Exploring Unschooling

We’re back with the second episode in our new series on the podcast, in which we’re working our way through Pam’s book, The Unschooling Journey: A Field Guide.

Today, we’re beginning our exploration of the deschooling phase of the journey with stage six: Challenging Our Beliefs About Learning. Deschooling has several aspects, and this is one of the big ones. We may carry many beliefs about the way that school is connected to learning and the way we expect children to learn.

In order to challenge those beliefs, we dug into five truths about learning: teaching is not a prerequisite for learning, curriculum is unnecessary for learning, children are always learning, learning is fun, and learning is not hard. Once we start to question our existing beliefs, many of these new truths come to the surface. And they really build on each other until we’re living in a whole new paradigm!

We loved diving into learning and we hope you find this episode helpful!

Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube.

THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE

Pam’s Substack article, “But if they don’t go to school, how will they learn?”

Learn more about Pam’s book, The Unschooling Journey: A Field Guide.

We invite you to join us in the Living Joyfully Network, a warm and welcoming online community of like-hearted parents. It’s a non-judgmental space where you can steep in these unconventional ideas around parenting, relationships, and learning, and explore what they might look like day-to-day in your uniquely wonderful family. We offer a free month trial so you can see if it’s a good fit for you. Click here to join us.

Sign up to our mailing list on Substack to receive our email newsletters as well as new articles about learning, parenting, and so much more!

Check out our website, livingjoyfully.ca for more information about exploring unschooling and navigating relationships.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

PAM: Hello everyone, I am Pam Larrichia from Living Joyfully and today I’m joined by my co-hosts Anna Brown and Erika Ellis.

ANNA AND ERIKA: Hello!

PAM: So we are back with another episode in our Field Guide series. We’re working our way through my book, The Unschooling Journey, A Field Guide, which is framed around the hero’s journey and it’s a weaving together of myths, contemporary stories, and just tales from my own journey.

In our first episode, if you haven’t listened to that yet, you can go back, we dove into the first phase of the unschooling journey, which was Choosing Unschooling, in which we answered the call to unschooling. We found our guides, which in a fun twist are so often our children. We navigated past various threshold guardians as we crossed the threshold from the ordinary world into the world of unschooling and moved through our time in the belly of the whale where we came to embrace the curiosity of a beginner’s mind.

Now we are firmly in the deschooling phase of our journey, which encompasses seven stages and really does represent the bulk of our transformational work. Joseph Campbell calls this next stage the Road of Trials, which through the lens of unschooling, I have broken into two stages because I experienced them as quite distinct from each other. The first focuses on challenging our existing beliefs about learning and then the second one on those related to parenting.

In this episode, we’re going to talk about five truths about learning. And if you’re new to unschooling and this is your first time exploring these truths, you’re likely to be dancing with these ideas more intellectually to just understand what they mean and some of their further reaching implications because it’s just mind-blowing enough to hear these the first time and go what, that doesn’t match with what I’ve known so far. Anyway, if you’ve been unschooling for a while and feel like you already intellectually embraced these ideas, now’s the time to peel back some more layers to build more connections and context around them.

You’ll be strengthening your web of understanding with your own experiences, because you’ve been doing this for a while, so building your wisdom. And you are moving towards really believing and feeling these truths in your own bones, owning them for yourself.

All right, after all that preamble, the first truth we are going to explore is that teaching is not a prerequisite for learning. And right off, oh my gosh, there are just so many aspects to this one truth, isn’t there?

ANNA: It’s true. And I think it’s so interesting, because all of us can think of so many things we’ve learned without being specifically taught in that one way. And, oh my goodness, just look at babies learning to walk and talk without expert classroom instruction. And yet somehow schools have really sold us on this concept that to learn you need to be instructed by someone.

And not only that, but learning happens while sitting at a desk. And let’s throw in some power dynamic, loss of autonomy, a little peer pressure for good measure. But even without all of that soup, the idea that we need another person to teach us in a very specific way is just so limiting.

But what’s funny, personally, is that I didn’t want to homeschool in the beginning. I was very resistant because I didn’t want to be a teacher. So that statement right there shows you how deep I was in the idea that learning was about a teacher giving information to a student.

I think it was just so baked into my experience and what I’d been told for my whole life. And so even when in my own life, there were all these examples of me learning things all the time as an adult on my own in different ways. But somehow those didn’t count now. It was just so interesting to unpack that for myself.

And watching my kids was really what changed that, with a little point in the direction of observing from John Holt. I could see that I couldn’t even stop them from learning. They were just these little sponges, so interested in taking in everything, turning it around, trying to make sense of it, building context, building their own unique web of learning that we talk about so often. And then I started to kind of deconstruct the whole process.

So, even with the most amazing, well-meaning teachers, and there are so many of those beautiful people out there, if a student wasn’t interested, it wasn’t going to work. And I also read a lot about brains at that time and how we don’t learn well under stress. And that’s when I started to think, is school ever a helpful environment for learning? Does it ever make sense? And I’m just not sure that it does. And I think learning can happen there, but it’s kind of despite the terrible environment, not because of it, not as if it’s an optimal environment.

And like you said, it’s so individual. How does each person take in information? I prefer reading. I’m not auditory at all. David’s much more hands-on and experimental. So, long lectures just wouldn’t hold his attention. He needs to be moving at all times.

There are definitely times I turn to people who know more than me about a particular subject. I love that. It’s fun to see how they approach it, how they move through the challenges. But in the end, their approach may or may not work for me, but I can learn more about them, the subject, and ultimately myself as I’m able to move in and out of that type of learning environment.

I think the big thing here is just as we start to question and observe, ourselves, kids, our partners, see all the different ways that learning is happening every day around us. And it really just opens up such a new world.

ERIKA: I love that. This idea is so huge. Once I started thinking about it, it’s like, oh my gosh. And it was one of my biggest paradigm shifts at the beginning of my own unschooling journey was realizing this truth. And I had a lot of fun digging into the word “teaching,” which started to not even make any sense to me anymore.

Once I thought about it, it’s like somebody can say, “Well, I taught these kids how to do whatever.” And it’s like, but did you? You could say that you told them about it, but you really can’t say what happened inside of their brains. And so, I really liked questioning the word “teaching” overall and trying to move to the idea of just learning.

Learning does not require teaching. Learning happens inside of the learner. And having someone teach you could be a way of learning something, but those two are not necessarily connected. And just because a teacher says that they taught people does not mean that they learned it. I know that’s true from my own experience in school and my experience as a classroom teacher in high school. I’ve taught more than high school. I taught music classes and some little kid classes as well.

Everyone is so unique, every individual is so unique. And what I’ve seen is that process of teaching, the way that I would teach makes sense to my brain. It’s such a challenge to try to, what they would call in school, differentiate your instruction in order to meet everyone’s brains. But then the thing that’s missing from that is the interest.

And so, the way people actually learn is by being open to learning and about being ready to learn. And so the format is less important. And the teacher is just a possibility. It’s not the only thing. And it’s not the thing that makes learning happen.

I really think that having that experience as a teacher probably helped me get there a little bit faster on this part, because I’ve seen it. And so, I know that the classroom experience can be really frustrating for teachers and students. But I think you’re right, it’s not an optimal environment for learning in any way. Because we’re trying to get every single different person onto the same page in the same method. Trying to learn the same thing. And that just doesn’t really make sense if we think about how different everyone is. So yeah, I love this one.

PAM: Yeah, I mean, for me, too, Erika, this was one of my big first shift. Because as you were saying, Anna, I didn’t want to be a teacher. When the kids came home, it was, oh, so I’m supposed to teach them now. But to recognize that teaching didn’t mean learning was happening at all. Why don’t I use the lens of learning for a while? Because anytime I use the word teaching in a sentence, I could actually rephrase it to look at learning instead. And looking at it through that lens was just so helpful for me on my journey. And it’s something to dance with, which we talked about.

We’ve talked about the pendulum swing. We may think, oh, well, if teaching doesn’t make them learn, I guess I won’t teach. And then if we’ve started thinking of everything we share as teaching, I shouldn’t tell them things, right? So, you just let them figure it all out themselves.

And then you recognize, oh, no, I can be part of this picture, as you were talking about, and I like dipping in and out when somebody else has more knowledge that you’re interested in getting. And Erika, you pointed out how important the interest part is. Because that is when it all bubbles up, right?

When somebody is interested, maybe they’re asking questions, maybe they’re trying to do something. And we’re like, hey, I know a little something about this. This is how it works for me, do you want me to show you how it works for me? Keeping in mind that learning looks very different for each person.

But we can still share the stuff that we know, that we think, all those pieces. So, the dance of the relationship of learning, for me, it’s really, really fun. And I don’t need to frame that as teaching. It’s just our relationship and how we all enjoy learning new things that we’re interested in at the moment.

And so, Erika, something you said there at the end leads very much to the next truth that we wanted to talk about, about how people learn better when they’re interested and how teachers have this thing that they are supposed to be teaching. But so, anyway, second truth, curriculum is unnecessary for learning.

That is something that many of us grew up with. It was a foundational truth that we didn’t even visit. School curriculum is all about just creating and delivering this linear system all around teaching delivery. It’s about divvying up all the bits that they want to teach over the next however many years equally, so that, this is what we do in grade one math, grade two math, grade three, blah, blah.

And while most teachers understand that the most effective learning happens when the topic is relevant to the learner’s life, at least even better if they’re actually interested in it, that’s just not possible within this system, right? And most of the time, curricula is out of step with the learner.

So, we flipped the perspective between teaching and learning. Let’s consider learning without following a curriculum. What would that look like? And what would that look like through the lens of a particular child? And when you think about it, that unique set of knowledge and skills that will be valuable to that child will be different, definitely, maybe a little bit, maybe wildly, from a school’s generalized curriculum, right?

I think it’s so interesting to contemplate what our child chooses to learn just by following their curiosity and their interests as actually creating a beautifully individualized quote “curriculum” that really just fits them like a glove, because it meets them where they are in each moment.

ERIKA: I like how that turns it on its head. We could still use the word curriculum, if we want to. It’s just completely different than it was in the school context. And I really think that this truth was hard to see when I was in the middle of it, because they’re saying that school is about learning, but school is more like a game where you have a goal to get good grades.

And so, when you’re in that system, it doesn’t really matter what’s on the curriculum. That’s just the process of this particular game that we’re trying to play. So, it didn’t matter if something that I would want to learn was missing from that curriculum, because the point was to get good grades on this curriculum, so who cares? But in the real world, there’s just so much outside of school learning.

If you think about almost anyone’s work in the real world, there are just so many aspects to it that are specific to that field that would never have been covered in school. I learned that curriculum was really chosen because it’s easy to test, or it’s easy to assign grades to these particular areas. Math could be so interesting. But school math has to be easy to grade. And the testing is really easy, based on the things that they’ve chosen for the curriculum. And so, once I realized that, it’s just so much less important than it feels when you’re inside that system.

What people are supposed to learn in school, are not actually the most important bits of knowledge for living life. It’s much more random than that. And so, that’s why so many people get out of school and they’re like, why didn’t they teach us about these important things? Taxes, or how to buy a house, or fix my air conditioning system, or whatever, like things that would actually be useful, or even being in relationship, communication tools. Those would be useful things for life.

What I’ve seen since then, in our unschooling lives, is that kids following their interests really does include everything that they’ll need to know for the life that they want to lead, which makes perfect sense. If they’re living the life they want to lead, they’re going to be learning the things that make sense for that.

And so, any additional learning that looks more like school subjects could come up naturally, or maybe they’re just curious. What if they’re like, I’m curious about what school math is like. And so, it could be a side project if it’s interesting to them. But another great benefit of learning without a curriculum is like you were talking about the pacing and the order in which they learn is so individual and unique.

So maybe they would be considered very far ahead in one area or behind in another area, according to school, but in the real world, that there’s no ahead and behind, there’s not a fixed order to things in the same way. And so it’s like what you were saying, developing their unique web of learning based on what makes sense to them and developing their own interests and skills as they grow with their unique brains, which is just going to look so different for different people.

ANNA: Yeah. Oh my gosh. I love that piece of really deconstructing the whole of it. What is the goal? And what tools do they have?

Because they’re saying, we’re going to take the things out of math that are the easiest to measure. We’re not looking at what are the most important things of math to learn about, because they may not be easy to measure. And as soon as you start to unpack and deconstruct that a little bit, it’s like, wait a minute, why are we all in service of this system? What is that serving?

I think a big sticking point for me with school learning has always been that linear aspect of it. It’s interesting, because it stuck out to me at first when I was pregnant and going through natural childbirth classes, we talked a lot about how labor isn’t linear. Doctors and hospitals would have you believe that you’re dilating at this set rate per hour. And if you don’t, they want to intervene. Well it’s one centimeter per hour we need to be doing.

But that’s not how the body works. You know, it’s fits and starts, rests and surges. And so quickly, I could see how that made sense with learning, too. We aren’t going to learn one number a day. And then the next day, we’re going to learn one number. And let’s learn one color. No, no more colors today. Just this one color. And I saw my kids get interested in colors when they were so young, and wanting to know the color of everything, running around the house. What’s this? What’s that? Showing me all the pieces. That’s how they get excited about things and want to make sense in their brain.

I saw them dive so deeply as they were exploring any topic, because you could see them building this context, building their web, placing the new information into their existing web. It is anything but linear, and any interruptions or redirections just messed with their flow.

And that really reminded me of another thing I remember from my own time at school, was being in class in the middle of a large geometry proof, and the bell would ring, and on to a completely unrelated subject. Now we’re going to talk about history. And only to have to get back into that mindset for the proof later that night to do my homework, because it didn’t get finished during the class. And I hated it. I loved proofs so much, but I wanted to do them from start to finish without interruptions, because there’s so many pieces to it. But the constant interruption just killed my natural love of learning and love of math.

And I just started playing the game, like you’re talking about, Erika. I just started playing the game. Okay, this is what they’re wanting me to do, is just check these boxes. So, give them what they want for the test, and then promptly forget it, because it doesn’t mean anything. And what I learned was not the material that was being presented, but how to survive and master that system. And so, I just think that’s happening every day in schools all around us, and nobody’s talking about that piece.

And I will say that I definitely looked at all the different curricula when my girls were young. I was like, oh, there’s all these cool nature-based ones, because that’s what I love. But like we’ve talked about with any kind of classes before, I’d look at these things, and I’d feel like, oh my gosh, they’re so dumbed down, because even those more alternative curricula, we’re trying to make it linear. We’re going to learn about this bug today. Doesn’t matter if you’re seeing other bugs outside. We’re just going to do this one.

And after observing my kids learning when they were so young, I knew context was everything. And to divorce a subject from the context of it just made it so abstract. It lost the meaning and just became about memorization.

Okay, we’ll memorize what these bugs are. We won’t look at where they are, where we’re finding them. And it almost felt like it was tying their hand behind their back, because the world is so rich with things to learn, to see in context, to explore. And I came to believe that really no curricula could improve upon engaged parents exploring, supporting kids as their interests popped up in their kind of natural environment.

And I say that to say, it’s not just schools that can do this. We can do this in homeschooling as well, if we’re trying to follow this linear model and not really watching how humans learn and understanding the specific brains of the people in our family.

PAM: Yeah, that’s that whole curriculum piece, right? And another aspect that came up for me recently, in this area, someone commented on one of my Substack posts where I was talking about learning, and I’ll link to it in the show notes. But it was really interesting. They were very favorable. But the one thing they were concerned about was learning gaps. Gaps in their knowledge.

And it’s just so bright now, having thought through all this. But look at all the assumptions that are just built into that learning, the idea of a learning gap, or summer learning loss, all those ideas. Because, number one, you basically got a curriculum against which you are comparing what somebody should know at some age for you to determine that’s a gap or you didn’t learn that when you were supposed to. So you’ve tied in curriculum there.

And no matter how much people talk about lifelong learning, if you’ve still got a curriculum that something should be known by some particular age, lifelong learning doesn’t fit. It doesn’t matter when somebody learns something. When you have bring that lifelong learning lens to it, it’s like, when is it important? When are they interested in it? When will they actually use it? That’s a great time to learn it.

It’s not like you need to learn in the past, in case someday you need it in the future, which is a lot of what curriculum is based around. So, I just found that to be super interesting, that there are just so many pieces wrapped up that just assume curriculum is the way people learn. And that just shows up and says, but I’m worried about learning gaps, which you can totally understand, but my goodness.

ERIKA: I totally understand it. But it’s so interesting, because if you think about something, like if you were to point out to that adult about their learning gaps, something that they don’t know about, it’s like, oh, but that isn’t important. So, the school curriculum devalues everything outside of it. And so, learning gaps can only happen with school learning. You wouldn’t say, I have a learning gap about auto mechanics or something. I’m not expected to know that. And so, I think that’s super interesting and really something for us to turn around in our minds so that we value all of the different things that people might want to learn about and not just this one set.

ANNA: Right, because I guarantee any of those kids that we’re talking about having a learning gap, they know things off the charts that other people, adults included, don’t know, because they followed a passion or interest. We see that all the time. And like you said, you wouldn’t say I have a learning gap because I don’t know about chainsaws like my husband does, but that serves him. And so, yeah, I think that’s one of those thoughts like my thought about how I don’t want to be a teacher. It’s that it’s so baked in. It’s so baked in that we don’t even see it.

PAM:

Yeah, yeah. And that’s what I was excited to point out. It’s not that when that thing was being taught that we were just sitting in a corner, not doing anything, we were just learning so many other things. And I think this conversation also comes up some with some unschooling families when their kids decide to try school or they want to go check it out. And then all of a sudden, they’re measuring their knowledge versus the knowledge they think the child should have in whatever grade, etc. And, oh, we need to catch up.

But instead of the phrasing “catch up” and “behind,” bring the lens of they’ve been learning all sorts of other things. Yeah, maybe not what matches specifically that curriculum, but they’ve been learning all sorts of other things. And they don’t lose those if they decide to go check out school. That is there, as you were talking about before, Anna, how rich life is, the context, all the things we know that are related to who we are as a human being and the things that we’re interested in.

And if school becomes something we’re interested in, it’s like, oh, I’m not behind, but I’m bringing my full self. And then I can learn those other things, rather than getting all stressed, like, oh, my gosh, did we fail because they don’t know?

ANNA: Okay, one quick thing before we move on, because I think it’s where we have that hierarchy, where we’re thinking school is somehow this important monolith, whatever we want to call it. And really, that’s why this deconstruction process is so important to understand school for what it is. It serves a particular purpose, and it is what it is.

But if you were to take your child and put them into an auto mechanic shop, you wouldn’t expect them to know all the things in the auto mechanic shop. You would know they need to figure those things out and learn them. And someone might tell them about stuff, and they might read a book, and they might try different things.

But why can’t we have that same environment with school to go, okay, yeah, they haven’t learned about how they annotate things and do this particular thing a certain way, so then they’ll learn about it, versus there’s something inherently wrong that they don’t know about it. Because it’s its own system, no different than any of these other systems. It’s not better or worse, but that takes the deconstruction to understand what’s behind it and how we got here.

PAM: Oh, that’s beautiful, beautiful. Okay, yes, we should move on. The third truth is that children are always learning, because I mean, they really, really are. Humans are, right? But when you look at kids, you can see it in action, whether or not you can name it, whether or not they can name it, they are learning.

Even when they’re cocooning, even when they’re watching a favorite show on repeat, they are having an experience. And the idea that children are always learning implies that learning doesn’t just happen at school, it doesn’t just happen with the teacher.

So, let me go back another layer, and that nudges us to consider the idea that all learning is valuable, just like we were saying, like auto mechanics to somebody who needs that information and skill is just about as valuable to stuff that would appear in a regular school curriculum.

Learning about themselves, learning about being in relationships with others, as you were talking about earlier, Erika, learning what they like and what they don’t like, what they’re curious about, what seems uninteresting, and how that changes over time. That is just all such valuable learning. Facts and skills are just other bits that are on that buffet table of learning, which each person can individually select at any particular time, what they’re interested in. And without the curriculum, and with this always learning lens, that brings us right back to that rich context that you were talking about, Anna, because if we’re following a curriculum, we’re really just picking out those bits.

But when we’re like, I’m interested in this thing, all the things that are connected or that we notice come with that, when we’re not just focused on the quote “important little bits.”

ANNA: And I think we’re at such an interesting time in human history, too, where we have access to everything, to people, to resources, to information that is very unique to our time, if we look back over the long scale. But no matter what, it’s really almost impossible to stop a human from learning. Even if you had no internet, you’re still going to be learning what’s important to you, what’s right in front of you. Every minute, we are taking in information, learning about ourselves, those around us, the environment.

Learning is so much broader than the idea of subjects at school. And as I said earlier, divorcing concepts from context is really counter to actually learning about the concepts. And I feel that way about math, English, history, music, all of it. It’s that interconnectedness. It’s that understanding why we need it, why it’s important, how it serves us in the life that we want to live. That’s what gives it meaning and helps it stick.

I loved watching my oldest as a toddler when she was putting things into context. The lion we saw in a book, then she saw it on a show, then she saw it at the zoo. And you could just see her building this web of understanding about it. And it’s so amazing to watch.

I think that’s the special thing about kids is that they have so much context to build. So it’s happening very quickly. I think we’re all doing it as adults too, but we’ve been working on that web a little bit longer. So, I think it’s so much easier to see in that young child.

And I think just that important piece of not ranking learning. Learning numbers is no more valuable than learning to draw or learning that you don’t like bright lights or learning how to be in relationship. It all has value.

And I guess if there would be a ranking, it would be more about what helps you the most in your unique life. That’s really what we’ve been talking about. What helps you explore your interests, achieve your goals, be the person that you want to be. That’s a very different metric than what school values. And I think it’s why people get disenfranchised because they think I’m supposed to be learning this. They’re telling me this is important, but it’s not helping me towards my goal of being an artist or a musician or even a mathematician because it’s very different than what they’re doing in school. And so, I think that’s where people get where it feels bad and they start to think “I can’t learn” and all of those pieces. Okay, I’m going to stop.

ERIKA: I remember getting those questions about, why do we need to learn this school? And I think most of the time I was pretty honest about, it’s on the curriculum and it’s going to be on a test. And so, that’s why we’re learning it. It’s interesting to some people and not to everyone.

And I really think, people intuitively know that children are learning, especially when they’re babies and toddlers, like, as you were describing, you can just see it happening. But then we might forget if we think that learning happens in school. And so, we might forget that they were capable of that and they are still capable of that. And we all are.

So if we think big kid learning needs to look like school, adult learning has to look like college courses, then you may not notice what’s actually happening and that learning is happening all the time.

But as we were talking about earlier, what they learn might be outside of that limited range of what is like observable learning in school. And what’s really interesting for me to think back on is what I learned in school was also mostly outside of the range of what was tested. The memories I have of school and what I learned there were about people, how to be safe, like what the signs are of dysregulation, is what I would call it now.

But that kind of hypervigilance, watching how people are behaving, how the teachers are behaving, how we’re being treated, and all of that kind of stuff. That is much more my memory of school than any particular little curriculum item that I would have learned and then forgotten.

And so, how kids learn outside of school might not look anything like how it was taught in school, or how you remember learning it and everyone’s brains are different.

I definitely have seen unschooling parents say they’re just not learning anything or things like that. And it’s just like, maybe let’s look at it differently, because that’s not possible. And so, the way that a unique child puts together their own web of learning, I love that image for it too. It makes so much sense that each person’s construction of their web is unique to them.

And I’ve heard my kids come back about things and be like, oh, that’s what that meant when I saw that on that show one time. They will literally make connections, and I can see it happen, but it may not look anything like something that I would have thought they were supposed to have learned.

But it’s just natural human learning. And there are so many internal things that people are learning. I think even in my experience in school, or other kids’ experience in school, there are so many internal things they’re learning about themselves, they’re learning about relationships and human nature, it might look like they’re learning nothing. But I trust that they’re getting what they need out of those moments and putting together their own web.

PAM: Right? That is so often conventionally devalued, because in school, that’s not measured. You want to measure just on those little bits that you know now. And then when we move on, the next time you kind of circle back, it’s just not valued. When you learn something and connect it, like you were saying earlier, Anna, it can’t really be measured. So, we can’t give it a grade. So, we just don’t consider it at all. It’s not part of school, which is how we come to see learning.

Oh, my gosh! And I think that richness is just what is so missed, that context, that building that web of deeper understanding, that’s just so valuable. Okay, I’ll be quick.

The fourth truth to explore. I love this one, too. And that is that learning is fun. Ooh, yes. Let’s try that one on for a bit. I think an interesting aspect of this idea. It’s something that you will, when you start learning about unschooling, you will come across it pretty quickly. The idea that our focus isn’t on learning a particular skill. We talk about following their interests and their passions instead of following a curriculum.

So, from there, they pick up the skills that we’ve talked about that are helpful along the way, but they do it on their own timetable versus the curriculum’s timetable. I like to use reading as a classic example, because that’s something that people are concerned that their kids learn quickly. And that’s totally understandable, because at school, learning to read is definitely a goal. One that they hold out as key for a child to be able to learn. And again, that makes sense, because at school, not being able to read can definitely interfere with learning, because so much of the communication at school is written. It’s a characteristic of that system. Here’s your worksheets, write this test. It’s all about words and reading.

But when the goal is pursuing their interests and passions, they have the time and space to find all sorts of ways to engage with the thing that they’re interested in. And we are there to read things for them whenever they like, if that’s how they want to bring in some information.

And they also have the time and space to explore just that complex puzzle of reading in their own way, and at their own pace when their unique brain is ready for it. So not reading is in no way a handicap to learning when we’re unschooling. Another layer around the idea that learning is fun.

It reminds us that people learn in different ways, as we’ve been talking about this whole time. Real learning is just so much more interactive and fluid than a classroom can accommodate. You really just have this one teaching style learning with reading, writing, communication, that’s really what you’ve got for learning there.

Okay, then there’s yet another layer, because we like peeling back layers, and seeing how when kids are following their curiosity and pursuing their interests and goals, so often this learning happens almost incidentally, like they’re just having fun. They’re just like doing the thing they wanted to do. And it doesn’t even need to be labeled as learning.

Once we get to that layer, at first we want to see, we want to expand our understanding of what learning is by basically labeling everything they do as learning. And then it’s like, when everything is a thing, then we don’t even need to label it. But because when they’re just engaging and doing the thing, it just now makes sense to them, and they remember it, like we were talking about earlier, because they chose to engage with it, it means something to them, and they’re going to be using it because it’s something they’re interested in.

So even if something gets challenging or frustrating for a little while, so often they choose to keep going, because it’s helping them accomplish something that they want to do. And again, they learn along the way, they learn how to deal with frustration, feelings, learn how to move through those, maybe learn how to take a break. They learn how to choose, is this worth continuing pushing through or do I want to give it a break now? Do I never want to see it again? And then they learn six months later, it’s not quite as hard as it was when they first burst out with it. But yeah, learning can be so much fun.

ERIKA: Yes! And I feel like when they do hard things because it’s important to them instead of because someone’s telling them to, all of those things, it’s so curious to think about. And I really think the fact that in our schools, at least in my country right now, they’ve pushed the curriculum lower and lower into the younger ages, because it’s like, oh, well, if we want them to be at this level at this age, then they should be preparing for that earlier.

And so, I mean, it’s gotten to the point where there is three-year-old curriculum that’s preparing them for four-year-old. All of this exists now. And so, this is not developmentally aligned. It doesn’t actually make any sense. And it backfires, because then kids think that they are stupid, or they think, I’m not good at this, or whatever internal messages they develop. But it’s really because we’re putting things on them in schools that their brains are not ready for, literally not ready for it.

And so, there are kids who can thrive in that environment. But it’s pretty unusual. And so, following what’s most interesting to them, it’s like a little secret. I feel like it’s just the best way for them to learn everything.

And I love that you pulled reading out, because it’s a tool. Reading is not an end result. And in school, it feels like reading is this end result. And we get so focused on it. Can they read? Can they read? It’s like, okay, but reading is a tool that humans use. Writing and reading are to help us share information with each other.

This is a way that we can learn about things or research things or whatever. And so, reading is part of life, because it’s helpful to us. It’s not important as a skill on its own. Treating it like that, like a tool that is helpful, makes so much more sense.

What I saw with my kids is they were curious about reading. They wanted to be able to do it because it would help them. It helps them in their games. It helps them communicate with others and all of this. And so, it really was a journey that they owned for themselves and it didn’t feel like me pushing them to learn it younger than they were ready to learn it. It felt like their curiosity was the driving force and then they picked it up as they needed in a way that made sense for their own brains.

And so, I think kids just naturally learn about what’s fun and interesting to them. And when they’re young, it looks like playing and when they’re older, maybe it still looks like playing, or maybe it starts to look like something different and unique to them. It could be projects or processing ideas with us or interacting with friends. Maybe they want to sign up for a certain class. Maybe they love collecting certain things or whatever it is. It’s so unique to each individual person. I think the idea that learning isn’t fun that school gives us is so terrible and damaging to people.

ANNA: Oh, it really is. Oh, and I love that you mentioned that reading is a tool, a tool among many other tools to learn and take in information. And I just love this whole idea that learning is fun.

And I think it’s because I love learning all the things, that it is fun! And I love your point, Pam, about how unschooling, the learning almost appears incidental, but it’s so purposeful in the way that it’s helping the learner move towards something that’s important to them, whether that’s a goal, an understanding, whatever it might be.

And I think because it can appear incidental, we brush it aside or think it’s not as important, or that it’s not this drudgery. And with any passion, the learning isn’t linear or confined to a subject. With a passion for Minecraft, you’re learning about building, geometry, animals, strategy, gems, tools, so many things. A passion for horses, the same. It incorporates all the school subjects, but then so much more, the connection, the nuances, all the pieces.

And so, observation is really our friend here. Watch and walk alongside your kids and be amazed, because I was constantly amazed. And I think, Erika, you touched on this, unfortunately, one of the side effects of a poor school experience is a belief that learning has to be hard and it has to be drudgery to mean anything. But that’s not true. Learning is magic. It’s amazing.

And again, there’s a deep internal drive that we have as humans to learn and understand the things around us. And as you both mentioned, it may not look like learning if we’re so narrowly defining learning, if we’re holding onto this school book drudgery as our definition of learning. But if you broaden your definition, you will see it’s rich and rewarding and absolutely equipping them to live a life that’s meaningful to them.

PAM: Yeah. And you started talking about it and that’s the next truth that we’re going to explore, because they’re very related. So, that’s that learning is not hard. Through the lens of unschooling, that’s our next truth, that learning is not hard.

And I found it distinct, because I could think learning is fun and hard. Like I want to enjoy learning, but it’s something hard that I do. So, I think that that’s why for me, I separated these out as well. And when you think about showing up at school, and this ties into what you were saying earlier, Erika, about the curriculum getting pushed down and down earlier and earlier, when kids are presented with this stuff, it really is so easy just to pick up the message that learning is hard.

Because there are so many reasons in the classroom following this curriculum that it is hard for them. It’s totally true. Trying to learn something that you’re not interested in can definitely be hard. Trying to learn something that your brain is not ready to process and connect and bring together can definitely be hard. If it’s just something that’s not part of their day-to-day lives, so maybe they’re not super interested in it, but also they won’t be using it because it’s not something they need to do, then that is hard to learn because it often just doesn’t make sense.

It’s just this little floating point, which earlier you mentioned, Anna, that’s when we end up stopping trying to understand what we would call learning and just memorize that factoid, because it has no context in our lives or in our interests. So, I just have to memorize this thing to perform on the test and to play that game.

So, for lots of brains, learning in school and following curriculum is hard. And then just put yourself in there. If you’re trying to be interested in the thing, questions are so discouraged. And not because the teacher’s just like, I don’t want to, but they don’t have time. If it’s not on the curriculum, we don’t have time to spend 20 minutes discussing it, because it won’t be on the test. How many people ended up asking that question eventually? It’s like, is this going to be on the test? And if not, you could just forget about it. It’s like, okay, I don’t even have to try memorizing or understanding it, because it’s not going to be on the test.

When you imagine kids in school, their days really are just filled with that push and pull of what is it that I need to know? How do I memorize it? And in all that, because of all the testing and the grading, we become so afraid of being wrong and we can’t ask questions. So, we stop being curious about stuff. We have to answer questions on the test in exactly the same way that we were told. So, we don’t even try to think of other ways that might connect for us better or understand better. We have to say it the way it’s supposed to be said. So, our creativity fades. I just feel it’s become so ingrained in that school experience that we now think that is the human experience that learning is hard. Full stop. That’s just it. Learning for anybody is hard.

But what so many unschooling parents have seen over these decades, as we’ve talked to more and more unschooling parents, what we’ve seen with our children is it’s the environment that makes a fundamental difference in how learning feels. When you’re doing the things that are interesting to you or that you want to learn, you’re following your curiosity, you’re following your needs, your own goals, oh my gosh, learning can be fun.

And the incidental piece is like, it’s not hard because I’m meeting it where I am. And I’m meeting it right at the place where I can learn. If I do jump too far ahead, it’s like, this makes no sense. I’m going to find information or a person or whatever that’s going to meet me where I am. So, now I can just soak it up like that sponge. We can learn like little kids do no matter our age. When you think of challenging or frustrating moments in it, it doesn’t feel like the learning piece is hard. It’s just like, ooh, I’m trying to figure out this piece and I want to play around with it. I want to figure it out. It’s much less about defining all learning as hard, because this particular piece is challenging or frustrating for me in this moment. It’s just so interesting.

ANNA: It’s true. And so this is going to sound a little bit cynical, but I think it’s really one of the ways that the powers that be keep us in line. Learning’s hard. You can’t do it on your own. You need these experts in this building or you’re not going to be successful. You’re not going to get a job. You won’t amount to anything.

Because as soon as you realize learning isn’t hard when it’s in service of an interest and that you don’t need that expert and that building, the whole system starts to crumble. But truly what you said is so important to tease apart. Memorizing facts devoid of context is hard, especially for some brains. For other brains, memorization comes really easily and I think those people do well in school. And so, like most things, there is a grain of truth to the idea that learning is hard. It can be, but it doesn’t have to be.

And for me, I think watching the babies and toddlers learning so much in such a short amount of time just really blew the lid off the idea that we can’t learn without proper instruction. But even then, they pick out specific things. Well, then reading’s going to be hard or math is going to be hard.

But again, it’s made harder by that environment and by that environment not taking into account different brains and different timelines. And if something does seem hard, is it still hard if we let go of the agenda around it, the timeline around it, the context? Is it a context issue that’s making it feel hard? Can we examine something that we’re saying feels hard and just understand it a little bit more?

A few months ago, a Network member talked about how people will say learning gets harder as you get older. It’s another truism, learning gets harder as you get older. When really, it’s that being in that school environment gets harder because as adults, we have much more context for living alongside learning. So, the artificial environment and arbitrary hoops make much less sense and are much less tolerable than when we were kids and didn’t know there was a choice.

And I think that there are actually some kids that intuitively know there’s a different way and they end up not doing well in school, because they just keep bucking, like, I’m going find my way out of this tiny little narrow place that you’re putting me in, because I know there’s another world out there. And for a lot of us, we don’t really discover that until we’re adults and realize we just performed for that system for many, many years. And now there’s this whole other world out here.

ERIKA: My kids didn’t go to school and I didn’t question it when I was in school. And so, this was a lot of new information for me and super interesting. But what I observed with my kids was that they just resist anything that doesn’t interest them, period.

And that’s not every personality. My husband, Josh, and I are really curious and interested in almost anything, where my kids are more interested in very specific things. And so, I can be like, isn’t this cool? And they’re just like, no, like, why would I care about that? So, it’s so unique.

And then imagine in school where they’re not even saying, isn’t this cool? Most of the time, they’re just saying, you have to learn this. It’s important to learn it. Of course, it’s going to be hard. It’s going to be hard to learn something if your brain either isn’t ready for or if it holds no interest at all. It just is so logical now for me to think about that.

But when I was in it, I didn’t know what was the problem with these other kids, that they weren’t actively participating or they weren’t trying hard or to do better. So looking back on it, I’m like, okay, that doesn’t make any sense though. The reason why I’m doing well in this system is because I’m good at memorizing or because I’m able to put my internal feelings and thoughts to the side in service of, this is what they said to do. I want to get this good score, whatever.

And so, looking back when I was first coming to unschooling, I felt a little bit jealous of the people who had realized about school when they were actually in school and were a little bit more rebellious, because I just totally got sucked into the game. I didn’t even see it. I did start to see it when I was a teacher in school.

But the more I think about this story that most people tell about learning being hard and learning being no fun, the more upset I get about this. Because it really doesn’t have to be that way. And I think it affects people for the rest of their lives, either thinking that they can’t learn or that they hate certain topics. And I think this is also the core of the “adults versus kids” conflicts that people have in their lives.

Because if the adults are saying, this is the most important thing, and the kids are saying, this is hard and I hate it, that clash is so terrible. And so, I think some kids can push themselves through it, but I don’t think that it’s natural and it doesn’t really make any sense because, like you were saying about the memorization aspect of it, the things that I remember from school are few and far between.

It’s not like that memorization type of learning to put it down on a test. It’s not learning that lasts or that makes any sense as something we take with us through our lives as important information. And so, yeah, this one upsets me.

PAM: I know, it’s so true. That is what is so fascinating about this stage of the journey, I think. Okay, so it’s been a long time. I do want to thank everyone for joining us. And we do really hope that you enjoy diving into this stage of the de-schooling phase as we challenge some of our conventional beliefs about learning.

I really think, as you were saying, it fundamentally sets us up so negatively, those conventional beliefs of how you have to be taught by a teacher, you have to follow a curriculum, learning is hard, learning is not fun, all of those pieces, we bring all that weight with us into adulthood. And we carry the message that we can’t learn. But then all the fun stuff that we’re doing and the deep dives into our own passions and interests, we don’t call them learning because they weren’t on a school curriculum, right?

ANNA: We devalue it.

PAM: We still carry the message, I can’t learn. Oh sure, I love this and I could do this for hours, but that doesn’t count, right? I mean, it’s just so deep, the messages that we carry.

We do invite you to join us in the Living Joyfully Network to continue these kinds of conversations. It is a warm and welcoming online community of like-hearted parents, absolutely. And a nonjudgmental space where you can steep in these unconventional unschooling ideas and just explore what they might look like in the day-to-day of your unique and wonderful family of individuals.

No matter where you are on the journey, just learning about it, been doing it for years, there are always layers to peel back around as things come up at different ages and stages. And we are very excited to welcome you. To learn more, just follow the link in the show notes or go to livingjoyfully.ca and just choose Network in the menu. And thank you so much, Anna and Erika!

We wish everyone a lovely, lovely day.

ERIKA: Bye!

ANNA: Bye, take care.

We’re back with another On the Journey episode! We had a rich conversation with Living Joyfully Network member Lucia Silva. Lucia was previously on the podcast in episode 251, Unschooling as a Lifestyle. She is an unschooling mom of two and she came back to share some updates about her unschooling journey.

We talked about trusting our children’s learning journeys, Lucia’s inner growth and mindset shifts, as well as her experience in the Living Joyfully Network and how the community has supported her over the years.

It was a really beautiful discussion and we hope you find it helpful!

Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube.

THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE

EU251: Unschooling as a Lifestyle with Lucia Silva

We invite you to join us in the Living Joyfully Network, a warm and welcoming online community of like-hearted parents. It’s a non-judgmental space where you can steep in these unconventional ideas around parenting, relationships, and learning, and explore what they might look like day-to-day in your uniquely wonderful family. We offer a free month trial so you can see if it’s a good fit for you. Click here to join us.

Sign up to our mailing list on Substack to receive our email newsletters as well as new articles about learning, parenting, and so much more!

Check out our website, livingjoyfully.ca for more information about exploring unschooling and navigating relationships.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

ERIKA: Hello, everyone. I’m Erika Ellis from Living Joyfully, and I’m joined by my co-hosts, Anna Brown and Pam Laricchia, as well as our guest today, Lucia Silva. Hello to you all!

PAM, ANNA, AND LUCIA: Hello!

ERIKA: Before we begin our conversation with Lucia, I wanted to invite you to join us in the Living Joyfully Network, which has really been life changing for me in so many ways. On the Network, we have such great discussions about so many topics. Our community has such a wide variety of experiences, and everyone’s really interested in learning and growing and being intentional with their families. It’s really unlike any other online community I’ve found.

Being part of the Network offers powerful support, especially during those moments when fears pop up or if you’re new to unschooling and just need a place where people understand what you’re going through. If you’d like to learn more about the Network and check it out for yourself, you can visit livingjoyfully.ca and click on Network at the top of the page. And we’ll also leave a link for that in the show notes. We would love to meet you.

So I’m very excited that we get to talk to Lucia today. I met Lucia on the Living Joyfully Network and have just loved getting to know her over the years. And she was also on the podcast back in episode 251 and shared her journey to unschooling in that episode.

I encourage everyone to check that out as well. And we’re excited to dive in for an update five and a half years later, which is wild. So Lucia, we would love to hear what everyone is interested in right now.

LUCIA: Five and a half years later sounds like, in the scope of kid time, it’s so long. It’s so long. And then thinking, how long have you been unschooling? Five and a half years still seems really new.

So, it’s interesting to think about those elastic times. And it was fun to see how some things are just so similar. I’m sure you guys see that with your kids. But, wow, I can connect where they’re into the exact same thing.

So there’s four of us. It’s me and my husband, Micah, and my two kids. They’re older now. To respect their privacy, I’m not going to be using their names. And I’ll just refer to them with neutral pronouns. They said I could talk about them in general.

My oldest child is still really into ballet. And that’s their primary passion. And that has remained strong, grown, changed a little bit. It’s not what they want to do professionally, but it is just a primary part of their lives. They’re also still really into reading and drawing and making.

They have a great friend group. And they do lots of fun stuff. I just dropped them off at the botanical gardens to hang out with friends this morning. And let’s see, there was one other thing I wanted to mention. I lost my train of thought.

My younger child, back when I originally did the podcast, they were really into building and constructing items out of stuff. And I had not really forgotten, even though we still have a lot of that preserved in the garage. But they’re really into building tabletop games, mostly card games. They’re constantly inventing new games.

We’ve brought a lot of them to the table, done a lot of design. We’ve taken them to little fairs and sold lots of them. And we have game tournaments.

They’re kind of based around the Wings of Fire lore, because that’s what their friends were into when they started it. It’s turned into this thing where they have this whole group of friends that are waiting for the next booster pack to come out. But it’s kind of amazing to see connections, from that fascination with construction, like moving pieces, how they fit together.

And now it’s, Mom, I have a new game. And it’s this whole fully formed game mechanics and point values. Now it’s branching out to some things that aren’t just trading card games. They’re thinking about what would be a good family game? But mostly card games. So they’re really into that. They’ve gotten really into fencing and chess, which I think are both similar sort of mental games.

And they love talking with Micah about probability problems and stuff like that. They’re also really into philosophy and philosophical debate, or debating anything. So that’s that.

And I think when we last spoke, Micah, my husband, was a professor at UGA, and he’s now moved into tech. And along that whole journey, so much of what we’ve gone through in our unschooling journey, I’m putting that in air quotes, because it just sort of becomes your entire sort of life philosophy, unschooling. But that has really been so meaningful for him on his journey of just learning the way his mind works, what his interests are, stuff like that. So he’s still in the research, data field, has gotten really into improv and musical improv with a little group here, and plays music all the time.

And I am, I think, still doing a lot of the same things. I like to sew, and I’m reading, and I love following little rabbit trails and researching anything and dabbling about here and there.

ANNA: So fun. All the things, but how they all weave together, right? You can just picture the household and the weaving together of all the things.

ERIKA: I love connecting it back to the old conversation and seeing how that tracks, because we always talk about that, looking back and seeing how those threads connect together. And it just also makes me think, oh my gosh, kids are all so different, the things that they love and are interested in. You can’t predict it. And it’s just so interesting.

PAM: Yeah, I loved hearing the piece of looking back and now seeing how that is weaving into the things they’re interested in right now, because they can seem very different. Yet, when you look back, you can see the thread that underlies the various things together over time. And that is so interesting, just as a piece of knowledge, just a little bit more understanding about who they are, right? I think that is super cool. Did you want to say something?

LUCIA: Oh, just as you were saying that I realized that along the way, I feel like that’s given me, it’s a really important reflection to have when they get interested in something that maybe I’m unsure about, like video games, for example, and thinking, what is happening with all this time? And it’s so easy to see what’s underneath for them. How does this work? How do the team dynamics work? How do I analyze these moves? It doesn’t mean that if you’re not doing that, it’s not important, but there’s always something going on underneath an interest unless they’re not being attended to, right? But if it’s intentional, just like we’re intentional.

And seeing that there is that through line and that intention under it. Oh, and then sorry, one other thing about my oldest kiddo, who’s really into working with kids these days. They’re interning at a Waldorf school and they’ve been babysitting a lot too, which is a job, and they assist in the little kids’ classes at our co-op. There’s something underneath it that’s more like a passion rather than just like, oh, I go babysitting. Looking at the intention they bring to that and how respectful they are of the children, their privacy, what they’re going through and what reverence they have for that job.

I mean, there’s all kinds of ways to have a job, but also to look at that as we are spending a lot of time doing that because I’m seeing that it is something that is really important to them to do rather than, oh, they’re working or they’re working without getting paid.

PAM: All the different stories we can tell ourselves, right? But when we take that moment to actually dive a little bit deeper, so often we can see those threads. We can see the intentionality rather than the surface story that just, oh, I’m taking them to their job. They’re doing this thing. I don’t quite know why they’re not getting paid. Whatever lenses that kind of automatically bubble up, if we take a minute to just dig a little bit deeper and see what else comes up alongside it, it is really exciting.

And it helps, as I think back, just helps with the mechanics too. Like I don’t mind driving them to X, Y, Z because I know the impact and what they’re getting out of it. I’m not just a chauffeur or something like that.

If I take that as the superficial story of what’s happening, but no, I’m fundamentally supporting their pursuit of something that they are intentionally interested in. Who knows where it will go? We’ve talked a lot about how you really can’t predict it because we can guess but it’s really only looking back where we can see those threads and the connections and go, oh my gosh, I am so glad that I supported and helped with that along the way.

ANNA: I just want to say I feel like this is a core piece of unschooling for me, this valuing the experience and the exploration and facilitating that. But it’s hard because it doesn’t necessarily have a product at the end, or it doesn’t necessarily even have a photo op or whatever the thing might be that grounds it in our culture. But gosh, it’s such a big part of it.

And when you can take this time to look back, you do see those threads and you do see that growth. And again, it may be that they end up doing something with children, but maybe they’re just building a wealth of information and connection and relationship pieces that’ll be used in some other way. So yeah, just love that.

ERIKA: It’s trusting, trusting that they know, right? They know the thing that’s interesting now, and that’s going to lead to something. And I feel like it can be hard because we are always seeing through our own lenses. That’s the part that can be challenging about that for me. I think, but it doesn’t make sense. Or why would you want to spend your time doing that?

Or little judgmental feelings can come up just based on what it would be for me, like that interest doesn’t make sense to me. I think if we can drop that part, drop the judgment and just trust that they know themselves and this is going to lead to whatever it needs to lead to for them. I really love them.

LUCIA: And it is so hard for people, they really want to attach it to something. Are they going to be a professional dancer? Are they going to go into child development? I’m like, I don’t know.

Are you going to become a historian because you learned about the battle of the bulge. I get it. I think they want to know that everything’s okay. I understand it, but it’s important, or it’s been important for me to make my little energetic bubble and go like, yeah, is that cool?

No, they don’t want to be a professional dancer because of XYZ or whatever. Then their face falls, oh, but they dance for 12 hours a week. Yes, that’s pretty awesome. That’s still great. It’s very, it’s just interesting when you get so steeped in this, to have to pull yourself out and see through those eyes, right? Remembering, that’s where they are. And I get it. And I’m going to figure out how to talk to you about this in a way that doesn’t make you so worried.

PAM: Yes, I would want them to not be worried. Although I have no control over that. I got those questions so many times, especially as your kids get older, right?

People start, well, then what are they going to be? Et cetera. And I got to a point where I just loved answering those with, “I don’t know, maybe.” They look at you like, don’t you know your child?

LUCIA: Don’t you care? Well, especially as they get older, right? When they’re seven, that’s fine for everybody. When they’re 15 going on 16 and everybody’s talking about college and what are you going to do?

And they look at you like, do you not care? Are you going to abandon them? And they’re starting to feel that, not pressure to do, but pressure to answer. Luckily we don’t get that from our family.

So, I’d like to care a little bit less, but we’ll encounter adults who are like, what are you going to major in? Oh, are you going to this? Are you going to that? What do I say? It’s like, well, here are the options. We can prepare a little, you can just be out there with it.

ERIKA: It depends on how humorous you want to be. You have lots of options.

PAM: Oh my goodness. So I wanted to pull back something that you mentioned a little bit earlier and we’ll tie it in with the first interview we did. Episode 251. I do recommend everyone go back there and check out because you talked a lot about your journey to unschooling there. The theme and the title of the episode was unschooling as a lifestyle.

And like you said earlier, it just becomes the way you live. So I was curious as you look back, how has your journey evolved so far? Because we know it will continue. And what things have helped you along the way?

LUCIA: Well, I did read the transcript of that episode again. I had a vague idea. And it was so interesting to me to see both how I was at the beginning and how I was already like two feet in, here’s what we’re doing.

And a lot of the sort of philosophy for lack of a better word, or like the ideas now are just, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And I know then that my yes was a different kind of yes. It just had a different feel and I was really eager and trying hard. And now a lot of those things just feel like, Oh wow. I can’t believe I was worried about that. That was my primary focus. I totally remember feeling that way. And I was thinking of Pam’s unschooling journey. Also, that was the first book that I read. That’s what it’s called, right? The Unschooling Journey.

PAM: Yes.

LUCIA: And thinking about the Network as this constant companion and knowing that the unschooling journey is based around this idea of the hero’s journey as the journey into and through unschooling. And I’m thinking about how many times we do that journey in this spiral, right? This big sort of macro journey of we won’t do that and we won’t do this and let go of that.

And we’re okay with this and then you go the next layer in and in and in, and now we’re sort of on this really micro journey where sort of everything spins around more quickly. I enter an unfamiliar situation or way of thinking, or how do I feel about this that my kid wants to do?

How do I feel about this and do a little whole circle of a journey with that. And I realized that for me, and I think for a lot of us who are part of the Network, that it’s a mix of a companion, a champion, an oracle, like all of the things that those mystical mythical heroes come upon that reveal some little truth, here’s a little encouragement, here’s your magic potion to keep you going.

But, for me, symbolically, there is no way, I guess I won’t say there’s no way I could have done it without the Network. But I know that my life is just totally different because of it. I know that every relationship I have is totally different because of it. I know that our family is totally different because of it.

And it’s funny, because I never get to talk about the Network. I think all the people outside my life know that I’m part of this unschooling network. They know it’s this online thing, and I have to go to a Zoom all the time. People will ask, why do you have all these Zoom meetings? Do you have a job? I’m like, no, no, I have, it’s a very important meeting I have to go to.

Because there are all these layers to it. When we started, I approached it the same way I approached listening to the podcast as like, I was in mentorship mode. And I still am in a different way. I remember, every week, as soon as the talk came out, I would listen to it. And then Micah and I would sit together on the couch at night, and I’d either play certain parts, we’d listen to the whole thing. We were steeping in this lecture series, and then we’d talk about it.

And I’d make notes and have these things I wanted to keep top of mind that week. And I could feel that transformation of ideas come loose in me and be like, okay, these are ideas I want to steep in. But then, I think I was maybe a little hesitant sometimes to post in the network, but I realized so quickly how much I learned from reading other people sharing it, everybody commenting and realizing this is unlike any other place that I’ve been.

And in the same way that unschooling is unlike any other place that I’ve been. If you think of this as the ultimate community for that based on intentionality, and not based on this set of rules and ideals. Which is so funny that a lot of the homeschooling and unschooling communities online turn into exactly that. Because I think people look for advice. And there’s always one person who wants to be the expert.

And that person ends up being the quote, unquote, expert and having the rules and you’re either in or you’re outside of that. And what I love seeing, even now, when somebody new comes into the Network, I learned so much from reading their new posts and the new things they’re wondering about. And I learned so much from people who are dealing with things that could seem totally irrelevant to me and my family. You learn so quickly how to read into the core of that relevance, how to offer support from your own experience to receive support from that shared experience.

And the ability to share those things and be in a space that is really without judgment, which is so weird. Especially when you’re dealing with something that feels like a high principle, or just high intentionality. Most of those spaces, and I’ve been in a lot that have to do with unschooling, but also that have to do with health or lots of other things, and it can feel like there’s this sort of untouchable expert at the center, or this untouchable idea, and we’re all sort of at the feet of that.

And feeling like we have this communal place, or real community, but also there’s this strong architecture that makes it so that anybody who walks into that space knows, gets the vibe. You can read the room really quickly, what’s going to be allowed here and not allowed here. There’s just not any bad behavior. So it feels really safe in those ways. But now it just lives in my head, all three of your voices live in my head, other people’s voices live in my head, phrases that people have said that I’ve written on a Post-it and stuck on my wall.

So that sometimes throughout my day, like, I’ll be like, oh, okay, I’m feeling uncertain about this. I got to post in the Network. But I can write the whole post and all the answers before I even do it. I realized that’s why I’m maybe posting less, and I think I should just do this anyway, because it was so helpful for me then.

And I love knowing that there are people in there who have been in there since I was there, whose kids are much older, and who aren’t visibly active so much. But just the other day, I posted something that was kind of a tender post. And immediately someone who had been in the group since I joined, who I wasn’t even sure was part of the group anymore, because I didn’t see them, but I thought about them as we’ve had some dialogue, and they just messaged me the loveliest message. Just knowing that there are people for whom this is so important. And just looking at the calls, I get so emotional sometimes when someone is sharing something. And everybody’s giving space, holding space, giving feedback, whatever it is.

And I see these 16 tiles of faces. And I think these are parents all around the world, who are dedicating their Saturday morning or afternoon or whatever it is, to talking about their families and their self development as caring people who are stewards of other people in the world. And that just blows me away. I think that in and of itself is so powerful.

ANNA: I feel like you captured it in a way that I don’t know that I could, because I think it’s really hard to explain to people. Because we do have those calls every week, we’ve been having them since we started in 2020. And I think of all of those weeks that we’ve had calls.

And that’s the piece too, that this web of people all over the world, bringing such intention and there isn’t one path. And you know that we don’t ever talk about there’s one right way or one way to be. But gosh, have I learned so much from just seeing other people navigating all the different pieces in their life.

And again, it may be a relationship issue, and maybe I’m not having that problem in my relationship, but just steeping in that intentionality and growth mindset is so powerful for me individually, and then just the collective of it is incredible. But yeah, I just am so grateful for you being there. And you really have seen it from the beginning and how it’s grown and what it looks like.

I just really appreciated that and got very emotional, because it is, it’s so powerful.

LUCIA: Yeah, and the growth mindset part of it. I think maybe you get lucky to meet a few people along the way in your real life who are invested in that. And I feel so lucky to have that in my partner, Micah, that’s where we are too, that is so important and central. And some people do have that with friends, but to be in a community of people where that’s their focus. And I think it’s maybe the kind of community that some other people may find in a totally different way in, like a church or something.

I always wanted that type of community without any of the one right way, or the dogma piece. Even with the most wonderful ones, there’s a book we’re going to go back to, or there’s a principle we’re going to go back to. Well, our principles are there’s no one right way. Everybody’s different. These expansive ideas.

Some people are nervous to come on the calls. At first, I know that I was, sometimes I’m even nervous now. But it’s hard to describe what it feels like once you’re there. It doesn’t feel like how I imagined, how can you create a warm, kind of magical community online on Zoom? I don’t know how it happened. But I think it’s just exactly that. You guys are the stewards of people coming together in this container with this intentionality, and everybody sort of rises to that occasion. And to do that kind of work in my life constantly is absolutely transformational. It’s changed every relationship I have. Really.

ERIKA: It speeds up the process for me. I feel like being around people who are constantly kind of reminding me of things that I need to work through or things I want to process. It helps me grow faster. I don’t know if that’s the right word. But that’s what it feels like. I don’t know if I would have gotten to these places. You know?

PAM: That’s the word that keeps coming up for me. This whole conversation is intentional, right? It’s like with that intentionality, and just showing up with that openness and curiosity. Okay, we’re going to go open and curious. Showing up with that piece, instead of the dogma, the direction, the measuring against, am I doing it right? Those are the pieces that we work hard to dispel, really, right? Which on one hand feels really good, there’s no rules to follow.

And then on the other hand, it’s like, oh, what do I replace that with? What do I do if I don’t have a rule to orient myself towards? But that’s where the openness, the curiosity, and the intentionality come in. It’s the intentionality piece, like you mentioned, Erika, that helps with the moving forward versus feeling stuck.

And I understand your hesitation about using the word fast to describe it, but maybe faster. It’s the reminder to visit those things. And also the compassion when we don’t have the capacity in the moment, and the space, as you mentioned, just the space, right? Just the open space that’s there for whatever is going on.

But I think that brings me back to the book, The Unschooling Journey, because number one, I love that you talked about the commonality of the different roles and people, mentors, and monsters. We talked about that a little while ago in the network, things that seem like maybe they’re getting in your way, but really, maybe they’re bringing messages. And that side is super interesting.

And to see when we’re spiraling or using that journey, how we can go more quickly, because we have more experience, and we have more language to help ourselves walk through those pieces, to remember, oh, yeah, this is my intention. This is why I want to do this. And oh, yeah, this is new.

Why is this bubbling up now? We’re always talking about that. It’s not that we don’t have challenges in life, we can just notice them a little bit more quickly, and move through them a little bit more quickly, because we gained these tools on what to do, instead of following the one path, right?

ANNA: That’s what I was going to say. We talk about that a lot. It’s not like this makes it the panacea, that nothing ever happens. It’s not all rainbow and sunshines. But wow, do I catch myself faster. I reorient faster. I get back to connection faster. I just slow things down to be able to be present with whatever’s happening faster than if I didn’t have that. So I think that’s the piece, because it keeps happening, keeps happening, all these decades later.

And there’s such a gift to it. And like you’re saying, I think it is faster, but there’s no end point. And I also appreciated you saying, Lucia, that it’s not always comfortable for people. I think some people come to an environment like the Network, and it isn’t comfortable because the one answer idea feels easier. Like, if you just give me the one answer, I’ll do it. That’s how we were trained in school. Tell me what I’m supposed to do, and I’ll do it. I’ll exceed the expectation. This is a little scarier in some ways, I think.

But if you can just get past that fear piece of it, and kind of steep in that container of acceptance and curiosity, it’s so empowering. It just opens up so many possibilities. And I think it really speaks to people when they can get past that piece of, but wait, I don’t want to do it wrong.

PAM: I was just going to say, that reminds me of, Pam, don’t lose it. When you mentioned it, Lucia, too, like when questions or challenges and things come up that don’t directly relate to things that are going on in our life, but it is still so useful to think through because it’s the foundational processes, right? It’s the tools that we’re using.

How do we apply the tools in this situation and in that situation? And that is just so much more deeply useful because then that’s understanding the tools and how you apply it in different places. It just gives us so much more experience on the breadth of how I might take this tool and apply it to all sorts of different things. I think of when we first come to unschooling and you encounter a challenge and you go and you ask, and you get an answer and you’re like, oh great, that worked great.

And then another challenge comes up a few months later. It’s like, oh my gosh, I don’t know what to do. I need to go ask and you ask and you get it, et cetera. If you’re not taking that intentional step to foundationally understand what’s the connection between why these different answers are working for me. I just find for me, I always need to go back and ask somebody because I haven’t learned the foundational stuff, gone underneath all that, where I can now think through something and help myself through it, et cetera. I don’t know if that makes sense.

ANNA: Okay, wait, just really quickly. I think this is making me, sorry, this is making me think about why it makes it faster is because, and maybe it’s personality driven too, but I’m experiencing to some extent all of the issues. We have a member that’s gone through like house flooding and having to move and all the things she’s navigating. Oh my gosh, I’m thinking of your thing with the fire extinguisher, Lucia.

I haven’t gone through those things physically and yet I was able to sit with it, hold the container, process it myself, think about what that would mean. So I think that’s what makes it faster because we only have so many experiences in our life but I don’t need all of those personally to learn more. There’s something interesting about that.

ERIKA: Yeah, I learned a lot about fire extinguishers from you, Lucia. I also, I wanted to pull back that other bit that I love that you said about intentional communities are often rule-based. I think that’s so interesting to think about.

Maybe other people that we meet that are very focused on growth and intention, they are trying to do things the right way though. And so our intention is totally different because it’s an intention about figuring out how people are different and being open and curious, An intention to be curious about things, which just, it feels very different.

LUCIA: Yeah, I mean, I wish it existed. I wish there was a beautiful room I could go to and be next to people and eat cookies and coffee afterwards. It’s like totally that part of it, but I realized it would be great if the world would be different.

You reminded me when you were talking about going through all of these things, even if they’re not your experience. I realized that a lot of what I used to do and still kind of do it out of habit, a fear-based habit, when I would hear about someone had this emergency and they were misdiagnosed and it turned out I would catalog, okay, if they have a rash on their palms, they check for Kawasaki disease. I was cataloging these, okay, if my kid’s not talking by this age, I have to demand whatever it was, some fear-based, okay, I’m going to arm myself with this practical knowledge that will fend off any bad eventuality.

And as we were talking, I realized that’s what we get, this real sort of other meta prevention, which is like we’re not going to prevent anything bad or practical happening, but what we have, we’re going to go through the same thing with it. If I’m feeling really strong about that, my priority is connection with the people involved, choosing out of love, being open and curious, all of the things that foundationally can feel like safety when so many things feel scary. Whether it’s that your kid’s playing video games or that they have an illness or that there’s a challenge. That there’s a different kind of safety, whereas I have always ascribed safety to rules and following best practices and figuring out the best way. So, this is something I’m still working on, but I like the concept.

ANNA: Me too. I do think, because I think our brain can be, you and I are very similar in that, and well, all four of us really, knowing the four of us as I do. I think we all want to, we have that brain that’s cataloging and thinking all the things. But for me, that deep breath into, there’s plenty of time, staying in this moment, being open and curious really is the thing that provides me the most peace and safety, because I think it was so stressful for me when I thought I was preparing for every eventuality, especially in my first pregnancy, and then everything went to hell in a hand basket. It’s like, but wait, I did everything the “right way”, and that got me stuck, right?

But I don’t get stuck there anymore, because I know things are going to happen, but what I know is that I can be present, I can have these connections, I can have these relationships, and that we’re going to figure it out. That feels more like real safety to me than what I was kind of chasing when I was younger with trying to do everything perfectly.

PAM: I love that.

ANNA: Okay, so I want to go to our next question, because I think it’s interesting. Something you’ve talked about on the network and reflected upon on calls is just observations about your kids and their relationship to themselves, and how you’ve seen them evolve as they’ve grown in this environment that you’ve created. How they move through the world, and so are there any little bits that you feel comfortable sharing just about your experience of that.

LUCIA: Yeah, I mean, it has been so interesting. This is an area where I can so directly see. Where I’m just practically learning from them, just by observing how someone else can be in the world, and being someone who is shaped totally differently by an experience of looking outside and adhering to outside standards to determine how I feel, when I need rest, what kind of food I’m eating. To see the opposite of that, of people who have such a strong basis in that type of self-knowledge, intuition, self-reflection, and all bolstered by, I don’t want to say extreme, but just actual autonomy of being.

And I don’t want to say I’ve given them autonomy, they’re not being prevented from being autonomous beings who have agency over so many areas of their lives, as much as possible. I believe that’s part of how they’ve developed this. Just watching how to do it. There’s no question, if they need to rest, they’re going to rest at this time, and if they they’re going to eat this kind of food, they’re going to eat this kind of food, and just this really strong conviction of anybody who gets in the way of that.

And they’re not rude people, but it’s about people who press back on that, are you really going to eat that? You’ve been in bed all day, etc. They have no tolerance for that type of external judgment, and they have sensitive humor about it. They function pretty well in the world, but things that I’m so uncomfortable with, I feel like this is the big personal project of my life to try and unravel the ideas of, have I done enough work to deserve rest? What should a person of my age, what am I capable of doing in a day?

Really having lost total touch with what I actually need to be resourced, and then living with people who are in total touch with what they need. And so, kind of going back to this idea of what are they going to do with their lives or major in, and also what we’ve been talking about as our process is in being open and curious, and all of these principles. That’s what they’re majoring in, right? You can do anything if you’re open and curious, you have a relationship with yourself that is grounded in trust or intuition. People see this, they will say, they’re so amazing, they’re such a pleasure to talk to, they just know who they are, but where are they going to go to college?

You just answered your own question, so it’s fine. But really, it’s just a total flip side of priorities of what starts to happen being steeped in something like this is where those priorities come up and change.

My oldest child was diagnosed with severe scoliosis a few years ago. A total S curve, and they deemed it surgical immediately. They would need surgery, and just in that room, they were just, I think they were 13 at the time, anyway, and just asked the surgeon questions, like, oh, what would happen if we wait? Do we need to do this now? The doctors started with when is your ballet break? When are we going to schedule the surgery? And then answered well, you should probably do this before you’re 22 or 23. They were like, okay, so let’s wait. What are the other options?

I’m using a little more confrontational tone than they did. But they said those things on their own. And then in the car later was said, they put their hands on my back without even asking. And I had to step back from not taking that as like, Oh, I really messed up. That’s my job. But I come from an era where doctors did all kinds of things without asking.

A lot of things, especially for a child, but that they would expect having very little experience with that for a doctor to say, Hey, can I touch your back? They’ve received no education about that. That’s just what they mean, well, they have by living in a world of the person who’s respected, autonomous.

So, that’s how they walked through that whole journey and ended up doing really intense physical therapy and loved their physical therapist. And it turned into this whole fascination with the body and how the body works and alignment and, learning that they were hyper mobile and reading books about this. And so they have a whole fascination with physical therapy and physiology now.

But ended up being deemed by that same doctor a year later, that their curve was corrected by like 14 degrees. And the doctor said, I would not recommend surgery anymore. They have no pain, a total success story for them. But again, there were all kinds of practical and sort of more emotional parts of how that is supported, right?

One is being willing to go out on a limb and run a ledge and be the outsider who’s not going to do the surgery, being willing to do that, right? You have to, again, step outside of this sort of echo chamber, everybody’s going, this is what you do, this is what you do, it’s going to be your fault if you don’t do this.

And just taking in all of the information, looking at the person in front of you asking all of the questions, getting all the information and going, Yes, let’s try this. And then being 100% willing to drive them to physical therapy four times a week, for a year, and them being willing to do it. And I’m having the time to do that in the middle of the day. And so many times I was more in it, in a practical sense. I think during that year, we didn’t have time for a lot of other things.

And they were getting older, we were doing just little, and that faltering that you have along the way. Is it enough? And Micah was like, look how much they’ve learned about themselves, their body, their relationship with their body, their relationship with all kinds of things this year, I realized, yes, wow. And seeing now a couple years later, what a big role that had in their life.

For some people, that story is different and also meaningful for them. They have a surgery, they have this long recovery, they have limited mobility, there’s an identity in that. And for my kiddo, they got this experience that fit their personality, which was to be in their body, get really in tune with, I mean, as a dancer, that’s how they relate to themselves. So it just expanded this vision for them of what is happening for them in their body, in their role, what it means, and the kind of relationship they can have with their body.

I think that really started to solidify for them, a core piece of the way they walk through the world, which I think could feel like an insignificant little side trail for some people. That was the year I had scoliosis and got the surgery or whatever, which is, again, the right path for some. It is not the right path for every 13 year old to do physical therapy every day on their own and in an office for two hours. But that’s what they wanted to do.

And there was a lot of support and scaffolding needed. And then a lot of trust to know when they got to a place where they didn’t need to do as much, and I was still in the like, well, have you done this today? Have you done that?

And they were like, no, I can feel it. I can feel my alignment, I can feel I’m doing okay. And I realized that they had integrated this into their whole, that’s the way they are, is that they’re constantly sort of being in that spiraling place of alignment in their body.

And I got to see it on an x-ray, which we don’t get to see when we’re talking about emotional things, right? There was this kind of parallel for me to get that level of trust with things that are not as evident or not physical around ways they’re thinking about things they want to explore, and to trust that all of that is just as valid, if not more than filling out the transcript, we would have filled out for a ninth grade year. Which is also challenging to come up against.

ANNA: It’s so interesting to think about that journey and how when we look at the threads, that piece of who they are with dance, that was there before. And so I think that’s the piece you trusted for them to be in dance six days a week for years, because it was that important to them. And now you see that they’re taking that experience into all these other pieces and all these other realms. And then their ability to be able to say, to know that I can ask my questions, I deserve for somebody to talk to me and answer my questions.

That’s just really powerful at 13 years old, and I know they’re both like that in different realms. That they have that experience. And I think that is one of the big things that we touch on. That’s a big difference that I see is, I feel like we were talking about it in the network not too long ago of just this kind of adults as authority or the enemy that we kind of structure it that way in our culture. And I think it’s so different when we can have that collaborative relationship between adults and children.

I think everybody’s better off. I feel like that surgeon learned a lot through that experience. And they still may value surgery, because that’s what they do. And they love it. But they learned something. I think having that collaboration just helps everybody involved, no matter what path is chosen.

PAM: I just wanted to bring it back, Lucia, I loved your point about how you could see the results on the x-ray. But it’s just beautiful to recognize that you had that moment, and you could see the intentionality that they were bringing to this whole process, and the choices that they were making, and how that was fitting with who they are as a person through their other choices and activities. But to understand, like you said, for other journeys, and emotional ones, just the different kinds of choices that a person, child or adult, makes in their life, that they are perfectly capable of bringing that same level of intentionality to it.

So that even if we don’t quite understand why they’re making those choices, we’re going to trust it the same as the one that we could more visually comprehend because of its particular circumstances. But to recognize that they are just so friggin capable of that, of being in the world and of choosing how intentional or how deep they want to go with a particular interest, or choice or, I’ve had enough of that. I don’t want to go any deeper, I don’t want to push any harder. I want to quit. That whole piece that is still with intention, that is a choice that they are making.

That is totally there, like you were saying, that authenticity, whatever word one wants to use. I just think that was such a great point. And to recognize the intentionality that they so often bring to things that we can’t see, often we can’t see the impact, again, looking back is easier as well. But yeah, I love that piece.

ERIKA: It’s such a beautiful example of that. And I feel like our kids who have grown up with this kind of autonomy and being more in touch with who they are as a different person than we are, I feel like that helps me remember, there’s not one right way. That’s literally what your child told the doctor’s, there’s not one right way, just telling the surgeon, there are going to be other ways to do this, and we’ll figure it out.

And I think it’s such a great reminder when my kids do that, because I think I was so schooled. So, you just get to a point where it feels like, oh, when this happens, you do this. And if this and this, this is the right way to do that. And that’s the right way to do this.

There’s just a lot of peeling back all those layers of expectations, or just feeling like, what are people gonna think? All of these different judgmental parts that we have. I remembered recently, I asked my youngest, are you interested in traveling?

Because in the past, that’s been something that we’ve talked about a lot and really enjoyed as a family. And it seemed like they really liked it too. And the answer was, not right now. And I was like, that is such a great answer that I would not have been able to give at that age. Because it just kind of leaves space to change. I’m not gonna say I’m not a traveler. But right now, I know I’m not in the season where I would enjoy that. And, I’m just like, wow, it just feels like such a more mature response. Your child at the surgeon is a much more mature response than I would have been able to have at that time. I would have been taken over by the authority feeling. So anyway, I think the kids are amazing.

ANNA: Yes. Two other things that came to mind about this whole piece, I’m going to try not to lose them. So one is, this is back to the x-ray and being able to see it, but not always being able to see it, whatever the journey for them is. And I think it’s just important to say out loud that we may never see it, we may never see the actual x-ray, right?

Sometimes we can look back and we can see the threads. And we can see how that really led into this developmental piece. But sometimes we’ll never see it because we’re different human beings, we’re never going to be inside of them. And I think that can, again, feel scary, or it can feel kind of exciting, to know there is this person on their own journey, and I trust their journey. But that can be tricky. So that stuck out for me.

And then the other piece you said about how people recognize, oh, they’re so self aware and easy to talk to. And then where are they going to school? Or what is their next step? It just reminded me, so you know, I work with a lot of adults and couples and I just wish people could understand that piece that you’re talking about. That’s the reason why they’re coming to seek help in their 40s and 50s. And 30s is because they don’t have it.

It’s not because they didn’t go to school, or they didn’t have the career, they did all those things that they were supposed to do. But they can’t figure out, who’s who am I? What is my voice? What matters to me?

And so for me, these kids that we see, because I mean, we’ve been at this for almost 30 years now, Pam, these kids that we see growing up in this lifestyle and moving on, that is the piece that they have, even through the bumps, and even through the maybe not figuring it out, or tough times, because it’s hard to become an adult and figure out all the things. It’s not that it’s without bumps.

But they do have that core sense of who they are, they do have this sense of, yeah, I can ask people for things, I deserve to have that collaboration. It is just such a different feel. Go ahead, Pam.

PAM: Yeah, so what bubble, they know who they are. And tying back to what Erika said, they know they can change. Yes, that they aren’t static. I know who I am. And this is static. And now everything that happens around me, I must measure against that vision of myself, and respond that way. No, that they have a sense of who they are, and a sense of how they can change, that that change isn’t bad, or wrong, or that who I was two years ago is now wrong, because I see things differently.

LUCIA: Without that, I feel like I was so oriented, like Erika, I was very well schooled in how I was being observed, how I was being interpreted, how I was being identified, and then identified with those identifications. I’m this, I’m that. And so really feeling this pressure to be that and always falling short of that.

And then seeing kids who just have no relationship to that. It’s like it doesn’t exist. It’s so weird. And I can feel it. I felt it. It’s so easy to see with the ballet piece, because you’re going to talk about something where you’re just looking at a mirror all day, right? How do you escape that? And it’s not that they’re not aware of the toxicity around ballet and dance. And that’s why they don’t want to do it professionally.

But they are an unbelievably gifted dancer, their musicality and technique, combined with the amount of hard work that they want to put into it is astounding. It’s hard to not go, but you could be that, everybody thinks you’re that. If it were me, that’s all I ever wanted was to actually be that good, right? And to realize, oh, wow, that’s what they don’t have, which is why they love it.

Why half the days they wake up and they’re like, I love my life. Instead of just what I remember is just the pain of being inadequate. And everybody’s going to experience that no matter what kind of life you grow up in.

But that’s not inadequacy is not the central driving force to overcome. It’s amazing to watch. It’s amazing to be around people who are not oriented to an external reflection of who they are, I guess. That’s what I would like to speed up for myself.

ERIKA: Well, this has been so much fun. And thank you so much, Lucia, for joining us. We hope everyone enjoyed the conversation and maybe had an aha moment or picked up some ideas to consider on your own unschooling journey.

And if you enjoy conversations like these, I really do think you would love the Living Joyfully Network. It’s such an amazing group of people connecting and having thoughtful conversations about all the different things we encounter in our unschooling lives. So we invite you to check it out and see if it fits with our free month offer. You can find the link in the show notes or you could just go to livingjoyfully.ca and the link is right on the homepage. So thanks for joining us and we’ll see you next time!

For this week’s episode, we’re sharing the next Foundations episode of the Living Joyfully Podcast with Pam and Anna, Open and Curious.

Open and curious is a helpful mindset shift for navigating relationships and challenges. In this week’s episode, we dive into Pam’s mantra and some of the many ways that it has proven to be so valuable in our lives. Being open and curious takes us back to beginner’s mind and allows us to see possibilities and question limiting beliefs that no longer serve us.

We hope today’s episode sparks some fun insights for you!

Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube.

THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE

We invite you to join us in the Living Joyfully Network, a warm and welcoming online community of like-hearted parents. It’s a non-judgmental space where you can steep in these unconventional ideas around parenting, relationships, and learning, and explore what they might look like day-to-day in your uniquely wonderful family. We offer a free month trial so you can see if it’s a good fit for you. Click here to join us.

Sign up to our mailing list on Substack to receive our email newsletters as well as new articles about learning, parenting, and so much more!

Check out our website, livingjoyfully.ca for more information about exploring unschooling and navigating relationships.

EPISODE QUESTIONS

How does it feel to think about being open and curious about the people in your life? What do you discover through that lens?

Try being open and curious while navigating a conflict this week, rather than jumping right to the solution you have in mind. What felt different?

Think about something in your life that you’re feeling stuck around. What bubbles up when you approach it with openness and curiosity? What other possibilities exist?

Next time you’re judging something your partner or child is choosing to do as “bad,” play with the question “Who would I be without this perspective? What would I do instead? How would that feel?”

TRANSCRIPT

ANNA: Hello and welcome to the Living Joyfully Podcast. Thanks so much for joining us as we explore relationships, who we are in them, out of them, and what that means for how we move through the world.

If you’re new to the podcast, we encourage you to go back and listen to the earlier episodes. We started with some foundational relationship ideas and have really enjoyed how they’ve been building upon one another. And if you’ve already been enjoying the podcast, we’d love it if you could leave a rating and a review. That definitely helps new people find us.

In today’s episode, we’re gonna talk about being open and curious. This is something you will hear us say a lot. I first heard about it from Pam and I find myself saying it daily at this point. When you think about the opposite, it’s being closed and disinterested, so it’s pretty easy to see why we both love it.

I don’t want to move through the world feeling closed and disinterested, and it definitely doesn’t help us solve problems or to connect with the people around us.

Being open and curious serves us in our relationships on a lot of different levels. When we’re open and curious about our partner, we want to understand them, what’s important to them, why they see things the way they do. We want to set aside any judgment and really lean into connecting with the person in front of us.

When I find myself not understanding something they did or said, I can remind myself to be open and curious about it, to not jump to conclusions, to not write a story, like we were talking about last week.

That gives us the best chance to avoid a misunderstanding. And part of being curious is asking questions and listening.

PAM: Yeah. I love this so much. I have found open and curious to be such a helpful lens to bring to my relationships. For me, it’s a quick way to get to beginner’s mind, which is a place where I don’t feel like I have to know the answers, and I’m just curious to learn more. I often feel a sense of wonder and a childlike energy when I can get there. And it’s not childish. Childlike. There’s a big distinction.

So, when I’m open and curious, I’m attentive and I’m interested in hearing new ideas and new perspectives. I want to learn how the other person is seeing things. I want to learn what they’re interested in and why it lights them up. And, of course, that doesn’t mean forgetting about who I am.

To me, beginner’s mind is about understanding that the world is richer than just my story. My story, the one I tell about myself, is definitely a vibrant thread, but it also weaves alongside the stories of the other important people in my life. And it reminds me that their story is theirs to tell and I want to listen. I want to know them, not my version of them.

And to take that metaphor just one step deeper, being open and curious reminds me to explore the tapestry of my life, which includes the people I love and care about, not just the thread of my story, thinking it’s the one right way to move through the world. It’s a tapestry of unique people and stories that weave together to create the bigger picture of my life, which leads us nicely into the next aspect that we wanted to talk about, doesn’t it?

ANNA: It does. Because being open and curious also really serves us when there’s a conflict. So often, when we find ourselves in a conflict, we have in our mind the right answer, how this needs to resolve for me to be satisfied. And unfortunately, It just rarely works out the way we plan.

If we come into the conflict pushing our agenda as the only way, we put the other person on the defensive and we end up spending a lot of time defending ideas back and forth, really rarely hearing the other person’s perspective at all. And if we come into the disagreement with this open, curious mindset that we’re talking about, we aren’t abandoning our ideas, like you said, we’re just remaining open to hearing the other person’s perspective.

That energy is felt by the other person, and then they are so much more likely to join us on the journey to understand and figure out options. We’re going to be committed to finding something that works. We’re going to get there faster by remaining open and not tunneling in on our one perspective or idea or what the fix should be.

PAM: I know, for me, when I first heard the advice years ago to listen to my partner, it made so much sense. So, when we were navigating a conflict, I listened. But eventually I realized I was still holding tightly to my right answer, and my listening was mostly focused on picking up the pieces that aligned with my solution, right? Everything else just kind of flew by. I truly wasn’t hearing their perspective. I wasn’t hearing their story. I was only taking in what I thought I could use to support my agenda or my solution, that tunnel vision that you mentioned.

And unsurprisingly, we often ended up at an impasse that way. Each person trying their best to defend and convince the other that their interpretation of the situation and their proposed solution is a right one. Our conversations were energetically draining and steeped in a power dynamic that definitely strained our relationship.

So, once I came to recognize what was happening, I chose to instead try to bring an open and curious mindset with me into our conversations. How are they seeing the situation? What parts of it feel important to them? What parts feel especially challenging to them? Does that make sense alongside what I know about them as a person, all the things we talked about way back in episode three that make them the unique person they are, their personality, their strengths, their weaknesses, sensitivities, all those pieces?

And in these more open conversations, with defensiveness down and curiosity up, there was space for me to share my thoughts and perspectives, not with the energy that this was the solution, but as more information to consider. And without that grasping and no longer feeling like the only choices we have are their initial solution or mine, we could often find a third or a fourth or a fifth path forward right through the situation that took each of our perspectives and needs into consideration.

So, it turns out that open and curious mindset not only gave me the space to learn more about what was going on, it also gave me more space to get creative in finding a solution that worked for everyone involved.

The process is like a muscle that gets stronger with practice. With each experience, where shifting to being open and curious helped us creatively navigate a challenge or a conflict, it became a bit easier to shift the next time, and then the next. Over time, I found myself shifting more quickly from defending myself to trusting that we could find a way through together. Being open and curious just helps me in so many ways, in so many situations with so many people.

ANNA: Oh my gosh, yes. I see it in so many different ways and I feel like it’s one of those tools we can cultivate that gives us something to do instead of taking things personally when we’re in a conflict. And that is so key when we want to navigate those conflicts with more ease and connection.

And this idea is also really important if we find ourselves stuck or with some limiting beliefs. Often this involves outside voices or some cultural constructs that maybe aren’t serving us. And if we bring that open and curious mindset to it, we can start asking questions. Where are these ideas coming from? Are they serving me? Who would I be without them? What other options can I find?

But we can only get there if we open up our minds beyond the parameters that are being applied to us by forces that don’t know who we are or what’s important to us. This allows us to start questioning these societal constructs. So, if I’m in a job that I don’t love, why am I still here? What’s stopping me from leaving? What would life look like if I made a different choice? How would that feel?

And also things we view as “have tos”. We talked about this a few episodes ago as well. We can start to question those have tos. And being open and curious allows that exploration to move us away from things that aren’t serving us, the things we’ve just accepted even if we don’t like the way they feel. “Relationships should be this,” you know, “School looks like this,” “Being successful looks like that.”

All these ideas are worth questioning, especially if we’re wanting to live our best life, a life where we can truly thrive.

PAM: Yeah. When we realize that we can question everything, that we can be open and curious about all the possibilities, I swear it just feels like the whole world opens up. I feel so much lighter. And it’s fun that you mentioned that. One of my favorite thought experiments is to play with the opposite perspective to see how it feels, particularly when I’m feeling stuck or frustrated.

So, say the story I’m telling myself is, I hate that my kid wants to play video games all the time. In my head, it’s fascinating to explore the question, “Well, what if I was a person that loved that my child is excited to play video games all the time?” So, being open and curious means letting the likely immediate reaction of listing all the reasons I think that’s a silly perspective just float on pass, because that’s definitely not being open and curious, and then just noticing what comes up next. How would I feel in those circumstances when I saw my child happily playing?

Well, I think I’d be happy too, because I like this. I’d probably have a big smile on my face.

And then I was like, okay, so then what would I do? If this was something I loved and I was excited about, I’d probably join them, sitting with them, and watching them play. I’d listen attentively to what they shared. And they’d probably be really happy that I’m showing an interest in something that they really enjoy. I’d cheer with them when they beat the boss or finished the level or solved a vexing puzzle, and we’d celebrate together.

So, I have that vision in my head, and then maybe it would occur to me to ask myself, so what’s wrong with that? It sounds like I’d be seeing their game playing through their eyes, which definitely helps me better understand who they are. And it sounds like a very connecting thing to do, which is something that I want to do. So, when I play with that thought experiment, so often I discover that things aren’t as bad as I imagined them to be on the other side. And I can ask myself, why was I holding on so tightly to my fear and judgment of the thing?

It’s just a great tool for me when I’m feeling stuck around what often turns out to be a conventional message that I’ve absorbed, that once I take some time to play with it and dig a bit deeper into it, I discover it really doesn’t make so much sense to me in my life in this moment.

ANNA: Exactly. And I think it’s so interesting that we can find ourselves defending and enforcing ideas because we think we’re supposed to, yet, when we choose to examine them, we find they don’t serve us or our relationships at all. And that open and curious mindset allows us to tune into ourselves and evaluate ideas related to who we are and how we want to move through the world.

Another time I use this idea a lot is when something bad happens, especially something that I might initially label as bad. Instead I can say, hmm, I wonder what’s going to happen here. I wonder what’s coming next. I don’t have to have all the answers. I don’t know all the things.

So, being curious allows me to look for new directions around things that might first be considered roadblocks. I don’t want to be shut down by what happens to me and around me. And the fastest way for me to avoid a spiral is to start asking questions and look at the issue with a wider lens, not jump into the judgment about it.

PAM: Yeah, that makes such a big difference. When you can just know that there are other possibilities. We talked about that tunnel vision, and we can especially feel that when something is going wrong or bad around us and we can get really fixated and pulled into that. But when we can take a step back to start asking questions around it and just looking a little bit bigger picture, that really keeps the possibilities bubbling.

ANNA: Right, and I think it’s related to the things we’ve talked about with time. There’s plenty of time. Because that’s the other thing. You feel the expansiveness of that open curious mindset. So, when something happens, instead of locking in and the judgment, you can feel that expansiveness of, hey, I can take a few minutes to kind of look at this from the wider perspective. So, I like those inner things that we can find energy shifts, because that’s what can help us move through any of these challenges, bumps, conflicts, whatever, with a little bit more ease.

PAM: Exactly. The energy is the whole thing, because the energy is, is ours, but it’s also the energy that we’re bringing to our interactions with everybody around us. It’s so helpful.

ANNA: So, here are some questions you might want to ponder as you explore the idea of being open and curious this week. How does it feel to think about being open and curious about the people in your life? What do you discover through that lens?

Number two, try being open and curious while navigating a conflict this week, rather than jumping right to the solution you have in mind, and then look at what felt different. How did that change how that conflict played out?

Think about something in your life that you’re feeling stuck around. What bubbles up when you approach it with openness and curiosity? What other possibilities exist that maybe you didn’t see at first?

And next time you’re judging something your partner or child is choosing to do as bad, play with that question. Who would I be without this perspective? What would I do instead? How would that feel?

So, hopefully you’ll take some time to think about those questions and about what an open and curious mindset could bring to your life. And we really appreciate you listening and being here with us today, and we will see you next time.

PAM: Yes! Bye.

Welcome to a new series on the podcast that we’re calling A Field Guide, in which we’re working our way through Pam’s book, The Unschooling Journey: A Field Guide.

We’re using the chapters of the book as monthly themes in the Living Joyfully Network, which is bringing everything top of mind for us, and got us excited to share our thoughts here on the podcast as well.

The book, framed around the hero’s journey, is a weave of myths, contemporary stories, and tales from Pam’s unschooling journey. The monomyth of the hero describes an individual who somehow stumbles upon clues to a truth that lies outside of conventional belief, and begins a quest—physical, spiritual, or both—to understand and eventually embody that truth as their new way of life.

Sound familiar? Unschooling unquestionably lies beyond today’s conventional wisdom around learning, parenting, and childhood. And through our journey to understand unschooling, we will learn and grow and change as we come to embrace this new lifestyle. It’s an inner, or spiritual, journey and, by the end, we will see our ordinary world in a new and extraordinary way. And while no two journeys are the same, there are similar stages and characters that you are likely to encounter in some form on your unschooling journey. This is where a field guide shines.

In this first episode, we’re talking about the initial phase of the journey: Choosing Unschooling. We talk about the initial call to unschooling, which looks different for different families. We also explore what it looked like to find our guides along this path, describe the threshold guardians we may meet as we cross the threshold into the world of unschooling, and share what it was like to find ourselves in the metaphorical “belly of the whale.”

It was a fun conversation and we hope you find it helpful!

Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube.

THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE

Learn more about Pam’s book, The Unschooling Journey: A Field Guide.

We invite you to join us in the Living Joyfully Network, a warm and welcoming online community of like-hearted parents. It’s a non-judgmental space where you can steep in these unconventional ideas around parenting, relationships, and learning, and explore what they might look like day-to-day in your uniquely wonderful family. We offer a free month trial so you can see if it’s a good fit for you. Click here to join us.

Sign up to our mailing list on Substack to receive our email newsletters as well as new articles about learning, parenting, and so much more!

Check out our website, livingjoyfully.ca for more information about exploring unschooling and navigating relationships.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

PAM: Hello everyone, I am Pam Laricchia from Living Joyfully and I am joined by my co-hosts Anna Brown and Erika Ellis. Hello to you both. And today we are starting a new series on the podcast called A Field Guide.

So that means we will have these episodes being released alongside our ongoing foundation series and our journey conversations with other unschooling parents and any other ideas that bubble up for us along the way. We definitely like to go with the flow that way. For this series we’re going to be working our way through my book, The Unschooling Journey: A Field Guide.

We’re also working through it in the network, our online community, which is bringing everything top-of-mind for us and got us excited to share our thoughts here on the podcast as well. So the book, it’s framed around the hero’s journey. It’s a weave of myths, contemporary stories, and tales from my unschooling journey.

The monomyth of the hero describes an individual who somehow stumbles upon clues to a truth that lies outside of conventional belief and begins a quest, physical, spiritual, or both, to understand and eventually embody that truth as their new way of life. So, I think that probably sounds familiar to most of our listeners. Unschooling unquestionably lies beyond today’s conventional wisdom around learning and parenting and childhood.

And through our journey to understand unschooling, we will learn and grow and change as we come to embrace this new lifestyle. It’s an inner or spiritual journey and by the end we will see our ordinary world in a new and extraordinary way. My body is full of goosebumps right now.

Anyway, as I explain in the book, we’re calling this series a field guide. That’s in the title because while no two journeys are the same, there are similar stages and characters that you are likely to encounter in some form on your unschooling journey. In this episode, we’re talking about the initial phase of the journey, which I call choosing unschooling, and the first stage is the call to unschooling.

So our journey begins in the ordinary world. I think most of us grew up absorbing the conventional messages around learning that kids have to go to school because that’s where the trained teachers are and to learn something they need to be taught. The call to unschooling is the moment when we catch a glimpse of this new and mysterious world, that world of unschooling, and all of a sudden our ordinary world looks a little bit different, maybe a little less tolerable.

And what I find interesting is that it doesn’t mean that we’ve never heard of it before. You may have heard the term unschooling or homeschooling in passing, but this time for some reason something has caught our attention and we are curious to learn more. That’s the call, the individual call to unschooling.

ANNA: I love the reminder that each journey is so unique and really each calling to unschooling is so unique. I think sometimes it can be this really organic thing that just kind of unfolds and other times a crisis point brings us to a place of looking around and seeing that message that, like you said, maybe had passed by our view before but we thought it didn’t apply, and now it does.

I think for us our call came very early on when we realized school would not work for our oldest. She was a deep diver from the start and we could just see that she really wouldn’t be served by kind of going backwards into this slower linear progression that someone else defined as learning.

We had never planned to homeschool. I was aware of it. It was big in our area, but it just wasn’t our plan. And as I started my own deep dive, I found all these different methods. I can’t even remember all of them. There were so many books that I read at the time and there were bits of each of them that I thought were interesting, right? But they didn’t really seem to line up with the child I had in front of me.

And then I read John Holt’s book, Learning All the Time, and it was this full-body yes. Not only did it validate what I was seeing in our daughter, but it felt deeply true to me on another level related to David and me and how we learned all the time and how we like to engage with learning in the world and how unique that was, even between the three of us, that ultimately became the four of us.

Our priority was this child who had been through so much, medically, already in her very, very short life because this was probably around three. So, stepping out of the well-worn path really wasn’t an issue for us. Our focus was just on her, on her survival, her thriving, and ultimately it helped us to create an environment where all four of us could thrive, which was, just it was really beautiful.

ERIKA: Yeah, I love thinking back to that beginning when I first heard the word, first heard of the idea. And it’s been fun to hear people on the network also share how they got that first call. I just remember, when Oliver was a toddler and a young kid, when he would see other kids playing, he would avoid them. He wanted to be off to the side looking, to have some distance for safety.

And then, if all the kids are going to do this one thing, or everyone’s doing this, he would go the other way. I was just like, okay, that’s going to be really challenging in school where the whole thing is to get everyone excited to be doing the same thing. If everybody was doing the same thing, he didn’t want to be there.

That has kind of changed over the years. But that was my first little peek into thinking that I don’t know that this is really going to work. And I had this vision of people judging him as not doing the right thing, when to me, he was amazing and perfect and doing everything he needed to do.

And so that was where it began for me. I really was just looking around, in a way that I hadn’t before, for alternatives. And I remember learning about different kinds of homeschooling. We didn’t know quite as much about neurodivergence at that point either. But I understood that I can’t make him do any particular thing, it just wouldn’t work. And so, I was trying to support his interests.

And then when I heard about the idea of unschooling, it was like, oh, okay, people are doing something that’s completely different than anything that I had experienced as a kid. But also that just made so much logical sense to me. And I thought, this kind of life is something that could really work for him.

And then when Maya joined the family, we were already kind of thinking that this was the way we were going to move ahead. And so, it’s interesting to see a lot of us get to some of the same thoughts, but from different angles. I really like that part.

PAM: Yeah, for me thinking back to when my kids were young, I did not even know homeschooling was a thing, that it was legal. So, I was deep in trying to help my eldest work with school. I was actually doing a lot of research around neurodivergent and stuff. And there was not as much as there is today. But that’s where I was exploring and trying to work with the schools to try and create an environment that worked for him. And I was doing a lot of work with teachers and with principals, trying to figure out things that would work for him. We tried another school, etc.

It was finally through that research into neurodivergence, where I found somebody’s article who mentioned homeschooling as an option. I was like, what the heck, and I think it was an American article. And oh my gosh, that quick search to see if that was legal in Canada, is that a thing. And I was doing that research and prep for a meeting with a principal at the private school we had transferred to. And I went and talked to the principal. And she’s like, Oh, yes, we will look at what you brought. And she was amenable. And she’s like, well, we’ll look for ways to work with him. Well, she said, ways to look for his gifts. So I was like, Oh, thank goodness.

And I went home and I thought, well, jeepers, he’s been there for months. If you haven’t yet seen him shine, because that’s what I was looking for, because, for me, seeing how he was at home and how he learned and just how he had so much fun during his days. And then the sharp contrast to who he had to become to marginally get through a school day.

We’re just so different. That’s why I was always trying to help the school because I didn’t know there was another option. So as soon as I learned about it, there was maybe two months between that discovery, and me going up to each of the kids individually and just saying, “Hey, I just learned that you don’t actually have to go to school.” Because I had said that. You have to go to school. Let’s try and figure out how we can make this work? It was my approach for a few years. And then they all said, absolutely. I’d rather stay home.

But yes, that call, I’m still thankful to the principal, just for pointing that out to me that, okay, yes, you’re wanting to work with me, but that what you’re telling me is already telling me that this environment, while better than the public school was not as good as we had at home. Because that’s where I could see those gifts and that shining every single day.

ANNA: You didn’t have to search for the gifts, right? They’re just there and apparent when he’s in an environment where he can thrive.

PAM: Just so bright and amazing and wonderful. And it was like, Oh, we could just do this. That’s cool.

Okay, so then the next stage I called finding our guides, because you’ve chosen to accept the call. Also, I will point out that it is perfectly valid to reject the call. There’s oftentimes when like you were saying, maybe you’ve come across it and thought, that won’t work for us. But this is the point where you’ve chosen it.

So you’ve chosen to accept the call and embark on your unschooling adventure. And at this point, your thoughts naturally turn to the road ahead. You’re fueled with anticipation, you’re more than ready to take your first steps. Sometimes, however, the questions and the fears swirling through our minds threatened to overwhelm us. This is something so different. How will I stay on the right path? Will there be clear signposts to guide me? What if I need help? What can I do?

As with many tales that I’m sure we have all heard, read, been through, watched, etc. When we begin our journey in earnest, a guide appears. You know, when you’re ready, the guide appears, the teacher appears, that is such a common thing. Anyway, so mythologically speaking, guides do tend to be elderly, experienced, think Dumbledore, think Obi Wan Kenobi.

But in a fun unschooling twist, as I looked back, I really discovered that the most important guides for me on my journey were my children. And I think that is such a fun twist. Dumbledore and Obi Wan and those elderly masters and guides have gone through a huge life process to boil down to the essence. Whereas children, they haven’t been inculcated with all the conventional messages like to fit in, etc. And when given the space and the freedom to follow just their human instincts, their curiosity, their joy, their fun, oh my gosh, they just do it. And for me to look at them helped me see what’s possible, right?

What kind of a life we could have and how interesting that is. I just found them to be the most useful guides for me in my journey. Whenever I was getting stuck in my head, it was Oh, go back and hang out with your kids, Pam, go do that for a while. And then things would become so much clearer.

ANNA: As I mentioned earlier, our focus was our daughter, and her survival. How do we create an environment that works for her and then add in her sister after she got here. They were so clearly the guides from the start. And I think it’s like you said, because this process, it’s a lot of unlearning for us as adults. It’s a lot of excavating and peeling off all these ideas that were handed to us.

And I mean, I feel the weight of it, even now just thinking about it. And what I saw with them was a lightness, an excitement about the world, this ability to just explore and take it all in. I think everybody’s seen it in a toddler but it’s there in the five and the seven, the 10 and even the 15 year olds. There is this excitement about the world that I think it’s kind of tamped down, as we try to fit into the path and take that linear path. They really were the guide, because they were the only ones around that really had that organic piece of just following their heart, just being excited about something and going with it and not putting filters over it, which I saw a lot of adults doing, myself included.

I was lucky to meet mentors and fellow travelers along the way that absolutely enriched my journey. I think they helped me understand myself more, maybe put some things into context. Each journey is so unique, but it was helpful to see, to have those fellow travelers. But really, it was the kids that were the real guides, because they just knew what they needed.

And we could see them thriving. And we could see that the environment worked. It was interesting because it not only worked in great times, when we were having fun but it really worked in the hard times too, because that connection, that focus on relationships, that was a big part of our family. It really helped equip us with what we needed to get through those hurdles that life would throw at us. And so it was just really interesting, like you said, it really turned it on its head to think about like, oh, we don’t need the expert.

The clear message for myself was, I don’t know better for someone else, ever. Not my kids, not the neighbor, not my spouse. As soon as I could get there, then I could be more open to really hearing what they know about themselves, what they know about how they want to move through the world. I love turning it on its head and seeing just how much they can teach us.

ERIKA: Yeah, I love that. I think that was why I was drawn to Pam’s work at the beginning of my unschooling journey, just because there was so much of that, redirecting my attention back to my children, because that’s what’s happening. The reality of our situation is what they’re interested in and what works for them.

But it was such a huge paradigm shift. I do remember at the beginning, just doing so much reading and maybe it was almost like a search for some guidance, at that time to just be like, this is so different than anything that I have thought about before so different from my experience as a child. And so I had not done much questioning of anything.

I mean, maybe in the back of my mind, but I hadn’t actively been like, what’s bad about school? What’s wrong with this situation? And school was challenging in ways for me too. And so it was just a lot of learning and a lot of just questioning all the things I thought I knew, all the things that I had been told, and just getting a new understanding for myself. And I think I needed to do that. And really read from the experience or listen to the experience of people who had already been questioning this, because it helped me kind of leap forward along in my own thinking.

And then once I did start that process of questioning things, it was very fast. It just made so much sense to me. And it was so fun. My mind was just like, this is so great, things that didn’t quite make sense to me as I was growing up, it was like, oh, yeah, because that didn’t work at all. It was really validating for myself to realize that the environment is so challenging and does not work for most brains.

And so I think, finding people who had already thought a lot about it, and we’re writing about it was really helpful. I’m thinking about John Holt. And I read John Taylor Gatto’s very angry books about education. They were really helpful just to be like, wait a second. It got me pretty fired up. But then moving forward, definitely Pam’s reminders to just look back at your kids, that was the most valuable guide along the way, as we continued our journey.

PAM: Yeah, I feel that, because they’re both sides to it, right? I found wonderful communities of experienced unschoolers, because I needed that so much. I hadn’t even heard of homeschooling, that was how my world opened to the possibilities.

I soaked it in like a sponge, just to see what other people were doing, what their experiences were, how they were approaching things, how they were thinking of things. That was all brilliant, that helped expand my context, expand the possibilities for what I could bring. And then, you were saying, when challenges come, having to go back to my kids or when my mind started spinning and wondering and questioning, and I wasn’t getting anywhere. My kids were my guides, because I could go back to them.

And that’s what was happening in our lives. You’ll hear that through the podcast for years, people are different, who are my kids, my kids aren’t their kids. But go back, if you’re newer, I hope you can go back to the unschooling rules series and the unschooling stumbling block series that we have on the podcast.

Because that can happen nowadays. When you’re first learning about things, when you’re looking to people who have experience, you’re kind of looking for the rules, well, then how should I do this? It’s something completely. How should I do it?

But if you don’t bring that back into your lives, into your kids, into you as a person, those are bound to rub. Somebody’s generic rules about how we do this thing are going to rub because they’re not your people. They’re not your family.

So, when things come up, and we’re looking for guidance, looking to our children, through the lens of the possibilities and things that we are bringing to mind, and we’re thinking about what might work for us, engaging with our kids and seeing it in action. That’s where you really feel the truth of it. So, as guides, when you’re in a tough spot, they’re such a lovely place to go.

Okay, so the next stage of this choosing unschooling phase of our journey, we are now crossing the threshold into the world of unschooling. In many myths, the hero encounters one or more threshold guardians as they cross into the mysterious new world of their story. These guardians are often gatekeepers like Cerebus, the three headed dog of Greek mythology who stands guard at the entrance to the underworld.

So for me, these guardians were things like, family and friends who were pointedly questioning our choice to not send our kids to school. Kind of testing my resolve to leave the ordinary world. And we were speaking of unschooling communities and finding experienced unschoolers. But there are some, at least, at first that seemed rather dogmatic about what unschooling “done right” looks like.

So it felt to me like they were kind of testing my quote worthiness to enter this new world of unschooling. What if that doesn’t seem like something I would ever do? Does that mean I can’t enter this world?

And then there was also navigating the more official guardians, like getting permission to homeschool from our local Board of Education and finding out what those regulations and things were and how to meet those. It was also helpful to find local communities and see how they were doing that as well. So learning those pieces. These can feel like things that are kind of rubbing, they’re getting in the way of us moving into this new world of unschooling.

But moving through them is kind of all part of the process. Learning about those pieces, learning why, why do I still want to do this, even though family and friends, with all the love in the world, are not wanting us to go outside of the ordinary world that they know, and they don’t understand that. So it’s scary for them.

And recognizing the part of the role that I’m playing and giving them that authority to be telling me that. How I’m taking it in versus how they’re sharing the message. Anyway, so yes, the guardians can be very different for different people, depending on where you are. But those were three that I definitely encountered on my journey.

ANNA: Yeah, I think most people probably encounter those. Maybe one is going to weigh heavier than the other. But I think the imagery is really helpful here, because it does provide that bit of separation, it puts us in that analyzing part of our brain where it’s not so emotional. It’s like, oh, look at these guardians. They are giving me some information.

And I think it can help us see that well meaning friends and family members are really just giving us information about who they are, and what’s important to them. And people can be very attached to their paths. And they feel best when they keep everybody on their path, because that’s their validation, right?

Well, if we’re all here on this path, then it must be the right path. People are still in that paradigm. And so I think it just helps us to recognize that it’s not about us, and that we can stay focused on what’s working with our family, just like we were talking about a minute ago, look back at your kids, what do you actually need? And then that big piece of that is trusting that it’s okay if it looks different, that they don’t need to be on our path, we don’t need to be on their path. We don’t have to convince anybody, it’s okay for it to look different for everyone, we’re all learning different things throughout that journey.

For number two, you know, I’m not a big fan of any kind of dogmatic ideas, whether it’s around diet or education or anything else, because we’re so unique, and each journey is so unique. There is not one right way. Okay, maybe I am dogmatic about that, people probably get irritated with me about that! I think the idea that there’s a right way really can feel comforting, I do totally get that, that it feels comforting, but to me it’s just so short-sighted, and the rigidity of it really restricts our growth. That’s what I saw in myself, because I’ve had my dogmatic days, especially when I was younger, and what I saw was that I just shut out so much when I was so focused on there being this one right way to do something. I feel like a whole world opened up when I realized, oh there are lots of different ways to do things. We’re each going to choose what works for us, and then change and pivot and do it again and twirl it around.

It was just so expansive for me, and I loved that expansive feeling, versus feeling like I needed to put myself on rails, to do either unschooling right or something else right. I just really loved that, and so just understanding there isn’t the perfect path, that it’s all growth, it’s all learning, it’s all context, it’s all building our web.

And then just quickly about the laws, I just want to encourage people to really understand the specific laws in their area, so for us it’s States, there’s provinces, you know, all kinds of different ways that it’s handled in different countries, but know exactly what’s there, and I mean read the statutes, because many times these kind of governing bodies will ask for way more than is actually legally required. When you can truly understand the statutes of your area and be able to speak about them, it will help you feel grounded and empowered because you know what we’re dealing with.

I lived in a state where they required annual testing. But when you dig into it, you don’t have to send the test to anyone, you have to keep it on file for X amount of time. There were all these nuances of the specific laws that I was like, oh, okay, we can make this work. It doesn’t have to be timed, you don’t have to do a specific level, and so there were all these different little nuances. And so I loved what you said Pam too about local groups. It does really help, I think, even if a local group may not fit you in all ways, to just check in with them, because they’re navigating those same laws and can help calm you and help you understand what’s really required. They will share some ways to make that work for your family and your specific kids and their brain.

So, just spend a little bit of time with that, because I think it can feel a little shaky if you don’t know that and you don’t know if you’re on solid legal ground. And so just me taking that time helped me feel really confident in any environment that what we were doing was legal and in compliance.

ERIKA: One thing I like about this guardian section is how the different areas kind of require a slightly different approach, but they’re all manageable. Once you wrap your head around what’s going on here. So, for the official stuff, shout out to Nance from Florida unschoolers, she is serving this role for Florida unschoolers, just reminding us of what is required. And it’s not a lot. She runs this big umbrella school that just makes it really easy for families to avoid having to do extra documentation that’s just not required by law.

There are people in every state who have figured things out and are working to look at what’s legally required and making sure that we can do it as easily as we can. And then for those family and friends, I think it’s so unique. I love hearing other people’s stories about this, because there are some difficult families out there with a lot of expectations of their kids and grandkids and people who have been in education their whole lives, and they think they know everything about it. And I think that adds such a layer of difficulty to this.

When you’re facing a guardian that is that intense, and that feels so confident that their information is the right information, it’s tough. Fortunately, for our family, we didn’t really have to deal with much of that at all. And I think just personality wise, I come in with a lot of confidence about what I’m doing.

And so I haven’t really had as many people questioning. But when I hear about people who have those really close family relationships, where it is very intense, and people are thinking this doesn’t feel safe. And I do love going back to just remembering, that’s based on their experience in their life.

And what they’re telling us about our life is really just telling us about themselves. Where they’re feeling judged, or where they’re feeling, well, if what you’re saying is true, it kind of makes everything I believe fall apart. That’s a very scary feeling.

And so people will really hold on tight to these beliefs that they have, like you were saying, Pam, at the beginning, well, you have to go to school. And if that’s not true, then I don’t know, that starts to feel a little scary for some people. How could that not be true? I had to go to school.

This is the belief that everything we do is based around it. It just helps me have a little bit more compassion for them, because it’s too scary for them to be able to go there. But we are each on our own journey. And so that’s okay. It’s okay if it’s different.

And I did come across those dogmatic unschoolers as well at the beginning of my journey. And that’s just another thing that I think it helped me learn, it helped me kind of clarify, what are the things that feel true to me right now? What are the things that I see working for my family right now? There were ideas that I thought, you know, we would never get to that place of like, what they were calling radical unschooling back then.

That sounds like too much. But then over time, the learning and things just naturally evolve where it starts to make more sense than it does at the beginning. But I do think it can be a little scary for unschoolers at the beginning of the journey.

If they see people who are doing things that are just wildly outside of their comfort zone. But I think that’s why I really like the vibe that we have on the network, because it doesn’t feel like that to me. It feels like everybody’s sharing experiences, but there’s no judgment about where you are along the path. I just feel like that kind of support where you can see people doing things differently. But it doesn’t feel like a threat. And I really appreciate that type of environment.

ANNA: Something you said, I just want to jump on real quick and that was that confidence piece, because I really do think that coming into those family environments with just a confidence, just a calm confidence, not an aggressive, I have to convince you confidence, but just a calm confidence makes such a difference.

And I think one of the things that’s really helpful with that is to be a part of community, whether it’s a small group of friends or joining something like the network, where when you have the doubts or the questions, which are going to come up for all of us, you take it there to a group of people that are going to hold it lightly. They are going to let you examine it without the judgment without the fix being, well, put them back in school or put them in their own bed or whatever the thing is. And so, because I think, especially those of us that have good relationships with our family, we came to them with things, we asked them for things, but this may feel outside of their comfort zone.

So just keep that more about connecting with the grandparents or connecting with the aunts and cousins and asking your questions in a place that really knows more about what you’re trying to do. Because it’s not about that there’s an answer or a path, but I just found it so helpful to hear from people that at least had the same priorities that I did, that we’re prioritizing the relationships and we’re prioritizing this path. It feels really different.

And I think that helped me have confidence in those other areas because I didn’t need to be asking them questions about it.

PAM: And you know what, I mean, this is exactly why I was originally inspired to write this book in the first place, as in a field guide, as in our journeys don’t look the same, but chances are there are going to be some challenges when people start to know that we’re not sending our kids to school anymore, right? Some challenges when we start looking for more information. Just understanding that shift that what they’re sharing is, even though the way it’s shared often feels like a judgment of us, actually, it really is all about them and where they are in their journey. And understanding that piece can completely help us shift how we engage with them.

Like you said, we have more compassion for them because we understand, we see through their eyes why they’re thinking this. We don’t feel as much the need to defend because it’s okay, they’re really stuck. I can’t change them. My goal is not to try to change them. If they’re curious, this is a seed that’s planted and they can come and ask questions. So now I don’t get defensive and keep trying to share and convince and tell them I’m right.

It’s like, this is working for our family right now and we’ll see how it goes. We’ll see where it goes. And pass the bean dip.

I don’t need to engage in this conversation because this is about their need. And we know they’re struggling with all sorts of questions. So give them time to process and to choose which questions they want to actually dig into. That was something that really helped me to eventually just not get engaged deeply. It doesn’t mean ignoring them. It means having other conversation starters in my back pocket.

What’s your favorite movie that you saw recently? What are you doing for fun? That was one that I used to love all the time. There are so many other possibilities. But just having a guide to the journey that can let us know these things are popping up. Help us recognize because so often we’re just so busy and stuck in our days. We really don’t have the opportunity to think bigger picture.

Anyway, okay. So our last stage of this choosing unschooling phase of the journey. We have stepped across the threshold. Hi guardians. I embrace you and now I’m moving past you. We are now going to be embracing beginner’s mind. And I will say I love how Joseph Campbell in The Hero’s Journey describes this stage. He writes it as the hero instead of conquering or conciliating the power of the threshold is swallowed into the unknown and would appear to have died.

So, when I first read this book, Hero with a Thousand Faces, when I got really curious about how the unschooling journey fit in, this was years after, right? But oh my gosh, this hit so hard. Being swallowed is a popular image in stories that symbolize a transition, right?

It describes the hero’s figurative death in the ordinary world and their rebirth in the new one. It’s about shedding our preconceptions and assumptions that made sense to us in the ordinary world and embracing beginner’s mind to learn about the new one. This stage is also often described as the belly of the whale, right?

In storytelling terms. And I just found that such an apt metaphor. And the whale comes in all shapes and sizes too, depending on the journey. When I was looking back, I just found it fascinating how well it described what happened for us, which is a long season of cocooning. For us, the whale was definitely our home. I found we spent a lot of time at home as we transitioned away from our ordinary world.

Home felt like a sanctuary for all of us. And it was free from judging eyes for me. And it was a place where the kids could dive into their play with abandon.

But after I read that, I thought from the outside looking in, I definitely can imagine that it kind of looked like we had died, right? But we were very happily cocooning. So for me, approaching these days with a beginner’s mindset helped me release many of the assumptions about children, about learning, about parenting, that I was carrying with me as truth.

This was just the conventional wisdom of what this looked like. But I can now see what they actually look like in our actual lives. And it got me constantly wondering, what if that’s not true? Beginner’s mindset was just a lens or a metaphor for me that really helped me feel more comfortable, just questioning all those pieces. What if that’s not true? I could just play with it, right? It’s not like I had to shift quickly from one strong belief to another strong belief. It was like, ooh, what if that’s not true? And it was just like a mind-blowing season for me.

ANNA: I love that. I think it is this really important process to create that kind of sacred space, especially when you’re leaving something that’s so institutionalized and mainstream to really allow space for everyone to settle in and begin that journey of self-discovery, self-awareness, outside of those institutional models.

Our call came pretty early. So, in terms of how it looked inside and probably to the outside, it was very similar. We just kind of kept doing what we were doing. But I think for me, what struck me as you were talking is that beginner’s mind piece.

I saw that with myself. I may have done my own little withdrawing a little bit, which ended up being a lot of reading, a lot of finding people because of that exact thing that you mentioned. Everything was on the table. I’ve always been a questioner of things, but it’s really discouraged. Which is so ridiculous. It’s critical thinking people, we should not be discouraging it, but it was. And so suddenly I was like, wait a minute. Nobody’s telling me I can’t do it, like they were when I was in school. Nobody’s telling me that I can’t look at all these pieces.

And so I do feel like there was a time where I really just cleared the slate and saidy let’s just start putting everything on the table. Do we really believe this? Do we really need this? Does this really serve me? And honestly, I will say, Pam, we say this a lot, but I kind of feel like I do this every decade or two. I’m doing it again now, in my mid fifties. Are these the things I want? Do I need to do this? Do I need to have these same rules? And so I don’t know. I think that’s a really cool vision to create a little insular space to get all the outside noise quieted down, to see where you are, to see where you want to grow. And we come out of it, right? We come out of those spaces.

PAM: I just want to pop in for one second, because you said like we cycle through this journey over and over. And I will put in the show notes, my image for the journey. And it is a circle because it is not linear: I was in the ordinary world, now I’m totally adjusted to unschooling and that’s the end of that journey. No, this kind of journey, this spiritual journey of self-awareness, et cetera, definitely is a circular thing that recurs. Anyway, thank you.

ERIKA: I love that. And I think it helps us to realize that that’s true, because I think maybe sometimes it’ll feel like a failure if we feel like we’re back at that questioning place again, about anything really. It can be frustrating when it’s like, didn’t I figure this out? Haven’t I already decided who I am? And then now things change. But yeah, I think it’s cool that it is a circle. And we go through many phases in our lives.

And I also love the reminder about beginner’s mindset, because I think that helps everything. It helps for all parts of our lives. But especially for this, and that being in the belly of the whale. I don’t know if from looking outside in, if anybody would have described it that way. I think for me, that feeling was more internal, because so much of my life was about academic achievement, doing really well at the things people wanted me to do.

And so it was really big, it was like a death of who I used to be, realizing a lot of these things. And I would get little reminders of that when I would be around people from older times in my life, who have this view of me that now doesn’t feel like me. And so, yeah, it’s deep, it’s a deep change that feels, it feels big like that.

And then as a side note, every time I read the belly of the whale, it makes me think of in Roblox, those obbies when you end up going in some big mouth. For some reason, I always think of those classic obbies, you always end up for some reason going into some big character’s mouth. So I don’t know, I thought maybe some other parents might have had that similar experience at some point. And I just always get that visual.

PAM: Yes, I think it’s very fun. There are different visuals too. There’s the train. So often, there’s a train journey, think Hunger Games, think Harry Potter off to Hogwarts. There’s always just some sort of metaphor, leaving one life behind and going to a new one, etc. So I find it very interesting.

Thank you very much to everyone listening for joining us. Thank you very much to Anna and Erica. It was an amazing conversation. And we hope you enjoyed our dive into this first phase of the unschooling journey, choosing unschooling.

And we also invite you to join us in the Living Joyfully network to continue the conversation. It really is like we were talking about earlier, about communities that expand the context that introduce questions I never thought of in that way. When we were talking about all the questions that we can put on the tables, maybe some we haven’t even thought that we could revisit yet, and have a place where we can do that without feeling judged.

Anyway, it is a warm and welcoming online community of like hearted parents, a non judgmental space where you can steep in these kinds of unconventional unschooling ideas. And just explore as we were talking about earlier, turning back to our guides what that might look like day to day in your uniquely wonderful family.

And we are very excited to welcome you. To learn more and join us just follow the link in the show notes or go to living joyfully.ca. And you’ll see network right there up in the top menu. We wish everyone a lovely day. Thank you so much.

For this week’s episode, we’re sharing the next Foundations episode of the Living Joyfully Podcast with Pam and Anna, Stories.

Humans are storytellers. We choose the stories we tell about our lives. In every situation, we can come up with a number of ways to tell the story of it, and they’re all a version of the truth. But we get to choose which version resonates the most with us, which one feels better to us, and then that informs our actions moving forward. Getting curious about the stories we tell can be an amazing form of self-care!

We hope today’s episode sparks some fun insights for you!

Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube.

THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE

We invite you to join us in the Living Joyfully Network, a warm and welcoming online community of like-hearted parents. It’s a non-judgmental space where you can steep in these unconventional ideas around parenting, relationships, and learning, and explore what they might look like day-to-day in your uniquely wonderful family. We offer a free month trial so you can see if it’s a good fit for you. Click here to join us.

Sign up to our mailing list on Substack to receive our email newsletters as well as new articles about learning, parenting, and so much more!

Check out our website, livingjoyfully.ca for more information about exploring unschooling and navigating relationships.

EPISODE QUESTIONS

What stories are you holding on to about yourself, your partner, and your family?

Where are the stories coming from? From your parents during your childhood? The outside voices of society? Somewhere else?

Do you see the story in your self-talk? How else might you tell that story?

How does it feel to realize that you get to craft your own stories?

TRANSCRIPT

PAM: Hello and welcome to the Living Joyfully Podcast. We are very happy you’re here exploring relationships with us, who we are in them, out of them, and what that means for how we move through the world.

And in today’s episode, we are going to talk about stories, both the stories we tell ourselves and the stories we assign to other people, meaning what we think they’re thinking. And yes, it can get very messy.

Now, this episode is a bit longer than usual, but we think it’s worth it. Stories are intricately woven into our relationships with the people that we love, and that’s because humans are storytelling animals. It’s how we make sense of our world. In the book The Storytelling Animal, How Stories Make Us Human by Jonathan Gottschall, he wrote, “Story is for a human as water is for a fish – all encompassing and not quite palpable.” I love that so much, because story truly is everywhere. And the language we choose makes a profound difference, because the stories we tell ourselves become our self-talk. That is why we want to be intentional about the language that we’re using.

And what’s really fascinating is that for pretty much any situation, we can come up with a number of ways to tell the story of it and they can all make sense and all could truthfully tell the story of that situation. And the thing to realize is, we get to choose which one resonates most and feels better to us, which then informs our actions moving forward, which calls back to our conversation in episode seven about how every moment is a choice. Stories and choice are woven together so well, aren’t they?

ANNA: Oh my gosh. So much. For me, truly understanding the role of story has been so pivotal. That awareness allowed me to step back and observe, so, where’s this story coming from? Does it feel real to me and who I am in this moment? Is it serving me? And if I’ve held onto it for a long time, why? Why have I held onto that story? And who would I be without it? That’s one I love to think about. Who would I be? What would it feel like?

Because there’s an energetic feeling to that. What do I feel without this story that I’m telling about myself or these people in my life? And those questions really can only come about once you take off the veil and realize that everything is a story. Then I get to dive in and have these questions. And through the questioning, I can hone in on what is really working for me.

And then I can start to change my story to be more reflective of me as the person I am now, the person I want to be moving forward. And I could see the role of story more clearly and use it as a tool instead of being held hostage by it, which is kind of how it felt before.

And for me, like you said, language is such a big piece of that. I try to be so intentional about my language that I use, whether I’m defining some kind of big event or a very simple task in front of me, because in that language is choice. I’m developing the story that informs my day and tells others who I am. And so, that piece is so critical to me, just seeing it for what it is. And then, how do I want to create my narrative? What language do I want to use to describe it? I like thinking about it.

PAM: Yeah. And once you see the scope of it, it’s incredible, because it’s not only the stories that we’re telling ourselves, but it’s understanding that the stories we’re telling others about ourselves and about our lives is the picture that they’re going to draw from. That’s where they’re going to meet us.

So, first, let’s look at our self-talk, at our inner voice. Sometimes we don’t think we have control over our self-talk. It just appears in our head, the words over and over and over when we’re spiraling over something, right? But we truly can change that over time as we make intentional changes to the language that we use and the stories we tell ourselves.

It is worth taking the time to listen to our self-talk a bit more objectively, to just ask ourselves, is this a helpful story for me?

ANNA: Right, because we have the self-talk, and we don’t think we can change it. I think that’s something I believed when I was younger. It’s hard to change or we’re given this story that it’s hard, but I think we may assign it more importance than perhaps serves us. So, I love the idea of really diving into that, because self-talk is just an aspect of our story. It’s no different. It’s no more powerful. And it’s not this boogeyman that it’s kind of made out to be.

And sometimes our self-talk is the stories that have been handed to us, perhaps by our parents or past relationships. And what’s so important there is to realize that the stories they told, even if the story is about us, is their story. It’s not ours and we don’t have to take it in and own it. It’s about them, where they were at the time, the stories that perhaps they were handed.

And so, that’s the thing, right? We can just keep continuing to hand down these same stories or we can take control of our own narrative. We can look at who we really are and what’s actually in front of us, and then write a story that lifts us up, because that helps us be the person that we want to be and it will inform our next steps in a given situation. And I think that’s what’s so important about it. That’s how insidious stories are. When we carry these stories from someone else, they change our energy and then they inform our next steps, and it keeps us on this same narrow path.

But at any moment, we can take back the reins. We can examine the stories that we’re clinging to and we can make choices because yes, Pam, it’s always about choices with me. We’re going to keep bringing that up.

PAM: Yes. Definitely. I love the point about realizing that the stories other people are telling about us, especially the stories we grew up with, are just somebody else’s perspective. It’s their story. So, maybe we’ve absorbed the story that we’re too sensitive, or we’re scared to try new things, or we’re very shy. That isn’t our story. It’s their story about us. And we get to choose our own story.

Speaking of, it’s also helpful to realize that goes both ways. So, for example, take a moment to consider the stories we’re telling our partner about our day. Maybe we’re more likely to take it as an opportunity to vent. “I am so tired,” or, “So many things went wrong today.” Is that what I want to convey? What will their view of my day look like from my story? Maybe that I’m so tired because I was busy having fun playing with the kids, or deep in the flow of working on a favorite project or knocking a bunch of those tasks off my to-do list.

Maybe more things unusual went wrong today precisely because I was working a to-do list that was filled with those iffy jobs, and I got them done in the end. But how will they see my day through my venting words? Probably not as the ultimately satisfying day that I saw. So, understanding that the stories I tell, big and small, live on in the world reminds me to be more intentional. Now that doesn’t mean not venting, but maybe prefacing it with a quick qualifier. Like, “My day was great. I just want to vent about a couple of things.”

It means considering who I’m speaking with and choosing my language to better convey the meaning of my story. Is what I’m saying true? Is it how I want to be seen by others? What do I need or want from the conversation? Because stories are the lifeblood of communication.

ANNA: Yes. And I think it’s interesting, too, thinking about that. What do I want to get from this story? Because if we do come at our partner with all the things that have happened in the day and then they come back trying to solve things and really we’re like, “Wait a minute, it’s just a story we’re telling about how we had these tough things,” you know? So, keep all that in mind. It’s the lifeblood of communication. I don’t think that’s an overstatement. I think that’s really so true.

And so, keeping in mind that others will see our story through their lens, what they know, and that’s okay. Understanding that helps us put their comments or reactions into perspective as well. Back to everyone is different. We see and experience the world differently.

PAM: Yes. And that is absolutely a wonderful thing. We have control over our stories and what pieces we choose to share and how we choose to share. Understanding that other people come to conversations with their lens, too, so, not expecting them to fully understand what it looks like through our eyes and not even expecting them to even be curious to understand. We can’t control where they are on their journey.

Now, I also want to talk about the stories that we assign to other people, because so often we tend to assume the worst story. For myself and many others that I’ve spoken with, when we’re feeling disconnected from someone or they react negatively to something we’ve said or done, the story we immediately tell ourselves is that we did something wrong, but often that really isn’t true.

It’s so helpful to remember that, when we’re thinking about what someone else is thinking, that is a story that we’re making up. No matter how well we know them, we still don’t know for sure. So don’t assume that the first story that we jump to is the same story that they see.

ANNA: Yes. So often, we find ourselves putting words into people’s heads, and we will actually play out the scenarios till the end without the other person involved at all. “They’re upset with me. I did something wrong. They don’t like what I’m doing,” whatever the words were saying. Even, “They’re trying to hurt me. Their actions are intentional towards me.” So often, we get that very wrong. We really don’t know what’s happening in another person’s head.

I have a friend that will honestly just create entire movies and the challenge with that is, it doesn’t leave room for anything else. Once you’ve created a story for someone, you start acting from that place with that energy. So, if you’ve ever had one of those dreams where it’s so real, your partner has done something terrible and really upset you, and you wake up and you’re still super mad and they’re going like, “What is happening? I just woke up. I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

But it’s the same when we create a story. We can buy into that energy and bring that energy to the person and they have no idea where it’s coming from. But instead, if we can first assume positive intent, second, we can ask questions and leave space and remain open, then the person’s free to share what they’re actually feeling. And so often, it does not come close to the stories that we’re making up.

So, I have a friend and a while back, she shared a story and she didn’t share it as a story. She shared it as a fact. She said that her husband didn’t find her attractive. And she said, “He actively avoids even touching me when we walk each other past each other in the hall.” And I was like, “Oh, wow. Have you talked to him about that?” And she was like, “Well, no.” And then when she did, she found the complete opposite was true. He was trying to be respectful of her space. So, he felt by moving aside in the hall, he was showing respect for her space and honoring her.

And so, then they had this conversation around what would feel good to each other and how they want to move forward. And it’s very different now. But she had been telling that story for years and he had no idea. That’s just how insidious these stories are. And I think it’s just really worth examining the stories that we put on others, even when we feel it’s justified, even if we think we know them so well, even if we’ve held onto these stories for years. Conversations are so important. Being open and curious. Leave space for people to tell us who they are. Pre-writing a detailed story does not.

You can feel that closed energy when you come in with this pre-populated story and it’s so disconnecting. Even some light inquiry can shed light on what’s really going on and give space for each person to share their perspective. And then we can understand where the communication broke down in the first place and why maybe we’re seeing it differently, but that won’t happen if we stay in our head creating stories. That will only happen with that choice of connection and that choice to have some conversations.

PAM: Yeah, sometimes I can get stuck in a really negative story about someone else, and I just don’t feel confident enough to ask about it yet or bring it up. But when that happens, I found it helpful to just remind myself that it’s a story and then start to play with that. How else might this story go? What about this? Does that fit? Maybe this? So, once I think of a few other things, even if they seem outlandish to me right now, I realize that there isn’t just one possible story. It wasn’t just the one thing that I was clinging to and being upset about. That lightens things up for me.

And usually, when I’m feeling lighter, now I can get curious. Which one is it? I want to know now. And then usually I can get to the space, the energy, where it doesn’t feel so heavy and I can actually bring up the conversation with them. I can actually go, “Hey, what about this? What did that feel like to you?”

On the flip side, moving through that process over and over helped me realize that I really don’t know what’s going on in another person’s life that has led them to make whatever choice it is that they made. That’s their story, their truth. That’s been a very helpful discovery on my journey around stories, just that realization that these are stories. My story, their story, it’s their truth in the moment. And that is just enough. I can be curious then. It reminds me that there are multiple ways that things can go.

ANNA: Right. And there are just always more layers, I think, to peel back on our stories, which kind of leads nicely to this last bit we wanted to talk about. We get to choose the stories we tell. And we touched on this back a bit back in the choices episode, but I want to bring it up again. We choose the stories we tell about the big things like our childhood and the little things like the grocery store. And in every situation, there are things that are easier and harder, that work or don’t work. But we can choose to focus on those aspects that make sense and feel better to us.

For any situation, we can come up with a number of ways to tell the story of it, and they all make sense in the context of the activity, the situation, the people involved, and they can all truthfully tell the story. But now, we get to choose which one resonates the most with us, which one feels better to us, which then informs our actions moving forward. That’s the power of story.

PAM: Right. Especially in more challenging situations, it’s so valuable to take a moment to not just jump in with the first story that comes to mind, which is usually fear-based. And it’s usually the worst one, the worst interpretation of things. And if we just stick with that one, we can get tunnel vision and start spiraling downward in our fears. We can get really stuck there if we only see this one worst interpretation of the situation in front.

So, instead, take that moment to come up with a few more stories that align with the situation. If we don’t take the time to consider other stories, we’re not really making a meaningful choice moving forward, are we? You can’t choose between one thing. And choosing more positive stories, ones that feel better to us, isn’t about avoiding the truth, because the different stories all incorporate the facts. But for me, choosing the more positive story is really a form of self-care.

Instead of telling myself over and over the versions that make me feel bad, that weigh me down, that pull me into that tunnel vision, I can tell myself the versions of the story that both make sense and feel better. Because from there, I’m in a more open and curious and receptive mindset, a place where I can now see more opportunities. I can be more creative in choosing my next step and my next moment is truly better. And I find myself then starting to spiral upwards, moving through it, rather than spiraling down and crashing and just feeling crushed.

ANNA: And getting stuck! So, my oldest daughter and I talked about this so many times over the years, because she is a master storyteller. And, I mean, it’s a gift. It is a gift that she has and it is amazing. But sometimes, it gets the better of her, because sometimes she can spin this really intricate story about someone else or about a situation, and it ends up making her feel terrible. But in the end, it’s just a story. We’re making it up in our heads.

And I think once I realized that, I decided, if I’m going to make up a story, I’m going to make up a story that feels good, one that helps me feel connected, that helps me move forward as the person I want to be, which is exactly what you’re talking about.

So, I want to examine if my story spirals me into a place of being stuck, or if my story is lifting me. I may not understand all the pieces, but I can feel okay about the situation if I look at it this way, and that helps me move forward as the person I want to be. And like we’ve talked about before, there are situations sometimes where I can get some clarifying information so that I can get a more accurate picture, because maybe there’s someone else involved and I can stop putting words in their mouth and actually figure it out.

But other times, like you said, it really isn’t even possible. When it’s not possible, I just always want to choose the story that feels better, because it’s just as likely to be true as the one that doesn’t. And so, I’m just wasting the time in this moment feeling bad about something when I really don’t even know the full story. And so, that’s why I love that you tied it into self-care, because that’s exactly what it is. It really is just this intentional choice to look at what’s in front of me and find a story that feels good.

And again, it’s not about pushing the other things aside. It’s not about pretending that things didn’t happen or changing the story. It’s just intentionally using language that makes me feel good about what’s happening around me. So, for me, if it’s a particularly challenging or difficult situation, it’s not about pretending that the difficult situation didn’t happen, but I look for, how have I moved through it? Look at the amazing support I’ve received from the people around me. Look at how loved I am because they’ve helped me through this situation. Look at what I’ve learned about myself from it.

Whatever the situation, I can always find a way to frame it to use what can be a challenging situation to make myself feel better and to move forward from there. And so, that’s also an empowerment piece, knowing that I can turn these situations that can completely derail me into situations that just boost me forward and allow me to be around the people that I love and to connect with the people that lift me up.

PAM: Yes. And another layer that I think would be helpful for people to peel back, and I am still peeling this layer back, but, why is our tendency to take on that weight? Why does it feel like the more positive spin or the silver lining is it cheat? It really is not. And we can do that work to peel back those layers and to realize that these are all stories, they are all versions of the truth. They could absolutely all be true.

ANNA: And I think this part is related to the stories handed to us by society. Things like, life is suffering. Only hard work pays off. Relationships are hard. And so, when you find this cheat, you’re like, “Wait a minute. Maybe it doesn’t have to be this hard. Maybe I can be enjoying it,” but then you might try to stop yourself. Like, “What? But we’ve been told that forever!”

But no, set that aside, because we don’t have to make situations more difficult. There’s going to be plenty of things in life to work through, but when you can find joy, when you can switch that focus, see the light, find the gifts in the situation, life is just so much more enjoyable. But we do have to shed some of those stories from society, some of those stories from even other people in our lives, in order to create what feels good for us.

PAM: Yeah, I love that. I mean, “Life is hard.” Don’t we hear that all the time? But then, if we tell a different story, the reaction can often be like, “Well, you’re a Pollyanna. You’re not seeing the truth.” Another story. Right? It is just so useful to work through all of that.

Now, you and I have both heard, “You guys are always so positive,” and people think it’s weird at first, which is okay, because it’s part of the process of peeling back those layers and understanding that our stories are ours to tell and there’s more than one way to tell the story. We don’t always have to take the negative, life-is-hard bent on it.

ANNA: Right. And the reason I’m telling the story is for me. It’s not to put on a show or make anything look different for somebody else from the outside. It’s because it helps me be the person I want to be.

It helps me in my relationships. I remember one time somebody said to me, “I get it now. I get that you’re not just a Pollyanna about life. It’s that it helps you have these relationships. It helps you move through these situations.” And I’m like, “Yes, that’s absolutely it.” I’m not thinking about anybody else’s reaction to me choosing joy or finding light in a moment, because that’s my internal work.

Now, I’m understanding that it can come across that way as people are listening to it, but I’m like, “Oh, no, no, no. This is just a tool.” It’s a tool that helps me connect with people. It helps me move through my days in a way that feels better to me. And it’s just a choice. And I think if somebody wants to play around with it, they can see how it feels for them, too.

PAM: Exactly. Exactly. And I find it helps me be more creative. It helps me come up with more possibilities. And that’s the thing. You can try it out for a while and you see how it goes. And I do suspect you’ll start to see things that wouldn’t have happened in the other mindset.

ANNA: Yeah, it’s really true. And I do think it’s so interesting and we definitely get feedback about that.

I mean, I definitely get that. “You’re always looking on the bright side!” And I’m like, I feel all the things, but it’s just, again, those stories we create, it impacts how we move forward. It impacts how we see all the things around us.

So, let’s talk about some questions you might want to ponder for this week as you explore the idea of stories. First, what story are you holding onto about yourself, your partner, and your family? And that’s a lot. So, that one may take a few minutes, because we have stories that have been handed us from childhood and on. So, there’s a lot of stories there.

Where are the stories coming from, from your parents during childhood, from outside voices of society, somewhere else? Identifying where, I think, is so key to realizing and taking your power back there, to realize, I don’t need to own their story. That story’s not about me at all.

And so, do you see the story in your self-talk and how else might you tell that story? Self-talk again, it’s kind of this bugaboo that we’re unsure about. How do we change it? But I think the first step, don’t you think, is just identifying it, just recognizing it as a story.

PAM: Yes. Recognizing it as a story and, like in the previous question, where did that story come from? Is it really my story or is it something that I’ve absorbed over the years? It’s someone else’s view that I’ve adopted because they can really feel like that’s our story, That’s our self-talk, because we should be more productive, we should be efficient. “I should be able to do this quickly,” or, “I shouldn’t be so sensitive.” There are just so many stories that we’ve absorbed over time that are really somebody else’s view. And to check in and start asking ourselves and see, well, does that make sense to me? Do I feel sensitive all the time? What’s wrong with being sensitive? There are just so many questions and layers do with that.

ANNA: And you know I love, who would I be without that story? So, feel that. Who would I be without telling that story about I’m so sensitive or I can’t get anything done whatever the thing is that people have handed to us. So, yeah, so interesting.

And finally, how does it feel to realize that you get to craft your own story? And so, I think it, I think that may take a minute, because it’s just realizing, Okay, do I get to write it? Because I think, again, some people think it’s a cheat. But it’s like, no, you really do. You really get to pick the things that you like and craft that as your own personal story, even when there’s tragedy, even when there are bad things that have happened. There are things to look at that we can just say, yeah, but this is who I want to be and this is how I went through those tough times, and this is what was surrounding me during that. And so, that we can hold onto that part of the story as well.

PAM: Yeah, and I think that’s one of the big things that I want to share with people is that these are true moments. This isn’t stuff that we’re making up. We’re not saying, ignore all this hard stuff that’s going on around you.

It’s, as you said, a tool that can be helpful in moving through those seasons, moving through those emergency moments, all those pieces. For me, it is so incredibly helpful for me to move out of that fight or flight tunnel, which can be super helpful in the moment. But we get stuck there so easily. This is a tool that really helps me move through that. I just find it’s become such a useful tool, because I know I’m more creative on the other side. I move through things with more grace and just more compassion and kindness for other people that are involved when I can help myself with this tool move beyond that tunnel vision and the that whole fight flight emergency response when things go wrong. That’s helped me.

ANNA: It will be fun to see what people bring up about stories. So, thank you so much for listening and we hope to see you next time. So, take care. Bye-bye.

PAM: Bye, everyone.