Button Pushing - Conscious Discipline Skills

0:12 Welcome to Conscious Clips on our time together. Today we're going to talk about button pushing. Now everyone has had their buttons pushed by something. It could be children whining for some people. For others, it's children talking back. For many of us, it's traffic. One friend of mine hated it when her husband wadded up the wash cloth and stuck it in the corner of the bathroom. This drove her nuts. So how do we handle the dreaded wash cloths in our lives?

0:44 Now to understand this we need a bit more, we need to dig a little bit deeper into this. So one of the things I want you to think about is how many of you have had a brilliant moment? I mean I'm talking there was conflict in front of you, the kids might have been fighting, if you're a teacher it was just a mess in the classroom and at that moment the right words at the right time just fell out your mouth, you don't even know where they came from and that conflict in front of you just went (deflating noise) and just dissipated.

1:12 When that happens we're accessing the higher centers of our brain called the frontal lobe. This is where our consciousness is but when we access the frontal lobes of our brain it doesn't mean we're taking this little piece and working with it, it means we're integrated. Our whole brain is in use in this situation. Now how many of you have you said "When I grow up, I'm never going to 'blank' my children" and then how many have already 'blanked' their children.

1:39 The situation here is that when we react, when our buttons, when our buttons get pushed we downshift from the higher centers of our brain into the lower centers of our brain and we open our mouth and out comes our mother or our father, or our grandmother. Now this is a hard space for us to be in for three reasons: First, when you get into a reactive button pushing mode, you end up one, reacting. Two, you end up demonstrating the exact skill you're trying to eliminate in children. You'll find yourself going "I said be quiet and stop yelling" so you'll yell at them to be quiet.

2:19 You'll grab things and say "You know better than to grab things from your brothers" so you will grab to try to teach them from stop grabbing. And the third thing is that later on, later on, whether it's five, ten, fifteen minutes, 20 minutes later, an hour, we start feeling guilty. We feel like "Oh my gosh, look what I've done. I swore I'd never do that" and here's the big thing: permissiveness always follows guilt.

2:50 So once you start feeling guilty for your behavior as a parent or a teacher, then you're going to start being permissive. And what does this look like in real life? Well, it could be that you have a six year old that says "I want a pair of sneakers and they cost a hundred dollars" and you go "There's no way on earth you're going to get those sneakers, no way, it's too expensive, I'm not buying them" and she whines all day long, and fusses all day long, through dinner. About 8 o'clock at night you've had it, and you just get so triggered that you start screaming and yelling, acting just like you swore you never would. You go to bed at night feeling guilty, you wake up the next morning and said "Mama has found the money, you going to get those shoes baby" and so what we do is we give in. So when we give in to children it creates anxiety they don't know where their limits are. So how do we go about doing this? And the, the beautiful thing about Conscious Discipline is you can take your buttons, you can take your triggers, which are wounds from your childhood, and when a child pushes them whether as a teacher, a parent or a colleague or a spouse, instead of reacting what you want to do is be a S.T.A.R., take a bit deep breath (inhaling sound) and when you do that not only do you help the next generation avoid those wounds, you heal yourself.

4:13 You can take difficult moments, start healing your own buttons from your own childhood and significantly improve on your parenting and teaching and relationships that you have right now. When your buttons get pushed you're going to take some deep breaths, three deep breaths before you open your mouth. This will desensitize the triggers from your childhood and it will start healing those buttons. The second thing is be conscious of the trigger thoughts generate. You're going to have a a CD-rom that gets installed and you'll hear such thoughts in your head as "I don't have to put up with this."

4:50 "He's not going to treat me like this anymore." Or you might have "I work so hard I don't know why people do this to me." You're going to have a CD-rom playing and you can overlay that CD-rom with "I'm safe. I'm calm. I can handle this." So here's your homework, your buttons get pushed (inhaling sound), take a deep breath, trigger thoughts start playing, replace them with new ones. "I'm safe. I'm calm. I can handle this." Until next time, I wish you well.