Tanya (00:01.876)
Okay I think that we are going live.

Tanya (00:15.65)
Just checking, just checking everywhere. Yep. It looks like I am live on Instagram and Facebook. Done it. So this is the first time that I am trying or attempting to do both Facebook and Instagram at the same time and going live. So hopefully it's working and you're seeing this. If you are seeing this live stream.

Let me know, let me know in the chat if you can see me. Send me a little hi or an emoji. Tell me where you're, if you're on Facebook or Instagram. I'd love to know. So I've really for ages wanted to go live on both platforms. And so I've been looking for a way that I can go, that I can do a live stream on both.

And today I want to talk a little bit about you and your well being. I know I often talk about your child's burnout, but parent burnout is one of the really big risks that we as parents run when we are taking care of our children who are in burnout full time.

And so I really wanted to talk about that today because it's a very real challenge for a lot of us. And I wanted to give you a free resource to help you and support you with this. So I know when my child was in burnout, just how much my own mental health struggled because I spent a lot of time just

co-regulating with them all day. I was worried all the time. There was lots of pressures and stress on me as a parent. A lot of times it felt like I was just living five minutes at a time. And that was really hard. It was really hard on me. It was really hard on my nervous system. There were several times where I felt like I was burnt out myself.

Tanya (02:45.512)
And there is, there's so much pressure. And I've spoken to a few parents this week who've said to me, you know, every time I try to just take five minutes for myself or do something for myself, my child needs me 24 seven, me not doing what they want me to or not being directly next to them on the couch will, you know, just causes a mouth down. And I just feel like

I am not even a person anymore, I'm just like a nervous system, a co-regulating nervous system. don't have, you know, my needs aren't acknowledged here and it's very hard for me to keep going. So that's why I wanted to chat to you today. So today I'm going to be talking about the following three things. Why you're

by reducing your own demands is crucial for both you and your child because low demand parenting isn't just lowering your child's demands. You need to be lowering your own demands as well. But that takes time, that takes practice. Also, I'm going to help you to identify what is truly important to you and then create a bare minimum plan with you.

yourself and your child and I will have a free resource of free pdf that you can go and download to be able to work this out where I just talk through all the steps and help you to do that. So why does parental well-being matter? Well the thing is is that you are the person that is holding it all together and

If you don't look after yourself, then who's going to look after everybody else?

Tanya (04:51.266)
there is a huge link between the stress that you're carrying and your child's burnout recovery. Because when we are low on spoons ourselves or we have low internal resources, we are a lot more likely to

not have patience, not being able to be an effective co-regulator. For me, when I know that my spurns are really low, can really, the first sign that shows up for me is resentment. Resentment towards my child, resentment towards my husband. I feel like I'm just doing everything for everybody else and

nobody is looking after me. But of course, it's my job to look after myself. But it can be really hard when you're in the everyday grind of parenting a child and burnout to be able to see anything anywhere past the situation. I

I liken this often to creating a shit portrait. So when we're in a shitty situation like parenting a child through burnout, it can color our whole lens of how we see absolutely everything through that lens. in the past I've likened that to like painting.

tapping your paintbrush into the shit situation and then painting the whole thing. And it just, you can't see past that because it is just so all consuming. It affects us and our mental health, our emotional regulation, our decision making and our connection with our child because we're just constantly in survival mode. The part of our brain that just wants to protect us.

Tanya (07:08.768)
And when we're in that part of our brain, connecting with another human being is really difficult. We shut ourselves off from our neocortex and our prefrontal cortex, which helps us to make good decisions. And it can just feel like you're just kind of in a fog. So I'm hoping that we can just kind of do.

a little breathing exercise together right now to just help us to engage part of that neocortex and then we can perhaps do some work together on trying to figure out what is the thing that is truly important to you, what are your true priorities and what are some of the things that you can let go of. So let's just take a moment.

to take a big deep breath in through our nose.

and they breathe out through our mouths.

I just want you to take a moment to ground yourself through your senses. So we're just going to do this together. It's a very simple exercise that we can do at any stage just to help us to come back into our bodies. So the first thing I'd like you to do is just to look around you. Look around your environment and notice five things that you can see and just name them in your head. So

Tanya (08:44.684)
If this was me, I've got a glass of water, I've got a plant, I've got my computer, I've got my microphone, I have a pen. So those are five things I can see. The next thing I want you to do, if it's safe for you to do this, close your eyes. And I want you just to really tune into your body, the feeling sense of your body, and just focus on four things that you can feel.

So it might be feeling your toes inside your shoes. If you're sitting, it might be where your body connects with the chair. It might be the feeling of your clothing on your body. It might be to tuck your hair up against your neck. Just tune into four things that you can feel.

The next thing that I want you to do while you have your eyes closed is to scan the environment and tune into your sense of hearing. What are three things that you can hear? So it might be the sound of my voice, it might be something in the background, it might be the hum of your computer. What are three things you can hear?

and now I want you to just direct your attention to your sense of smell and just see are there two things that you can smell at the moment

And then the last thing is our sense of taste. Is there one thing that you can taste? Now, when you're ready, just take another big deep breath in through your nose, breathe out through your mouth. And so hopefully you have some part of yourself that's back into the thinking part of your brain.

Tanya (10:52.834)
I use a lot of these with my membership. I do offer a free nervous system reset every week where I offer a little tip, a little thing that we can use as parents to help us to regulate ourselves, to take care of our vagus nerve so that we can feel more

more in touch with who we are in our body and look after our nervous system so that it doesn't burn out. So if there's something that you're interested in, let me know and I can send you some information. So what I'd like us to think about now, and this was, I think it was maybe Lisa Kordolf where I got this idea from, and it's something I've always...

especially when things have gotten really hectic and I felt like I've been juggling a lot of things. And so the idea here is like we're juggling all these balls right? And. But not all the balls that we are juggling have the same. Have the same urgency. Have the same importance, have the same priority. We have.

glass balls which are the things that if we let those balls drop to the ground they are going to shatter and it's going to mean you know some type of crisis in your family and then we have all these other balls if we're juggling and we don't sometimes we don't even realize that we're juggling them but they're like rubber balls if we let them drop they're just going to fall to the ground they're not going to break

And sometimes, like later on, we can catch them again. And so I want you just to stop and think for a moment. If you're listening to this in the podcast, you can pause the episode here and maybe even just grab a pen and paper and just write down what are your, what are your glass balls and what are your rubber balls? So an example of a glass ball might be

Tanya (13:09.418)
your mental health, it might be your child's health, it might be you know making sure that you keep the lights on, you know the basic sort of things that we have to do otherwise the whole thing just falls down. And then what are some of the things or some of the tasks that you're doing in the day?

that are actually rubber balls that you can let go of. What are your non-negotiables? And what are some of the things, some of the load that you're carrying that is actually not necessary? It's draining you. It's taking away your energy and you don't actually need to be carrying them. But you might not have thought that it's possible to actually drop this ball.

or you might feel like it's expected for you to carry this ball or to juggle this ball and here's the time for you to be able to give yourself permission to let that ball drop and if you're watching this live or if you're watching this in recording I'd love for you to tell me in the comments what is your

What are glass balls for you? What are rubber balls for you? Also, if you're watching this as a podcast, let me know in the comments. And, you know, what are some of the expectations that you're holding really, really tight to yourself that you can actually let go of? Sometimes I talk about like having the 1950s housewife on your shoulder telling you all the things that you should be doing.

in order to fall into the category of a good parent? What are some of the some of the areas that you're shooting yourself?

Tanya (15:15.982)
An example of this might be that you're really stressing to keep your house tidy. Because you've internalized the thought or the idea that if your house is a mess, that that means that you are lazy or you're a slob. Just insert any sort of label.

that you might have been given for if you are messy or you're not keeping a beautifully pristine tidy house. So, you know, one that might be a rubber ball that you're carrying, that might be something that you might need to let drop. If mess is something that really triggers you, you might just choose one room in your house that's a room for you.

that you keep neat and tidy, that you have control over, but you might let other areas of the house, you might let that go in those areas. So the next thing that we're going to do is once you have established your glass balls and your rubber balls and you've categorized them, I want you to think about creating a bare minimum plan.

A bare minimum plan is a simplified, low demand routine that meets the core needs of you and your family while reducing stress. So here are instructions on how to do this. I as I said, I have included a PDF that you can download and I am going to just put it on the screen now. This is where you can go.

to get your bare minimum plan. So tanyavalentine.co forward slash minimum. If you go here, it will show you you'll be able to go and download that plan. But basically what you do in a bare minimum plan is you list your weekly or your daily tasks and you categorize them. Are they essential or are they optional?

Tanya (17:37.674)
Is it a glass ball or is it a rubber ball? And then ask yourself for those tasks. Can I eliminate them? Can I reduce them? Or can I delegate them? There's a fourth thing that you can do here. And I got this idea from Martha Beck, and she talks about can you better that task so

If you can't reduce it, if you can't delegate it, if you can't eliminate it, can you better it? for example, I used to find cleaning the house to be a real drain of my energy. It was a real chore and I absolutely hated it. I dreaded it. But then I changed my mindset around it and I

I just see it as a time where I could actually do something for myself. So I pictured like as I was tidying things and organizing things and putting things in their place that I was almost like organizing my brain while I was doing it. Another way that and I really love the outcome of like a nice clean tidy space because that's visually appealing to me.

Another way that I make better that activity for myself or make that activity my time is by listening to an audiobook or a podcast or something that relates to my special interests. So that's one way that you can better a task and reclaim some of that is for yourself. So that's sort of the first two steps of that.

then ask yourself if it's if a task is essential and you can't better it, what are some ways that you can reduce the demands of that task or that demand? Where can you release some pressure from that? So it might be that you release your idea that you have to have a, you know,

Tanya (20:01.324)
a home cooked meal every day. It might look like meal prepping and just, you know, making sure that you have safe foods and have things that you can just pull out of the freezer or the fridge and just heat up instead of spending all your time and your spoons on cooking every day. It might mean that your family eats

chicken nuggets or beans on toast or scrambled egg on toast or whatever. And you let go of some of those ideas of like, we have to do all these things around meal times. It might mean that, you know, we let go of the idea that everybody needs to sit around the table and eat dinner. You know, maybe we allow people to sit in their own rooms and eat food.

or if your child really struggles at dinner time, you're allowed them to have a device at the dinner table. Letting go of some of these things doesn't make you lazy. It isn't cheating. It's actually looking after yourself and your energy and saying, my energy, my wellbeing is more important than these little tasks that I have given myself.

I was speaking to a mum recently and we talking about how when her child, she gets very little time where her child will be on an iPad or do something. And so when she does that, when her child does do that and is distracted, she spends all her time running around doing tasks, doing jobs and

instead of actually taking their time to just relax, sit down, do something that actually feeds her energy rather than drains her of energy. A lot of these things are, you know, what we've conditioned, we've conditioned to do in our mind rather than actual have tos. So, and the other

Tanya (22:27.45)
thing is to build and rest in self care. It makes those non negotiables because really they are they are essential. And I think another really important thing that we don't often talk enough about as parents is also making those making self compassion really important part of our lives to taking time to actually

Physically tell ourselves or feed ourselves kindness as if we were a really good friend to ourselves is so essential for helping us through as we navigate this burnout.

And you know, I hear you lots of parents might be saying things like, you know, I should be doing more. I'm not doing enough. say that that 1950s housewife might be sitting on your shoulder really screaming in your ear. You might find it really hard to say no, you know, you might find it really hard to ask for help.

And so some of these things are things that we really might have to work on and to be able to say no. And I realized that often the barrier with saying no is that we don't want to upset people or we don't want inconvenience people. And a lot of that for me was realizing, because I'm a reform people pleaser,

A lot of that for me was actually realizing that when it comes to boundaries, I can't have my cake and eat it, to use that cliche. But basically what it means, what it boils down to is my job when setting and maintaining a boundary is to set and maintain the boundary. And we're doing it out of love for ourself, we're doing it out of love for our family.

Tanya (24:40.841)
and

That is my job. That's all I have control over. How somebody else takes my boundary or how they feel about my boundary isn't my responsibility. And so part of the trick with creating boundaries and saying no is to start getting and telling yourself and telling your body that you are safe.

even though somebody else disagrees with you or somebody's upset with you. Because a lot of us have spent time in the fawning space and we have used fawning as a survival mode to appease everybody else and their feelings and their emotions and it feels really unsafe for us.

when we encounter confrontation or somebody that doesn't agree with us or somebody whose feelings are upset by our boundary.

And so, you know, that is something that we all, all of us, if your primary survival technique or survival strategy is fawning, survival state is fawning, because often we don't physically use it as a, like an intentional strategy. That is something that you may need to work on as a parent, as a person, to help you to start releasing.

Tanya (26:24.276)
some of that fear of upsetting others. If this is something that you have identified through listening to this that you might need some help or support with, please reach out to me. Please, you know, we can book a free 30 minute call where we can talk through some of this stuff and see how we can, how I can support you. I've also

left have a I'm just going to bring it up now I also have a membership

Tanya (27:02.58)
just bring up the so tanyavalentine.co.m membership. This is a membership for parents specifically who are navigating the child, neurodivergent child's burnout recovery. And we have things like resources in the group that you can use to support you on your journey, as well as a monthly coaching call.

where we talk about different things that might be, we might need some support with, or your situation, you know, areas that parents need some help in as they're navigating this recovery journey. So if you'd like to know more about it, send me a DM, send me on either Instagram or Facebook.

or you can go to this link and join us there. You can join us risk free with a seven day free trial so that you can see whether this is something that you might enjoy or you know and if you want to leave within the seven days you can keep all the resources that you have utilized. There are some some lovely joining bonuses those are yours to keep and

So there's no risk in joining us and we'd love to have you. So wrapping this up, I just want to leave you with three little tasks that you can do. So use the bare minimum plan. I'm just going to bring up the URL again for that. So go to this link and download your bare minimum plan today.

Create your bare minimum plan. And also just remember, you are not failing by doing less. You are prioritizing your wellbeing. You're listening to the wisdom of your body.

Tanya (29:16.002)
When our body budget is in negative, it's very hard for us to keep going. you know, really take a moment to let that sink in. You know, you can't, and I know this is a cliche and it's a cliche for a reason, but you really can't pour from an empty cup. And many of us are,

you know, are really empty, really depleted. So please take time to just look after yourself in some little way. And I really invite you to share your thoughts or your questions in the comments or send me a DM on Instagram or Facebook. handle is TanyaValentineNZ and I look forward to connecting with you again sometime soon.

Tanya (30:14.606)
for now.