I had an experience a few months ago that began with a fantastic workshop with one of my favorite schools, and *seemed* to end with a broken down, broken into truck.
But the real ending came full circle when I found that what I had been teaching that early childhood team the day before, was *exactly* what I needed to remember in that moment.
File this one under – everything we ever needed to know in life, we learned in early childhood education.
If you want to learn more about the science of joy, its impact on the brain, and why all this talk about happiness and joy is different from toxic positivity, this is the episode you’re looking for.
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Notes from the Show:
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I first have to note that when I rattled off a quick list of the things I was thankful for, I missed some really important ones. My audio editing attempts didn’t work, so I’m listing a few more here.
SO thankful for my friends/neighbors who not only answered their phone late at night, but also left their home on a dark, rainy night to come pick us up; for another friend who loaned me a car until we got things squared away; and for the fortunate chance and generosity that located a tow truck in the area so we were only charged one way and at a discount because the dispatcher took pity on us. And for many other friends who said, “You could have called me” – and I knew I could have. I am very grateful!
Here are some fascinating resources when it comes to the science of happiness and joy.
Six Relaxation Techniques to Reduce Stress {Harvard Health Publishing}
Here’s an EXTENSIVE white paper on The Science of Gratitude, put together by the Greater Good Science Center at Berkeley. OR you could check out this much shorter article from them here.
The Greater Good Science Center at Berkeley has a podcast series on the topic called The Science of Happiness, hosted by Dr. Dacher Keltner.
Two more prominent voices in the academic world on the topic of joy and happiness are Harvard professor, Dr. Arthur C. Brooks, and Yale professor, Dr. Laurie Santos.
Here’s a sampling of what they have to say:
Arthur Brooks on the Science of Happiness {CBS Mornings}
Brooks writes an ongoing series of columns for The Atlantic called “How to Build a Life” and has written several books.
The Science of Happiness (with Laurie Santos) {How to Be a Better Human, TED Podcast}
She’s a Happiness Professor. Her Lessons Are Helping Her Beat Burnout {TIME}
Santos hosts a podcast series called The Happiness Lab.
Why We Play
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Transcript
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This transcript was created with Podium.
Highlights:
(00:03) – Joy and Resilience in Chaos
(02:02) The Science of Joy in Action
(07:59) Science of Joy in Teaching
(13:28) – Cultivating Gratitude and Resilience
(14:48) Joy vs Toxic Positivity
(17:58) Promoting Joy and Positive Behavior
Full Transcript:
00:03 – Amanda Morgan (Host)
Hi, I’m Amanda Morgan and this is Not Just Cute the podcast where we discuss all kinds of topics to help bridge the gap that exists between what we know and what we do in early childhood education. We’re starting conversations with academics, authors, decision makers, educators and parents so that together we can improve the quality of early childhood education while at the same time protecting and respecting the childhood experience. I had an experience a couple months ago that began with a fantastic workshop with one of my very favorite schools to work with and it seemed to end with a broken down, broken into truck. But the real ending came full circle when I found that what I had been teaching that early childhood team just the day before was exactly what I needed to remember in that terrible no good, very bad day. File this one under everything we ever needed to know in life. We probably learned in early childhood education.
01:07
You can find this episode’s show notes, which are always full of links, tidbits and resources, at notjustcutecom. Forward slash podcast. Forward slash episode 78. Before we jump in, a quick reminder that there’s no better time than right now to share the importance of play through the why we Play letters. These 45 done-for-you letters will help you share the why behind play with parents, administrators and others in your community. You can check them out and grab a free sample letter by going to notjustcutecom. Forward slash why we play. As I’ve said over and over, people don’t value what they don’t understand, so let’s do our best to help others understand and value play. The why we play letters were written to help you do just that. Grab your sample letter today at not just cute dot com. Forward slash why we play.
02:02
Well, I recently had the opportunity to apply some of what I’d recently taught about the science of joy in the middle of a pretty challenging couple of days. I am all about being research-based, but this is one of those moments where life gave me a chance to put the research to the test in a really interesting way. If you want to learn more about the science of joy, its impact on the brain and why all this talk about happiness and joy is different from toxic positivity, this is the episode you’re looking for. Let’s jump in. So my summers can get pretty busy. Not only does that tend to be the busy season for conferences and team trainings for me, but I’m also mom to four boys and wife to an awesome husband who also has a busy summer season and we all have things going on all summer long as a family. Luckily, we also make a pretty great team, if I say so myself. So between us and some really awesome friends and family who have stepped in from time to time we’ve got each other’s backs. Time to time we’ve got each other’s backs Well.
03:06
My last training of what I saw as this year’s summer season was probably the prime example of the crazy juggle that we sometimes end up doing as a family. I was training a team in Houston, texas, and on the same day that I would fly back home to Seattle from Houston, my husband would be leaving to drive with our oldest son back to his second year of college in Logan, utah. Go Aggies Now. As just a side note, the fact that this was his second year and that I would be flying out to see him about two weeks later made this juggle a little bit easier emotionally, so we can set that aside. Then, on top of that, our second oldest, our 18-year-old, would be on his way to catch a flight early the next morning after I got home, headed out for a boys trip with his friends who had all just graduated. And remember, there’s another teen and a preteen at home to account for as well. So we’re just in full juggling mode as a family. But, like I said, we make a great team. So we figured out all the moving pieces and the plan is up and running and everyone is doing their part.
04:10
So my husband and my oldest son are in a car headed to Logan. I get to workshop with one of my favorite teams in Houston and then I’m on a plane headed to Seattle and our 18 year old is driving our 20 year old truck to the airport to pick me up. Everything was working like clockwork Until it wasn’t. So my son pulls up to the curb at the airport and, acknowledging that he’s just battled his way on I-5, which is no fun and the fact that the airport traffic was pretty busy that night, I offered to trade him seats and drive us both home.
04:41
About 20 minutes or so into our drive I start to notice something is not right. If you’ve driven a lot of old cars like I have, you know that little tug in the steering wheel. You can just feel that things are going south in a hurry. So I noticed that the lights are also starting to dim, and sure enough. As I look down at the dash, the battery gauge is dropping. So I start looking for an exit. Oh, and did I mention that there was construction as well? So it’s dark. I’m on I-5 and there is no shoulder because of the construction. So I’m just hoping to get off the freeway as soon as I can. So I’m saying a few silent prayers as I’m desperately trying to remember which exits go to another on-ramp and which ones will actually get us to a surface street and off the freeway.
05:28
We take an exit and, providently, it takes us to a couple of quick right turns and into a parking lot where, I kid you not, my son and I push the truck the final three feet into the parking stall. We pop the hood and it’s clearly a broken belt, along with a steaming, overflowing radiator and a dead battery. It’s just one big mess, right. One big mess, right. So there we are in a parking lot at about 10 o’clock at night. Two of our four drivers are on an interstate road trip and the other two are stranded in a parking lot with a completely disabled truck. So my mind, which is a ball of stress at this point, races through what my options are for getting home.
06:08
I message a friend who usually goes to bed really early, but she happened to be up and she and her husband drive out to pick us up. While we wait, I check in to make sure that the two younger boys are still taken care of, and let my husband know what’s going on. By the time we finally get home, it’s almost midnight, and that’s midnight Pacific time, which means based on the central time zone. Where I woke up that morning, it’s about 2 am, and I’ve been up for over 20 hours. Even after we got home, I still needed to help my son get situated for his own trip that would start early the next morning, and I finally collapsed into bed for what was basically a nap, and then we had to leave at about 6 am the next morning to get him to his flight on time. So, even though everything is crazy, it’s still running pretty smoothly that morning, and I’m just so grateful that we still have all the balls juggling in the air.
07:00
And so, on my way home, after dropping my son off at the airport, I decided to stop by the parking lot where we left the truck. My next order of business is getting a tow truck arranged, and so I’m thinking I should probably stop by and make sure that the hotel that let us use one of their day passes for the shared parking lot so that we wouldn’t get towed away. We want to make sure that they know that we haven’t abandoned it. We really are coming back, we’re working on it and we’re going to get it out of their way. Well, as I pull into the parking lot.
07:27
I almost couldn’t process it at first because I was so tired, but sure enough. I almost couldn’t process it at first because I was so tired, but sure enough. In the few hours that have transpired overnight, the driver’s side window has been smashed, completely shattered. I just sat there, exhausted and overwhelmed, and honestly thought okay, should I just start crying now? I guess now is now okay. Is it now a good time to cry? And for the record, that would have been perfectly fine. Sometimes you need to just hit the reset button with a good cry. No judgment here.
07:59
But in that moment I kind of laughed to myself as I thought about one of the topics that I had just been talking about with that school in Houston the day prior Joy. It kind of seemed ironic at first that 24 hours ago I was sharing the science of joy. And now I’m sitting in a rainy parking lot contemplating whether or not this is an appropriate time for a teary meltdown, right? And then I realized that it really wasn’t ironic. It was actually perfect timing. I started thinking about those key elements of joy and how they had everything to do with that moment. So just to back up for a moment when I teach about play, I like to focus on two essential elements joy and agency.
08:45
In the workshop that I was sharing with this particular team, we talked about some of the research around joy and how it impacts the brain it literally changes it so that we can be better and learn better and we also talked about how we can use these research-based principles to cultivate joy in our own personal lives and how we can bring those same principles into our classrooms to cultivate joy there. Now, because I love it when alliteration aligns with academic research, we talk about these joy factors play, people being present and positive, and finding purpose and passion in our work. Again, each one of these applies to our personal lives, so that we can show up as our best selves to serve each other, and they also apply in how we build a joyful environment for the children we love and teach. As we talk about being present and positive, I point out that there’s this misguided expectation that being present and positive is reserved for some kind of professional yogi up on a mountaintop right, or that we can just fake our way into pretending that everything is just fine. But that’s not what it’s about. Being present means really grounding yourself and becoming aware of the realities right in front of you, not the anxieties of what might happen or might have happened, or the over-processing and over-magnification of the challenges that we face. And being positive simply means giving ourselves the opportunity to see the good that is all around us, even when they coexist with challenges.
10:25
So for me, that usually starts with a simple thing that costs zero dollars. But I sometimes have to remind myself that I can in fact afford it and that is a deep cleansing breath. You know one of my favorite lines in Fall Guy the movie. If you’ve seen that Ryan Gosling at one point just I almost wonder if it was ad-libbing he just breaks into this line, this series of lines, where he says your brain needs carbs for basic mental processing. Right, your brain needs carbs. And I love that line and it’s true. And you know what else it needs. Your brain needs oxygen and when we’re stressed we sometimes have the tendency to hold our breath a little. I don’t know if you’ve noticed that it’s not something we do intentionally, but oftentimes when we’re a little stressed, when we’re hyper-focused, we hold our breath just a little bit tighter, we breathe just a little bit more shallow and our brain is not getting all the oxygen that we need. That deep breath gives our brain the oxygen and signals to the rest of our body to relax and release a little bit of that tension. So that’s the first step that I do in trying to become present and see the positive.
11:42
The other part of being present is grounding yourself by observing the things around you, just looking around and seeing there are trees outside, the light is on, the wall is painted blue, simple things. It’s just opening our eyes to see what is right in front of us and ground us in the present reality rather than all the spinning that our brain has been doing. It just slows all of that down a little bit. And then I like to ask myself what do I love about right now? And it can’t be what I’m going to love later, when I get home and have my favorite dinner, or what I loved about yesterday when I was having such a great workshop. It’s what do I love about right now? What do I love about the way these raindrops trickle down the side of this window, maybe? Or is there something I love about the comfortable sweats that I have on? Or is there something that I love right now, right in this moment a scent, a sensation, something that I feel or see or hear, anything that I love right in that moment? Because there is always something that we love right in that moment and if we aren’t Now, related to this is the practice of gratitude, whether that’s in a general sense of just being aware and feeling that gratitude, but also in a specific sense of having a practice of being grateful and giving thanks people who have blessed your life, and I like to include some gratitude for your past self and the hard work and growth that your past self did to bring you to who you are today, the hard things that you have already moved through.
13:28
That let you know that you can do the hard thing that’s right in front of you Now. As you do this gratitude practice, it can take on a lot of different forms. Maybe you like to make a mental list or a written list or a gratitude journal. Maybe it’s a prayer practice where you give gratitude through prayer, maybe it’s writing thank you notes, or it can just be as informal as seeing the good and just making that mental note and thinking about how grateful you are At all of those levels. It changes your brain.
14:00
So as I put these practices to work, as I sat there in that rainy parking lot with shattered glass all around, I found that I actually did start to feel a little bit better. Now let me be clear. These exercises did not make my problems suddenly go away. I was still staring at a broken down truck with a broken window. It still took a lot of work and, unfortunately, a lot of money to get that truck repaired and back into our driveway. This joyful practice didn’t make my problems disappear, but it did put my brain into a better state for getting to work and solving that list of problems. It helped me to be resilient and resourceful.
14:48
That’s where the science of joy is different from toxic positivity. Toxic positivity pretends that there are no problems and no bitter emotions. We pretend that with positive thinking and a fake pasted on smile, along with a hefty dose of denial, of course, that these problems will just drift away and take care of themselves and we can be our best, most enhanced version of ourselves. And there’s nothing in the research that tells us that. Again, that is just toxic positivity. Again, that is just toxic positivity. The research says that all emotions are valid, in part because that first emotion is an impulse. It’s not a choice or a calculation, it’s just a human response. It’s something you experience. You can’t validate or invalidate that impulse, it just is. But the next moment is a choice. What we choose to think, do or rehearse to ourselves over and over again is our choice. We know that being present and positive grounds us so that we can put our brains in a state where it can do its best, thinking and intentionally choose, and then we can take that mental clarity and flexibility and resilience to help us solve the very real problems that are part of our very real lives.
16:10
So I took that deep breath and I really looked at my surroundings as the rain streamed down the windshield. I thought about and validated what I was feeling right then, which, honestly, was exhaustion and defeat, and then I started thinking about all the things I was grateful for. I was so grateful that I got to be with that team the day before and all the energy and joy and goodness that they put into my life. I was so grateful for my family that everyone was okay and safe in that moment. No matter how I wanted to replay the what-ifs of what could have happened, the reality was we made it off that freeway safely, everybody was okay and I was so grateful for that. I was grateful to the hotel, who was so kind to give us a pass to park in their parking lot so we didn’t have to worry about getting towed overnight. I was grateful for the kind strangers who stopped to see if they could help us, even though our truck was beyond help.
17:09
At that point I could just sit and think about all the reasons that I could be grateful in that moment, even though the challenges and the frustration still existed. But I could at least recognize where the positive things were and, like I said, gradually I started feeling better Now. There were still phone calls with tow truck companies, our mechanic, the glass repair and our insurance company. There were still bills to pay and I was still exhausted, but I felt more ready to do it and to still get to the other things that that day demanded of me. I took just a moment, over and over again during that process, to be present, to take a deep breath and to see the positive and then move forward to do the hard things.
17:58
Now I’m sure that you can see this connects to the classroom. As teachers, we bring an energy to the classroom that sets a tone, and the way we frame and talk about the day not only impacts our own brains but the brains and the habits of the children that we work with. When we practice joy, we are in a better state for life and for teaching and we model for children to see the good and to find the joy in their own lives and their own experiences as well. It’s always interesting to me that tattling is often a really big issue in early childhood classrooms, but what if we reframed that and challenged children to see the good and make tattling something maybe positive?
18:41
In one of my classrooms we talked about warm fuzzies and how sometimes, when we feel good inside, it feels like a warm fuzzy feeling, and that there are many ways that we feel that feeling. I feel it when I see something beautiful or when someone is kind, and we talked as a class about when they feel that warm fuzzy feeling. Then I put out a bowl of pom poms and a jar and we started collecting warm fuzzies as a class. So, instead of getting attention by pointing out all the bad things around them, children could share with me and with each other the things they saw around them that gave them warm fuzzies, beautiful things to point out, wonderful friends who were kind. It didn’t make the other problem behaviors disappear completely, but it did shift the focus and the currency of attention in our classroom. So in this season of gratitude, I hope that you take a moment not only to be present and see the good around you now. I hope that you take a moment not only to be present and see the good around you now, even in the middle of whatever challenges you’re carrying, but to make that a practice you engage in over and over every day and a practice that you invite the young children you work with in to be a part of as well. So maybe it is true, maybe all we really need to know about life we learn in early childhood.
20:01
Thanks again for listening to Not Just Cute the podcast. You can find show notes at notjustcutecom. Forward slash podcast. Forward slash, episode 78. There you’ll find links to some of the resources I mentioned, as well as other tidbits I know you’ll love. If you’d like to have me come talk with your group about joy and learning, you can learn more at notjustcutecom forward slash speaking. You can also hit up the show notes for a link to the why we Play letters. Head to notjustcutecom forward slash podcast. Forward slash episode 78, or go straight to notjustcutecom forward slash why we Play to get signed up and download your free sample letter. I’m Amanda Morgan. You can read more on my blog and sign up for the Not Just Cute newsletter at notjustcutecom. You can also stay tuned for social media updates on Instagram by following me there at Amanda underscore not just cute. Thanks for listening today and, as always, thank you for standing up for children and for childhood.
