Dear Difference Maker,

Grab a cup of coffee because I have a lot to say today.  Not so much because I think you need it as much as I’ve made it my business to say it.  I think that deep down you already know how we, as a society, are inadvertently creating a debilitating Catch-22 for far too many children over the past three decades.

As you are also aware, there’s been an alarming uptick in failing grades as early as the first Quarter because of isolation. Now more than ever before we must be mindful of the mental health impact of this pandemic on students grades.

Even our highest performing students say the toll of this pandemic on their mental health is skyrocketing depression and anxiety.  I think we can all agree that now is not the time to put additional stressors on students that are just barely making it.

This is not a time to try to cram large quantities of content into their brains. This is a time to build what needed to have always been done:   Create safe, inclusive classroom community first to open the doors for learning readiness.

Trust the newest neuroscience along with the science of epigenetics:  students can in fact catch up academically in the right mental, emotional environment.  One of the ways we can bring much needed relief to troubled minds is with my Relabeling Technique.

Relabeling is not only one of my signature techniques, it’s my WHY behind 40 years of helping children and adults get to the heart of what’s really going on with the words we use to describe each other and how powerful they are to either limit learning or accelerate it.

Having been labeled my parent’s “problem” child I am eternally grateful that the current diagnoses being used today were not in existence for my parents to use to explain me to others.  I’m pretty sure I would have been their Alphabet Soup kid, i.e., a kid who is given multiple diagnoses.  I had more than enough to unpack and come up over as it was.

There are currently 28 diagnoses being used to explain unproductive and unskillful behaviors along with learning style discrepancies today:  ND/NT, ADD, ADHD, CDD, ASD, Aspie, OCD, ODD, SPD/HSP/HSC, ED/SED, DS, SN, LD/SLD, LPD, RAD, RSD, HFA/H-FAD, DMDD, DLD, MPS-VI, PDA, GATS

Is anyone seeing a problematic pattern here?

Here’s the irony:  the most effective communication techniques and tools for working with diagnosed students are the same exact techniques and tools that work with students whose social-emotional behavior and learning abilities we consider normal!

Here’s a field-tested fact:  you can be doing everything the right way, using the most effective tools and techniques currently being taught, but if you have even an infinitesimal unconscious bias coming through energetically as an attitude, vibe or tone then chances are, the students you are currently struggling with are not going to get the kind of results they could be getting without the limiting labels.

Take this to heart:  Anything after “I AM” chases you.

I have no idea at what age I became a “problem” child, all I remember from a very early age was that I  couldn’t make even one mistake without getting a significant dose of my mother’s VIBE of disdain, disapproval, judgment, skepticism and disappointment.

To distance themselves from anything they feared I might say or do when out in public, my parents more times than not introduced me as their “adopted” daughter, Mary.  After all, their gene’s weren’t responsible for how talkative, independent and active I was.

At the start of every school year, my mother made it a point to go in and introduce herself to my teachers to make a deal with them that if they believed about half I what I came to school talking about from home, she’d believe about half of what I came home from school telling her about.

When I became a teacher I learned that I was pretty much a normal kid after all.   In fact, it was very healing for me to know that there had never actually been anything wrong with me or the fact that I had preferences about how I learned best.

Because I was my parent’s “problem” child I was determined to never do to any child what my parents had done to me attitudinally, verbally and physically.

So in my third year of teaching when I greeted my classroom full of students with thick file folders, the first thing I did was get selective amnesia about every diminishing thing their previous teachers thought they should tell me about them.

The second thing I did was relabel them in my mind so that I would always talk to them (energetically) as if they could do everything I was asking them to do or learn.  Simply put: I treated them the way I wished I would have been treated day in and day out no matter what.

After the year we’ve all had, now is the time to experience the healing power of relabeling through community building.  The last 9-Weeks of any school year are pivotal in creating the excitement and expectancy of getting on with the next school year.

Learn more about how to make your classroom safe, all-inclusive and hum with academic productivity with my “9 Weeks to A Make A Difference Year” program.

Click the link for more information and be the one to set the tone!

Reaching out …

PS … For purchases over $100 Pre-Apply to Buy with a Purchase Order. School-Wide licensing is available.

Founder of Heart Productions & Publishing, the Pacific Northwest

Let’s Remove Life-Limiting Labels 
Excerpt from No Labels, No Limits eBook

How to fix what ain’t broken!

The problem is that our children are not broken. We just see them and treat them as if they are. This becomes the seeds that we plant, water and feed their minds. An adult’s belief, attitude, vibe and tone sets the stage for the story-line. It’s the cornerstone to everything that comes after.

Children are unskillful at problem solving, communicating and meeting expectations at an adult level.  So if they are unskillful, then that simply means teach the skill that’s helps them thrive.

How do you intervene? 

By learning to see the cues each individual’s neurological wiring is signaling with new eyes of understanding.

While diagnoses and labels are what gets children with differing learning levels, problematic behaviors and unskillful communication additional academic assistance and emotional support,
it remains a double-edge sword that, without relabeling,
will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
-Mary Robinson Reynolds, M.S.
Behavioral TurnAround Specialist 

This has been documented in mountains of research from Stanford to Harvard.  Check it out: Google the Pygmalion Effect or the Rosenthal Effect.

My students will tell you that I treated them like they could and so they did.  This student from my first year of teaching, was diagnosed as dyslexic.  I myself had been sent to remedial reading class in 6th grade for a month, so I knew how reading with others would help.  It wasn’t until the following summer that I got my Remedial Reading Endorsement K-12 to learn more.  However, what I learned was that what I intuitively decided to do with Rita was spot on.  I just removed the label and set her up for success.

What I’ve learned from my own upbringing and from working with 1000’s of other people’s children and raising three of my own, is that appearances are deceiving.

It may look like they are being oppositional, disrespectful, hyperactive, learning challenged but if you’ll just take 30 seconds to look behind the curtain, you’ll see what story is trying to be told.  Let’s find out what seeds have been planted in each of our psyches.

What you and your students are going to undertake in Week 8 will quickly shift energy, and without you trying so hard to get them to “get” what’s wrong with them, a new label can problem solve unproductive behaviors and excel academic productively.

Week 8 of my 9 Week program focuses on the transformational power of relabeling ourselves and others.

This is such an life-changing activity that if you have not seen any improvement with how your students are treating each other by Week 8 then I highly recommend you not do the relabeling activity until you have observed them being consistently kind to everyone in their classroom community.  It’s too important to not wait until you are certain that no one will make fun of anyone else.

If you still have students minimizing other students, go back to the beginning of this curriculum and begin again.  Put your investigator hat on and be even more vigilant about figuring out what’s going on for them that they are still not as caring and kind toward each other as you are deciding they can be.

If however, your students have been engaging with each other with care, then you are ready to do Week 8.  It is a life-changing activity and must be taken seriously.

There are literally hundreds of positive, life-affirming, mind-reprogramming adjectives to describe children and their behaviors and/or learning styles that we are not using.  Google “positive adjectives to describe children” then 1) get selective amnesia, and 2) begin again …

Whether you are a teacher or an administrator, I invite you to do your own labels first so you can take your own power back.  We all have stuff to unpack about what we’ve been told about ourselves that maybe we have not yet relabeled.

There was a time period in my professional journey where I felt I was speaking too much truth to power.  I felt that in doing so, I was not being responsible about filtering myself and it was risking my employment.   So I went to a therapist to find out what was going on for me that I was unable to filter myself anymore.  I selected an older wiser woman that I felt safe with.

After I summarized what had been happening, she simply said,

“Mary, let’s take a look at this picture. You are a single mother of a three-year-old, caring for him all by yourself 95% of the time. You are carving out a new career for yourself as an author, trainer and speaker, and you do this after a full day of work.

“Your workload requires that you be responsible for the counseling of 500 children in an elementary school where there happens to be abuse toward the children and parents who don’t exactly fit the system.

“You meet all of your financial obligations on time, and you maintain a house and a yard for you and your child. You house a college student to help care for your child in the evenings when you are speaking, after putting in a full day of work. You prepare meals and keep house.

“Where in this picture do you think you are not responsible enough?”

I was shocked. The fact that I was that responsible was news to me. She then asked me where I got this idea that I wasn’t responsible enough. And I knew right away.
It was my mother. My mother and I had argued and fought endlessly throughout my adolescent years. She had begun telling me I wasn’t responsible when I was very little, and it built from there to become very explosive by the time I was in high school. It was hell, to say the least.

The day I relabeled myself my life changed before my very eyes.  I’d been relabeling my students for years but it never occurred to me to relabel myself.  I have never again felt I wasn’t responsible enough.

I wept deeply as I felt the freedom from this life-long burden evaporate into thin air.

I want you to imagine, what freedom awaits you
and more importantly your students. 

I’ve done relabeling with children and adults of all ages for forty years now, and it never ceases to amaze me how people change when they take control of their lives in this way.

Relabeling is one of my signature techniques.  Use it safely.  Use it well.  When you invest in this curriculum you will receive my signature No Labels No Limits: RELABELING Technique with a full 1-hour training waiting for you in Week 8 online dashboard.  Plus my LIVE 90-minute performance at Portland Community College campus-wide faculty, staff, facility and custodial services on Re-Labeling Ourselves and Others.

Make the time to listen to it before you do this with your students.  You will be so glad you did.

KISS: Keep It Simple & Straightforward

Your Road Map:  1) one class period a week for nine weeks: play a heart connecting movie and/or engage students in a community building activity which you will then use to, 2) direct the conversation using my “done for you” questions to, 3) explore what is really on in your students’ hearts and minds.

When you follow my 9-Week Make A Difference Year Curriculum you will …

• slow everything down and breathe a collective breath.
• ease your students into constructive and productive social emotional engagement with “done for you” activities and discussion questions.
• learn deeper levels about each student by listening to them discuss “what came up” for them about the movie or activity.
• start tuning-in to your students’ “hidden stressors” that each of them is struggling with daily, not just academically, but socially and emotionally to build a common bond.
• experience the transformational power of my WIW – “What, If, When” – technique, to shift the energy of the room in 30 seconds or less as intense situations come up (and they will come up)!
• see unskillful behaviors with new eyes of understanding, hear with healing ears.
• be thrilled at how a safe, inclusive and caring community will yield calm minds and accelerate learning.
• marvel at how quickly students – particularly those who are normally behind – are able to catch up and even pull ahead.

Click the link for more information and get started now!

For purchases over $100 Pre-Apply to Buy with a Purchase Order. School-Wide licensing is available.