Special Guest Expert - Lynn Mclaughlin: Video automatically transcribed by Sonix

Special Guest Expert - Lynn Mclaughlin: this mp4 video file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Brigitta Hoeferle:
How many times have you said to yourself, I'm going to succeed? And yet you keep coming up short? You probably noticed that high achievers with heart do things differently, but you just can't put your finger on it. You're curious about why high achievers accomplish more and have more satisfying relationships. It's because success is the result of your mindset and the consistent actions you take. This show is designed with your success in mind by revealing these powerful patterns of our dynamic individuals and guest experts, you can model what they do and apply to your future success now. Let's roll up our sleeves and get started. My name is Brigitta Hoeferle and this is the Success Patterns Show. And welcome everyone to the Success Pattern Show. It is my distinct honor. We are here to give you the golden nuggets. Surely you have something to write on and write with because success patterns are more valuable than ideas. Let me explain. Ideas, while very powerful, require trial and error and a lot of time to put into action. Just think about manufacturing. First you have an idea, then the proof of concept, then a working prototype, then small production batches, and finally full scale production. This takes months, maybe even years. And you have maybe met some people who are collectors of ideas and they do little else. Forget everything you have heard about ideas. You're not looking for ideas. You are looking for success patterns. Success patterns are different. Success patterns are better. Why? Well, success patterns are proven. Have a logical sequence of steps to follow, have an action imperative and deliver consistent results. In today's content rich program, you're going to learn valuable success patterns because we have a special guest today. She's a children's mental health specialist, and I'm going to call her an overnight success. I'm pretty sure we're going to dive deeper into that. She is a passionate, beautiful being and she's all about her passion, is all about children's mental health. And she's giving not just the children, but the educators, the parents, the people around these children, tools that they need to make, you know, to get through daily life and to actually make choices, good choices, choices that will impact them in a positive way, and that'll reduce levels of anxiety that, gosh, we know people are suffering globally from she from an entrepreneurial perspective, she is a, like I said, an overnight success.

Brigitta Hoeferle:
But it took three years to land on her. Why? Why her purpose, why she doing what she's doing and helping others to avoid making the same mistakes. Her mission is to empower, to make conscious and positive choices in all aspects of our lives. She's We've been taught to be reactive rather than proactive when it comes to our well-being, inner and outer. So why are we waiting for symptoms to appear before we even take action? It's a really good question to ask, so let's put some strategies and tools in the hands of our educators and the hands of our children and the hands of our parents and the hands of our administrator administrators so they can then solve everyday problems the positive way and build empathy. A big another big, big word self compassion and kindness. Holy cow, children are our future and we got to teach them well and lead the way. We have the power to make this world an incredible, incredible, positive place. And it starts with us, the adults right now. So I am super, super excited to have Lynn McLaughlin here with us. Lynn, so good to have you. Thank you for being on the show.

Lynn McLaughlin:
Thank you. What a beautiful introduction. Thank you so much.

Brigitta Hoeferle:
Thank you. Thank you for saying so. Well, so nicely. Right. So mental health kids, where does this come from?

Lynn McLaughlin:
Oh, boy. Well, 35 years as an educator, Yeah in all kinds of roles, starting as a teacher, a consultant, a principal, a superintendent, now teaching in post-secondary. And over time, we all know over the last decade, even longer than that. And there's not a teacher I know and I know a lot of teachers who can say that there isn't a child in their class, whether we're in kindergarten all the way through post-secondary, that is struggling to some degree with their mental health, debilitating anxiety, starting with anxiousness, debilitating anxiety, kids who can only come to school for one period a day or can't come to school at all, We have day treatment programs for five year olds. But in in Yeah, in all of those roles, though, you know, and I thought about this just a few years ago, what happens? We need more supports. We add more supports in our board. We brought child youth workers into schools. We train them. We train people on behavior management. We created rooms, zones of regulation rooms to teach kids who are having trouble managing their emotions. We brought in emotional vocabulary. We responded to that growing need in our in our kids. And then in my own family, I had a daughter who really struggled with anxiety in her 20 seconds. And what happens? We see symptoms, we respond, we get help. We got it all wrong. We got it backwards. We got it backwards. We got to be starting when they're born. We got to start to give them the tools before they're ten years old, even eight years old when we know those are the formative years, right? Yeah, That's where that's where it all comes from for me.

Brigitta Hoeferle:
And I agree with you on so many levels, from educator to educator, from mom to mom, from administrator to administrator. Right? There are so many parallels that you and I have. And and I wonder, you know, in the time that we learned and the time that we took our training and of course, we're leaders and we're ongoing learners, we weren't prepared for the pandemic. We weren't prepared for this, you know, mental health avalanche that that came towards us as as parents, as educators. But was it real? You know, I think we and I don't want to overgeneralize this, but was it all all due to the pandemic or have we missed the signs leading up to the pandemic and through the pandemic.

Lynn McLaughlin:
Before the pandemic, we had they said 1 in 4 of us is going to experience a mental health, a mental illness in our lifetime or so. It's pretty clear we've been doing it wrong all along. If a quarter of us are going to struggle to that degree during our lifetime and there's I don't want to simplify. There's very complex reasons for mental illness, neurology and all of those other kinds of things. But we have been responsive. And I mean, I live in Ontario. We get a letter in the mail, It's time to do this. It's time to get your mammogram. It's time to we're we're doing it. We got to get back to the other end of it. And and we as adults now, your introduction was fantastic. We have to look in the mirror because it drives me crazy. But agita when I hear people say, oh, it worked for me. We just got to build some resilience in these kids. It's an entirely different world. It was a different world before the pandemic, and boy, did that exacerbate things. It is a very different world and we've got to go back and say we have to do it differently. And we should have been doing this a long time ago. And many places in the world are many places have there's countries in this world where mindfulness or whatever term you want to call it is embedded in their curriculum. It's something they do every day.

Brigitta Hoeferle:
Yeah, it's happening. So, so, so how can we be? Because clearly we cannot go into into the the past and change the past. But from here on forward, from right now, what can anyone do, you know, in terms of mindfulness, in terms of empathy, in terms of recognizing not one child is the same. May they have, you know, dare I say, abilities and and and different abilities. What can we do? Because it's it's for the untrained eye. For the untrained ear, it's hard to see because these children just had this conversation with a parent the other day. And she made such a clear point. She said, you know, a child with an with or a person with an amputated leg, we're not going to send them up Mount Kilimanjaro by themselves because it's very obvious that that person is missing a limb. Now, mental health is not as it's not written all over us. It's not there's not one thing where we can say, ah, there's this and therefore there's that, Right? So how can we be more mindful just and even if we don't have those lenses yet?

Lynn McLaughlin:
William Yeah think we're talking about hidden disabilities too, right? And that can take on a lot of different forms. But what I've researched and what I've learned and I've got a partnership with my niece, who is a social worker, so we've got the clinical piece there, as well as my educator piece and all of the experience between us. We have to be thinking about emotions differently. And the words that you've said this before in a past show, emotional literacy is a term that's really, really overused. But to understand what that actually means is so teaching emotional vocabulary, I'm I think I heard the other day there are over a thousand different emotional words. I don't know what they all are. That blows my mind. There's over a thousand of them. It's not happy, sad, glad, mad. And then teaching the kids to say, I know I am angry. I know I was just in a kindergarten class and it was so fun doing the drama thing. Show me what angry looks like and they can describe it. I see tenseness in my face, my arms. I'm breathing heavy, my face is turning red. But then to say, why am I feeling angry? And then what are they going to do to get out of it? To a positive outcome, as positive and outcome as possible? Emotions are here for a reason. They're telling us something, but we've got to learn to manage them rather than them shutting us down. And they're shutting down a lot of our kids, a lot of our youth and a lot of us now. So I think the first thing is we have to we have to understand that process and then do some deep thinking ourselves, because most of us. We're not raised to talk about our feelings openly. That's tough. Once we start to do so, you know, it becomes a little bit easier.

Brigitta Hoeferle:
Yeah. You know, I rewatched Brené Brown's TED Talk on vulnerability. Oh my gosh. I think I can recite it at this point almost verbatim. I love it so much. And I've studied her getting ready for my TED talk. But the vulnerability side, the true vulnerability side, not the going on social media and going and kind of thirsty of, oh, look at me. You know, that's not vulnerability. But a lot of people make that mean vulnerability. That's how a lot of people nowadays also kind of package emotional intelligence of what that means. And, you know, different people and different groups of people make it mean different things. So the mindfulness, the education around how do we how can we be more empathetic, how can we learn to detect these these big emotions. Right. You you you mentioned big emotions earlier. And how can we then give tools to cope? So what comes after that once now someone has a platform to be vulnerable and to be aware and to detect that this is going on now what now?

Lynn McLaughlin:
Now we have to learn those tools and strategies. So that's what it comes down to for me. And I'll tell you, when I was working with my niece, um, I could yes, I had no idea there were step by step strategies that I could be modeling and teaching for my kids. And once I learned them myself and start to practice them myself, then our children see us doing it and they practice it as well. It's okay to show people that we're angry or we're worried or we're scared, but we can also model how we get through that. So some of the evidence based strategies, we all know deep breathing, right? We can talk about deep breathing. You can call it whatever you want to call it. There's all kinds of different ways to do deep breathing, which I've learned from from my niece, Amber. But we can teach kids how to calm their minds by using that as a strategy. We can teach them two, three, 4 or 5 years old. I just did it. We just did it with kindergartens yesterday. And boy, do they catch on fast. If they practice that and practice that and practice that. That's one strategy. There are countless strategies out there. We learn them ourselves. We model. We model when we're upset because it's okay to be upset. But when we blow up and of course we don't blow up, I mean blow up, we all get upset in a certain way. Hopefully we don't blow up in front of our children if we can model how we get through that, like, okay, I come home from work and it's been a horrible day and I'm really upset. It's all right to say to my kids, I have to take ten minutes. Mom's going for a walk. If you got little people, I'm going to go sit in the other room with my earbuds on. I have to listen to some music or read. And then you teach them. I'm upset, but this is the way I use to calm down what works for you. And when they're upset, you help them work through a routine that works for them. It might be going for a walk out in nature. It might be having a bath, it might be whatever it is, but modeling for them. But we have to learn those strategies ourselves first. What works for us?

Brigitta Hoeferle:
That's the key. That's that's I think that's the million dollar answer right there. So how do you know in order for our kids because you said it earlier or I said it in the in your introduction, Children are our future, you know, And the song goes, I believe the children are our future. We must teach them well and let them lead the way. Yes. And we might not just teach, but like you said, truly model. But here's the here's the key. When we model with our own limitations, it's not a good model. So it's not up to the that we teach children. We first have to teach ourselves. We first got to poor all of that knowledge into us. And when I say us, I mean the adults. The educators, the parents, that administrators, the the you know, whoever works with the with these children. That's where it starts.

Lynn McLaughlin:
Oh, you got my crystal ball right there. My crystal ball would be exactly what I was saying earlier about the countries that are already doing it. Just imagine the synergy we could create if educators And when I say educators, I'm talking teachers, support staff, secretaries, custodians, anyone who works in the school were actually taught and as a whole system learned, whatever the strategies are, mindfulness activities, whatever those kids are, then going to go home. First of all, all the educators will be healthier. They're going to feel better because they found a way to manage their emotions positively. And it doesn't mean that we don't still have those bad days. That's okay, kids, go home. Kids model it, parents learn it. I just think the whole thing could really. Oh, my gosh. The future. The future of kids. If we could start to do this in child care centers, what a difference it would be. You know, people who we hear all these angry people all the time. Well, imagine a world of empathy where kids can actually recognize there's someone that person is lonely sitting. I'm going to go do something about that. And I can tell not just because they're sitting alone by their physical characteristics, by the emotions that I'm seeing, empathy. Let's build an empathetic world and have our kids do that and learn it.

Brigitta Hoeferle:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And that's one of the laws that I teach, right? Everything is about expert modeling. And so there's that word of expert and the experts got to, got to do a really good job in modeling it. That doesn't mean that we're going to be perfect, but we got to be very mindful in modeling it. I was on a Lady JB's JB Owens show this morning. We talked about awakening and modeling again and and having choices and having, you know, when we're aware that we actually have a choice to either feel really frustrated and angry or neutral of, okay, so now I'm having this big emotion. What am I going to do with it? Yeah, that's right. Now and you're you're not just an educator. You're an author. Yeah you're contributing with insight to children. Tell us about your books. It's just one book.

Lynn McLaughlin:
Well, yeah. So the book series, I've written a few others, but the book series is called The Power of Thought. And so my partner, my, my, she's also my niece, Amber Raymond is she's a social worker. And I was just out for a walk. It was two years ago, January and I and I just did, you know, why are we doing it backwards? Why aren't we being proactive? Why aren't we giving? And I called her and I said, Amber, do you want to write a book with me? And it turned out to be a series. It's now called The Power of Thought. And we just created this this make believe planet we called Terra. And it's so if you're an author and you're doing things on a fictional basis, it's such fun because you can make it look, you can make it anything you want it to be. And it was Amba's idea to name the characters after Crystals, because every crystal is unique and they have very positive healing principles around them. Right? But every book there's four books out. The fifth book will be the end of this month, teaches an evidence based strategy. So kids on this planet zoom out. They don't walk, they hover, they fly, and we take them into a situation that any child can relate to and introduce all of those emotions. And they all glow in the color they're feeling because they haven't managed to control them. That you don't they don't know how. So every book we take them through and at the end they're all glowing green and they figured it out. It doesn't mean they didn't have a tough time, but they're in a place where they can manage those emotions in a positive way. We're really thrilled with it. We're doing parent parent community presentations now. We're at in schools and you know, lots of and boy, when we do deep breathing with a with a gym full of parents and guardians who haven't practiced it before, it's really it's quite an experience. But you know, they're all there for a reason. They want to learn. They want to understand. They want to know. And we learn every time with new questions that come from them, too. It's it's just been so inspiring out in schools, reading to kids. Oh, my gosh. Wow. It's just.

Brigitta Hoeferle:
When I'm like, say, I know when you say a gym full of people and you're they're all breathing in sync and you're all you know, you're all in there for the same reason, that gives me the goosebumps because that's truly that that ripple effect that so many people are talking about. And it's not millions and millions. It starts with our community. It starts with our school. It starts with at home with our own kids. It starts right there to truly make a difference and and to use what you have so beautifully put together and written. Yeah one of our listeners, she says, That's very powerful and I agree with you. Latonya Um, and, and she says, you know, it's it starts with us, it starts with the, it starts with the adults. So there are four there are four books in the series right now, but I know that there's actually a fifth one coming.

Lynn McLaughlin:
Yeah So, you know, and every time we put out a new book, we we say, Oh, this is my favorite. No, no, this is my favorite. And the next one that's coming out, our illustrator, we we scooped her up right out of high school, Kennedy Collegiate in Windsor, Eliza Batten. And I mean, she just taken the series to an entirely new level with her creativity. The next book is based on Call Me Yourself using the elements of Earth, Wind, Fire and Water. And it's really cool, like using your imagination in those realms. So every time we come up with another one, this is my favorite. No way. It's kind of fun.

Brigitta Hoeferle:
These books should be in every in every school library, in every classroom, in every parent's home. And, um, it is is one of the books. Does it come with, with crystals or do all of the books come with crystals?

Lynn McLaughlin:
So every character is named after a crystal, including the adults who are teaching Opal. Opal is my favorite adult figure, was a great big brimmed hat, and we never see the faces of the adults, which is kind of cool. It reminds me of a couple of comedy series from my day. Um, but Crystal is really a company, all of the characters from all of the books. So we do have a set of crystals we have with little accompanying guides. Calnali is the name of a of, of the character. How does that relate to the crystal? And then you get to look at the crystal and say, Oh, wow, this is really individual and and kind of neat, but you can buy every book. There's no order. You can buy the third. You can buy whatever book you can buy. I can call my mind if you want because that's the way you want to do that. Or I can check my senses or I have choices. You can buy them individually or as a set, but the crystals will go with every single one. It's perfectly fine. Yeah, it's really kind of cool. And that was my sister in law's idea that crystals, by the way, as a as an activity center in her class.

Brigitta Hoeferle:
So so there's a whole family of educators and and and child specialists in the greater McLaughlin area family.

Lynn McLaughlin:
Oh yeah. There's a lot of teachers, Yeah sisters. Oh, we've got we've got a lot of connections. Yeah.

Brigitta Hoeferle:
Before we got ready for the show or as we got ready for the show before the show, you said two things that really stood out well. You said many things that stood out to me. But there's one thing that I really want to reiterate, and that is the books and the knowledge and the mindfulness and the empathetic way of being in our world creates this intrinsic way of of growing up. It's not an it's not an external, but you got to be that way because that's how, you know, it's very reactive. But you've got to be a good kid, but you've got to write good grades. But, but, but you gotta, you gotta, you gotta. That's all put on the individual child. Where is that self that is able to grow and develop and that's intrinsic. And talk a little bit about what the what these books do.

Lynn McLaughlin:
Well, oh, boy. I'm going to have some people call me after this, but we've got it backwards with all the pressures with academics and achievement. If we could be focusing on well being, oh my gosh, even piloted in a group of schools, for Pete's sakes, it would be fantastic if the Minister of Education and the province of Ontario would say, We're going to put well-being as part of the curriculum all the way back down in early years. Wow. And then train the teachers. But it's more than just. So on. The teacher Right. So with every book we also have an educational guide. What questions do you ask when you're looking at the cover? What do you ask when you're in the middle, when you're reading it afterwards? And then we have a little fun caricature sketches that children can take and apply something that's happening to their own lives. So they take that strategy and learn it and say, This is what will work for me this time. Then they can start to practice it. Then they practice. If I have choices as the example, for now they can use, I have choices every single time something happens and they think they can only do A or B No, there's so much more out there. And if you know you have other options, that anxiety will. I don't have to do that. I don't have to. Wait a minute. Hold on here. That's part of it. So it's not just about reading to kids in this series. And very often it's not. If we're trying to teach something, this is about having them learn it so they can use it for life. And of the five strategies we teach, two might work for one child, two might work for another child. You might have three kids in three different ones working, right? Because we're all different and we're all unique and we have to figure that out for ourselves. I hope that answered your question.

Brigitta Hoeferle:
Oh, yes. Well, the question was was very woven into many questions because I have so many questions around that. And and I'm looking for answers. Right? I'm looking for answers for our own children, for all children that that are coming to create better behavior, to create better well-being. Because how is someone that is not well in their physical or their mental body? To learn, study and have good grades.

Lynn McLaughlin:
Know that you go back to the Maslow's hierarchy of needs. The first thing is safety, I believe. Is that still? Yeah, exactly. I mean, so in every behavior has a reason. We all know that. Every educator knows that if there's a blow up, there's a reason for that blow up. What was the reason? And then it becomes a teaching. It becomes a learning, It becomes a, you know, story. There's lots of different ways we can do it. But yeah, it's if we're if we're feeling better emotionally there, no one can convince me. You send me the research that tells me otherwise that I'm collecting right now that says if we're feeling better emotionally, that that's not going to affect our entire lives in a positive way.

Brigitta Hoeferle:
I agree. There's a lot that I teach and and that states when you change one modality in that can be the way that you're thinking or the thoughts that you're thinking. Then the others will follow. So if you're in a better mental state, guess what? Everything else will fall into place.

Lynn McLaughlin:
Yeah, you said it earlier, making conscious decisions, right? If we are aware, I've time to tell one little story and my husband won't mind if you don't mind. Just really, really quickly. We were. We were towing an empty trailer. We had just moved my son to the East Coast and we decided we were going to divert out of Canada down to Boston. We were going to have a great time in Boston. We hit a rainstorm coming into Boston in the back. In my mind, that trailer was planing behind us and I asked my husband to slow down. I think he turned up the music actually, at one point. He wasn't slowing down. He wasn't slowing down. And my stress level was going like this until I remembered my husband was a police officer, for Pete's sakes, if anyone knows how to drive in storms, he did. I took out a Sudoku puzzle. I took my eyes off the road. I looked down and I calmed myself because me getting stressed was only affecting the overall stress level in the car, and I could have been the one to cause that accident. So a conscious decision that I made knowing I was elevating the levels of stress in that vehicle and I shut it off right away. But I had to be aware that it was my behavior that was causing that issue. Now, trust me, we did we did have a follow up conversation about listening to your passengers. But regardless.

Brigitta Hoeferle:
What's funny and what a great example. So thank you for telling that story. What a great example for us to to be tuned in. And even if we're not tuned in to our awareness to bring it back because we have a choice to be aware, not to be aware, it always comes back to making that, that, you know, that awareness and that conscious decision, LaTonya says. I totally love to experience the book series. I'm glad that she opened that door because you actually brought a gift for us, didn't you?

Lynn McLaughlin:
I did, yeah. So the four books that are out there, um, if you're listening, you're, you're getting this code. So you're about to give them a discount code. We'll give you 20% off and we always throw in some extra things when we ship things out by mail too. So.

Brigitta Hoeferle:
So I'm definitely getting these books for our school. All you got to do, guys, is go to Lynn mclaughlin.com/store/book minus bundle or dash bundle. So Lynn mclaughlin.com/store/book-bundle. And I'm going to spell Lynn McLaughlin. L y n n m. C. L a. U g h l i n.com. So Lynn McLaughlin slash store slash book dash bundle. And here's the discount code. Make a note of it. It's all capital letters and it's all together one word book bundle and the number four. So book bundle and the number four all one word that gets you all the books with all the bells and whistles for 20% with 20% discount with book bundle for This is such an incredible gift. I can't wait to dig into those books. I wish they had them when my kids were little, and I got to say, they turned out really, really cool.

Lynn McLaughlin:
Yeah. Yeah, I do wish to. I do. I do. Absolutely. Hey, but we only. What's the expression? If we only knew then what we know now? That's right.

Brigitta Hoeferle:
That's absolutely right. So I know people are eager to get in touch with you, Lynn. How do they get in touch with you?

Lynn McLaughlin:
Send me an email Lynn at Lynn mclaughlin.com. Yep, no problem.

Brigitta Hoeferle:
So l y n n no e l y n at Lynn cleveland.com or simply go to her website and that is Lynn mclaughlin.com. Lynn last parting words what would you leave us with today.

Lynn McLaughlin:
Self-compassion everyone Amber taught me this. I'm a type A personality, but boy, I've come a long way in a few years. We are human, we make mistakes, and it is okay to make mistakes in front of the people we love. We just say, Hey, I really blew that. I'm human too. We give ourselves some self compassion.

Brigitta Hoeferle:
Love it. Thank you. That's the words I needed for today. Thank you for being on the show, Lynn. Guys, tune in again next week, same time, same place with another great guest expert. Until then, ciao and bye for now. Thank you for tuning in and you will notice opportunities to apply success patterns daily while eagerly anticipating next week's content rich success patterns.

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