Defining your Values as a Parent or a Professional Serving Families Perinatally or in Early Childhood Can Guide Your Work & Lighten The Load
Today’s episode is just an intimate conversation between you and I wanted to share a bit about what guides our work here at Learn With Less®, and how we make decisions about the resources we share, the people we bring on to join us on this platform, and the values that guide us.
Helpful Resources Related to This Episode:
Learn With Less® Infant & Toddler Development Blueprint: a free resource outlining the four major areas of development in the first three years, and how to use our 4-pillar framework to support and connect with your baby or toddler, without having to buy a single toy.
Learn With Less® Bundle: our best infant and toddler resources, including our bestselling books, fun family music album, a pre-recorded Learn With Less® “Caregiver & Me” class, and a 1-page handout outlining how you can take everything we did and do it at home to maximize your time with your tiny human!
Understanding Your Baby & Understanding Your Toddler: our bestselling books and the basis for the Learn With Less® curriculum. These are month-by-month development and activity guides for playing with your baby from birth to three years.
Learn With Less® “Caregiver & Me” Classes: the magic of Learn With Less® lies in the communal aspect of coming together with our resources, in community with other families. Join us for a virtual or in-person class led by a licensed facilitator near you!
Learn With Less® Facilitator Training & Certification Program: Use your existing skills as an educator or therapist to serve families holistically with a high quality program that will provide lasting impact on your life, income, and community! Apply now to become a licensed facilitator Learn With Less®.
Text Transcript of This Episode:
I want today’s message to reach you as we reset for a new season of Fall, a new school year, and so many hopes for the future. I’m recording this in mid to late August 2021. So over the last few years, I’ve done a lot of work to create a values aligned life and business.
Undoubtedly, parenting and working through a pandemic has tested so many of us on so many levels. However, when we get clear on our values, it helps us to clarify what motivates us and helps us to see the path forward to the life we want to create. And sometimes more importantly, how to get there in integrity with what we believe.
Now, if you’ve done any kind of values work before, you’ll know that this experience can help illuminate and lighten the load. I’d also love to get to know what your values are. So you can go ahead and send me a message on Facebook or Instagram at Learn With Less®. Seriously, I love learning about you and I love reading every response.
Now if you’ve been here for a while or you’re new to Learn With Less®, I want to re-familiarize you with the values that we hold here partly because I believe it will clarify for you whether you still want to be here you know receiving my emails or listening to this podcast. I’m partly because I want you to know more about what motivates me and how we create the resources that we do here at Learn With Less®. So here we go.
What are the values we hold at this company? You know, I start every podcast episode in my intro by defining what those are. But really these help to guide every decision that we make here at Learn With Less®. So the first value that I’d like to share with you is community. This is one of the reasons why I create this podcast to be in community with you all at some level, right? We also value communal learning, the resources that we share in our Learn With Less® “caregiver & me” classes, our books, things like that.
We really do share resources that help facilitate communal learning, which is about facilitation versus like hierarchical learning and learning together and alongside one another and really creating a safe and brave space that is inclusive for all identities. We value communal support in that we’re here for each other. And we recognize that our diverse experiences make us stronger.
Now I create community, on a broad scale, of course with you here, just by being in your ear or listening to this podcast, but I also take it very seriously with regard to say, the training program that I have created with the Learn With Less® Facilitator Training & Certification Program. We create a very strong community, and we build community for our facilitators that we’ve trained and licensed, and then support and coach along the way as they continue to bring our programs into communities in their world. And we also want to, of course, foster that community building for each and every class that any one of our facilitators hold.
So we model that in our training program. And then that gets to be just divided and conquered and continued on through the facilitation of our licensees through the Learn With Less® program all over the world.
The second value I want to share with you is playfulness. Now being playful, is a core element of the Learn With Less® philosophy play is also one of our four pillars including play, talk, sing and move. And these four pillars are present in really everything we do and all the resources like my books, Understanding Your Baby and Understanding Your Toddler. And that’s what all of the Learn With Less® caregiver and parent and me classes are based upon.
So play, talk, sing, and move… but play! We know that play begets play, right? So the more playful we can be as adults, the more we can model playfulness to our children and at our company for our clients, right? Both those parents and caregivers and the professionals we serve. So this often takes the form of musicality, right? This is why we start and end each episode of the podcast with with a song! It might take the form of sharing joy and joyful moments and silliness, and just stuff surprise and delight. So we try to you know, incorporate playfulness into really everything we do.
The next value I want to share with you is simplicity. You know, the Learn With Less® philosophy is is very much about simplicity, right? It’s not a parenting philosophy. It’s just about re-adjusting, reformulating, re-orienting… it’s about re-orienting our lens to see the value within simple, simple materials and simple moments of everyday simple interactions. Right? So we value simplicity in materials. But also, since that’s such a core value, we try to incorporate simplicity into all the explanations that we provide for clients in our resources and in our content, like our books for instance, definitely in our classes, right, our Learn With Less® classes are very much, we try to say less and do less and give you more opportunity to observe and practice and explore and reflect as a parent. And as our licensees know, we really encourage facilitators of our classes to do and guide less, say less, and give our parents and caregivers the chance to try and do more.
So simplicity in explanations as well as simplicity in processes that we create here at Learn With Less® in the back end and then simplicity in solutions to help you move forward in you know in your own parenting style or moving our clients one step forward who participate in our classes to say like, “oh well here’s one little thing when very simple adjustment or different strategy that you might try with your little one when you’re sitting with them or changing a diaper.”
And also simplicity to help our facilitators who are building these sort of side hustles building these “caregiver & me” classes within their communities like how can they move one step forward to really build that business or build that practice of working with families we believe that families already have everything they need right simplicity and materials so we know that toys are great and a lot of people ask me you know well if I am following Learn With Less® do I does that make me you know quote unquote, “a bad person” or “a bad mom” or “a bad professional” if I’m drawn in by certain toys and buying toys?
Listen, we’re not anti toy! You know, we, we just we value simplicity. We know that this reorientation that you can make for yourself and readjustment to see that there are so many ways that you can play with a simple empty tissue box and you… don’t need, you know, a beautiful, organically stained wooden toy to do essentially the same thing, right pull tissues out of a box, for instance, or explore simple materials as a baby or a toddler. Like, we all know that that empty paper roll, it’s pretty amazing and can take the form of so many things. So we share how to play and how to talk and sing and move with those simple, simple materials.
Now, another one of our values is education. We value the power of knowledge. And we know that the network effect of our shared communal knowledge as a whole is so much more powerful than that of one person, right. So that’s why I love bringing guests on to the podcast. And when I started the Learn With Less® podcast, you know, the first, I don’t know, 25-30 episodes, I was I was creating all that content myself. But as I went along and realized that, my goodness, I don’t have all the answers, obviously, I’m one person, I’m not supposed to have all the answers.
And I, as a parent, myself, as well as a professional really wanted to learn from others. So I would bring on people who are knowledgeable in lots of different areas, or who had totally different unique experiences from what I have. And so, I so believe that we can all educate ourselves through others, it doesn’t have to be, you know, formal education, it can certainly be through communal education and through your community.
So, you know, we encourage you so much as I said, community is such a big part of what we do here with our classes that we share with families all over the world. And we encourage you to educate yourself about how your child learns, because that’s so much that takes so much of the edge off of early parenthood, I think for many caregivers is just knowing, okay, well, what’s appropriate, right now, what’s my kid supposed to be doing or, or thinking about or knowing or understanding, you know, when we have that knowledge to know what our kiddos might be working on, then we can think about very simple ways that we can support that learning, right?
We also value self education and self advocacy, and then reaching out for support when you need it. So that’s why, for instance, with the Learn With Less® Facilitator Training & Certification Program, we have created a robust set of resources and a beautiful, you know, very organized framework for people to go through our process, and then be able to successfully host these classes, Learn With Less® “caregiver & me” classes throughout their communities and bringing in clients, and sharing our values really, at the end of the day with people in their community, those shared values.
But we also continually support our clients, and we know that they’re going to also have to reach out for what they need. We are here, right? We are always here to help. But we definitely want people to be able to advocate for what they need. And we are here to listen, the last value I want to share with you is our value of inclusivity. We very much value the diverse perspectives, experiences and practices of our clients, all of our clients.
And that includes, again, both our licensees and then the families that we all ultimately serve. And we really do value, of course, the provision of access, offering information and service at all financial levels. For instance, through this Learn With Less® podcast, through our books, through our “caregiver & me” classes and our courses. And then through our licensing and certification program, we are in the practice of honoring and creating and upholding spaces for those who hold marginalized identities. We try to do this and educate ourselves in a responsible manner that doesn’t center one identity.
We also encourage you, our community, our larger community to be in a practice of self understanding with regard to things like anti bias work, anti racist work, so that you can responsibly serve and uphold the identity of your clients, your community members, fellow parents, fellow caregivers, in your community, or in other aspects of your own professional or personal work.
So those are the values – those are the values that we hold dear. Defining and leaning into my values has definitely given me the vocabulary, helped me to set the intention, and allowed me to live my values really through my business as well as in my personal life through my parenting and truly create remarkable space for folks that I serve. And it has created so much more depth for all of my clients and really provided me with such a strong compass for the way that I’m doing business.
So I wanted to share that with you and whether you are a parent, a caregiver, an educator, a therapist, or all of the above. Whether you are expecting your first child or you have multiple tiny humans running around your home, or whether you support families in the perinatal stage of life for those with young children, we all have values that define us, that help us shape our commitments, and that allow us to lead our lives heading down the path that we want to go.
I would love to know: what are yours? Give it some thought, and tell me! I would love for you to share by sending me a message on Facebook or Instagram over at @learnwithless because the more I know about you and the values you hold, the more I get to understand our broader community that we’re building. I understand more about what inspires you, what guides you, and what it is about learning with less that helps you find meaning and inspiration.
So with that, we’re going to sing our goodbye song and head out. Thank you so much for joining me today!
