This is not about you, Maren!

Picture by Jan Enkelmann, Mysore, India 2005

A while back, I was teaching iheart to a class of 10/11 year old primary school kids. I was called back after a very successful run the year before. Only this time, the stakes felt much higher. I was briefed at length about a long list of problems the children of this year group presented. It was the cohort that had started school during lockdown. Up to the present day, you could still see the implication of that. Delays in language, reading and writing, behavioural challenges, concentration struggles, social difficulties, high stress levels among the children, a lot of backstabbing and telling of. Teachers didn’t know how to approach them and were secretly counting the days before this group would move on to secondary school. But actually, there was quite a bit of worry in the mix, in terms of gang grooming and drug use in this age group already. The teachers were looking for new ways to give these kids the best possible start at big school next year. Then we got to the official bit of our meeting. More than half of the class had a diagnosis of some kind; ADHD, autism, dyslexia, a recent bereavement. "Don’t speak about their parents because some of them don’t have any. Don’t mention, … " another long list followed.

By that time, I was already half considering to run out and never return.

I felt a lot of awe and respect towards these teachers, who were fighting for the only school in one of the biggest council estates in South London. A high percentage of the parents did not speak any English, most children lived in Single Parent household, often looking after 2 or 3 siblings while their mum, dad or aunt were out to work.

It felt like a very tall order and I wasn’t, at all, sure if I was able to help. Just minutes before my first session with the class, my mind was racing. I was going over the briefing again and again, almost making myself sick with fears of not being able to help. I went to the bathroom about 10 minutes before my class started and thought I could not do this. Literally thinking about how I would inform them that I had changed my mind.

Then something amazing happened. A thought popped into my head. This thought said, “Maren, this isn’t about you!” Just that, nothing else. It was the sort of quiet but determined thought that comes without explanation. What happened then was almost comical. A thousand voices chatting and shouting in my head about all the problems and diagnoses and drug dealing and deprivation and more problems, what am I supposed to do about that?, will I be good enough, ready? I can’t change that!…, suddenly they just shut up. Phoom. All of them at once. It was like an army of noisy people suddenly turning their heads in one direction with their mouths closed. They was total silence.

Five minutes later, I stood in front of 30 bright, curious, cheeky, lovely 10-year-olds and told them about iheart. I looked into all of their little faces and fell in love with them. The eleven sessions that followed were indeed more demanding than anything I had done before. We discovered so many things that made them tick, or scared. They tested me on any trick in the book but the presence and connection I felt in those first few minutes, determined our relationship throughout. Every time I lost it again by being confronted with yet another unforeseeable thing, I was quickly able to return. This was only possible for me because an insight had kicked me out of a deep cycle of ruminating. And because I could see what crazy difference this had made, in real time.

“This is not about you, Maren!” was enough to remind me where I was heading. It was enough to nuzzle all those voices and get me fast track back to True North.

I’m not telling you this to say, ‘look at me, I did so well’ on the contrary. I almost blew this big time. I’m telling you this because, the thoughts and worries about being ready, being good enough to handle difficult situations, what happens if I make this worse, what if they don’t listen, don’t like, don’t respect me, or ‘how dare they’, ‘It’s their fault, I haven’t done anything wrong’… are pretty much always in the way when we are faced with a challenging circumstance. My insight on that day, has helped me many a times, when I was just about to pounce at my own kids or needed a reminder to calm down first before being able to respond more wisely.

Did I have answers to all their problems? No. I couldn’t make their world perfect either. But what this insight enabled me to do was to be fully present and connected with, instead of concerned and worried about them. This way we managed to build a relationship that helped them to hear what I pointed them towards.

This class, by the way, roleplayed fantastic insights of themselves at the end of our time about their own relationships with their classmates and showed some massive behaviour improvement especially in less supervised settings like the playground after lunch.  

The big learning I took away from this experience was that presence and connection always trumps any good ideas and content you might want to pass on. This literally applies to any relationship in any context. Just check in with yourself. How many times do you make a disagreement or simply a problem you haven’t found a solution for, about you? Catching this is gold, it takes you back to True North. And from there, an entirely different world presents itself.