Christopher Willard, PsyD

Growing up, my mom was a psychologist. Um, so like to joke, you know, Dr. Willard is my mom’s name, please call me Chris. Um, and so I’d always kind of resonated with like, that seems like a job that is really helpful to people and is very kind of verbal and about storytelling, um, in many ways, and, and also has science and other components to it and has a lot of integrity. And so I always thought that that was cool, that I’d either be a writer or a therapist or a teacher when I grew up. And, um, I’m kind of, now you’re all up. I know, and I can’t believe like how lucky I feel that I’m sort of, that I am, in fact, all of the above. And yeah.

So like, I was an English major, and I was like, I’m gonna write the Great American Novel.

And, you know, that didn’t exactly work out, but I get to write about other things that I’m passionate about and indulge my creative side in writing. And I also find even just being a therapist, um, being a psychologist, being a teacher in all those ways really indulges my creative side too. And so I just feel so lucky as we were chatting before, you know, kind of, we, we started recording just like, how is this my life? Like, this is so cool. I get to talk to interesting people on podcasts. I get to travel different places and speak about things I love, like mindfulness and resilience and emotions and mental health and wellness, and all this kind of stuff. And I get to help people one-on-one, and I get to teach in other ways.

It’s just so, it’s been a blast. Um, so my story is I got started, I mean, in college actually, we both went, um, I had a pretty hard time actually with some mental health stuff, substance abuse, undiagnosed ADHD, took a few years off to kind of like find myself or get my shit together, however you put that. And during that time, I had a year where I just sort of fell apart. And then another year where I ended up going on a mindfulness retreat basically, ’cause my parents didn’t know what to do with me. They kind of dragged me and it was really transformative for me. It was like, things make sense. I feel connected. I feel happier. I feel calmer, more peaceful. And like, your mileage may vary, but for me it was totally transformative. Um, after that I got sober. I’ve been sober for a few decades at this point. I, you know, sort of practicing meditation regularly. I went back to school, finished my degree. From there, I actually worked as a special education teacher.

Very challenging environment. Impatient, yeah. Um, residential school and then was like, this job is really hard. Those therapists have a good job. I’m gonna go be a therapist. That seems much easier. Um, and some days easier, some days harder. But grad school and then, um, my dissertation, I was like, you know, I’m gonna… I’ll be damned if this just sits on a shelf. And I actually got How to Get Your Book Published for Dummies, and I did what it said and I wrote a first book and then it worked and I wrote more, and then I did some speaking and then it just sort of, kind of just started going from there. And, and so I, I love that I get to do all these things. It works with my brain. I didn’t really realize I had ADHD myself until a couple years ago. My son, who was maybe nine, we were on vacation, and he says, “Hey Dad, what’s ADHD?” And I was like, well, let me go get my DSM. And I pull it out and I start reading the symptoms. What are there, you know, 12 symptoms? And my wife just cracking up and she’s like, “Well, Leo’s got like 11 of the 12, but Chris, you’ve got like 10.” I walk around as if on a motor, but everything else is, uh, a little, a little accurate. So it’s been a, it’s been a journey and continues to be one. Um, so that is a journey.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus

So there are a lot of, there are a lot of pieces to the story even before we get to, you know, what you’re focusing on now. So, because, ’cause you are this beautiful tale of struggle and success. Right, and, and a lot of parents in our community, I would say we support parents of kids of all ages with a, with a particular expertise of parents of older teens and young adults. Mm-hmm. Because the story you describe is a pretty common scenario, whether there’s a diagnosis or not, that kind of hitting a wall, leaning into coping mechanisms that may not be helpful or healthy.

Christopher Willard, PsyD

Right.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus

And, um, and really flailing for a while.

Christopher Willard, PsyD

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus

So when you think back to that experience, like what stands out for you now that, that you would tell your younger self?

Christopher Willard, PsyD

I mean, I, you know, I remember my parents went to go meet with a, a family therapist and I guess who gave them the advice of, you know, the, like, he was like, the number one rule of parenting is: never give up. I just feel so grateful that my parents did not in fact give up when I was having some really dark times and I was making some really bad choices when I was in really, really bad shape. Um, they kept loving me, they kept supporting me. They also did that with, with boundaries, which is also really important, um, and can be really hard. You just love your kid, but you’re kind of smothering them in other ways or enabling other things that aren’t so helpful. Um, and I, you know, I have to say, it’s like, I feel so lucky. And also the older I get, the more I think about the word luck and how much oftentimes that kind of means privilege. It’s like, here I am like a white guy from the suburbs. Like some of it’s luck that I was lucky. Um, and a lot of it is just like circumstance. And my parents had resources. Um, and because my mom was a therapist, she knew a lot of where to get resources. Now there is so much less stigma. It is so much more common for young people and for families to get help.

Almost every parent that calls me to get help for their kid is like, I told him, I’ve got my therapist, or I told her like, mom and dad are doing their work too, and it’s so normalized, which is I think, great. But there’s still so many people that haven’t gotten that diagnosis that kind of helps them make sense of their life or been able to access the support that they need when it is still enormous waiting lists. Enormously expensive to get mental health help, to get coaching help, to get, um, you know, learning help. I mean, all these kinds of things, accommodations that are actually helpful as opposed to just keep kids treading water or even, you know, kind of sinking in other ways. So. It’s, uh, I feel lucky in many ways. And part of what I wanna do is kind of help more people access good tools, good information, all of this kind of thing, because it’s, it’s hard to come by. So,

Elaine Taylor-Klaus

Yeah. It, it can be. And, and to your point, there’s, there’s a great awareness around and a debunking of the stigma. Mm-hmm. And yet it’s still there. And yet access to services is still there. And, and what strikes me, one of the things that strikes me in your story is that there you were. Getting educated, a special ed teacher, and you still have your own undiagnosed issues.

Christopher Willard, PsyD

Mm-hmm.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus

That even as you were living it and supporting other kids, you still weren’t yet understanding how to apply it to yourself.

Christopher Willard, PsyD

Is that. Absolutely. And there also, I think for some, some people, not everybody, but with some issues or neurodivergence or whatever it might be, are really able to kind of muster their resources to support other people and then can’t do them in their own life. Yeah. Like I was doing executive function tutoring all through graduate school for other people, but could I keep my own calendar in order? No. You know, and then kind of realizing, oh, okay, here’s what it is. I have my own totally wackadoodle systems that no one else will be able to understand, but they do work for me. But it is, it is kind of amazing how we in some ways gravitate, you know, toward, we, we, we teach what we need to know, um, oftentimes even before we know that we need to know it. So it’s, it’s amazing.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus

Yeah. So, so let’s take a quick break and then let’s come back and talk about sort of how your career moved into mindfulness and emotional resilience.

Christopher Willard, PsyD

Absolutely. Okay, sounds good.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus

So welcome back everybody. My guest is Chris Willard and we are talking about the journey of, of the classic neuro spicy person who is a bright young adult, kind of faltered a little bit before finding your path, which I think happens to a lot of kids in our community. And then even as you found your path, hadn’t yet figured out the need to apply it to yourself. You talked about going on a mindfulness retreat.

Christopher Willard, PsyD

Mm-hmm.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus

And, and that has clearly led you into doing work with mindfulness and, and emotional regulation. Tell, tell us a little bit about that.

Christopher Willard, PsyD

Yeah, that was, um, you know, again, sort of during this time off from school, my parents didn’t know what to do with me and basically they’d gotten interested in this stuff probably ’cause of their own stress, not related to being my, my parents. Okay. They dragged me along and it really was was with someone named Thich Nhat Hanh. This was in 1999 or 2000.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus

Wait, you went to a retreat with Thich Nhat Hanh?

Christopher Willard, PsyD

I did. Yep. Yep.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus

So, wow.

Christopher Willard, PsyD

Wow. Okay.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus

Yes. Like these parallel understandings.

Christopher Willard, PsyD

Yeah. Awesome. Okay. So that was just, I mean, it really just kind of blew my mind and, and blew my heart open in a sense. Also, I mean, all at the same time. And, um. And just, I mean in a little bit, you know, I mean I, religious experience, but kind of like, this is amazing. I’m gonna teach everybody mindfulness. There’ll be world peace in five years. And you know, it didn’t quite work out that way, but, but that in fact, like there was something about seeing how much this could be helpful for me. When I was young and then wanting to find ways, you know, could this be adapted for young people? How could we teach this stuff to kids? So maybe they don’t take quite the shorter journey than I took. Um, and so that just really excited me and that became a little bit of my work in graduate school. I kind of tried some experiments and as a teacher just didn’t, they, they kind of mostly flopped.

It was right when mindfulness and these kinds of practices were really getting more popular, getting more research behind them, kind of early two thousands, late two thousands. I also feel really lucky. I kind of got, you know, in the right place at the right time. Um, but, but amazing research now on the brain on ADHD, on depression, on anxiety, even on trauma, on so many different things, um, that I think are, are so helpful and really, you know, beyond the point of mainstream to the point of. Probably even some backlash towards some of these ideas. Um, mostly I think around misunderstandings of, of what some of these things can mean, but, um. And what’s been amazing is just being able to draw from my experience, but not like project my own experience onto other people, but just, you know, being able to help. And then drawing from like the wisdom of Hanh, the wisdom of other just incredible mindfulness teachers out there. And then with the science just really coming through in the last 15 years around it, 20 years around it. Um, it’s just so, so incredibly exciting. So, um. Then I’ve had fun, as I said, just being able to, you know, writing books for little, little kids, um, as well as writing books for teenagers or for parents and just trying to like, how do we.

Make this fun. And, and for me, I thought so long, it has to look like Thich Nhat Hanh. It has to be perfectly still and graceful and quiet and silent and maybe the slightest bit of smile. And that is great. But at the same time, how can we bring a little bit more joy to this and maybe even some, some silliness and humor. So trying to bring that in to the mindfulness world and into education where. There’s also just so much seriousness sometimes and yeah, like how do I take my work seriously, my clients seriously, my students seriously, but not take myself quite so seriously. Um, I think is is important.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus

I get, I get that. I had a supervisor once who said to me. Um, you know, not every conversation has to be significant. And it was, it was some of the best advice I ever got really was, was, and I think part of what we do at Impact, it’s about we’re dealing with serious issues. Mm-hmm. And we have to hold it lightly because that’s what allows us to be with some of the complexity that we deal with that sometimes can be really hard. I mean, what your parents went through with you going through the journey you went through, that was not easy. Right. And they had to, they had to figure out how to be with that and they had to figure out how to navigate it and to not lose hope. And, and so we, to do that and do it lightly is, is a gift I think to bring.

Christopher Willard, PsyD

Yeah. It’s so much is, and I actually am, I’m working on some new writing and one of the sample chapters I sent out was about the neuroscience of humor. And it was so fun just to like, do research on that. Like what? What jokes do and, and even more than being funny, like being, um. Good humored. Basically like being an easy laugh, like when someone tells even a corny joke when you laugh. Like what that does to everybody’s nervous system, what that does to everybody’s brain for getting out of that locked in place, getting into a more playful place where creativity emerges, where new solutions to seemingly intractable problems can start to. Come through it. Actually, it’s amazing actually just what, what humor, um, and lightness can do for a situation. And gravitas has this place too, with some things is important to keep very serious. But finding that balance, knowing how to work all of those different sides of, of things, I think is so important in life and healing and helping other people for sure. Um, as well.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus

I kinda wanna go two different directions. One is, I, I just wanna share with you, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Institute for Play, but there’s this beautiful book, and I’ll share it with you later on, play that where they identify eight or nine different play styles and humor is one of them. And directing is like, there are all these, and we’ve done a lot of work with that, with, with, in our community, um, and, and with the professionals in our community to kind of find the play. What I’m, what I’m hearing you speaking to that I really wanna focus on is. Is what you’re saying, I think underneath it all is that mindfulness doesn’t have to be counting how many times you chew or sitting in a meditative pose. In, in quiet.

Christopher Willard, PsyD

So, yeah. Yeah. I, I, I think that that’s so important because I think that ends up. Keeping certain people out the door of, well, my kids has ADD, they’ll never, never be able to sit still. It’s like, well, let’s do something that isn’t about sitting still. Let’s do something that’s about play. Like one of my favorite Lev Vygotsky, who some people probably know, you know, sort of zone proximal development kind of development guy. He did this study where he was trying to get, I think it was eight year olds to stand still. And of course he gets at a stopwatch. And you know, five minutes later the kids are running around everywhere and he calls them back in and he says something like, you know, stand still for as long as you can. But this time, imagine you’re like the guard at a factory or a night guarding a castle, and the kids then actually stand still successfully for like 18 or 20 minutes.

So it’s like tapping into imagination, making it playful, making it a game. A little bit of a competition, still activating the prefrontal cortex, still quieting down the limbic system in these different ways through play. And so we think when we think mindfulness, we think stillness, breathing, and we can make stillness fun. We can, you know, you know, be still like a ninja play freeze tag, right? We can make breathing fun. We can do superhero breaths, we can do alligator breaths. Even that aside, it can be about, you know, the anchor of attention doesn’t have to be the breath, the anchor of attention can be play right. And that I feel like just when I read that study just sort of turned everything inside out. And I thought about being a kid and being at like this camp where the counselors were like, we’re gonna go walk as silently as we can in the woods. Can you walk without making a sound and realizing. Oh, you know what I did? Mindful walking on that Hanh retreat and you’re just focused on each footstep and not thinking about the past of the future.

That was a lot like being a kid, walking silently in the woods and just focusing on each footstep and not worrying about the past of the future and just thinking about the texture of the ground underneath you. And it’s like putting those things together or listening to sounds in the quiet and it’s like, well make it superhero listening rather than just, you know, listen to sounds. It’s like, what’s the farthest sound you can hear? These things make it playful. They make it fun. And, and again, now that I’m 48 and look back, it’s like, eh, counselors are probably just trying to get us to shut up. And maybe they were, but at the same time, it still had this element of planting these seeds of mindfulness, this sort of amazing amount of focus through play, um, and through using our imagination. And so for littles, you know, that can be just great way to introduce this stuff. And as kids get bigger, they’re not gonna. Do butterfly breaths and ninja walks and stuff like that. But the seeds are there and there’s other things we can do with adolescents, with young adults that are kind of still, those training wheels, um, for mindfulness just kind of help onto that path. That may get them to some, at least some inner stillness, hopefully, um, to, to be able to find what,

Elaine Taylor-Klaus

What I’m really hearing is, is permission to find ways to make mindfulness accessible.

Christopher Willard, PsyD

Yeah. Yeah.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus

Right. Whatever that is. And for some kids it’s play, and for some kids it’s creativity. And for some kids it’s being fully present. But, but the notion is that there isn’t a right way to do mindfulness.

Christopher Willard, PsyD

Yeah. I mean, I, I, I really, I think we can bring mindful awareness to anything. And I think there’s interesting questions like. Oftentimes in different places, people say, you know, well I run, is that mindfulness? Or they’ll say, you know, fishing is my mindfulness, and it’s, you know, is dancing mindfulness and it’s like. You can do all those things mindfully and also mindfulness or not, whatever works for you, man. Like just, and I think we also have this western like, okay, we’re gonna take mindfulness and put it in the lab and study it. And so it’s got a lot of good research. But I bet if we took dance, you know, for other cultural practices from maybe not the dominant culture and put them in the lab, we’d probably get pretty amazing similar results about self-regulation, about nervous system regulation. Emotional regulation, attentional regulation, these kinds of things that we’re really trying to help ourselves and our, our kids in the next generations with too. So,

Elaine Taylor-Klaus

So let’s draw the connection. ’cause a lot of parents in, in our community and professionals, our community, we’ve all, as you said, we’ve heard the research on mindfulness. We’ve heard Susan Smalley speaking at a conference like we get, we’re supposed to do it. And a lot of parents get caught up in the checklist of, what am I supposed to do to help my kid? Right. And so we’re trying to get them out of the doing and into the, what is, how are we being with, in relationship with our kid? So let’s correlate mindfulness, if you will, to regulation, to emotional regulation, focus regulation. The, the pieces you were just talking about, how does it connect?

Christopher Willard, PsyD

I mean, I think there’s different ways. I mean, there’s so many different metaphors for kind of how do we understand how the brain and body work, right? We can do zones of regulation and mindfulness helped us out of the, you know, red zone and into the green zone. We can do window of tolerance from Dan Siegel, right? Mindfulness helps us access and, and expand that window of tolerance a little bit more. We can do hyperarousal, right? And I think these are all really pointing to the same thing, but mindfulness and, and, and I say that a little bit as an, you know, sort of clinical mindfulness, maybe I sort of say that as sort of an umbrella term, but you know, things like breath work, things like visualizations, things like muscle relaxation. They’re not all necessarily exactly mindfulness, but they kind of all technically speaking, but they’ll get us to this place where our nervous system is, is better regulated and where we’re our, our brain is regulated into a place where we can.

Focus for the long term. We can maintain our focus. We can activate the regions of the brains that are maybe under activated in some people, you know, on the spectrum or with ADHD or executive function challenges or things like that. Um, and, and in those ways it ends up being really helpful, like breathing again and, you know, it can get an eye roll. But the fact is even just a couple well-regulated breaths. I can actually really change, send blood into the prefrontal cortex, which we know is smaller and less active. Right. And a lot of the kids that we work with and worry about, like the insular, uh, cortices on the side that are a little bit more. Play in, in, in social pragmatics and, and, and empathy and, and other things like that. So, you know, then learning to regulate our breath. We know that, we know that we can regulate our breath. We can then regulate our body. Our nervous system is in our body. The brain is the biggest part of that. We’re actually then able to regulate our emotions, our attention, and our impulses.

So that’s a lot of what’s happening just by regulating our breath when we practice, just regulating our attention. Right. I’m gonna set my. Set my mind, my, my awareness on this piece of music. Um, because focusing on a chant is maybe boring for some of us, right? Or the breath, right? That, you know, I notice it wander off and I bring it back. That’s really actually building the capacity of sustained attention. It’s building the capacity of selective attention where I can. I actually have my brain, my attention focused on what I wanted to focus on and not on the spitball going by me or the interesting conversation outside in the hallway and wishing I was out there or you know, whatever it might be for somewhere someone else or just the in, in, uh, the kind of in intolerability of, you know, a sound or a sensory thing coming at us that is, that is so hard for, for, for some of us and some of the kids that we work with, to be able to kind of notice that and sort of set it aside and not have it be quite so agitating or frustrating to, um, learn how to process that sensory input.

So these are some of the ways it ends up making a difference and it really doesn’t, it really is like. I’ve got this dad I work with. I’ve been kind of dining out on this story lately, but it’s like, you know, we, we, we finished up therapy for a while, a few years ago, and I was like, what was the most helpful thing we did? And he was like. Well, I’d drive home, you know, park in my driveway and just take three breaths before I went inside. He is a very highly special needs kid who’s gonna be always institutionalized probably. And he was like, and then I’m not always bringing the comp, but at least I’m not bringing more chaos and then the co-regulation can happen and I’m not bringing my bad day in and infecting everybody with my emotional baggage for that day. And that actually, you know, kind of brings me to the point that. What research says and, and common sense too. It’s like the, one of the best things we can do for kids is practice mindfulness ourselves, like great to tell them to breathe or focus on this or that. But the more well regulated we are as adults, right?

Regulation is, is contagious. Um, stress is contagious. Anxiety is contagious. But actually so is calm, so is regulation. I was a little bit like, oh three is a therapy. It’s a lot of money just to take three breaths in the driveway. But at the same time, it really is like that. That really did make a difference. Right? Yeah. Made a difference in the family system too, which I think is so important to remember and Yeah. Yeah.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus

A lot of what I’m hearing you speak to is the, the first of all, the incremental nature of it. Mm-hmm. It’s like one breath builds on the next breath, builds on the next breath, right? One day, and then two days and three days. So there’s this. The practice and the, the incremental tolerance, extension of it. Yeah. That, that you’re, you’re pointing to. And then the other thing, you know, one of our biggest messages that I hear you reinforcing, so thank you, um, is, you know, the change we want for our kids starts with us. And we, we believe as parents, we get caught in that cycle of, what else can I do? What else can I do? What, what should I be doing? And what you’re saying is you should pay attention to how you’re being with yourself and in dynamic with your kid.

Christopher Willard, PsyD

And that that being is go, we can respond, not react, you know? And. You know, gallivant around and give talks and people are always, you know, what’s the, what’s the best practice for my kid with ADD or the best practice for my kid with a temper problem? It’s like, well, the best practice. It’s your practice. Sorry, that’s the bad news and the good news. Easiest student. Hardest student is gonna be you. Or like, we create more mindful kids in our school. It’s like, well, the best way to create stressed out kids and miserable kids is you surround them with stressed out, miserable adults. If you want calm, mindful, compassionate kids, you have to actually surround them with mindful, compassionate, well-regulated adults and um. That often is like, uh, okay, it’s hard.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus

But on the other hand, you can’t control what happens. You can control how you respond to what happens, right? So, we have the capacity to influence the situation by paying attention to ourselves, which is really the only thing we can do anything about it anyway.

Christopher Willard, PsyD

Exactly, and I think what I’ve learned from kind of Buddhist understandings, kind of beyond just like the, the mindfulness, which is only one aspect of it is, is that things change under certain, you know, with certain causes and under certain conditions. Like we can’t change someone else, but we can create the conditions under which, you know, they’re more likely to make the changes that they need to make. To me, that’s what good accommodations is. It’s what good parenting is. It’s, you know, how do we, you know, kind of like tilt it so that things like roll downhill and, and roll more smoothly. I dunno where I’m going with that metaphor, but like, basically, you know, it’s like what are the conditions under which this kid is likely to thrive? What are the conditions under which our family is likely to thrive as, as parents that we’re likely to stay together in our relationship through this really stressful time. Right? How do we keep creating those conditions, um, for success? Because we can’t make success happen, but we can keep tweaking the conditions for it to, to be more likely now.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus

Yeah. We do a lot of work around the tone of the home. And kind of our job as a parent is an invitation, so that speaks to that. So. I hate to stop the conversation ’cause it’s, it’s fascinating and we have to start bringing it to a close. You guys, if you’re, if you wanna find out more about Chris Willard, you can find him on Instagram at Dr Chris Willard at his webpage, drchristopherwillard.com. There’s some resource there, some good downloads for you there. So go check that out. Um, Chris, as we wrap this conversation, is there anything we haven’t talked about that you wanna make sure you bring up to this, to this conversation?

Christopher Willard, PsyD

Yeah, I mean, I think you and I could talk for hours. Um, I think I keep interrupting you too. I apologize. Um, but I, I mean, I think fundamentally when it comes to mindfulness, this doesn’t have to be hard. It doesn’t have to be exotic. It can be the three breaths in your driveway before you go in the house. It can be modeling for your kid when you’re in the heat of an argument. Hey. I actually need to take three breaths before I come back to this conversation because it’s getting heated now. And you can model that when they’re young with, I’m gonna take three breaths in this really heated Uno game right now. And then it can be, I’m gonna take three breaths in this heated, you know, debate we’re having at the dinner table or in the car about curfews or something like that. Um, as long as you come back to the conversation, right, you’re really modeling that stuff or you know, I’m feeling really overwhelmed by the situation network.

I need to do something to regulate myself. Whether it’s three breaths, listening to music, eating healthfully, doing a yoga posture, you know, whatever it is that you do that’s healthy, that’s maybe not what I was doing in college. I dunno what you were doing in college. But, um, but finding some of those, those other ones that we can model, that’s the best way we can teach this stuff now.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus

Yeah, Beautiful, beautiful. Alright, so before we wrap, do you have a favorite quote or motto that’s come up to you that you wanna share?

Christopher Willard, PsyD

I, um, uh, I have a couple that I, I put into my presentations. One is this, this meme I saw that says, um. Never in the history of calming down has anyone ever calmed down by being told to calm down. And it always is a great laugh line. Um, but it’s also like the way that we get calm, the way that, you know, we have our kids get calm is we create the conditions for them to be calm. And that starts us being calm. Right? Um, and so, you know, no one’s gonna love it. Or like, focus on your breath, right? It’s like I’m gonna focus on my breath. I’ll invite you into this with me and maybe you will roll your eyes or slam the door. But that is what I can do in this moment. Um, so that one, that’s one of my faves. Yeah.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus

I love that. I, I shared with, because it always gets a laugh. Yeah. And everybody always knows what it means.

Christopher Willard, PsyD

Yes.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus

Like nobody wants to hear anybody say, calm down.

Christopher Willard, PsyD

Right.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus

Right. And yet, and yet we. Default to that sometimes when, and, and we do it when we don’t know what else to do. And so what I’m hearing you saying is pay attention to the tools that we have at our disposal to calm ourselves down, to to take the breath, to take the beat, to take the time out and to prioritize calm so that we can be modeling and be present.

Christopher Willard, PsyD

Right.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus

Absolutely. So thank you. Thanks for being here. Thanks for what you’re doing. Um, it’s lovely. I love that you’re bringing play into it. I’m looking forward to reading more. ’cause that is, um, it’s so important and it’s, and I think it’s a great mirroring, not mirroring, but blending of, of a lot of things that are important in family dynamics. So thank you for that.

Christopher Willard, PsyD

Awesome. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. This has been a lot of fun.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus

Truly a pleasure. To those of you listening, take a minute, check in with yourself. What are you noticing about what came up for you during this conversation? What are you aware of? What are you taking away? Maybe what’s one insight that you’ve got now that you weren’t thinking about half an hour ago? And, perhaps what’s some action you wanna take to bring this forward with you into your life this week? What’s one, one shift that you might make in the coming week? As always friends, thank you for what you’re doing for yourself and for your kids. At the end of the day, your energy, your presence, your being, and your doing, you make an extraordinary difference. See you next time.

Diane Dempster

Thanks everybody. Thanks, Chris.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus

Thank you.