle school.
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B
We should chat.
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A
She's a progressive. My wife called the book obviously Talked to a lot of authors, and we have them on the show. She's used to that. But maybe the topic per se, the title. Big kids, bigger feelings playing into your first book. You can kind of work your way there. But let's set the stage. What are we talking about and what are the big takeaways?
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B
Yeah. So what we do that's different than what's happening is that we look at your nervous system as a whole. And this is the part of being a human on planet Earth. You know, you have your five senses. Sight, sound, taste, touch, smell. There are four other senses that we don't talk about a lot that really factor into how you show up in the world. And if you can be regulated, if you can access your whole brain, whether it's for things at work or it's for teaching or it's for learning for kids. And so we have our vestibular sense, which is located in your inner ear. It's responsible for your movement and balance. We have our proprioceptive sense that lets you know where your body ends and something else begins. If you are, like, walking by the table and you bump into it, your proprioceptive senses, it's having a hard time letting you know, oh, a table there, you should move over a little bit. And we have our interoceptive sense that lets us know if we're hungry, if we're tired, if our heart's beating fast, if we're, like, anxious, any of those internal cues. And then we have our neuroceptive sense, which is like the energy reader of the room. If you come into a room and two people have been arguing and they stop arguing, but you feel it in the room. You're like, oh, this is awkward. That's your neuroceptive sense at work. And so we look at all nine of these senses and help you understand where you fall or where a kid falls in terms of whether they're sensitive to it, it drains them or they're seek, it regulates them. The things I'm sound sensitive when my kids are, like, loud and annoying and, like, making all the noise and all the sound is happening in my house, it adds up for me. And I can lose my cool if I'm not mindful of it and paying attention to it and supporting myself through it. Just the other day, they were, like, bickering in the car on the way to school and driving each other nuts. And I was, I'm gonna pop in my AirPods and I'm gonna listen to one song so that I can control the sound and not lose my cool on them. And so we're looking at these nine senses and helping, like, how does your nervous system work? What's going to drain you? What's going to recharge you so that you know when you're getting drained? Oh, here's what I have to do to recharge, because it's not one size fits all. You know, this is a data 4, and this is stuff that's so overlooked when we. We have a school that we work with that's high needs. Most of their kids are high poverty. A lot of them have at least one incarcerated parent, a number of homelessness situations going on. And we came into that school last year, and from Q1 to Q2, all we focused on was this nervous system, understanding each kid, putting system systems in place for those needs to be met proactively throughout the day. Not just the kid is losing it and is dysregulated, and then they're pulled out of a classroom and there's disciplinary action. Not that reactive cycle, but proactively supporting it. And we saw a 66,0% reduction in behavior support calls from Q1 to Q2 just by doing that. When we're looking at this, we're looking first and foremost at how do we really set you up for success throughout the day.
- [07:16]
A
That's interesting. I've been sitting here thinking about my wife. She comes home and has the stories to tell, and she deals with a lot of that poverty and other things. There's a lot of variables that play into maybe the misbehavior, but it doesn't change the fact that it's happening. And it blows my mind. Alyssa, along the same lines, I don't want to get the education system. There's so many advancements. There's smart people like you, companies like yours. We have so much information now that's changed. And arming our teachers, arming our parents and getting knowledge and turning knowledge into action into change that then has an impact on our children. Is there anything more important?
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B
It's huge.
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A
There is.
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B
No. And it's so huge. We look at the mental health crisis today, and I'm like, yeah, no one knows how their brain and body work. We're just like shooting in the dark. Pause and take deep breaths. I don't even know what it feels for these kids. They don't know what it feels when it's building. My son calls this the volcano, where it's like building inside before you explode. And then afterwards, these kids can tell us what they should do, what they shouldn't do. They might know the rules, but they can't put it into action because they don't know the precursors for what's coming before it. They don't know what that kind of volcano as it's building feels like. And you're so many factors that are also coming into play, the homelessness or poverty and how that's factoring into even how they're showing up at school or in everyday life. And so we get to come in and be the detectives and help create that. And one of the things we as a business created was a lot of schools have like a behavior tracker where they kind of track kids behaviors. And really we use it predominantly for disciplinary action to see like, oh, this kid's had X number of behavior support calls. They're going to get whatever the disciplinary action is in correlation to the policy. And we came in and said, how about we actually use that information nation to change behavior. We pair it up with the kids. We have everyone's nervous system regulation questionnaire information that lets us know how their brain and body work. And say Jackson gets a behavior support call three times in a week. We get pinged and it says on our end, oh, we have to create a behavior support plan for this kid to meet their need. And it pulls in Jackson's information and makes a customized behavior support plan to actually meet the need that's driving the behavior. So we're not just focusing like whack a mole getting these behaviors over and over and over on the surface.
- [09:29]
A
Interesting. Let me play the other side of the coin. Play my wife's role or the teachers. I'm sure you hear this. It all sounds cheers from the back. All that makes sense. If I could work one to one and if every kid at that level, boy, that would be a wonderful day. That might be an excuse. We'll give up precedence to reality and to reality. Probably some truth and some false to that. How do you balance that? I'm sure you probably hear that all this is great, but if I had four children in my classroom, this is manageable. How do we make it school?
- [09:58]
B
We are not doing individual support for almost any of our kids in the school systems. We often use what's called multi tiered systems of support. You look at the baseline is called tier one and that's like universal supports that everybody gets. Tier two is like maybe a couple customized things for some kids, some specific tools in place. Tier 3, they have special meetings, they're getting certain services provided. All that jazz. We do the bulk of our work in Tier 1 and Tier 2. For us, when we're creating a behavior support plan, that doesn't mean it's individualizing this kid's getting one to one support. What it means is that they're getting the tools in place and the things that they need to not see this behavior happen. Let me give you an example. We got a kid who every time they're at lunch, we're seeing these huge behaviors. They're getting in trouble in the lunchroom every day. And it flagged in our system. Yeah. About the same time every day, this kid's getting a behavior support call, and it turns out it's at lunchtime. What we know about this kid from their profile is that they're sensory sensitive. What that means is that they are the kids that notice the details in the space. My husband's like this. If I put something down on the counter, he's like, put it down, put it away. The clutter is annoying for him. If there's a bunch of sounds in the space for these kids, it can also be the feeling of certain clothes. I want to be comfy and cozy in my clothes. And if it's too tight or too itchy or there's a tag that starts to drain them, all these things start to add up for their nervous system. So you put them in a lunchroom where it's loud and it's busy and all this is going on and they're losing their cool. The schools that we work with, we accessed some grant funding. They got access to little kind of essentially mini ipod things that connected to the Bluetooth in the cafeteria, and kids can just pop it on and listen to sitting music, and then they're in control of the sound. And this kid didn't have another lunchroom behavior support call for three months. And all we did was say, like, yeah, his nervous system needs some help during lunch. And he would wear headphones and listen to music instead of, like, being in the crazy loud lunchroom that was too overwhelming for him.
- [11:50]
A
Yes. You and my wife have a call. It's validating that if nothing else, with Alyssa Gamble, all her big kids, bigger feelings. Alyssa, as we started to close out here, walked me through. I always like to ask this, like, kind of book. I'm someone that's about to read your book, and I walk in thinking something, and I'm going to walk out thinking something different. What's the biggest change that I would get from reading your book?
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B
There's so much talk about kids and their feelings these days, and I think a lot of people think that it means that it's permissive and kids are going to be soft and they're not going to be able to like handle real life stuff, that we're going to step in and make sure that they're not feeling hard things. And what we're doing is actually kind of the opposite. I'm not putting hard things in their way, but I'm helping. You know, how do you actually support them through the hard things that we aren't stepping in? We had a for instance, a mom reach out the other day and she was like, the friends are doing these TikTok dances. Her daughter was not included or invited. She's like, do I step in? Do I help, whatever? Do I reach out to these parents? No. Your daughter's learning what it feels to be left out and not be included. And that's going to happen for the rest of her life. Sometimes in different spaces. You get to create a space where she can talk to you about that, where she has a place to talk to. Because in the past, so many of us grew up in spaces where we felt the hard thing, but we didn't know what to do with that. And we see this huge mental health crisis where kids are drowning and adults who don't know what to do with their emotions and they're just losing their cool and they can't have conversations with each other because they don't know what to do when they're in the hard space. And when we're navigating this, we're not saying that we're going to snowplow obstacles out of their way. We're saying how do we teach them what it really looks like to cultivate resilience, to know what it feels to be in a hard feeling, to experience something hard and move through it and process it and come out on the other side instead of just like bearing it down or building resentment.
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A
That's a big one. Or boys mean. My nine year old, who's the youngest is the baby. He is an anxious kid. He's like a very normal kid. He builds up anxiety over big things and small things sometimes. And when you were talking about that, what it said, we don't get it out of his. I mean, I grew up with a military father. My wife and I Both played team D1 team sports. We're go getters. We're not easy parents. And trying to figure out exactly what's going on. When I was hearing you talk, what's being processed right now that's causing that even as adults, we know these are children, but we're always think of ourselves first, how we react to things or how we do things. Everybody's makeup is different. It's a hard reality. But that's why we have books like yours to help us figure it out.
- [14:22]
B
That's right. It's not a one size fits all. And you know that as a dad of four, all these kids are different. And so, so much of our work is really helping you understand who's the kid in front of you and what's actually going on in their brain and how do you help them? I also, I grew up in a family of five, all athletes and high achievers. And it was also definitely not a soft household. And when I look things from my childhood that I want to pass on. Respect was really important in my household, and I want to carry that on. I want my kids to have respect for themselves, for everyone around them. And also there are things in my childhood that I'm like, yeah, and I'm going to leave that to the wayside because this piece doesn't carry on into this next part. And one of those for me is that my kids will be able to share their emotions. It doesn't mean I'm going to make it go away. It doesn't mean the boundary changes, but that they get to be disappointed about a boundary or ask why that it's not a. In my household, because I said so culture, it's. Yeah, you get to ask why and be curious and I'll let you know why. Again, it doesn't mean the boundary changes, but we can have a dialogue in this. And so when we're looking at these things, there isn't one right way to do it. And if we don't get to the root of what's going on with kids and really respond to that, we're just going to keep seeing behaviors over and over and over.
- [15:39]
A
Yeah. Keep doing the same thing. You get the same results. So Mark told me, including my own deaths tends to be the same. Where can everybody find the book and learn more about what you're doing? With Seed and Sow.
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B
Yeah, we're@seedandsew.org is kind of our mothership. And the book is wherever books are sold at publish with HarperCollins, anywhere you get a book. And I read the audiobook for big kids and then for tiny humans as well. Go snag that bad boy.
- [16:04]
A
It's an important topic and I appreciate the work that you're doing. It makes a difference.
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B
Thanks for shining a light on it.
- [16:10]
A
You know where to find us. Ryanisright.com we're gonna sign up that meeting with Alyssa and my wife, if nothing else. But look, get out there. Get big kids, bigger feelings. It's an important topic if you have children. It's important just to understand how everyone works a little different and that we've got the opportunity to mold the world that we want through our children. We'll see you next time. Right about now.
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B
This has been Right about now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast network production. Visit ryanisright.com for full audio and video versions of the show or to inquire about sponsorship opportunities. Thanks for listening, Sam.