Mastering Calm Living - for ourselves, our families and schools

November 8, 2021

Today, we are talking with a leading authority on calm parenting. She’s the author of two business self-help books, The Power of Conscious Choice, and Switch Off: How to Find Calm in a Noisy World. She’s an occupational therapist who has been working in schools for about 20 years now and has one key mission: to help young people live a little better and to support the adults doing the same - teachers, mentors and, of course, parents.

Angela and I were booked to deliver a parenting seminar together, but to be honest, coming into this interview I was hungry to learn from her. I felt a needed a 'calm guru' in my corner this week - and I wasn't disappointed. Angela knows her stuff. She's been featured Channel 9 Today EXTRA, The Australian Financial Review, Good Health magazine, Huffington Post,

Mamamia, Radio 2UE and numerous other parenting and lifestyle publications. Her regular segment on The Luke and Susie Show is syndicated across Australia.

Witnessing a lot of the anxieties that children are facing have in an overwhelming life, she got inspired to host A Kids' Life podcast. It’s about helping us to better understand the complexities of life as kids. She’s also been featured in numerous media publications and shows.

We covered a lot of ground in this interview.

What is calm and where does it come from - how do we manage our energy for a more balanced life.
What's her writing process?
The Inclusive Classroom - what does it look like and where does it start?
And of course - how does Angela define success, and how is she using education to scale that for her audience?

Angela is such is brimming with quality information and I know if you're a parent or educator wondering how to have a bigger, more positive impact in your home or school, then you're going to love this episode with Angela. excited to bring her on today—here’s Angela Lockwood.

To make the most out go this really insightful episode with Angela, I’m recommending that you to do two things:

Take the Lifestyle Design Quiz to get this concept of balance going right in your life. It’ll generate for you a free personal profile, your strength profile, your focus for growth, and some coaching questions to help you get clear on what is your next step.
Let’s have a chat about your fundamental beliefs. So, I'd love for you to book a call with me.

Podcast highlights:

[2:15] Switch Off and Find Calm: It is about how overstimulated our kids are in schools. Trying to minimize overwhelm in our lives really helps even us adults. It was a very life-changing process.

[4:19] Writing Process: Writing for me was always a way to minimize overwhelm and a way to clear my head. It was always a way to sort of make sense around my observations on life. I try to bring good logic and practical applications to bigger conceptual ideas.

[6:24] The Power of Conscious Choice: About how we make decisions in life, how do we learn from the ones that don't go particularly well, as equally as the ones that do go well, how do we simplify the decision-making process. It really made me look into my own psyche and how people do overcome big things in their life and learn from it and move on.

[11:00] Writing down recurring thoughts allows you to take a step back from it.

[16:54] Kids do face a lot of stress. They do have a lot of things going on in their mind. Some important strategy to teach children early: drawing a picture about how they're feeling or what's going on.
[12:49] Blending creative and logical: The power of conscious choice is all about how we make logical decisions and intuitive decisions—how the two need to come together. My intuition speaks really loudly and very clearly, so the slower I could calm my thinking, the more aware I am of what's around me.

[15:50] Setting up your own indicators: Manage your energy and be in tune with your body. When your heart's racing or when your brain's going fast. When it doesn’t feel right there, that your indicator that something needs to change.
[16:54] Energy Balance in Kids: Inclusive Classroom is a personalized learning approaches program to support teachers who have children with additional needs in their class from an occupational therapist perspective. My goal in life is to make life a little bit easier for kids that find it a bit tricky and a bit different.

[24:32] Ultimately, inclusion comes down to teacher beliefs. Every teacher does want the best for the kids in their class. They are doing their best with what they know, and they have a lot of overwhelm themselves.
[31:01] How kids learn: They learn how to fall over and pick themselves up. They learn to explore, they learn to look at things differently. Being in nature is so good for the soul, but equally it's great if we really break it down for our physical skills as well. When they're together in nature, problem-solving becomes just something they have to do.
[33:17] Success for me is when I know that a teacher's thought has changed the way that they see a child. In kids, I always get teary is when they look at me when they've done something they never thought they could.