No Off Switch: Why Regulation Belongs in All Your Roles

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Jessica shares practical ways to regulate your nervous system and bring calm, steady energy into parenting, teaching, and leading.

In this episode, Jessica explores how nervous system regulation shows up across the many roles we play, whether we’re leading, teaching, parenting, or supporting others on the front lines. She explains why our nervous system doesn’t switch hats when we do, and how our presence impacts the people around us in every setting.

Jessica offers practical strategies for bringing calm, steady energy into classrooms, meetings, and family life. From co-regulating with students to repairing after rupture with kids or colleagues, she shows how small shifts in tone, posture, and pacing can make a powerful difference.

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Transcript:

Jessica Doering: Hey y'all, today we're going to talk about regulation and that it looks different in the different roles that we play in our life, but that the nervous system rules are actually the same all across the board. And I'm really excited to share with you some strategies that you might be able to use or ways to think about your leadership, your teaching, your parenting even a little bit differently. It doesn't matter if you're leading a meeting or you're dealing with a toddler, your nervous system comes with you to both of those places. And we know some of you listening might be a leader in a school or a similar setting where you're trying to step into really hard situations all day. You're trying to stay calm. You're trying to wear a lot of different hats throughout the day. Some of you are frontline professionals, you're showing up, you're holding the line for the hardest situations, right? Whether it's kiddos whose behaviors are escalating, maybe it's a parent situation, maybe it's a client situation. And you know that you're showing up in a lot of hard things. And for some of you, then after you do all of those things all day, you're trying to help people all day long. And then you come home, and maybe you have a spouse, maybe you have kiddos, and you're still trying to hold the line, right? And the thing that's hard is so often we're taught about nervous system dysregulation just in one of those roles, but we don't always think about how our nervous systems are the same, whether we're leading, whether we're teaching, whether we're parenting. And there's this common thread that goes throughout all of them, that our nervous systems are actually impacting the people around us. And we're showing up in all these different areas and all these different places with the people around us. And our nervous system is the thing that we bring with us that's actually impacting everyone else's nervous systems.

Jessica Doering: So, what I want to do is share just a little bit about maybe in a couple of different roles what that might look like, what that might mean, right? I know you've learned a lot about regulation. If you've been listening for any length of time, know that nervous system regulation is one of the number one things that we teach, because it's so essential to literally everything else that we do in life, in work, in our relationships. If we're not calm, we're not steady, our lives are impacted by that. And the people that we want to show up and serve don't get served as fully as we want them to. So, what might this look like, right? In a couple of different roles in life, we all have all these different hats, right? Teachers, maybe this is for you. We're thinking about co-regulating before instruction. We're helping to calm students' nervous systems. We're showing up with a warm tone, predictable rhythms in the classroom. Maybe you're a leader, and you're just the steady presence, right? You show up with calm. You're trying to reduce the sense of urgency in things that are maybe not urgent around you. You have non-reactive body language, right?

Maybe as a parent, this is just like soft, right? Soft connection with our kiddos and repairing after rupture. This is not being domineering or controlling, but instead shaping and guiding. We have a few tips today for what does it mean to show up with our nervous system in these different settings, right? How do we bring the same presence, whether we're showing up as a leader or a teacher or a parent, whether it's a friendship, a romantic partnership, the things that are going on around us—how can we be more aware of these different roles and how our nervous system plays into them?

Jessica Doering: So, the first thing to think about is just making sure that you are showing up calmly in all those interactions across the board. But that doesn't mean you have to be cold toward other people. Having an open body posture, responsive pacing, being emotionally congruent. Maybe it means in a dysregulated moment, you're softening your eyes, you're anchoring your tone, you're slowing your words, shortening your sentences, not being too overwhelming. Here's the thing for a lot of us: if you're anything like me, if your voice says that I'm fine but then my face says I'm two seconds from snapping, then the kids and staff, everybody's gonna believe your face, not your voice, not the things coming out of your mouth. We want to be congruent across the board. So, you don't have to stay regulated 100% of the time. Repair matters. We do have to return to regulation faster. We have to be willing to come back into a good place when hard things happen. We have to come back after that and say, hey, I was feeling overwhelmed. I didn't react well. Let's try that again. It's about presence, not performance. What we want you to do is think about all of these things in your different roles, right? What does it look like if you're someone leading people? How can you bring that calm presence into your leadership? How can I be the person who repairs when things go wrong? Maybe you're on the front lines and you're thinking about, in my role, in my capacity helping people, how do I show up in that way? And maybe you have both of these roles. Maybe you're, for example, a mentor teacher and you're leading someone else in that, but then you're also still on the front lines and then you go home with your kids. In all of those roles, we want you to think about how can we start establishing a daily rhythm that would benefit from these regulated practices. Thinking about our body posture in meetings, our body posture when we're with kiddos, our body posture in our relationships at home, like applying all of these strategies in our different settings. So, dysregulating situations with adults when you might be in a leadership setting with adults is going to look different in some respects than a leadership position in the classroom where you're with kiddos, right? Having those dysregulated moments and leading them through that, you still want to have the same underlying principles. We want to have the soft tone, and we want to slow our words down, and we want to shorten our sentences. But if I'm with an adult versus a child, the way I do that may look totally different, right? If I have my two-year-old with me, I'm going to talk to her a little bit differently than I'm going to talk to my business partner, right? And that's just honoring the stage that they're in and honoring my position in the relationship. What we want is for you to begin thinking about applying the things that you're learning—all of this regulation, all of these strategies—in all of the roles in your life. For me, I know when I started learning about the nervous system and trauma and how chronic stress and trauma affect our bodies, I did it because I had students who I so deeply loved, and I wanted so much better for them. I wanted so much different for them. But what I noticed was that I started learning about nervous system regulation for the classroom, and it started affecting everything I did. Like, I'm a nonprofit volunteer. That's a role that I play where my nervous system shows up in that, right? And the people that I interact with, their nervous systems are showing up. And I was realizing, oh, I'm starting to understand better how to show up in this. I'm a wife. I started realizing how my nervous system was showing up in that role and how I could bring a more calming, regulated presence into my marriage. I'm a mom now. I wasn't when I started learning about all this stuff, but I have four beautiful children, and man, if my nervous system is in a bad place, then my parenting is not where I want it to be. And if I just learned about this stuff in the classroom and never started applying it in my life and other areas and all these other roles, then I don't think that it would have been as game-changing for me. But when I started showing up in every area of my life and in all of these roles and asking myself, how can I be more regulated, things really shifted for me. So, I hope it will shift for you as well.

Jessica Doering: I wanted to invite you—if you're like, all this nervous system regulation stuff, like I'm all in, I want to do it, I try to do it, maybe you're like me and you're like I fail at it all the time, and that's just life, right? None of us are perfect, we're all learning and growing—but if you're like, I really want to do this better, I want to dive deep, I want to do this regulation stuff in all of my roles in the best possible way. We want to invite you inside Behavior Breakthrough, which is a course that's designed to help you with this nervous system regulation, specifically around behaviors that you're seeing. It's intended for teachers, but actually if you're someone who works with kiddos in any capacity, if you're a parent, this is going to help you too. Because we know the behavior challenges leave us feeling drained, and it can test the limits of our own nervous system and make us feel like we're in survival mode. But just know that if that's you, you're not alone. And so we created Behavior Breakthrough, which is a self-paced, research-backed course designed to help educators understand behavior through the nervous system lens and prevent burnout in themselves before you spiral. So, when you're showing up in all these different roles and you have all these different hats on, your nervous system can start to go berserk, right? And you feel pulled in all these different directions, and burnout starts to creep in. And so in Behavior Breakthrough, you learn how to respond to challenging behaviors in ways that work and that create connection and calm in the classroom. You also get four and a half graduate credits from the University of Pennsylvania, and it's only $1,950 for four and a half graduate credits from an Ivy League school. Like y'all, you gotta get in on this. If I had this course back when I was in grad school or even before then, I think that everyone needs a course just like this. The classroom management courses that we are given are not super helpful and don't really practically give us everything we need for actually being in the classroom. But this course is so different from that. So, we're enrolling right now for the fall cohort, and you get to keep access through the spring. So, all the resources and strategies and the online community, you get to keep that even through the spring semester so you can come back to it as you're implementing and growing. And we would love to support you in this. So, please check the link in the description below if you are interested in jumping into this cohort. I want you to lock in what you're learning right away. And an easy way to do this is just leave a review or comment and just let us know: what was your biggest takeaway from this? And don't forget to subscribe to future episodes to learn more ways to hack your brain. Until next time, I am Jessica. Thanks for joining us.


Categories: : Regulation Strategies

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