Speaker 1Hello and welcome to the How Not to Screw Up Your Kids podcast, the bucket-emptying episodes, all about tackling topical subjects in bite-sized chunks or sharing top tips to relieve either your overwhelm or your child's, because your time is super precious. I'm your host, Dr. Mary Han, psychologist and parenting expert. So, pour yourself a cuppa, find a conversation. Today's bite-sized chunks of information are all about the foundations to building confidence. So, let me just sort of explain. I've talked a lot about confidence, I talk a lot about resilience, and I talk a lot about anxiety and overwhelm. And if you have not yet listened to the longer podcast episode of Boost Your Child's Confidence in 10 Days, I would highly recommend that you listen to that. I know we've had lots of feedback on that. Parents have found it super, super helpful, because it literally breaks it down to what you need to do on each day. We've even got a crib sheet so that you know exactly what you need to do. And we're getting wonderful emails in that are really showing how engaged your children have been in that, building that confidence and the results that you're seeing as well, which is incredible. But I wanted to do this episode as a shorter episode of like three things that are the foundations to any aspects. If you're listening to this, and you've got a child who isn't as confident as they could be, maybe they're avoiding particular situations, maybe they get very easily overwhelmed, maybe they're super self-critical, yet they're always saying how rubbish they are, they're not very good at anything. When it comes to building and bolstering confidence, we know, because I've been saying it enough, and if you've been listening enough, that it's all about, it's experience, it's exposure, our children's confidence only builds when they do, rather than what, you know, we can theorise about it, but fundamentally they need to be in it in order to win it and in order to be able to build that confidence. So it got me thinking about what are some of the things that are so helpful to start with in any scenario with any child that will then give you those solid foundations on which to build. So here they are. Now you will have to excuse me for one moment. I'm just in the recording studio, and my chocolate lab, I don't know if you can hear her panting, has just literally barged her way in, even though the door was shut. So you might just have to wait a moment while she settles. I'll close the door, and we will continue. All right, we're all settled. And I will continue just a moment. But I'm apologising in advance if there are lots of different noises and pants. She's 13. She's just basically doesn't follow any rules anymore. Anyway, sidetracked. So here are my three foundations when it comes to building confidence. Do not almost like don't attempt to start that sort of exposure or doing anything to build your child's confidence until you have followed these three. Steps. So the first thing is, I think it's really helpful when we explain to our children the connection between the mind, aka their brain, and the body. Yeah, so we want them to understand and to help them understand that the connection between what they think, and the thoughts that they have, and how their brain operates, how that then is almost like these domino, how it cascades into the feelings that they get in their body. That sort of tight chest, or that swirling in their tummy, or that nausea that they feel, or that the sweaty palms, all of these things are connected. And when we help our children understand that there is that connection, it helps them to feel that they've got a bit more control. So I would encourage you to go into as much or as little detail to your child, dependent on their age and stage of development, to know that this is something that you are going to keep communicating again, and again, and again. And all that will happen is as they get older, and as they get, they develop in terms of their ages and stages, you will just go into more detail. But that internal chatter, that connection between the mind, the brain, and the body is always going to be there, and it's always going to be relevant with our children. So I'm just going to give you some of the things that I use when I'm working with young people to help them understand that connection, because once they understand the connection, it makes it easier for them to see why we then ask them to do the next two steps. So the brain fundamentally does not know the difference between what's real and what's imagined. And that's why, personally, I don't watch scary films, because my brain believes it's all happening to me. My brain, and the way that my mind works, it's all happening to me. So I often talk to children about the fact that the brain doesn't know the difference. And that's why the words that we use about a situation are powerful predictors of how we will assess the dangers or the safety of a situation. So it's important when we're thinking about the words that we use, and when we think about, just think, when you're in a situation where you're in a situation where you're in a situation where you're in a situation where you're in a situation where you're in a situation where you're in a situation, all of those things are shot in such a way that they draw the audience in. So you feel like you are in that particular situation. And of course, your mind doesn't know the difference. And so if it's a feel good film, it draws you into that warm, glowy feeling. If it's a teary film, and anything like me, it draws you in. And then the next thing you know, you're completely blubbering. Or if it's a teary film, it draws you in. And so if it's a teary film, it draws you in. becomes much more difficult to layer up. The third way that you can look at this is that also, when we or our children are lacking in confidence about any given situation, we have a tendency. And even if we're just lacking confidence generally, is that we have a tendency to be selective with our attention. So we notice the things which feel like threats to us, or they confirm our belief that the thing we're being attacked by is a threat to us. And so we have a tendency to be selective with our attention. And so we notice the things which feel like threats to us, or they confirm our belief that the thing we're being asked to do is way beyond what we are capable of. And that's sometimes talked about selective attention, we sometimes use that as a confirmation bias. So it's helping our children understand that. And I'm just going to talk you through three famous studies that looked specifically at selective attention. We've been studying this, that these sort of like famous seminal studies in lots of ways started in the 50s. And the invisible gorilla study, which you may or may not have heard of was back in 1950. And it's a study that's been done in the 50s. And it's a study that's been done in 1999. So he's like 27 years old, that particular bit of research. So these are this phenomenon that we know exists in humans, it's what it's their flaws in the way that we think, or well, not flaws, they're there, because our brain is trying to avoid overload and just process what it can. But what it does do is it really helps us understand why that might also play out in a situation where we're not feeling very confident. So you may or may not have heard of the cocktail party effect. This was a study that was done back in 1953. But basically, they looked at how people can focus on a single conversation in a loud room. Yeah, so we've all been there, if you've been to a party, and you're talking, having lots of conversations, there's a really loud room, and you're talking to someone, that you can have the conversation with the person, and then you tune out all of the other conversations. Because what you're doing is you're so fast. was that even when you were having a conversation with one other person and tuning everything else out if your name was mentioned elsewhere not in the people that you were talking about you were able to pick that up so it shows how the brain is selective in what it pays attention to but there are some things that we're super fine-tuned with so that was the cocktail party effect there's also been what we call dichotic listening tasks and this is basically you get information given to you in both ears but you're asked to tune in to one ear over another so you'll get a message in your right message in your left but you're told to listen to one or the other so you're basically being asked to listen to selective messages and what they found was that participants rarely noticed the details in the ignored ear even you know so much so that the speaker would speak in a completely different language and they didn't notice that so again it shows how powerful the brain is at tuning things out now in confidence it's not a dichotic listening we're not they're not getting messages for in both ears and we're asking them to select one but our children are selecting specific messages and specific situations and specific aspects of their environment that they're tuning into that confirms how scary something feels and then tuning out all of the stuff that shows them that it's less scary and of course you know all of these effects we can use this when we talk about friendships when we talk about anxiety and stress or it comes into so many aspects of human behavior the third study that i just want to talk about if you have not seen it then search for it online it's called the invisible gorilla study and it's by simons and shabry it was 1999 and basically participants were asked to watch a video of people passing a basketball and they had people in white tops and they had people in black tops and they were simply told to count the number of passes made by those wearing the white tops and in the middle of this passing this ball someone in a gorilla suit walks through the scene bangs their chest chest and then moves on and yet it honestly when you watch it it's so obvious that there's a gorilla there and yet 50 percent of participants did not see it they were so focused on counting the passes that they completely did not see that and it just for me there's such a powerful way of us understanding and of course it was done 27 years ago and it looks incredibly dated it looks almost older than 1999 but it just shows that power so helping our children understand how fallible their brain is how easily it can be manipulated how easily it can pick up on false data or inaccurate data or only some of the data from their environment is a really great way of helping them understand so that's foundational you can also look at things like optical illusions they are great for showing how the brain and the mind plays tricks on us so foundationally that's what we want to help our children understand what we then need to do as part of the foundations when we're looking at then building confidence is we want our children to learn and to use at least two different breathing techniques now i know that you are probably either rolling your eyes because you're you're like they don't work very hand or you're rolling your eyes because it's like oh i need to have that conversation with my child again who already rolls their eyes at me every time i mention a breathing technique the breathing technique is about positioning it as a way of pressing pause and preparing yourself for a situation that feels overwhelming so rather than positioning it as a you know a breathing technique it's just simply a moment to reset a moment to transition from one thing to the next thing that feels scary or feels overwhelming so position it that way if you have not listened to the episode then i would highly recommend the breathing technique which is the physiological side which i call the sniff sniff side that has got an enormous amount of data that supports its effectiveness so i would highly recommend that that's one of the ones because it's easy to do the effects are almost instant between one and three of the sniff sniff size will have an effect in terms of helping your child or even yourself go from that sort of sympathetic nervous system of fight or flight to our parasympathetic nervous system of rest and restore if you are banging your head against a brick wall with your children when it comes to breathing techniques if you are trying to support them in a situation that they feel is overwhelming and you have tried as hard as you can to get them to do breathing techniques then your backstop is you do it in that situation where you are helping and supporting them and you're preparing them just do it yourself two or three times whether that's box breathing whether it's the sniff sniff side whether it's take 10 whether it's the 7-11 whatever works for you whichever one you want to try if you do that and you do that consistently in situations where emotions are high not necessarily for yourself but your child your child is picking up on you doing it and over time they will eventually give it a go but do persist with those it's just about how we frame breathing techniques that avoids that eye roll and they're much more likely to then to then do that if it just becomes something that's just embedded in your family home and in your family life and it's just something that you do they're much more likely to do that so that's the foundation because if we're if we've got a child who's lacking in confidence then the internal narrative that they have go back to the brain and the mind the very first thing we talked about their internal narrative says that they can't do something which means their body is already beginning to respond physiologically in a way that is stressful which is why we then have the breathing technique and then the third bit is now we've dealt with the mind in terms of them understanding now we've dealt with the physiological the physiology piece which is trying to get our body back into rest and restore there's a whole other stuff about the internal dialogue which i'm not covering in this episode because that's a whole bit of the internal dialogue that i'm not covering in this episode because that's a whole big chunk on its own but the third thing is we then want to create an exposure ladder for your child and one for you so if we've got a child that we're helping and supporting build that back their confidence and that foundations we need to remember that our children cannot be what they cannot see so we will want to be also working on our own exposure ladder so that our child sees that we are doing that so our child sees us doing all of the things that we're encouraging them to do and an exposure ladder is just simply a series of small challenges that require your child to have an attempt at something that they find overwhelming so it's about pushing them slightly out of their comfort zone so that they get exposed they are exposed to the thing that feels scary and they're not going to be able to do it again and again and again and that they're able to then use their breathing techniques they're then able to understand the connection between their brain and their body and why they might be interpreting a situation or being selective with the things that they notice and what happens over time and these don't have to be huge challenges but they have to be sufficiently uncomfortable for it to be worthwhile because if it's just easy they don't build that confidence and confidence builds by feeling that they're capable so we build that confidence and we build that confidence and we build that confidence and we build this we have this exposure ladder and they just increase in the same way as you go up the steps of a ladder they increase in terms of the challenges so they become more difficult the higher up we go with the ladder but of course we start at the bottom so we build some confidence until we start to get to some of the bigger things you know when your child is on that first rung of the ladder and then once they get to the top rung when they look at that top rung of course when they first started that top rung would have felt like out of control and they would have felt like they were completely out of their comfort zone and they would have had absolutely no belief that they could have done that but that comes with repeated exposure repeated challenge and then that being able to experience and to build on that confidence so i'm you can probably tell i'm incredibly passionate about this because if we get the foundations right then even if we can't get our child to move very quickly up the exposure ladder or we're really stuck on that bottom rung if we've got those foundations right if we keep talking about that brain and that mind body connection and how our brain can be tricked into all making all sorts of false assumptions and selective and what it pays attention to it then helps our child over time to be able to identify where they're they might be falling into some of those traps and it gives a really nice language that we can use with our children because the brain's playing tricks on us all of the time and everyday things. So it's always there as an opportunity to discuss. So I hope that that has been helpful in terms of giving you those foundations, but please do go and listen to the 30 second reset, which is a bucket emptying episode, because that technique is superb. It's not my technique. It's a very well researched technique that is backed by science. So there's 30 second reset and also the building children's confidence in 10 days. That challenge has just landed with you guys really, really well and has been super, super well received. As I say, we've had some incredible feedback on that one. So do go listen to that as well, because that will build on what we've talked about. So it will then give you the structure to then going up that exposure ladder. And of course, if you have found this episode super helpful, I can guarantee you that you will have friends, colleagues, neighbours, family with children or who are aunts, uncles, grandparents who will also find this super, super helpful. 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