Tag: dan siegel

Fear and Confidence

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“Everything you’ve ever wanted is on the other side of fear.” – George Adair

The other night our iPad fell on the ground. My kids and I were getting in the car after visiting my brother and his wife. My brother folded the stroller and the iPad that my 6-year-old daughter always uses fell out of the pocket and landed on its corner. We picked it up and went on our way but as we drove, my daughter discovered that the power button had been slightly crimped down by the fall and so all the iPad would do was show the Apple icon and then go black over and over again.

This iPad is her favorite thing in the world. It represents her agency in the world to discover things that other 6-year-olds are doing. It has her books, videos and games so it is also her main source of entertainment. That iPad holds a lot of power and possibility in one sleek package.

She started wailing in the backseat that it was broken. I calmly said, “Don’t worry, I’ll take a look at it when we get home. We’ll try to fix it.” And she wailed back, “We can’t try. It won’t work.”

What?? We fix things all the time. This was the little girl that just an hour before had confidently stood up on a paddle board and was paddling it by herself on Lake Union. And then she was jumping off the paddle board over and over into the lake to swim around with not a worry in the world.

And now she was saying we couldn’t even try. That all was lost. Everything was broken and would stay broken. This wasn’t normal or rational, this was fear.

It struck me that confidence can’t show up when fear is running the show. So in my ongoing inquiry into confidence, I went digging in to get some perspective into this.

In their book The Confidence Code, authors Katty Kay and Claire Shipman distill the definition of confidence from all their sources of research and erudition into “Confidence is the stuff that turns thoughts into action.” They also describe the other positive attributes that often go hand in hand with confidence, what they label as the confidence cousins: self-esteem, optimism, self-compassion, and self-efficacy. But all of these things, confidence and the cousins that work to create belief that you can make something happen, are part of our rational/thinking brain.

Neuropsychiatrist Dan Siegel and parenting expert Tina Payne Bryson have great illustrations in their book The Whole-Brained Child that illustrate how fear is a downstairs (limbic) brain function and that when we flip our lids, we temporarily lose access to the upstairs brain that supports thinking. The downstairs brain that provides quick reaction so when we are in critical moments of fight of flight doesn’t stop to think about it.

So in our moments of fear we lose, maybe just momentarily, access to the stuff that creates confidence until we move though it. This brought to mind for me of one of the rapid fire questions Brené Brown often asks her guests on her podcast Unlocking Us: “You are called to be very brave but your fear is real and you can feel it in your throat, what is the very first thing do you do?” And the answers from her guests are things like:

  • Oprah: “Take a deep breath. Remind myself to breathe.”
  • Dr. Angus Fletcher: “I think of the bravest person I know who happens to be my son who is much, much braver than me.”
  • Dr. Julie Gottman: “Put my hand on my heart.”

Coming back to my daughter in the car I asked her if what she was saying was because she was afraid of losing her iPad. She said she guessed it was. And owning that, we then could reason through the fact that the only sure outcome was the one if we didn’t try. If we did nothing, the iPad would stay broken. So we had nothing to lose by trying.

Sure enough, we got home, fiddled with the button and it came back to life. The button is a little tricky now but our confidence is restored. We could try – and it worked. As the quote for this post says, and it is one of my all-time favorite quotes because it has gotten me through many barriers of my own making, “Everything you’ve always wanted is on the other side of fear.”

This is my second post delving into confidence. I Can was the first.

(featured photo from Pexels)

Whole-Hearted Little People

Posted in meditation, ParenthoodTagged , , , , , , , , , , , ,

“I believe that you have to walk through vulnerability to get to courage.” – Brene Brown

Early yesterday morning there was a fly in my daughter’s room. It woke her up early with its buzzing and between her efforts to get it and to get me to get it, my son was awakened early. Which is why my kids were grumpy last night. When I told my daughter to stop taking the toys away from my son, she said, “I know, I know, I’m the worst kid.” And when I told my son to stop picking the flowers and leaves off the plants in the planters, he lay on the ground drumming his hands and fists. In my observations of these little people, it’s pretty consistent that my daughter internalizes negative feelings while my son externalizes them.

I don’t have a strong belief when it comes to male and female energies. I was brought up to believe that I could be whatever I wanted and so I got my degree in electrical engineering and climbed mountains as a hobby even though both were male-dominated activities. Now I’m a single parent combining the traditional roles of mom and dad and I don’t think much about making a distinction. So it is with complete fascination that I watch these two kids come out with different ways of being.

It made me think of a generalized progression of how we can develop into our stereotypical males and females from where we start. For boys who are taught not to express their emotions through thumping their hands on the floor, they can become stoic and unexpressive. For girls who want to avoid the pain of turning their feelings inward, they can start trying to become perfect.

This reminds me of a fascinating passage I read from Canadian psychologist and author, Jordan Peterson who argues that it’s the thousands years of evolution that has created the conditions for the male and female psyches.

“Women are choosy maters … It is for this reason that we all have twice as many female ancestors as male (imagine that all the women who have ever lived averaged one child. Now imagine that half the men who have ever lived have fathered two children, if they had any, while other half fathered none). It is Woman as Nature who looks at half of all men and says, “No!” For the men, that’s a direct encounter with chaos, and it occurs with devastating force every time they are turned down for a date. Human female choosiness is also why we are very different from the common ancestor we shared with our chimpanzee cousins, while the latter are very much the same. Women’s proclivity to say no, more than any other force, has shaped our evolution into the creative, industrious, upright, large-brained (competitive, aggressive, domineering) creatures that we are.”

12 Rules for Life – Jordan Peterson

That extremely long view argues that there isn’t much I can do as a parent to affect the expression of the male and female energies and I’m not sure that I agree with that. In wanting my kids to develop as authentic, healthy and kind beings and good citizens of the Universe, I can’t just throw in the towel and chalk it up to human nature. So I’m borrowing from sociologist and researcher Brene Brown’s work on shame and vulnerability, Dr. Tina Payne Bryson and Dr. Dan Siegel’s work on brain integration and regulation, and developmental biologist John Medina’s work to build up our ability to name our emotions, develop resilience from shame and failure and work on walking through vulnerability to arrive at courage. I believe we can work towards being whole-hearted beings regardless of gender and I’m sticking with that.. and getting a good night’s sleep!