Alyssa Campbell: Emotional Regulation, Resilience, and Proactive Behavior Support for Children

 On today's episode of Right About Now, a little bit of a different episode.
 I talked to Alyssa Campbell. She's the author of Tiny Humans, Big Emotions, It's a New
 York Times Best Seller, and she just released Big Kids Bigger Emotions. We talked about
 releasing the book. Everything that goes into raising kids today, and some of the insights
 that we can use to better train our kids to adapt and deal with today's challenges.
 And some of the triggers that happened were all different. I think this is important
 in today's society as we talk about raising good human beings, good people, good people
 that go on to be good business people. I also brought in perspective of my wife, who
 is a principal to middle school. So, fascinating discussion with Alyssa Campbell about all
 of these things. Enjoy this talk, and I know you will too, right now.
 We're not saying that we're going to snow plow obstacles out of their way. We're saying
 how do we teach them what it really looks like to cultivate resilience, to know what it feels
 to be in a hard feeling, to experience something hard, and move through it and process it,
 and come out on the other side instead of just bearing it down or building resentment.
 This is right about now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network production. We are the number
 one business show on the planet with over 1 million downloads a month.
 Taking the BS out of business for over six years in over 400 episodes. You ready to start
 snapping next and caching checks? Well, it starts right about now.
 A few weeks from now, so it won't officially be one day. We will ground this in a little
 bit of reality of your reality today. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, it's a whirlwind today.
 That's for sure. I started press and media yesterday at 5.30 in the morning and ended the
 day at 11 p.m. We're in it. C-O of seed and so, collaborative, emotion processing method.
 That's a mouthful, but it's an important one. That's right. We call this step method for
 short. Talk to me about seed and so, and then we'll get into the book. Yeah, for sure.
 Seed is the company that I created, and we work with schools and talker programs and teachers
 and then organizations on how to understand how to actually create spaces that are calm and
 regulating. And we use it, I mean, we're a team of 12 at this point, and we use it in our workspace
 every day to know how do you work best, how do you function, how does it work within teams,
 and the mismatches of teams, and being able to navigate really just being a human on planet Earth
 is the work that we do. Ah, how to be a human. We need more of that sometimes. It sounds basic,
 but like for them to do a quarry that we've lost our humanity, especially with AI and everything
 else, a little worrisome and just overall development. I'm a father of four boys and it's not lost
 on the role that I play in bringing them up, but as parents, it's, you don't feel like you always
 know every answer. And I don't know this about being perfect, but we do want to raise good human beings.
 That's it. And there's so much information out there right now. It can be hard to know like what
 actually to pay attention to. So we're just here that this still is really getting nerdy with you,
 but make it make sense. Yeah, talk to me. Your second book. My second book, Tiny Humans Big Emotions,
 was a New York Times bestseller and hoping to bring this one to the list as well. I know. Who's
 our target for the book? Obviously, I go parents and all that, but some of them is a little deeper than that.
 Yeah, this one is for the five to 12 year old age range of those elementary school kids and
 its parents, its teachers. The bulk of what we do at seed as a business is working with schools.
 That's our biggest revenue driver. It's really coming in and working with schools and through
 schools, also working with families. So the book's designed to be able to serve families and
 schools and teachers. In fact, one of the coolest things we've seen so far in this pre-order season
 for books with schools doing like bulk orders or families to have access to it or for their
 teachers to have access to it, to dive into work, look like, to do in tandem with each other.
 It's interesting you say that my wife is a principal at a middle school. Yeah, we should chat.
 She's a progressive, but I call the book. Obviously, talked with a lot of authors and we have them on
 the show. She's used to that, but maybe the topic per se. The title of Big Kids, Bigger Feelings,
 playing into your first book, you can kind of work your way there, but let's set the stage.
 What are we talking about and what are the big takeaways? Yeah, so what we do that's different
 than what's happening is that we look at your nervous system as a whole and this is the part of
 being a human on planet Earth. You know, we have your five senses. Sight sound, taste, touch, smell.
 There are four other senses that we don't talk about a lot that really factor into how you
 show up in the world and if you can be regulated, if you can access your whole brain, whether it's for
 things that work or it's for teaching or it's for learning for kids. And so we have our
 vestibular sense, which is located in your inner ear. It's responsible for your movement and
 balance. We have our proprioceptive sense that lets you know where your body ends and something
 else begins. If you are like walking by the table and you bump into it, your proprioceptive
 senses. It's having a hard time letting you know, oh, there's a table there. You should move over
 a little bit. And we have our interceptive sense that lets us know if we're hungry, if we're tired,
 if our hearts be in fast, if we're like anxious, any of those internal cues. And then we have
 our neuroceptive sense, which is like the energy reader of the room. If you come into a room and two
 people have been arguing and they stop arguing, but you feel it in the room, you know, this is awkward.
 That's a neuroceptive sense that work. And so we look at all nine of these senses and help you
 understand where you fall or where a kid falls in terms of whether they're sensitive to it. It
 drains them or they're seeking it. It regulates them. The things I'm sound sensitive. When my kids
 are like loud and annoying and like making all the noise and all the sound is happening in my house,
 it adds up for me and I can lose my cool if I'm not mindful of it. And paying attention to it and
 supporting yourself through it. Just the other day, they were like bickering in the car on the way
 to school and driving each other nuts. And I was, I'm going to pop in my airpods and I'm going to
 listen to one song so that I can control the sound and not lose my cool on them. And so we're looking
 at these nine senses and helping you understand like how does your nervous system work? What's
 going to drain you? What's going to recharge you so that you know when you're getting drained? Oh,
 here's what I have to do to recharge because it's not one size fits all. You know, this is a data
 four. And this is stuff that's so overlooked. When we, we have a school that we work with, it's
 high meets. Most of their kids are high poverty. A lot of them have at least one incarcerated
 parent, a number of homelessness situations going on. And we came into that school last year. And
 from Q1 to Q2, all we focused on was this nervous system, understanding each kid, putting systems
 in place for those needs to be met proactively throughout the day. Not just the kid is losing it
 and is dysregulated. And then they're pulled out of a classroom and there's disciplinary action.
 Not that reactive cycle, but proactively supporting it. And we saw a 60 60 percent reduction in
 behavior support calls from Q1 to Q2 just by doing that. When we're looking at this, we're looking
 first and foremost at how do we really set you up for success throughout the day? That's interesting.
 I'm considering thinking about a lot of wife. She comes home and has the stories to tell. And she
 deals with a lot of that poverty and other things. There's a lot of variables that play into maybe
 the misbehavior, but it doesn't change the fact that it's happening. And it blows my mind a list of
 along the same lines. I don't want to get the education system. There's so many advancements. There's
 smart people like you, companies like yours. We have so much information now that's changed. And
 arming our teachers, arming our parents and getting knowledge and turning knowledge into action
 into change that then has an impact on our children. Is there anything more important?
 It's cute. No, and it's so cute. We look at the mental health crisis today. And again,
 no one knows how their brain and body work. We're just like shooting in the dark paws and take deep
 breaths. I don't even know what it feels for these kids. They don't know what it feels when it's
 building. My son calls this the volcano where it's like building inside before you explode. And then
 afterwards these kids can tell us what they should do, what they should and do. They might know the
 rules, but they can't put it into action because they don't know the precursors for what's coming
 before it. They don't know what that kind of volcano as it's building feels like. And you're right,
 there are so many factors that are also coming into play. The homelessness or poverty and how that's
 factoring into even how they're showing up at school or in everyday life. And so we get to come
 in and be the detectives and help create that. And one of the things we as a business created was
 a lot of schools have like a behavior tracker where they kind of track kids' behaviors. And really
 we use it predominantly for disciplinary action to see like, oh, this kids have X number of behaviors
 support calls. They're going to get whatever the disciplinary action is in correlation to the policy.
 And we came in and said, how about we actually use that information to change behavior? We
 pair it up with the kids. We have everyone's nervous system regulation questionnaire information
 that lets us know how their brain and body work. And say Jackson gets a behavior support call three
 times in a week. We get pinged and it says on our end, we have to create a behavior support plan
 for this kid to meet their need. And it pulls in Jackson's information and makes a customized
 behavior support plan to actually meet the need that's driving the behavior. So we're not just
 focusing like a whack-a-mole getting these behaviors over and over and over on the surface.
 Interesting. Let me play the other side of the coin. Play my wife's role or the teachers. I'm
 sure you hear this. It all sounds cheers and that. All that makes sense. If I could work one to one
 and if every kid at that level, boy, that would be a wonderful day. That might be an excuse. We'll
 give a precedent to reality and to reality. Probably some truth and some false to that. How do you
 balance that? I'm sure. You probably hear that. All this is great, but if I had four children in
 my classroom, this is manageable. How do we make them invisible? We are not doing individual support
 for almost any of our kids. In the school systems, we often use what's called multi-tiered systems
 of support. You look at the baseline is called tier one and that's like universal supports that
 everybody gets. Tier two is like maybe a couple customized things for some kids. Some specific
 tools in place. Tier three, they have special meetings. They're getting certain services provided
 all that jazz. We do the bulk of our work in tier one and tier two. For us, when we're creating a
 behavior support plan, that doesn't mean it's individualizing this kid's getting one to one support.
 What it means is that they're getting the tools in place and the things that they need to not see
 this behavior happen. Let me give you an example. We got a kid who every time they're at lunch,
 we're seeing these huge behaviors. They're getting in trouble in the lunch room every day and it flagged
 in our system. Yeah, about the same time every day, this kid's getting a behavior support call
 and it turns out it's at lunch time. What we know about this kid from their profile is that
 they're sensory sensitive. What that means is that they are the kids that notice the details in
 the space. My husband's like this. If I put something down in the counter, he's like, don't put it
 down, put it away. The clutter is annoying for him. If there's bunch of sounds in the space for
 these kids, it can also be the feeling of certain clothes. I want to be comfy and cozy in my clothes
 and if it's too tight or too itchy or there's a tag, that starts to drain them. All these things start
 to add up for their nervous system. So you put them in the lunch room or it's loud and it's busy
 and all this is going on and they're losing their cool. The schools that we work with, we accessed
 some grant funding. They got access to little kind of essentially mini iPod things that connected to
 the Bluetooth in the cafeteria and kids can just pop it on and listen to some music and then
 they're in control of the sound and this kid didn't have another lunch room behavior support call
 for three months and all we did was say, yeah, his nervous system needs some help during lunch
 and he would wear headphones and listen to music instead of like being in the crazy loud lunchroom
 that was too overwhelming for him. Yes, you and my wife have a call. It's validating that of
 nothing else. It's always a gamble. All their big kids, bigger feelings. Alyssa, as we start
 to close out here, walk to me through, I always like to ask this is like kind of books. I'm someone
 that's about to read your book and I walk in thinking something and I'm going to walk out
 thinking something different. What's the biggest change that I would get from reading your book?
 There's so much talking about kids in their feelings these days and I think a lot of people think
 that it means that it's permissive. I think it's going to be soft and they're not going to be
 able to like handle real life stuff that we're going to step in and make sure that they're not
 feeling hard things. And what we're doing is actually kind of the opposite. I'm not putting hard
 things in their way, but I'm helping you know, how do you actually support them through the hard
 things that we aren't stepping in? We had a, for instance, a mom reach out the other day and she
 was like, the friends are doing these TikTok dances. Her daughter was not included or invited. She's
 like, do I step in? Do I help? Whatever. Do I reach out to these parents? No. Your daughter's learning
 what it feels to be left out and not be included and that's going to happen for the rest of her life
 sometimes in different spaces. You get to create a space where she can talk to you about that,
 where she has a place to talk to because in the past so many of us grew up in spaces where we felt
 the hard thing, but we didn't know what to do with that. And we see this huge mental health crisis
 where kids are drowning in adults who don't know what to do with their emotions and there's
 losing their cool and mechanical conversations with each other because they don't know what to do
 when they're in the hard space. And when we're navigating this, we're not saying that we're
 going to snowplow obstacles out of their way. We're saying how do we teach them what it really
 looks like to cultivate resilience to know what it feels to be in a hard feeling to experience
 something hard and move through it and process it and come out on the other side instead of just
 like bearing it down or building resentment. That's a big one. Or voice. I mean, in my nine-year-old,
 he's the youngest, he's the baby. He's an anxious kid. He's like a very normal kid. He builds up
 anxiety over big things and small things sometimes. And when you were talking about that of his
 what it said, we don't get it out of his, come, I grew up with a military father. My wife and I both
 played teams B1 team sports. We're go getters. We're not easy parents and trying to figure out exactly
 what's going on. I was hearing you talk. Let's be in process right now that's causing that. Even as
 adults, we know these are children, but we're always think of ourselves first, how we react to
 things or how we do things. Everybody's makeup is different. It's a hard reality, but that's
 how we have books like yours to help us figure it out. That's right. It's not a one-size-fits-all.
 And you know that it's a data for all these kids are different. And so so much of our work is
 really helping you understand who's the kid in front of you and what's actually going on in their
 brain and how do you help them? I also grew up in a family of five all athletes and Thai
 achievers. And it was also definitely not a soft household. And when I look at things for my
 childhood that I want to pass on, respect was really important in my household. And I want to
 carry that on. I want my kids to have respect for themselves for everyone around them. And also
 there are things for my childhood that I'm like, yeah, I'm going to leave that to the way side because
 this piece doesn't carry on into this next part. And one of those for me is that my kids will be
 able to share their emotions. It doesn't mean I'm going to make it go away. It doesn't mean the
 boundary changes. But that they get to be disappointed about a boundary or ask why. That it's not in my
 household because I said so culture. It's yeah, you get asked why and be curious. And I'll let you know
 why. Again, it doesn't mean the boundary changes. But we can have a dialogue in this. And so when we're
 looking at these things, there isn't one right way to do it. And if we don't get to the root of
 what's going on with kids and really respond to that, we're just going to keep seeing behaviors
 over and over and over and over. Yeah, keep doing the same thing. You get the same results.
 So that's right. It's hard told me. That's right.
 Where do I find the book and learn more about what you're doing with Seed and so?
 Yeah, we're at Seed and so.org is kind of our mother ship. And the book is wherever books are
 sold, it published with pepper Collins anywhere you get a book. And I read the audiobook for big kids
 and then for tiny humans as well, just like that bad way. It's an important topic and I appreciate
 the work that you're doing. It makes a difference. Thanks for shining the light on it. You
 don't find us Ryan is right.com. We're going to sign up that meeting with a listen my wife if nothing
 else. But look, get out there, get big kids bigger feelings. It's an important topic if you have
 children, it's important to understand how everyone works a little different and that we've got
 the opportunity to mold the world that we want through our children. We'll see you next time
 right about now. This has been right about now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network production.
 Visit RyanisRate.com for full audio and video versions of the show or to inquire about sponsorship
 opportunities. Thanks for listening.