Diary of a Working Woman
Passionate, hard-working, fearless Educationalist, Psychologist and mother, Johnette Barrett talks to a selection of working women who have gone through many challenging experiences, often having to undergo many conflicting roles. Johnette unravels the secrets of being a successful woman in today’s world.
Diary of a Working Woman
Michelle Georgia Mohamed: The Role of Psychology in Overcoming Adversity and Parenting Difficulties
Michelle deeply believes in the potential of psychology in everyday life and its role in child development. She takes us through her unique approach, focusing on preparation, visual timelines, and open communication to create a calming environment for children with autism and anxiety. She also shares how visualization techniques and positive thinking can make a significant difference when dealing with severe health diagnoses.
But that's not all. We also explore the personal side of Michelle's story. She discusses the meaning of a fig tree gifted by her grandmother and how it brought her a step closer to nature, reminding us of the therapeutic power of the natural world. Plus, we discuss the Radical Remission Project and its insightful findings. This episode ends on a hopeful note, with Michelle emphasising the importance of updating our belief systems, and fostering a sense of independence in our children. This enlightening conversation not only speaks about Michelle's resilience, but it's also a beacon of hope for everyone facing adversity.
A new podcast in which Johnette Barrett, educational psychologist, seeks out inspirational working women who have transformed their lives and that of others through their courageousness and compassion.
The conversations that follow are sometimes eye-opening, sometimes heart- breaking and sometimes humourous.
Diary of a Working Woman (DOAWW) is hosted by Buzzsprouts .com.
Email: diaryofaworkingwoman@yahoo.com
Instagram: doaww podcast
Website: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2227789
Hello, my name is Jonette Barrett and you're tuning in to Diary of a Working Woman, or DUA. Today I'll be speaking to Michelle Georgia Mohamed, who is a psychologist, teacher and mother. For over 20 years, she's worked with children and families until having to take a career break due to ill health. During her time at home, she has discovered the true power of psychology to heal her own life and help her to be a better parent. Michelle's daughters both have dyslexia and one of them has health issues, including anaphylaxis.
Speaker 1:The challenges they face as a family have been managed positively using psychology in their everyday lives and routines. The psychological approaches that have been most helpful for Michelle are solution focus psychology, cognitive behavioural therapy or CBT, cognitive education, mediated learning and dynamic assessment, and all this was gained from Michelle training at a specialist centre in Jerusalem. So you also use these strategies for children on the autism spectrum to help with anxiety, as well as visualisation techniques that are often used in sports and health, psychology and behavioural therapy and use of association. Michelle often offers support to other parents living with illness and or with children with additional needs. Today, we will be discussing how positive psychology can help, using some everyday learning and family situations as examples that you may find helpful and relatable.
Speaker 2:So hi, michelle, hi, it's lovely to have you here with us today. It's great to be here in so many ways.
Speaker 1:Thank you. So, having gone through a serious, critical incident in your life, you say you've discovered the true power of psychology.
Speaker 2:That's right. Well, I think for years I worked with other people and I was so focused on how psychology could help other people in their lives and how I could use it professionally. And sometimes you're so busy with work that you're just automatically in your home, you're on the treadmill, really, and it's only when my health broke down and I couldn't work anymore.
Speaker 2:Back in 2013, I was diagnosed with breast cancer and then it quite quickly spread and it got into my bones. It got all over the place, which meant that I was stage four, which is deemed uncurable, and my program my health planning and program at the hospital was was termed as palliative, really, and it was how do you deal with that challenge, really? And it gave me a chance to stop, get off the treadmill and just say I need to use this for myself. I can't help anyone else until I help myself. I've got two very small children at the time. I owe it to them to use it for us to get better and to make it through this. So really, they say necessity is the mother of all inventions, ain't they? So sometimes you only dig deep and use stuff when you need to and really use a little strength when you need to and it's really helped.
Speaker 2:So now it's a case of really I'm still not working. I haven't gone back to work, I've not been well enough because a lot of my treatments make me very tired I deal with fatigue and achiness and so on but I'm still able to use psychology in my everyday life and sometimes I get a phone call for someone with an SOS who's in a difficult situation and I'm able to use it informally and more and more I realise that in a sense, we're all psychologists. We can all use psychology. Psychology is for everyone and you're related this often when a lot of my friends, at this time in their life, have teenagers who are thinking where do I want to go next? And if they're not sure they maybe they do well to maybe become a graduate and have a degree so that they could enter certain professions that require graduate status, but they're not sure what subjects to do. I often say psychology is a great one, because wherever there's people, even if you're designing machines, who are you designing them for? You're designing them for people.
Speaker 1:so I'm a great fan of psychology and I think in my life as a fellow psychologist I really can relate to what you're saying and it is interesting. I mean you've said it all so quickly and you've got a similar history in terms of health to my first guest, sivirina Williams, who's also diagnosed, but with safe delivery of breast cancer at the time. And you know, for you you say it now and it's almost as if it's it wasn't a big thing. You know it doesn't maybe not feel like that to you now, but I'm just really interesting how you just said you know we're all psychologists. Of course we're all psychologists, but you know, I guess you know is there's a difference between using psychology consciously and just being aware that, because we're interacting with people every day, there's an element of psychology in every interaction that we do. So you know, I know that you're going to be talking about how you use psychology every day, but you know I'm just pleased that you have recovered from stage 4 cancer. Have you fully recovered from stage 4?
Speaker 2:I've not been given the all clear, just in case anything's still lurking around. But I have regular scans and the tumours that were there before it started as breast cancer but then it went to the lymph, the lymphatic system. I had little tumours under my arm. It went to the bones, it was in the liver, it was in the lungs. It was all over the shop really. But luckily, bit by bit, every scan has improved and now a CT scan doesn't show any. But I've not been given the all clear, in that I still have to keep up with the treatments and keep making my children clear. But you know, in that sense you know when you've not got tumours and you've had so many it's huge, huge progress.
Speaker 1:So, from the time of being diagnosed and then realising that you weren't fit or healthy enough to work, what sort of psychology did you use to just come to terms with your future and your prospect of no longer being this working mother as such, although when you're at home and you're managing the home and you're managing your children, you're?
Speaker 1:still working in my eyes, but you know what sort of psychology did you use to help you to cope with your diagnosis and then to move forward, to be able to help your children in different ways, which you'll talk about, and also to reach out to others to support them?
Speaker 2:Well, of course, at first I had a very human response, which was how on earth am I going to get through this? And this didn't happen overnight. It wasn't, like you know, I had total confidence, although there was a quiet feeling that came from my faith that, you know, I was brought up Christian and still very much believing in God, and that the universe is on your side, really, that everything, like how weeds can grow through paving stones and things, that really everything is working towards life. But that brings me on to the main side of psychology I used, which was very cognitive. It was the cognitive approach that's behind cognitive education that I used to specialise in, as you said, I went abroad and trained in but cognitive behavioural therapies as well. And everything begins with your belief system. Once you know that all your feelings, all your how you experience life, all your thoughts and emotions, they all stem from your belief system. So it took adjusting that.
Speaker 2:So I realised that part of my identity as, at the time, a psychologist, a practicing, a seeing psychologist, a mum and a wife, part of who I felt I was was about what I did. And I had to change that belief and believe actually I am me, whatever job I do, whether I had had children or not had children, whatever path I took in life, you know, but the soul level I am me and that can't change and actually if you believe in the afterlife, it will never change until the end of time and when you start to have that belief, you're not defined by what you do, because when you lose all your energy, when you get really sick and ill and you can't even cross a room without getting out of breath and having to sit down again, it's a struggle to climb stairs, it's a struggle to do anything, even to get out of bed.
Speaker 2:You know. But you just have to have that belief that you can do it and that you'll find ways to do it. So even at times where I didn't have the strength to actually stand up and go against gravity, I would. What I would do is I'd make sure everything next to my bed was clear and I'd actually tip myself out of bed. I think gravity will help me if I put my feet down.
Speaker 1:So the mindset, you say depends.
Speaker 2:And I do think that once you start to, whenever you get anxious or worried or overwhelmed which is totally human and it's not I want to say here but it's not to say that if you're a psychologist or a lay person who uses psychology, that that protects you from any sadness or anxiety or getting cross with your children or anything. Of course it doesn't, but it means that when life goes wrong, when inevitably things go wrong and you have a very human response to it, you can reflect. It just gives you those tools for affection and you can learn from it and you can know what works, what doesn't work. And you can use that scientific approach as well because, as you know, when you work in schools, it's very much about somebody who refers you because they see that there's a problem, things aren't going as well as they would want, that for that child, family situation in the classroom, and you know learning isn't going as quickly as they'd like and you come from it with the belief that everyone can learn and that there's many different ways to learn and that actually it might be that the learning environment needs changing. If you change the environment, then it takes someone from.
Speaker 2:We're only disabled by our environment. Disability only exists where there's a mismatch between the person and their environment. So if you need to use a wheelchair, if you have a house and a car and ramps in and out, if you have everything you need to access everything in a wheelchair, you're actually, in a sense, no longer disabled, you're enabled. And obviously, when we think of disability, we often think of a wheelchair and that's the symbol for disability wherever you see it. But there's so many different ways to be disabled and there's so many invisible disabilities that we don't realise that somebody is struggling with the environment as it is. But they're only struggling because that environment has barriers and our job as psychologists is often to bring down those barriers and create access for all.
Speaker 1:So you're able to do that, and you said one approach was the cognitive, behavioural approach, where it's all about the mindset and your belief system. So you believed that you had the resources, the willpower, the strength to actually not I wouldn't say overcome, but to cope and manage with your situation, and it helped you. How did you help your family at the time to come to terms with the diagnosis? What psychology was useful then?
Speaker 2:I suppose, yeah, really with my children it was very much about communication, about the idea that the premise of therapy and psychology, which is that talking about something, it helps and that silence, just suffering in silence, is what lets things just bubble away under the surface. So bringing things to consciousness, allowing them to ask me questions, talking about things, being very, very open about things and open about that hope, because I do really feel that psychology can give you hope, because it's all based on the idea that for every problem there's possible solutions. And once you've come across that now, I say that to my children back then when they were little, and also now that they're sort of teenagers and a nearly teenager. Whenever there's a problem at school, with friendships, with anything at home, if we keep getting, you know, cross with each other about using the bathroom, or something like that just normal everyday thing during lockdown.
Speaker 2:You know, when we're locked down together, you just say, well, there must be a solution. For every problem there's a solution. Let's come up with some ideas together.
Speaker 1:So would you say you're sort of a solution focused family, Definitely definitely.
Speaker 2:The solution focused effect approach is all about the idea, isn't it, of course, of looking for the exceptions. So even if you have a problem that is really persistent and really serious like the health problem I had, the health problems that sometimes my daughters had as well there's always going to be exceptions. There's going to be times when you feel well or better. There's going to be time. There's a whole range, and that's the other thing about disability that people often don't understand. They think it's just a constant thing that you always feel the same way. But there's a whole range of ability depending on how enabling the environment is, depending on how much rest you've had, depending on your emotional environment. What I've realised is that actually just being really holistic has really helped us, that you know when you, when you have joy, when something brings you joy, then even if you're absolutely exhausted, sometimes it gives you that boost of energy.
Speaker 1:So having children.
Speaker 2:You know the greatest thing about children in a way, is the joy that they can bring in terms of enriching your life.
Speaker 1:So even at those times where you feel that you know you have no life, you know you're not sure what the future holds and what the prognosis of your diagnosis will be. Just hearing their voices every morning, seeing their little faces, feeling their soft skin against yours when they hug, you can just bring that hope, can't it? Definitely so. You know you've mentioned that to me when we spoke that both your daughters have dyslexia, and dyslexia is something that is is quite common these days. How did you use psychology to help your, your daughters to come to understand what dyslexia is all about and to map perhaps not certain limits on on what they can achieve?
Speaker 2:I think it really helped that I had that experience before with other people's children and at first, when I was very poorly, there was this frustration in me because for years I'd helped other people's children with their learning issues and then at one stage I was just too poorly and I could see that my girls were having a bit of trouble accessing the curriculum and that they needed a slightly different approach. And it was quite difficult at first to have the energy to help them at all with that. But at least I knew with questions to ask at the school and and was able to give input as a parent and request that they had individual education fans and so on. So at first it was just about trying to encourage the school to support. But as I got better and was more able to if I rested during the day, then when they came back from school I was able to help them more and more with their homework, almost like an informal tutor or mentor, but also as mum.
Speaker 2:And of course they do say sometimes don't work with your own children because of course the emotions get in the way sometimes, but the positive thing about that is that actually I think when kids go to a teacher or a tutor, they're still on their best behaviour and if they're really frustrated they might just hold it in. But in the safety of their own home with their own mum, they could just like scream and say this is a totally fine thing.
Speaker 1:So many parents that I talked to in my job as an education psychologist, so how difficult it is to support their children with homework because of the emotional side of things, they're connected. They see you as mum or dad, as parents and that was teacher and sometimes it's difficult to you know make a distinction between those roles. So you know what sorts of what tips could you give to parents out there in terms of psychological strategies they could use to help them to help their children with homework?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I suppose I would say just please try not to take it personally. It's very hard because of course, it's being directed at you, but this is a projection of all their frustration and all their feeling of inadequacy at the time if they've been set a task that's not quite right for them, because even the best teachers in the world will set a task and they never truly know how the child's going to respond. The best teachers in the world would, of course, differentiate. They'll set different tasks for different students that are meant to be pitched at the right level, and the psychologist Vigotsky spoke about the zone of proximal development as being this zone of ability, this range of ability where you know you can do things with help, but you might not be able to do it on your own. And the next step of where you're going, where you're heading for, but if you, if they're a bit too much out of their comfort zone, is something that it's about breaking it down. It's about saying to them this is frustrating, acknowledging that frustration, and something that I learned from the professor in Jerusalem was that that learning is frustrating. Learning is frustrating. Basically, if you stay in your comfort zone, you'll never learn anything. Just stay with what you already know and stay with what you can already do and you'll never make progress.
Speaker 2:And that's why toddlers get so. They throw tantrums, don't they? Because they want to move, they want to talk, they want to be able to act on their world and they're beginning. It's tantalizingly close that they're able to do those things, but they're not quite there yet and you get all the tantrums. And then we have our other transition, which is when they become teenagers and they're nearly an adult, but not quite, and they want to be out there in the world, acting on the world, being their own free agent. But they're not quite ready. For a start, they can't, and they're very money yet. If they're at school or you know so, they still need mum and dad. So that frustration can really come through and knowing that that's just a natural part of child development, that's where my knowledge of child development and I can just take a step back, take a, take a breath. Not always. Sometimes I just argue back because I'm human.
Speaker 2:But but when that happens, we all take a breath, you know, take five and then come back to it.
Speaker 1:Realizing this is telling us that this is frustrating because you're nearly there absolutely, and I think we're just going to take a break at this moment, michelle, a little break on the teenagers. We'll pick up psychology to help your teenagers. When we come back, we'll be right back. Welcome back. I'm talking to Michelle Georgia Mohammed, who is a psychologist, teacher and mother, and today Michelle is talking about the power of psychology. So, michelle, you mentioned quite a few different psychological approaches that you use on an everyday basis and for our listeners it might be nice just to have some examples of how you use them. So, if we talk about children with autism or young people with autism, I think these days we're definitely more aware of the ASD autism spectrum disorder. We know someone or someone who knows someone who has autism, so maybe you can talk about, you know what you understand about ASD and very often children on the spectrum or young people with ASD exhibits anxiety. So yeah, that's right.
Speaker 2:That was my earliest specialism. I started my first degree in psychology at 18 and in the second year, when I was 90, I was asked to do a practical placement. We had to just go and apply psychology somewhere in the real world and a friend of my mums ran an autistic unit and that's where I first, all those many moons ago, became interested in education for autistic young people. But now, after all these years of working with young people on the spectrum, I realised more and more that the things that help people with a diagnosis would also help people without a diagnosis, and the things that help children also can help adults. Those approaches and one of the things is that just change is stressful.
Speaker 2:It's particularly stressful in an autism spectrum, but it's actually stressful for everybody, and so if there's going to be a change, that preparation, looking ahead and saying this is what's going to happen next, and a lot of in the teacher approach and certain approaches to teaching autistic children have now become more mainstreamed and they're used in all mainstream classrooms for all of the children to help them and things like the visual timetable. So, for example, in my kitchen I have a huge dry white board and different colour dry white pens and we constantly plan ahead what's the week ahead and I have a calendar with the months ahead as well, and so that we've always got that idea of what's coming next. What are we going to need to do to prepare any anxieties about it? We can have a little chat before and then a debrief afterwards, but it just means that my girls know what's going to happen next.
Speaker 1:And that creates a nice calm home atmosphere, doesn't it?
Speaker 2:If everybody knows what's coming up, then obviously we can't control everything that happens Exactly and I find that if you can be really clear and transparent and open and forward-planning about what you know is going to happen or what is scheduled to happen, then there's less anxiety for that and you can say that for the things that you can't plan for, that you don't know it's going to happen, like suddenly something gets cancer, a trick gets cancer because of a storm or something, and that's life and that's part of your child's learning as well and there's a lot of psychology around that.
Speaker 2:To just talk about how much control we have over life, we can't necessarily control what happens to us, but we can control how we respond. So I've really found that has been very helpful and also from the dynamic assessment work I used to do, I found that I can use that because one of my daughters she's really had trouble settling and paying attention. I never got her a diagnosis of ADHD, but she was a very active little toddler. She was all over the place and that wasn't a very good combination with a very ill mummy. She was very slow. She was such a fast child.
Speaker 2:She really was not very well matched at that point Energetically, but emotionally of course yes, and in other ways, but one of the things I found was that it was really hard for her to concentrate, and we've done a assessment. The whole idea is as dynamic as it suggests. You change things during an assessment. So instead of just giving a fixed test and giving someone a score and, if they don't do very well on it, still being none the wiser about what's going to work In the test, you change what you do and you work out what works, what's going to help, and one of the most powerful things I used in schools and then used with homework was something as cost-effective and simple as a blank sheet of A4. Literally, a black piece of A4.
Speaker 1:Okay, so Perik had that, so a black sheet of A4 is all you need. What do you do so?
Speaker 2:all you need to do is when a child is feeling really overwhelmed and you watch their eyes, you'll see their eyes are going all over the page or over the shop and they're overwhelmed. It's information overload. All you need to do is take your blank piece of A4 and just cover most of the page. Just expose the very beginning, what it says, and cover the rest, and that way you're chunking, you're making things more manageable, you're reducing the visual load, you're reducing the cognitive load, you're calming them down and making it more manageable, and that way they can actually then be passed. It's very symbolic and very practical as well that you pass by the end of it. You show them how they can just look at how much information they can deal with at a time, and that's part of your assessment as well. You'll know what level of text, how much text they can take in in one go without being overwhelmed, and that you can let other people know that too. And then at the end of it you give them that and you say look, use this when you feel that the page is too busy. There's too many songs it is.
Speaker 2:Sometimes these mass text books are full of sums. You might have 100 on one page even, or 50 on one page, and it's just too much. So just one at a time. Or reading a book just and losing your place. Often with dyslexia or attention problems, the eyes move, they're distracted by something else and when you come back you've lost your place. So just using the blank sheet of A4 as just a page marker, just moving down the page, just delivering one line at a time, so something as simple as that, as accessible as that.
Speaker 2:We've all got paper, even if you've got just an unused envelope or something, if you've run out of A4 paper we've all got something we could use and I'd call it their cover page and I'd hand it to the child or to my child and say you know, it's yours. And sometimes it would be as if I'd given them a gift worth hundreds of pounds that their faces would light up, you know, because they felt I'd really given them a tool that they could use.
Speaker 1:Well, I think that's a really good tool that you know that listeners out there who have children or have you know, I don't know adults that they support with anxiety Sue's, can use that approach in life. I think that's a really good idea.
Speaker 2:Just a chunky thing, one step at a time, the more manageable step at a time, yeah, and that's it.
Speaker 1:when we're faced with challenges as adults, if we think about the whole thing, it can be overwhelming, can't it Exactly so? You just take one step at a time, one little bite at a time, and then somehow you just feel that managing. So thanks for sharing that. So you also mentioned visualisation techniques, so that's right and they've been born from things like sports psychology.
Speaker 2:Often, you know, like David Beckham visualising his perfect goal, and they're really used in the field of sports, you know, and lots of top teams. You'll have two teams and they'll be neck and neck in terms of their physical ability and their experience. But what sets them apart, what gives them that winning edge, is the psychology. And visualisation can be used as well in your health. So, for example, I would visualise tumours melting down and being swept away by my healthier lymph, and I drink loads of water and I'd walk by my, my partner. Next door to me there's a little brook that runs through it and I'd really, if I was up to having a tiny walk, just look at the water. Or even if I just sat and looked at the water or just imagined, when this is the thing, the power of your mind. Again, that's something that's free. A sheet of paper is almost free and your mind is totally free. So the power of that can really set you apart. And you know there may be all sorts of expensive treatments that can help, but at the end of the day, what will set one person's health or one person's business apart from another is just that belief, that this psychology, so the power of the mind, is amazing. And I'll just give you an example of what I used to do. There was a technique I used to use where I was visualising things and then, at the end of that visualisation, meditation that you do, it asks you where would you like to be in six months time? Imagine yourself in a positive way in six months time you know further down the line, and then a year, and in five years, and it's really encouraging you to have a positive view of the future. And that's what the placebo effect is based on. That's what sort of self-fulfilling prophecy is based on the idea that you get what you expect. And I'll just give you a little example.
Speaker 2:One was when I could barely walk. I imagined that I I would close my eyes and imagine I was walking along a beach and my daughters were running ahead of me and collecting up shells. And only sort of six months, a year later, I was well enough to go on a holiday. It was all inclusive and all my travel was arranged and I was very looked after and everything was cooked for me and everything.
Speaker 2:But then what happened was I found myself on a beach and because the weather again, talking about enabling environments in the canary owls, if you've got a problem with your bones, unfortunately living in London isn't the greatest thing because we're really damned look, you're getting sold here. It's very humid, whereas if you go to a dry, warm environment, it's amazing. Your bone, your, your joints work so much better. And there I was, walking on the beach. I thought this is it, this is what I visualized. It's manifesting and I took a photograph of it and I saved it as my screen saver, just to remind myself. Start imagining new things. This one has already come to pass.
Speaker 1:And what next was that up? So again that resonated with me in a really big way. I do believe in the para visualization and visualizing and manifestations. What would you say to people who think this all sounds a little bit airy fairy and that if you've got a serious health diagnosis no amount of visualization is going to help? Because we know that there's research out there that shows that, you know, with a positive mindset of visualization you can heal yourself. So what would you say to the latest?
Speaker 2:it's evidence based, but what I would say to them is that nobody's making them have to believe this if it's not for them not the same thing won't work for everybody if they really don't feel comfortable.
Speaker 2:I suppose if it was someone I really know well and I had time to explore it more with them, I would really try and explore what belief is behind that. What's the belief they're operating? As I said before, everything starts with your belief system. Is it even that they don't dare to believe that? There's a part of them that is scared to believe that? Because what's the what if they visualize and it doesn't work? And, for example, one of my one of my daughter's friends was saying about they're doing GCSEs, was saying I'm not working hard. She was saying come on, let's just really get pull off, put on it next out, put our fingers out this, this week, this year, and and and really work hard. And he said, well, in a way I'd rather not work out hard because then if I fail, at least I didn't bother.
Speaker 2:I know it's going to be bothering and she said no, it's the opposite. Work hard and then at least you know you did your best but sometimes we was losing psychology. But yeah, I mean. The thing I'd say is that you've got nothing to lose, you've got nothing to and everything to gain potentially absolutely no, that's.
Speaker 1:That's really good, and I like the the whole thought of daring to believe, because sometimes we I just pull a fear, aren't we? And that's so fearful and it is normal to be fearful, but I think sometimes being fearful can be disabling. It can.
Speaker 2:Now I think it's where you look at what's the positive fear and what's negative fear. Positive fear is where you start to feel oh, save your walking home at night. Oh, something feels off here. The hairs at the back of your neck might just prickle up and you just think something really doesn't feel right here and you decide that you're going to jump in a cab instead or you're going to go into the next shock that you pass. There's just a feeling that something, and then afterwards you find out that something did go very wrong.
Speaker 2:Our instincts are incredible and some of the research that really helped me in my journey is called the Radical Remission Project. That was through Harvard Research and a woman out there in America who had been working at a cancer centre. She decided she was very solution-focused. She decided we always looking at the disease and how it goes wrong and what goes on in the disease. But what about these people who, against the odds, get better? Let's study them. Let's study the exceptions. What are the exceptions to the problem? And she meta-analyzed a thousand cases of radical remission where people with advanced so-called incurable cancer came back and she found that what they had in common were 10 different things and one of them was they trusted their instincts. So even instinct is scientific. It's not boo-boo. It's a very low level of thought and a very fast level of thought that you can't verbalise yet, but it comes from somewhere, for a reason.
Speaker 2:And sometimes we're just picking up on energy. We are energy. At the end of the day, we're not just matter, we are energy. We are energy. And you're picking up on bad energy or good energy, and that is scientific, and more and more the field of neuroscience, of energy science, is proving that.
Speaker 1:That's so interesting, isn't it? The whole idea of bad energy and good energy. We know this. We can walk into a room and you say this instincts take over you say something's wrong.
Speaker 2:You know when someone's talking about you? Yeah.
Speaker 1:Did you go?
Speaker 2:back yeah.
Speaker 1:Did you just feel it was wrong?
Speaker 2:I suppose when it becomes negative, fear is when you stay, and it's the same with stress. Stress is actually in a fight or flight situation. If there's something bad, the adrenaline kicks in and gives you the energy to be able to run away or to fight. What happens is when you can't switch that off. You don't have the off-situ and it's chronic stress. That's when we get ill. But individual stressful situations are actually adaptive and they're good for us. It's only when you can't switch it off. And the same with fear. I suppose stress and fear are very similar, aren't they?
Speaker 1:Interesting that you mentioned stress and fear. Perhaps you can help me. So I'm experiencing both of those at the moment stress and fear, in that I have an 18-year-old who's going off to uni and will be leaving home. I'm very sad, and yet it's a normal part of that transition to adulthood. So how would you advise me to manage my stress and my fear of the unknown, the uncertainty of what's going to happen in the future, with him being away from my watchful eye?
Speaker 2:Well, I'm sure there's loads of parents out there who can really identify with that and I predict to me already, even when they start going out with friends on their own and catching a bus on their own and so on, that feeling of well, you see your role as protector, as parent-parent, but at some stage down the line, a good parent allows their child the freedom to explore the world on their own and be independent. So I suppose it's about redefining your role and that comes from your belief system and updating that. Updating your role as a mother, your role as a parent, your role in their life, as being someone who's there for them, but not always physically there. Emotionally, you're there for them all the time, but, as you say, it's absolutely natural. And actually re-educating your brain, because unless we update our brains, we're still stuck in the idea that it's our job to feed our kids close.
Speaker 2:Our kids do this, do that and every now and then, as they go up another stage of their development, it's time to reevaluate what is our role, what is their role? And actually not allowing them enough freedom is in itself not good for them. It's actually bad parenting. So being able to just readjust, as I said before, how I had to readjust my image of myself, my concept of myself, when life changed for me and I wasn't defining my success and myself in terms of my career anymore. What's your success as a mum? It is when you've actually prepared your child to leave the nest.
Speaker 1:Well, I think that's it, though I'm just thinking, I'm just wondering how well I might prepare, because, well, this is your doubt in yourself.
Speaker 2:So actually this, is where the solution focus thing helps.
Speaker 1:Where are the exceptions?
Speaker 2:And think of your child and time they've done things totally independently For example you didn't sit those A-levels for him.
Speaker 2:He did them himself. So we can rise to the occasion. As I said before, we only know what we're capable of when we dig deep and we're in a situation where we have to. But otherwise it's just a concept, it's an idea, and you often think with life, oh, I'd never be able to get through that yourself or for your loved ones. Surely, we won't get through this, but it's amazing how resilient we are. And so, thinking of exceptions, thinking of a time when he's surprised you with how independent he's been or how he's been able to actually help you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, it's been happening with this podcast. It sounds like another clue, but I suppose you know when you say it goes back to your core belief system, and I suppose the belief system that I've got around him leaving is that perhaps I haven't prepared him enough for adulthood, can't cook his solution to my question about how he was going to feed himself All you need to do is buy me an air fryer and I've got YouTube. It's our new concept. He's absolutely right.
Speaker 2:And that is something that we're thinking back to. When we left home, I mean, I wanted to be vegetarian and so I bought loads of vegetarian cookbooks, but you can teach yourself really, and having that faith that he can learn, you learned enough to get him to university and he will learn. It's the same with learning to drive it's absolutely terrifying at first. Those that are scared are probably the most responsible drivers because they realise that they could do damage if they don't do this well. So that's again about positive fear, knowing that as you become a responsible adult in this world, you have responsibility for what you do and the effect it has on other people. So a certain amount of fear is absolutely natural and actually even positive in places, and a certain amount of anxiety and nerves means you just care about it. They say that about performers, don't they?
Speaker 1:They get anxious.
Speaker 2:They get nerves because they care, because they want to do a good job. But there's also the concept of the good enough parent. All you need to have done is be good enough to have kept them alive and to go through all these stages of development, and then, once they're an adult, they carry on. You pass the button to them and you're always there for them, but you've given them the skills and schools have given them the skills to then be able to learn what they need to themselves.
Speaker 1:Thank you for that. That's been really helpful. Well, I think we've managed to just touch upon all the areas that I think we'd set out to in terms of the true power of psychology in our everyday lives. I don't think we should speak about behavioural therapy and the use of association. Maybe you can talk just a little bit about that before we draw to a close.
Speaker 2:Oh yes, I suppose what I realised was that probably one of the simplest forms of stimulus response psychology, where you just associate things. I've heard of Pavlov and his dogs, the idea of just having a positive association or a negative association with a certain event, and how powerful that is and how those two things become associated and how I've used that in a positive way. So, for example, my daughter who hates reading, who's in the garden centre and she saw this wonderful swing chair. So I made a deal with her. I said tell you what that can be your reading chair.
Speaker 1:Very good.
Speaker 2:She says to me to put in that lovely chair. She's beginning to feel more positive about reading. And another example is that one of my medicines that I was taking for treatment for my bones, I had to go to the infusion suite. I had to have a drink and I really obviously didn't like it at first, because it's totally natural not to want people to stick me in. But at that hospital my local hospital there's a little pharmacy and gift shop and they had really really cheap deals on toiletries and perfumes. So for the first few cycles that I went I would buy myself a gift and I thought, well, I'm out and I still have to do more. It's almost like going to a shopping centre and I get my cheap, my good deals below RRP on my plan.
Speaker 2:So, associated going, so I would say associated with positive events.
Speaker 1:Positive events. So you have the dreadful needle going with a positive event of going shopping, my favourite thing. I think, yes, that's a really good one. If you were going, if you wanted to just leave one bit of advice for our listeners today in terms of the power of psychology, what would that be?
Speaker 2:I think it would just be that there are so many solutions out there. Psychology is all about solutions, and you might not come across it the first time you try, but just test it. Test it out. Will this help? And there's so much you can try. And now we're living in an age where, yes, technology can have its downsides and there's the dark web, but it also it's a hugely powerful tool you can research. So if you can be your own scientist, you can be your own researcher. The answer is out there.
Speaker 1:Okay, you heard it first. The answer is out there and the answer is in within as well. Often we have our own answers, our own solutions, if we just care to stop and really think and listen to our instincts and your apps.
Speaker 2:Right and, as that radical emission research showed, that our instincts can guide us, and Carl Jung called it the collective unconscious, really that idea that sometimes you can almost energetically tap into the solutions and the knowledge that's out there. You know, among humankind, and sometimes we don't even know how we know, but, as you say, you still yourself and if you have that belief that there is a solution, you know, you go to bed that night and you wake up in the morning and you have a really good idea. No idea where it came from, but it's just there.
Speaker 1:Well, Michelle, it's been absolutely wonderful speaking with you today about psychology.
Speaker 2:So colleges two psychologists.
Speaker 1:But it's really fascinating and I think I'm just inspired by the way you like my first guest, Serena Williams, who was also diagnosed with breast cancer, as I've mentioned before but how you were able to use all your training and expertise to actually make sense of your own life after your diagnosis and just moving forward in how positive and beautiful and bright and just supportive you are to people out there who may be on a similar journey. So thank you very much for that and I'd like to ask my guest at the end to either share a favourite piece of music or song that they might be listening to at the moment, or maybe share a favourite book, because I really like reading. I might, your daughter.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've tried to say anything so far.
Speaker 1:You are good mom, you tried to set the plan. Reading's good, so in one of those.
Speaker 2:The last book I read actually was called the Island of Missing Trees, by Elif Shafak and a lovely Turkish sit period author, and it's absolutely beautifully written and one of the main elements of this story is about a fig tree and I have one in my garden that was roamed from cutting, that my Greek grandmother gave me and is going to a huge tree and it's really beautiful. It's about the power of nature and how actually plants are much more intelligent than we realise. They actually communicate through their root systems and that's one of the themes of the book, and so that was really beautiful just trusting that nature is intelligent.
Speaker 1:We are intelligent and nature is intelligent. Nature is in charge, isn't it?
Speaker 2:anyway, look at the pandemic, you know. Okay, lovely.
Speaker 1:So you're here. I did Viewers. Please do read. Sorry, I've forgotten already.
Speaker 2:My short so memory, elif Shafak, and it's the Island of Missing Trees.
Speaker 1:The Island of Missing Trees. Okay, well, thank you, michelle, and all the best in the future.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for having me. Thank you.