How to recover from emotional trauma, rebuild your life, and thrive, with Nichole Myles

What does it take to come back from trauma? Well, sometimes that journey can feel like you are just trying to survive. And whether we realize it or not, all of us have gone through the trauma of living through a pandemic. And we are all trying to navigate our lives and move forward as best we can. Well, my guest today turned her personal stories of trauma into opportunities for other people to glean critical steps in their own growth and move from survivorship to thrivership. This conversation was truly something special and I can't wait to share it with you. So if you are ready to move from surviving to thriving, head on over to Empowered Educator.com/thrive and sign up for the five week online course that will change the game for how you show up at work and at home. Feel less stress and more ease, less pressure and more calm. Less frustration and so much more joy. It's time to thrive. Go to Empowered Educator.com/thrive. Remember all the passion and vision you had when you first went into teaching? Feeling like building young minds and creating community through your work would make a lasting impact on this world. Well, those days may feel like they're behind you now because you're exhausted, stressed and overwhelmed and frustrated. But I'm here to tell you it doesn't have to be like this. In fact, the love of teaching never really went away, but it absolutely needs transformation. Welcome to the Take Notes podcast. I'm Jen Rafferty, former music teacher, mom of two and certified emotional intelligence practitioner. And I'm here to light the way for you. In order to create a generational change for our kids, we need to shift the paradigm away from the perpetual stress and overwhelm and into a life of joy and fulfillment. This is education 2.0 where you become the priority, shift how you live your life and how you show up both at work and at home. So take a sip of steamy morning coffee and grab your notebook. It's time to take notes. Hello and welcome back to another episode of Take Notes. Today I have a fabulous guest and I cannot wait to get on with this conversation. She brings more than 20 years of experience in education, nonprofits and leadership. Nicole Miles weaves together, compelling storytelling with experience and expertise to engage listeners in a journey of self discovery, the ups and the downs of growth and what it takes to come back from trauma. Having gone from a traditional upper middle class life to losing everything, living in domestic violence shelters and having to rebuild an entire life while raising three children, the goal doesn't just speak about post traumatic growth. She's lived it. And she uses her education to hone poignant personal stories into opportunities for participants to glean critical steps into their own growth and to examine what they've overcome and how to really lean into that experience to amplify their futures. Nicole, thank you so much for being here and take notes with me today. Oh Jen, it's my pleasure. I'm really excited to be here. I'm excited to get this going and I know we spoke a little bit before. So I'm just excited for you to share your origin story about, you know, what led you to doing the work that you do now in this world. Sure. I'd be happy to tell that because it's so interesting how kind of all the parts of our lives end up weaving together and there can kind of be that moment of synergy. So as you mentioned in my intro, I am a domestic abuse survivor. And when I disclose that over time, people always say, you should tell your story. You should tell your story. And I really didn't because I didn't want to tell a traumatic and damaging story. I didn't want to have one of those lifetime movie stories, right? But it was very dramatic and painful for people. I've wanted it to help. And I am a former teacher and I've been in nonprofits and in leadership. And so I kept trying to come up with ways that I could help people with that story and not just tell my personal story so that someone else could compare notes on their trauma versus my trauma. And about a year and a half ago, I ran into an article while studying organizational psychology. I ran into an article by positive psychologist, Dr. Richard Tadeski. And he wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review about something he called post traumatic growth. And it was a study that's been done. Actually, this is a 30 year old study. We just really haven't spent a lot of time exploring it that he and Dr. Robert living did on what makes some trauma survivors move forward and some get stuck. What I now call survivorship or thrivership. And I was so compelled by this article because what he was saying was he was hoping that there would eventually be what he called expert companions. And these would be people who had come through a trauma and rebuilt their lives and followed some steps or framework who could guide other people coming out of a trauma to actually learn how to leverage that for transformation. And when I read that article, it all kind of coalesced that this is what I do. I've been a teacher forever. I've worked in leadership. I really wanted to help people with this story. And so I ended up actually emailing him and saying, I am not a clinical psychologist. So to be very clear, I'm not a therapist is this a thing that I should be doing. And he was like, you're exactly the person that I want doing this. And so I built this framework and got to work. And now we're here coaching and consulting others because you don't have to get stuck in the negative parts of your story. There are amazing strength building opportunities in there and it can reframe and transform your whole life. And that's what I want people to know. Sure. And you know, when you are transformed, that's how the people around you are transformed also as I'm sure that you've observed an experience in your own life. And that is absolutely correct. So one of the reasons that I've noticed and similarly for me and my experiences, one of the reasons why we don't share stories is because the shame that comes from the trauma. So can you talk about how you worked your way through that yourself coming from a place of shame to feeling empowered by your story? I mean, that's a process all within itself. It is its own process and it is, you know, no lies, it is painful. It absolutely is painful. And some of it had to do with really my own personal situation. That when I left my abusive situation, we went through a lengthy time of shelters and homeless lists and ended up on the other side, really penniless with these three kids. And suddenly the whole world was different financially. Everything was different from an employment perspective. Everything was different. It was using a different name to try to get through things. And I kept budding up against my own trauma. I couldn't fill out a rental form without having my credit check, which meant that I'd introduce myself with one name. And now I had to explain that I had a different one and my credit had blown up because that's what happens with so many of us in financial trauma, divorce trauma, abuse trauma. Suddenly I was having to explain this. And it was not easy to get to the place of saying, I'm going to have to disclose. But it became easier to do it in front of what was about to happen instead of as a cleanup job behind. So for example, when you're filling out that rental application and then somebody calls you back and says, Hey, like, can you explain why this name is different from what's on your app? Is this somebody else or is this still you? And now you're trying to back pedal and explain what happens. I got to the place of saying I can't do that anymore because then I was reliving it twice. I was filling out that application and feeling all that shame. And then I was waiting for that call to come back and I was feeling it again. So if we are going to do this, it's taken the bandaid off in one strip. Instead of little inch by inch, I'm going to take care of it. I also eventually learned then that if I was leading that conversation, I had agency over it as opposed to somebody else getting to lead and dig into that conversation. I found when I led with it, people didn't ask as many questions and these aren't friends or family or community that I was working with. These are people like the HR department in my job or people like potential landlords for whom it is fair to say this is not necessarily anybody's business. But because of the way trauma infiltrates kind of all of our everyday lives, it was there. And I had to be able to deal with it. And so I finally decided I was going to get in front of it instead and start leading with that story. Wow. And that shift must have felt so different for you, even physically, I imagine, to just take control of the narrative. Yeah. It was a huge mental shift. I tell people things that have happened for me in the space of years, you know, not in the space of weeks and not in the space of months. So if you are stuck in something and feeling like I don't feel any better yet, this happened over the space of years of being able to have that shift and it still felt embarrassing for a long time. And I still felt a lot of shame about it. But eventually I got to that place of feeling like, OK, I have agency, I am in control. I'm going to disclose they're going to see a different name. And it's because I'm a domestic abuse survivor and they're eventually became a little bit of a so bring it. Let's see what happens when I introduce that because people don't really know what to do with. you when you are the person leading that conversation. And I would say that if you eventually get to the place where you build up that really resilience, that thicker skin to say, I'm going to lead with this, it becomes empowering instead of disempowering and that shift, it happens in your body, it happens in your mind, it happens throughout your life. And now I can go into spaces, I do go into spaces and publicly say, this is my story, this is what happened, this is what I went through, it changed that shaming piece, that internal shaming space we feel so much. Victims of trauma are so often, that is what we're caught in. Okay, that's part of our abuse cycle, if it was abuse that got us there, it's part of recovery, if you had an injury or your sickness and you couldn't contribute to your family the way you wanted, shame is really potent and agency takes away shame. Wow, and that's incredibly powerful and the way you described, you know, this is my story, this is what happened to me, I'm noticing your language there, that this isn't who you are, your trauma isn't who you are, and I'm wondering if you can speak a little bit about how maybe that piece of it played a role in separating the story from you which could dissolve a little bit of that shame too. Absolutely, it's so interesting you picked up on that, so that's the first step in post-traumatic growth, it's a step that I call education and it is about removing the person from the story, so it really is, there are places throughout post-traumatic growth where we need to personalize our story, but the first step is actually to depersonalize the story. So this is what happened to me and it happened to me because not because I'm flawed, not because there was some Machiavellian universal power who placed me within a user, you know, all of these kinds of toxic language that we use for people, everything happened for a reason, these things that we internalize, it really became this happened to me because this is a systemic problem. My views happened to happen over 2008, which is the last major financial crisis that we had, I was married to somebody involved in the investment community, so there was a lot of additional stress there, we know that untreated mental illness is a huge problem, and so starting to kind of put together, why did this actually happen? If I was not involved in the story, why did this actually happen? And eventually you get a list of these things happened because of a variety of outside of your self settings, whether that is an illness that is your trauma or whether it was a car accident that is your trauma or whether it was abuse that is your trauma, there are things that happened outside of you, the personalized things that are outside of you, and that starts to reframe how you can look at those events dramatically actually. Sure, well because now you're not making meaning of it in relationship to your worth and your value as a human being. That's right, that's huge, it is, it's a huge step and it's a massive shift and it allows you to take the next steps going forward. So let's talk about some of those next steps, and a lot of the work that you do in the words that you use or evolve around resilience, and I have to share with you that I use to really hate that word, I'll be totally honest, I was in a therapy session a few years ago, I was in a marriage that was not healthy and not going well and she said to me, you know, Jen, you're one of the most resilient people I know. And I walked out of that session being like, what's like, no, I was so mad Nicole because I was like, I don't want to be resilient, I just want this to stop. And I was resentful of that comment, I was even resentful towards her in that moment because I didn't feel like I should have to be resilient in this situation. And you know, fast forward now to the work that I'm doing, I understand resilience much differently. But before I share, I really want to know, you know, how do you define that word? And when you're talking to someone who kind of feels that resentful way about it, what do you dress? How do you go about this? So first of all, I think that's fair because I think we've done a huge disservice around the word resilience because we keep presenting it like it's a panacea. Like it's okay for you to be going through these terrible things because you're resilient. Well, do you know what the option are? It's resilience or failure or sometimes death. Like resilience is a response. So that's the first thing I will tell you. The other thing I will tell you about resilience is that we are wildly overselling it in society generally as this kind of goal. I view resilience as a first step. It's a necessary first step, but it is only the first step. And when we stop at resilience, this is why we have so many problems. There are amazing resilient people and amazing resilient communities, but what you pointed out is exactly right. Why should they have to be so resilient? Resilience doesn't address a systemic failure. Resilience doesn't address a toxic relationship. Resilience just gets you started. And so I tell people, I used to use a metaphor about resilience about riding a boat. And you know, you say things like sometimes our imitate's life. Last month, I had a little bit of a life-imitating art moment. I took my son who was a teenager, whitewater kayaking for the first time. So we like to kayak. We live near the ocean. We really, really enjoy that as a hobby. And there are rare things you can do with a teenage boy together when you're a single parent, but this was one of them. But we've never done whitewater before. And I was like, we are going to go do some whitewater kayaking. We felt really ready for this. And then like, we had a little moment of intimidation. Both of us were like, here's your crash helmets and the kayaks had legs straps. And we were like, well, okay, right? So seven mile kayak trip, level three whitewater off we go. We kind of get our bearings and everything's going okay. For the first few little rapids. And then we hit kind of our first major rap at maybe a mile in. And his kayak went sideways. And so when it goes sideways on these river rapids, you're stuck. And so he's stuck sideways. And worse, his mother has followed closely behind him too closely behind him. In fact, and I t-boned my own child in his kayak at full force rapids. Flipped him, rolled him into the rapids upside down in his kayak. And now he's in the water. Good news about the Chattahoochi River. I said it is it. It is a shallow river, but we're in rapids. And so the kayak has slipped over. The paddle has gone one direction. And now he's in the water and he stunned because his mother has flipped him. And this is trauma, right? This is trauma. You didn't see it coming. You never expected it. Now you're in the water. What's he doing? He's grabbing for the paddle. He's grabbing for the kayak, which now threatens to suck him under because of the waves, the way they're moving so fast. The tools he knew when he was upright in the kayak won't help him anymore. The boat, the paddle, none of this helps him. And I'm stuck. And now I'm yelling. Get on your feet. Get on your feet. Get on your feet. Get on your feet. He's stunned and he's kind of flailing around, but he finally comes to and he gets on his feet. That, that moment, that's resilience. Right? He had a trauma. He's been dumped into the water. The tools we thought we had aren't helping anymore. You had to get on your feet. That's great. He is out of immediate danger because he's on his feet. Guess what? He's still in the water. We're still with an upside down kayak and a paddle out of reach and water rushing around us. And that's what resilience is. Resilience is that part where we get people to their feet. And they were like, "Good, you're good. Congratulations for your resilience. This is a terrible thing to do to people because we've not taught them yet how to get out of the water. We've got to finish that step and that's where the post-traumatic growth piece happens. So I think it's fair to be frustrated with resilience because we keep getting to that place of like, "It's great. You're resilient." Yeah. Well, you're in the water. You're stuck. You're not where you're supposed to be and you know it. You just keep getting up because the options are what? Drown or get up. But it isn't helping you. And so eventually he did. We recovered. He got back in the boat. We got the paddle and kind of had to unpack what we learned. But I think that that's a great metaphor for what is happening with resilience right now. And I do teach specifically resilience skills because the other thing that happens is we've passed off resilience is like it's a trait. Like, you're born resilient or you're born not resilient. And that's just not true. Either you've had the life experience, unfortunately, where you've had to be resilient or you haven't yet or no one's taught you what you actually need to be resilient. And so now I teach something that I call resilience rings, which is about creating your own skills for resilience, which are lean, learn, and leverage. Those are the three rings and we put different activities in there so that you can fall back on resilience. It's important to know how to get to our feet. It's just important to know that that's not the rest of the journey. And so I really, that's how I'm really viewing resilience these days. It's an essential tool. It just isn't the tool we've presented by as a society. Yeah, first of all, that story was so spot on. What a lesson for every one of us for you and your son and everyone who gets the irritant. I mean, my goodness, I think reclaim or reframe that word because you're right. The problem happens when we get stuck at, we made it through the thing, but then the now what doesn't really explain. And so when I think about resilience now after doing the work that I've done, it's that second piece of it, which sounds similar to your three ring paradigm or your framework, but we have to lean in to the emotions of it. Otherwise, it's just emotional bypass where it's, oh, I'm on my feet now. I must be fine. It's totally fine. I'm fine. And we call that resilience, but it's really just bypass. And that of course leads to all of these other things. And so I really looked into this word and one of the things that came up in a conversation actually with a former professor of mine, we were talking about this resilience and regarding to the definition of really bouncing back, right? You thinking of a bouncing ball, you have to get to the most bottom part in order to bounce back up. That's right. It's that leaning in to doing what you were saying about the growth and the leaning in doesn't always feel good, but we have to do that if we really want to be resilient in the true definition of what it means. And yeah, and I just, I would love for you to talk more about those rings because I think having that step by step way, it's like a roadmap. Right. So I'm a huge believer in tools. And I think that's one of the other reasons why I've loved working in the space of trauma, you know, people kind of give me the like, why would you do that? Because this is so much empowerment for an individual to say these are the tools. And so when I present these rings as lean learning leverage, there's a lot of, and there really is a lot of carryover in resilience and self-care, which is the other reason why we get resilience wrong because you presented it just like it happens, right? I'm tough. I made it. Let's go. And actually know you've got to do a little internal self-care or some external self-care to really be able to have that recovery in your resilience. So when I present the rings to people, I take them through actual activities for them to create what goes in each of those circles. So lean is really about who is in your community, who is in your world, who's your 2AM phone call? Do you have a therapist? Do you have a community group? Who's in your lean circle? What's in your learn circle? So it is what are you doing? And it's also a big misnomer about like it has to be meditation or it has to be something zen. It'd be very clear that in my learn circle is a batting cage because I used to be a softball player and sometimes I am frankly not a very happy person and I need to hit some things and a batting cage is a great place for me to go and kind of get that out. A rage room is in my learning circle. Absolutely. My kids too, they know we go to the rage room together because it feels great. I love that. These are the things that help you release. Also, I started painting a few months ago and so that's in my learn circle and it's kind of all of these things that I want to explore for me. These things don't have to cost money and I will also say to anybody listening. If your version of self-care or learn and resilience is causing you kind of like either existential or actual financial dread, it's not going to help you because you're going to feel guilty and bad about it. And this is another one of those societal things. We're like, you know, this $200 jar of face cream is great self-care, not if it is causing you stress. And so I also like to walk but I live in the South. I like to walk at night. So I like room light and starlight. Like that's part of what's in my learn circle to see what's out there at night and really get myself moving. And then leverage is what I am learning about myself in lean and learn. So this is the Medicognition part. What am I drawing from myself? For me, it's that I like creative things. For me, it is that my tenacity rises to the top every single time I get knocked down. I will have to hover in a corner for a little bit, but then my tenacity is going to come back. And when I have that as an actual tool, when I can see that, that I know I'm going to go there again, that I'm going to be able to be a creative problem solver, you know, people who've come back with amazing responses from what's happened to them, even when I don't feel it, even when I am lost and I can't possibly tell you what my Medicognition is going to be with this. When I've done this exercise for leverage, I can go back and look at it. Go, all right, you know what's going to happen next. You know, you're going to come back around to this. You know you're going to fight. You know you're going to tell somebody. You know, you're going to do what you have to do because you've done it every time. This is what's in your leverage ring. And that's going to move you forward. So that's how I'm starting to teach resilience to people now because I think you can build out those rings and really have yourself a set of tangible and intangible tools that will remind you how to be resilient in a not-then-dick way. Because that feels amazing because you're standing in your power. Whereas before in the scenario that I explained, I was a victim of my circumstances and still standing in the water, but I was standing. So look at me. I get to celebrate the fact that I'm standing and it just made me so mad. And so this reframe is everything. I mean, this is really what it is about and how we continue to move the needle forward, not just in our own healing, but this transformation. Like I'm going to circle back to what you said at the beginning. When we transform, we create new paradigms for the people around us. And specifically for a lot of the folks who are listening to our educators, it has to happen in these places where we're in front of kids because they are watching us because you're always in front of kids, right? In front of kids. And when they're seeing the adults in their lives, parading arounds being resilient, what are we actually teaching them? And that's the stuff that really gets my fire going because we need to heal ourselves in order to make this generational change. So I would love to just kind of move the conversation to teachers for a minute because when we talk about trauma and a lot of times we either have these big broad strokes of what trauma is, sometimes we get the responses from teachers of, well, I'm not a therapist. We weren't trained for this, which, yes, you're absolutely right. You were not trained for this. And we don't have the tools to deal with our own trauma ourselves. And that's kind of that third piece is where I come in with my work because we can't do the other two if we can understand the other two if we don't actually take care of ourselves. So in regards to being in the classroom, what are some things and trauma-informed practices that teachers can do and principals administrators can do today to just kind of get comfortable with this idea that trauma informed doesn't have to be heavy or hard. Those are both exactly right. They don't have to be heavy. They don't have to be hard also because we do paint with big broad strokes around trauma. Feeling shame or embarrassed because your trauma is not big enough is a huge problem. I find that in education circles, I find that in human services and nonprofit circles all the time. Neurobiologically, teachers listen, because some of you already know this, you've just forgotten. Neurobiologically, your trauma, whether it is the car accident that happened, that wasn't that big of a deal, but it caught you off guard or whether it is an abusive situation or an addiction or an illness, neurobiologically or you are being chased by a bear. It is exactly the same path inside your brain regardless of what that trauma is. So if you get triggered by that trauma, it has lit up inside your brain. All of those systems have lit up exactly the same way as when it was happening, regardless of how severe that trauma actually is. And that means you've released all the same hormones. That means all that cortisol and adrenaline is flowing. So getting a hold of you have a trauma, I guarantee you do. It's causing your brain to light up in a certain way. And just again, knowing that that's what's happening is super empowering because you can have a minute and say like, I'm having those feelings, you all know what happens when you get that startle response and you get that rush of adrenaline and it hits your stomach and you feel anxious and a little bit nauseous, like that's a trauma response. And having control over what you need to do in those moments is really the first step. Knowing that you have them and not being ashamed of the fact that you have them because your trauma response, which by the way, it's no longer just fight or flight. It's now fight, flight, freeze or fun. And your trauma response, my own therapist, was so proud of me for this because this was one of my most difficult things was that when people meet me, they assume that like my trauma response would be fight because that's what I come off as, but it's not it's freeze. And I carried that as a huge amount of shame for really, really long time, but trauma response is embedded in us when we're children. So the children that you're working with right now, they are learning what their trauma response is going to be and it's going to kind of stick with them. So it's between six and nine that you're getting your trauma response. So whatever yours is, you didn't cause it. It's not because of something you did, like this happened to you in childhood and that reprogramming is a big, big deal. I think once you get control of that, the next thing to really look at is what's the language you're using? What's the language you're using in your classroom? What's the language you're using at home? What's the self-talk language? And if anybody goes to my library, website and signs up for my email list. One of the things I have is a trauma-informed language quick reference and it's 20 phrases to avoid and 12 to say instead and why. And what we are really looking for is to avoid phrases that take agency, avoid phrases that diminish our legitimate feelings, avoid phrases that disempower us, and avoid phrases that depersonalize what's happened to us. So we don't call ourselves victims. We don't say to children or to anybody else get out of a victim mindset. We name them and this is the place where instead of depersonalizing, like we did an education, we personalize, we bring this to them. We do not do toxic positivity. Most of us were raised with this from just playing, right? You're playing on the playground, fall down, you get a scrape. What is the response? That's the same response as resilient. You're fine. Brush it off, you're fine. When you do that, you diminish and you disempower. So you have to stop that and you need to say, healing doesn't happen on a timeline. You're carrying a lot. Those feelings are valid and you have to give space for them. And you really need to avoid these kinds of phrases like everything happens for a reason. This one ranks as probably the highest phrases that drive me crazy in recovery around trauma-informed practices. Is this everything happens for a reason, idea? That again, we've been selling as a society. So you and I connected and we connected because if I hadn't been abused, you had been in a terrible marriage, we never would have met. And so we should all be thankful and grateful for these horrible things. Like that is pure garbage. And if you want to steal somebody's agency, even a child's, you tell them everything happens for a reason and then turn around two minutes later and tell them that they are responsible for what happened. You're not delivering economists messages that make any sense when we do that. Either there are natural consequences to what happens or there are universal Machiavellian powers who are placing us like a chessboard out there. Both things cannot be true at the same time. And it really steals our agency. When we start to say those, everything happens for a reason. This was meant to be. So if you got to work this morning as a teacher and got that parent in your classroom that you just see coming, right? You opened the email and there's an essay right away about you making those kids bring in purple folders that nobody could find to target this year. That is not a-- do not look at that and go, well, you never get more than you can handle. Everything happens for a reason. And if you are delivering that to a colleague or if you are a leadership person and you are delivering that to a teacher, you are not helping them. Either feel those emotions or learn to solve their problems. And that is a huge, disempowering move in the world of trauma-informed spaces. We really have to honor where people are instead of dismissing them with these kind of quick little bumper sticker phrases everywhere. I can just sit and talk about this. We just listen to you talk about this because you're speaking my language for sure. I mean, this is my language. What you're saying, we don't even think about it. That's the thing. We don't think about it because we have been trained just because in the air that we breathe, this is how we've been brought up. These are the things that we say. We don't even think twice about saying these things. That's right. And so what I find when I am observing some places, moving into trauma-informed practices, there sometimes seems to be this disconnect. Well, now I have to do something else. This is something else on my plate that I have to do now. But this is the stuff that's going to make you better so you can show up for your colleagues and your students better. If we reframe this as to not being about the kids, this is about you. This is about creating culture for you. So you don't bypass. So you don't say things that are ridiculous in the vein of toxic positivity when you're actually feeling something because that's not healing, that's not growth, that's not conscious living and that's certainly not empowerment. So yes. But I think you bring up a really good point that it starts to become like, "Oh, this is another thing I have to do." And look, this takes practice and you will screw up and you will screw up because you have been inculterated and continue to be inculterated in a world that absolutely says things like you should just be grateful. It does an entire industry of people where you just make a journal of gratitude of things, my world is falling apart, but here are the list of 15 things that I feel grateful for. No disrespect to the gratitude folks, there is a place for that. But if you are doing that in an effort to not deal with what is happening in front of you, that is not a healing process. It is absolutely not a healing process. You have to look at why you're doing this. Anything with self-care, anything in your resilience rings is the same way. If you are watching six hours of Netflix because you need a downtime and you get to release those emotions and ugly cry at whatever series you are watching, more power to you. You are watching six hours of Netflix so that you don't have to have a feeling to numb yourself out, you are missing this. And if you are using language and messing up and then saying, "I am messing up," you're on the right track. Eventually it's gonna lock in. If you are not using language 'cause you don't wanna have to deal with or you don't wanna have to feel things, you don't wanna look at a kid who's falling down and say like, "That is a lot." I'm so sorry. You must be feeling that way. If you wanna sit down for a minute, if you are not doing that because you don't wanna have that emotional connection, you gotta have a timeout with yourself and really explore what's happening. - I'm so glad you said that because, again, I think it goes back to the bypass. Gratitude's great, but you can't gratitude bypass your way through your face. (laughs) Like you can feel the things and then be grateful for the light switch that you got to turn on separately. It's not an excuse or a reason to not feel or to be resilient and say, "Well, at least I have lights, at least I'm not. " And this is something else I talk to it. When we talk about boundaries recently, I had a workshop. It's like, "Well, at least I'm not sick. At least I have my health." And shouldn't the bar be higher than not dead? Right? Well, this is my whole argument for thrivership and set of survivorship is that we've quite literally architected an entire society that says, "You know what, you're not dead." So be grateful, dammit. And what else should you want? You're not dead. You're still here. You came back from that. Isn't that enough for you? And then it also kind of rolls that tape for you that you feel like crap because it's not enough for you. And you shouldn't feel bad. You're teaching posts, well, it's not even post-COVID, endemically in COVID. And this year, the win is that none of the parents made death threats to you this year over making your kid wear a mask. Listen, that is not winning. That's slightly better than the absolute hellscape you were living in two years ago. And I'm glad for that. But I think that it's a terrible idea to tell people that they should be grateful or that they should be satisfied with that's what's happening around them right now. I think that is an absolutely horrible message to be delivering because it sells us short. It makes our lives way too small. Sometimes big wins happen incrementally, but it shouldn't just be tiny little wins that are slightly better than not dead. Right. And this is just it. This is where our work comes in and helping people understand a pathway to feeling empowered about their external circumstances. And before I ask you the last question, I just also want to say, and agree with you and highlight the fact that you say, everyone has trauma. If you're human, congratulations. Right. You have trauma. And it's not just for some people, it is just part of the way of the human experience. And to me, there is beauty in that that there is a human experience that we can all connect with, even though it's painful, and even when it's painful, that you're not unique, we all know what trauma is and we can use it as a connector instead of feeling shame about it to drive us apart. And I think that's really important. I think that's so important because it is, it did something that brings us together. And the most amazing thing about trauma is that it will distill what's really in you. Yeah, I always paint myself because it's real. I was this very polite with a bob and the requisite holiday sweater vest, right teacher, but I was silenced. I was silenced as a human and my trauma helped end that. I had to find a voice, but I was in there the whole time. And the trauma distilled down where those strengths and power is. And I think that that's what is, there's an opportunity in that. It's not that we should go rushing for our trauma, but if we really explore it, you will find true moments and zones of genius in yourself and strengthen yourself that you just didn't know what were there. Mm, that is beautiful. So first of all, we need to continue this conversation. We do. So we're doing, we're going to have to do someone. I'm going to hand in that one, but for the sake of this episode, I need to ask you in your work and in your experiences, both in and out of the classroom, you know, what is your dream for the future of education? I've missed being in the classroom. I've been here since I've been in the classroom. I'm a child in school, though. When I think about what education looks like for me. I envision the perfect education space for me is that we set out to help every single one of our students find their zone of genius. Like that is what an ideal education looks like to me is I have never ever met a child or a parent who didn't know there was something special inside of them. They didn't necessarily know how to find it. And you know, instead of we were past the stage on the stage piece we're getting closer with this project based learning. But if we were archaeologists of children instead and we were digging to find that zone of genius and just release that zone of genius and kids, I think that that is my ideal setting for everyone. One, and I would love to see teachers do that too when I wrote my master's thesis that was part of it. I'm old enough that it was when we thought gardeners eight domains were really it. And so my thesis was around uncovering those domains and building classrooms around them. But it was still that same idea that like if I know you and I have an arts background so that creative thought process we could be matched with those creative thought kids. And as their brains grow and move around we shift them off to the kinetic spaces and we shift them off the analytical spaces and they get to work where their brains are growing. I just think that so much would change for kids so much would change about our emotional well being in our health because we've been working in that strength base place. And so the operations are all over this right now with 360 models and the Maxwell strength base programming. I don't understand why schools aren't there yet. We're still doing the your bad at this so we need to remediate and spend extra time on that instead of letting you do the things you're great at and I want to find school that really let kids be great. I agree having those spaces and places is how we grow and I think that there are opportunities and my hope we know when I ask this question is we say them out loud so it can be once up closer to becoming a reality. That's right. I love that. Yes. So you mentioned a resource and I want to just make sure that you explicitly tell us what it is about language. Where do we find that? Sure. So if you visit my website, which is miles to go dot net. So it's M y L E s miles to go dot net right on my front home page. You can sign up for my email list and when you do you will automatically receive a download which is 20 phrases to avoid and 12 to say instead for trauma informed language quick reference. And it's just a simple PDF so you can have it out with the three columns and it looks very easy to read very fast and just kind of help you to not only avoid those phrases but to have something new to put in your lexicon also because I think that's really important. I don't want to just tell you what's wrong. I want to give you some tools to be able to use better language. So I think that's really amazing. And if people want to know more about you and work with you, all of those links are going to be right there in the program notes. And I'm going to check that out myself too. I love that. And we will have some more conversations. I cannot wait. So thank you so much, Nicole for your time and your talents. And this was just a wonderful conversation. And I hope it's just the start of something. Thank you. Me too, Jen. This was great. Thank you for the work you're doing and teachers hang in there have a great, great year. Remember that everything does not necessarily happen for a reason, but you can make good reason out of what is happening. I love that. Yes. So if you've enjoyed today's episode, make sure to leave a five star review and write something really nice. And we will see you next time on take notes. Incredible, right? Together we can revolutionize the face of education. It's all possible. And it's all here for you right now. Let's keep the conversation going and empowered educator faculty room on Facebook.