The Art and Science behind My Journey into Self-Reg

There’s an old saying that “When the student is ready to learn, the teacher will appear.”

I remain unsure to this day whether or not this quotation emerged from the early 1970’s television series Kung Fu.  It is, however, reminiscent of something that one of the characters, Master Po or Master Kan might have said to the young student disciple character Kwai Chang Cain, also known as “Grasshopper,” played by David Carradine.  The axiom holds true and is relevant in oh so many ways.

It can then be said that I must have been at a point in my career, and/or in my life, where I was ready to learn.  The message of Self-Regulation® as articulated by Dr.’s Stuart Shanker and Susan Hopkins, resonated so profoundly with me that I immersed myself as a not-so-young “Grasshopper” in their science, their writings, and their tutelage.  Their work has become my passion.

As an educator for more than 30 years, (10 at the post-secondary level, almost 10 at the kindergarten level and 10 in between), you might think I had seen it all.  I know I thought I had.  Troubled behaviour, poor choices, lack of discipline, no self-control, unwilling to exert effort, were some of the catch phrases that wall-papered my mindset.  After all, I was doing everything that I could to teach my students! But was I really?  Truth be told, there was more that I could be doing, or better said, there was a different way for me to be doing it.

Stuart Shanker’s & Susan Hopkins mantras of “No such thing as a bad child” or “it’s never too late to change a learning trajectory” and perhaps most profoundly for me, “the fundamental unit of development is the dyad (relationship)” changed my perspective & changed my teacher-student relationships.

Learning about the science behind our stress response systems has helped me to recognize that the wallpapering phrases I referenced earlier were fallacies and inconsistent with the science.  What I was seeing were in fact “brain/body stress response systems that were in self-preservation mode.”  There is a HUGE difference between Stress Behaviour and Misbehaviour.  I know, I see, and I feel that now.

Cognitive Dynamics is an organization that I began as a means to help change the way people think about stress, and energy, and to point them towards the work of the MEHRIT Ctr. (TMC) at www.self-reg.ca.