Walk With Me

Jadon: I don’t like making my bed because I feel like there’s no point in doing it unless someone’s coming over because no one else is going to see your bed besides you and your parents.

Liz: Yeah, but they say making your bed in the morning is the best thing you can do to take care of yourself and to get your day started the right way.

Jadon: They do?

Liz: Yeah. I’m going to have to look that up and explain it better to you. And God knows I haven’t explained it well to Grace or Ella because they don’t make their bed.

Jadon: Yeah, I definitely don’t see Grace making her bed.

It’s not really about the bed, of course. It’s about the person you become. The little things matter. Addressing University of Texas graduates, Admiral William McRaven shared the profound truth he’d discovered when he was training as a NAVY Seal: “If you make your bed every morning, you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride, and it will encourage you to do another task and another and another.” Making your bed creates what psychologists call a “keystone habit”—one small behavior that naturally triggers a chain of other positive actions throughout the day… a domino effect for your entire life. These “small wins” activate our sense of agency and self-efficacy.  The same mental processes that help you make your bed—planning, follow-through, delayed gratification, consistency —get stronger each time you use them, making it easier to exercise self-control in other areas.

But instilling such a simple habit – this first small win of the day –  is also the very thing that can make a mother feel like she is losing the battle.

Jessica: This was one of those mornings, I feel like as a parent…Am I doing anything right? Or am I doing literally everything wrong?

I think that everything I asked him to do, I asked him 900 times. And by the end of it, he’s looking at me like I’m crazy, and I’m looking at him like he’s crazy. And I’m not really sure which one of us is crazy. But it was just one of those mornings where it’s a million times to do one thing. And then it’s like, we’re at that pre-teanage where it’s like, well, why do I have to do that? Why do I have to make my bed?

Now you have met Jadon and his mom, Jessica Maxwell. Jadon is a very active 12 (jadon: so tomorrow I will be twelve and a half.) Sorry. 12 ½ year old boy. He is the very young man I worry about in our traditional school settings. His body needs to move and his mind races even farther ahead of his legs. I walked with Jessica to talk about parenting a child with so much energy, but felt like Jadon deserved his own voice in the matter, so I tried my best to keep up with Jadon on a walk of our own.

Liz: So sometimes I think of your life as living in the eye of a hurricane because you have a dog, a son, and a husband who all move at warped speed at times.

Jessica: Everybody in my life moves at warped speed.

What’s next? What meal is next? What are we doing next? And trying to teach Jadon the ability to be bored, to just relax. I feel like he should have learned it when he was younger, but somehow I’m still trying to impart how to be calm and maybe sit down and read a book. And that’s just not his personality. 

Jadon: Basically, my brain has to do something all the time to keep myself entertained because I get bored very easily.

Liz: And bored is bad?

Jadon: For me, I feel like boredom is the worst.

Liz: Why?

Jadon: Because there’s nothing ever to do when you’re bored. I’m wasting a lifetime being bored, not enjoying it.

Another one of my heroes, Wendy Mogel, has spent decades telling parents exactly the opposite: she wants children to be “unhappy, frustrated, bored” because these uncomfortable feelings are actually essential ingredients for raising resilient human beings. Yes, Jessica, this is wisdom from her book, The Blessing of a B Minus, I have been encouraging you to read.

Drawing from Jewish teachings, Mogel understands that struggle has always been part of human development. The rabbis instructed fathers to teach their sons to swim—not because water was unsafe, but because life requires us to navigate uncertain waters. When we constantly rescue them – even from boredom’s discomfort – we’re essentially telling them they’re not capable of handling their own inner life.

Perhaps most importantly, Mogel understands that what we call boredom might actually be the gateway to something sacred. In Jewish tradition, there’s profound meaning in ordinary time—the moments between the holidays, the spaces between the prayers, the quiet hours when nothing special is happening. These aren’t empty spaces to be filled but holy pauses where growth happens quietly, where children learn to befriend their own minds, where creativity blooms and where they learn that they are enough, just as they are, even when they’re doing absolutely nothing at all.

But they won’t get that… at least not at first… and not at 17 in my house… they will ask, Why? Why would you want me to be unhappy, frustrated and bored? Why?

Liz: Yeah, they say the why stage is when they’re three? But whoever said that didn’t have the teenager yet. 

Jessica: They definitely didn’t have a teen or a pre-teen because it’s like, well, why do I have to brush my teeth? Why do I have to brush my hair? Why do I have to do any of it? But I think it’s definitely 12 years old. 12, for us, seems to be the why. And I feel like as a parent, I’m consistently stuck between giving you answer and just being like, “Please, I’m going to yell at you. Stop arguing with me. Just brush your teeth because I said so.” And I swore my whole life that I would never be the “because I said so” parent. Because that’s what my mother said… It was always “because I said so.” I feel like some days right now with a 12-year-old that’s just where we’re at.

Liz: So how does that compare to your memory of you at 12?

Jessica: I don’t think I was anything like Jadon at 12. I didn’t argue quite as much, but I was much less sure of myself.  I was definitely very shy. I was very quiet. We moved a lot, so I never really adjusted to big circles of friends that carried over with me. So I was definitely a very different child. I was very unsure of my own voice. Jadon’s got a lot to say all the time. He really is as you said he’s so colorful. Well, that’s his personality. He’s just big, and loud, and bright, and not always happy, but he has a lot to say. I think it took me having him to learn how to really find a voice and speak for myself.

Jessica: I want him to find his voice younger and use it well. Just not to argue. 

Liz: Just not with you. 

Jessica: Just not with me, with everybody else, right? But no, I was much quieter. I think I lived life really, really small. I didn’t like to take up a lot of space. And I want him to learn to take up space.

Liz: How do you think you learned to be small?

Jessica: I think, well, my childhood was just very different from Jadon’s. There was a lot more trauma and a lot more turmoil and not a lot of financial comfort, not a lot of mental comfort. And that’s just what it was. My mom was a single mom. There were four of us. And all of our fathers, for the most part, were alcoholics. So it was just different. You learned, I think, a little bit more when you had to be quiet. And then I think I just carry that quiet with me. Even still, sometimes you pick and choose when you want to be loud. 

I was a really poor kid in really rich towns. We grew up in Connecticut, and my mom, it was a big priority to her to have us in good school systems. So she made sure that the towns that we lived in, even if the living situation itself wasn’t great, she always made sure that we were in a town where we could get a good education. I definitely felt really out of place. To me, as a child, they all seemed so comfortable and confident in their lives and their families with their mom and their dad and their dog. It all just seemed, from the outside, really perfect.

As an adult, you look back and you realize they all had their own things going on. But at the time, it just made me feel small and quiet.

Liz: One of the themes I keep hearing in our conversation is that it was like this for me. I don’t want it to be like that for him. I used to say, “I don’t want my kids to end up like me.” And a therapist said to me, “Just stop for a minute. Your children love you. The sun sometimes sets in you for them, and yet you tell them, ‘Don’t be like me’.” And it made me realize, I’m not so bad. I don’t have to be small. They don’t have to be big. 

They are their own sentient beings, our children. They will be who they want to be perhaps in spite of us. We look ahead and worry about what’s next and they are trying not to waste their lifetime being bored. In Mogel’s book you’ll read, “Jewish wisdom holds that our children don’t belong to us. They are both a loan and a gift from God, and the gift has strings attached. Our job is to raise our children to leave us. The children’s job is to find their own path in life.”

Jadon: I don’t want to grow up. Being a kid is the best.

Liz: That might be the best statement anybody’s ever. How do you know that?

Jadon: Because I just see how stressed-out parents are when they’re older. Always having to do work, not having a lot of time. But when you’re a kid, you still have to go to school, but you have a lot of free time after.

I mean, I am excited to be my own person, but there’s no need to rush to it.

Liz: What does that mean, be your own person?

Jadon: Like, get to be able to make my own decisions. Like, If I don’t want to go to something, I don’t have to go to it unless it’s mandatory, and choosing the rest of my life.

I would probably like being a professional coach. I feel like that would be pretty fun.

Liz: For hockey? Or does it have to be that sport?

Jadon: It could be any sport. Just not baseball. I feel like baseball is so boring.

Liz: Why?

Jadon: It’s a lot of just standing there.

As I said, Jadon’s is a body in motion. 

Liz: So I can’t imagine what it’s like in Jadon’s brain to try to be present when his body needs to be moving to what’s next.

Jessica: I feel like, unfortunately, Jadon’s most present when he’s having really bad anxiety. When I was a kid, it was about social situations and public speaking in school and being in very traumatic home-life situations. That’s when I would have them. He has them about something I can’t even help him control. It’s about a natural disaster. It’s like storms, thunderstorms, lightning storms, wind, anything like that. Last year, he had a panic attack and had to leave a Yankees game right before he went away to camp. And just couldn’t… They ended up… He was with Justin, and they got a taxi, which I don’t know. I wasn’t there. 

Jadon: Yeah. Actually, I went to the Yankees Mets game around this time last year.

Liz: How was that?

Jadon: It was good. It got canceled halfway through because of a storm, though.

Liz: So they actually had to call the game? That’s not fun.

Jadon: If it was rain, it would have been fine, but it was lightning.

Liz: What’s it like for you in storms?

Jadon: I have a phobia for them. I hate them. They make me nervous.

Liz: How so?

Jadon: I just don’t like lightning or thunder. It scares me pretty bad. I’m really sad.

Liz: What does it feel like in your body when you get scared?

Jadon: It feels like my stomach isn’t there.

It feels like it’s empty with no bones, nothing in there, no blood, just empty. Empty space. And I constantly check the weather on my watch.

Liz: Does that make it better?

Jadon: Sometimes. I sometimes have to just put my watch away so I don’t have the temptation of looking at it.

Liz: So how do you get through it?

Jadon: A lot of the time I just go in my room, close the blinds, and just pretend, try to get to sleep for a little bit.

Liz: Can you?

Jadon: I just normally can shut my eyes. I normally can’t fall asleep.

Liz: What do you have to say to yourself? I assume you have to talk yourself through it.

Jadon: I just say there’s nothing bad going to happen. It’s going to be over soon or eventually.

Liz: Do you ever talk to him after an anxiety attack? “Hey, pay attention to right now when you don’t have it,” so that he can start to learn for himself that he will get through it?

Jessica: We talk a lot after they’re over. I’ll talk about how you’re feeling leading up to it, one, so you can try to recognize it. Because I feel like if you can recognize the symptoms coming on, then you might not be able to stop it, but you might be able to work on some of the techniques that we’ve talked about using to keep yourself calmer. But I think we probably need to do a better job after the fact of having more conversations about it.

Liz: Yeah, not we, you and Justin. We, the entire world.

Somebody once told me, your hardest feelings really last 10 minutes, and then they cycle into something else. And if you go into that, I’m going to have to fact check that time. But if you go into, I don’t know if I can make it through this, whatever it is, knowing in 10 minutes, I’m not going to feel this way… 

Then you can make it. I did fact check it. I was wrong. Neuroscientist Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor’s research reveals that any emotional response lasts only about 90 seconds physiologically. After that initial chemical cascade, any remaining emotional response is simply the person choosing to stay in that emotional loop.

Jessica: With Jaden, I’ve tried to speak very candidly that these feelings are normal, and they’re okay. It’s okay to have panic attacks. It’s okay to be anxious. So he speaks about it, his anxiety. He speaks very candidly about it, whereas as a kid, I was very quiet about it. I felt wrong or weird, and you didn’t want people to know. And Jadon and his buddies at school all talk about the things they have anxiety about. It’s a normal conversation.

Liz: That pendulum shifted. 

Jessica: I mean, for him, it did. I don’t think that’s the case for everybody. But I’m so grateful that it has for him and that our conversations around his anxiety are spoken about very candidly and not swallowed down because I tell him all the time, “We can’t do anything about it if we don’t talk about it.” I can’t do anything about it as a parent if I don’t know about it.

Liz: Can you do sleepovers pretty easily?

Jadon: I wasn’t the best at sleepovers the first time, I got nervous. But now I’m a good at them.

Liz: Does it matter who you’re with?

Jadon: Yeah, it does. I have to be comfortable with their parents.

Liz: You’re talking a lot about your having to feel safe with the people you’re around. Whether it’s teammates or…

Jadon: So Frankie had a sleepover for his birthday, and I’m like, I don’t know his parents that well, but Lincoln and Johnny do. So I asked Lincoln, “What are they like?” And he explained to me what they’re like. And I’m like, “Okay, I’ll try it, but I’m not comfortable sleeping over.” 

Liz: That’s pretty good to know yourself and figure out the boundaries and figure out how to take care of you. Most people don’t know that.

Jadon: Sometimes I am just too nervous to tell people something.

Liz: Then what’s that like?

Jadon: I don’t want them to think I’m weird for it. But then I also think they might not think I’m weird for it. So I’m stuck in a circle not knowing what to do.

Isaac, Lincoln, Johnny, Franky, Silas all know that I have a fear of thunderstorms. 

Liz: I like that you surround yourself with people who understand who you are, your fears, and your strengths.

As an elementary Head of School I assumed my main objective was to teach children how to walk through the halls of high school and later the streets of life without us… to know how to find their way from homeroom, to recognize a false friend from a true friend, to advocate for themselves, to fail and to learn from that and then to try again.

Jessica: I think as a parent the ability to tell them that the way you’re handling the situation is not the best way to handle it, hopefully, helps us to teach them that it’s okay to change course. With your kids, even as they’re older, it’s like, “Okay, well, you handled this poorly, but that’s not the end.” It’s not just like, I handled it poorly, and now everything is ruined and kaboom. But I want to teach them, “We handled it poorly, or you handled it poorly. So what do we do now?”

Liz: But it’s not going to go away until it’s taught him the lesson he’s supposed to learn, and that might take 15 tries.

Jessica: Oh, my goodness.

Liz: And that’s fail forward, fail better. I mean, that’s where that comes from. You are going to make mistakes. And to think that you’re not or to think that it’s one and done is only more pressure. And I think that perfectionism is what leaves a lot of women feeling small.

Because if I’m going to be bigger than this little space in the world, I have to do it right. And that’s a lot of pressure.

Jessica: I think it is. I think even as an adult, it’s a lot of pressure. It’s hard as an adult to learn to take up space and not continue to be small or feel small.

As a student at Mount de Chantal, I wanted to try out for The Comedy Team at Linsly’s Extravaganza, the main event at our brother school. I went to my drama teacher for advice. I’ll never forget her words, “Liz, you’re small. But you have what it takes to fill that whole stage with your heart and your voice.” I did. I may not take up much space physically, but… ‘Though she be but little she is fierce’. Thanks Shakespeare…and thanks Katie Crosbie.

Liz: So yours is going to be special. I’ve never done one like yours because I walked with your mom, and a lot of what she said was about you. I decided that you should get to say something about you. How do you feel about that?

Jadon: What do you mean?

Liz: How do you feel about the fact that it wasn’t just going to be your mom’s story about you, but you were going to get to tell your own story?

Jadon: She probably told her story about me, basically, because I’m everything to her. She loves me so much.

To Jadon, Jessica is not small. She is larger than life. Her love fills his entire space. If we could see ourselves through their eyes and hearts instead of through their actions or reactions, we might begin to believe that. We should practice. We should rejoice in some small wins. 

Thinking about it…maybe the most beautiful thing about making your bed is what it teaches you about hope. Every morning, you’re essentially saying, “I believe this day matters enough to start it with intention. I believe tonight I’ll want to come home to something welcoming. I believe tomorrow will bring new unexpected joys, and when it does, I want to be ready.”

It may be a small win but that’s not such a small thing after all.

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Sometimes I look back at my life from 30,000 feet and all the odd tangents, twists and turns actually look like a straight path leading where I was meant to arrive. When I was walking that path it didn’t always feel like it was heading anywhere.  Still doesn’t. There were unexpected dead ends… breathless uphills… shin-crushing downhills… and of course awe inspiring vistas. I had no map to allow me to look ahead to see the destination… nor an app to telegraph every turn.  Still, I’ve made it… so far.

Growing up I thought the path was more of a ladder — set a goal, work as hard as you need to achieve it, reach for the next rung higher than the last… and so on.  Lather. Rinse. Repeat. I knew nothing of tangential paths, nor pivots.

And then… I took a walk off-campus with one of my dear friends, Sharon. The year was 1987.

Liz: You are literally the first person in my life that I watched step off the treadmill and say, I need a break.

Sharon: Yeah, I am off the treadmill.

Liz: I’m talking about sophomore year in college.

Sharon: Oh, sophomore year in college.

Liz: How did you have the courage to do that?

Sharon: I think it was just from paralysis and not having the foresight to know something was off, and I just wasn’t happy. And looking back, yeah, that was a pretty big move. In the day when there was no mental health guidance or it wasn’t accepted.

Liz: So I don’t know if you’re going to remember this or if I’m remembering it wrong, but we went for a walk. And on that walk, you told me, Hey, we’re not going to be roommates next year. I’m leaving. Do you remember that?

Sharon: I don’t remember that. But that was a pretty shitty thing to do.

Liz: No, I don’t think of it that way. I just think now, given where my life is, it’s hilarious that we were on a walk when you told me. I remember just thinking, “You’re crazy and fearless.”

Sharon: Fearless. Well, in hindsight, it’s a good thing it all worked out. I mean, I have to hand it to Princeton for being so accommodating and so laissez-faire about the whole thing. It was like, “I’m leaving, and I’ll come back someday.” And they said, “Oh, okay.”

In hindsight, I’m very proud of myself because I think it was a very mature decision. But I also think I went to college fully unprepared, coming from a public high school in the Midwest, going to a very competitive university with very high achieving people and not knowing or understanding what major I wanted… Did we have counselors? Did I have anybody in my corner telling me this would be a good major for you… It was just like, here, pick some classes. And you picked some classes and you hoped for the best. So I didn’t know what I wanted to major in. I didn’t want to squander the time and the money not knowing what I was doing. And then I think the Rooming Draw fueled my awareness that I just really wasn’t happy, or this wasn’t what I wanted.

Liz: So the Rooming Draw was a catalyst?

Sharon and I had met on that same floor where I met Anne Chen… fifth floor Witherspoon. It was an all-girls hall on the top floor of a building with only staircases. When we moved in, we didn’t know we had been assigned to one of the least desirable locations on campus. Months later, with five other close friends, we entered the sophomore rooming draw. We were top of the list. Sharon and I, along with Stacey and Josie, chose to live in Blair Arch – one of Princeton University’s most iconic and beloved architectural features. There’s something about that magnificent stone arch that has a way of making even ordinary moments feel significant… and we lived above it.

Daily we could hear the sound of footsteps echoing through the arch below – that distinctive acoustic signature of stone and space that you can’t replicate anywhere else. Living there, you became acutely aware that you’re just one small part of this arch’s century-long story. Generations of students have passed beneath your floor, and generations more will continue long after you’ve graduated. It’s humbling and magical – you’re both deeply connected to daily campus life and removed from it.

The following year as “luck” would have it, we were last in the draw. There were no rooms left. A group of seven of us, including Sharon and me, would have to live off campus.

Sharon: The Rooming Draw was definitely a catalyst. I didn’t want to live off campus.

I think it was as simple as that. And I didn’t want to necessarily live with people that I didn’t know very well. I mean, I’m not a very outgoing person to begin with, and it just felt forced to me, and I didn’t think it was going to be for me.

Liz: How much discussion was it with your parents?

Sharon: Very little. Being a parent now and understanding how important communication is, I think it’s a generational thing. But I had no dialog with my parents about anything, really. Not even when it was time to apply to college … basically, they knew where I was applying. But there was no talk about affordability, location, is it the right fit? It was just you get in and you tell them where you’re going, and they say, “Oh, okay.” So when it was time to leave, it was a very quick conversation, “I’m not going back. I’m not sure what I’m doing.” I think the only thing they said was, “You need to do something, and you need to go back.” And that was the conversation.

Liz: And you went home and lived at home for that year?

Sharon: I lived at home for a while, and then I got a job in Chicago. I worked for a construction company. So that’s where I learned that I was interested in construction and building, and I was able to come back and say, “I’m going to major in architecture.”

I also remember one of the reasons I really wanted to take off is that I was very disappointed that Princeton didn’t have a travel abroad program, because now that I know that is so much of who I am – travel and experience and adventure. And I think that would have solved the problem had it not been so uncommon, and they made it so difficult.

Liz: You don’t know the relief you just gave me… the stories we tell ourselves… I have always thought I just didn’t take advantage of it.

Sharon: Oh, no, it didn’t exist. No, that’s what I really wanted to do. I wanted to study abroad.

Well, I did travel abroad. So after I worked that year in the construction company, I created my own “travel through Italy” summer to look up all of Palladian architecture. I didn’t get very far. I got to Verona and outside of Venice, and then I ran out of money, but that has telegraphed throughout my life: travel. That is what has been a consistent theme through everything I have done in my life: travel and adventure. In fact, I’m just sitting back wondering when the next one is going to be. But it’s Henry’s time. It’s Henry’s era.

Henry is Sharon’s son. He is entering his senior year of high school.

Sharon: I feel like it was my era for so long. I mean, there’s so many things that I missed in his younger years, never, ever picking him up from school. Never, ever was the teacher’s aide, the in-school reader, never brought the treats… because I was working.

Liz: So you couldn’t get there.

Sharon: I couldn’t get there. Until we moved to London, I would say, I was not present in his school life at all. There was a nanny that picked him up or he went to after-school programs. And the irony is that he doesn’t remember. He doesn’t remember that I wasn’t present because he thinks I’ve never worked a day in my life. He’s like, “Well, you’ve never worked.” I was like, “Well, actually, I did work. I worked really hard, and I worked a lot.” So somehow it hasn’t scarred him or fazed him that I wasn’t around, because now I’m very much around, and he’s going to be sick of me being around because I’m going to relish every moment with him, because when he’s out, I know he’ll be out.

I get it. As Ella grows into herself and needs me less, I feel this urgent pull to drink in every remaining drop of her childhood. I understand why Sharon wants to be present in a way she wasn’t always before. These final years are both precious and fragile, like we’re trying to pour an ocean into a teacup, desperate to capture what’s left. It’s for us…not them…if we are honest. I know we can’t go back, but maybe we can love them fiercely forward.

Like so many other things I missed, I didn’t soak up those last moments of being their whole world before they stepped into their adolescent independence. I didn’t know it was the last time I’d read a story at night or the last time I’d toss her in a pool.

Just like I didn’t know the “lasts” with my parents – last trip, last meal, last “I love you.”

Liz: Is there a life event that you can see as the pivot turned?

Sharon: Oh, absolutely. The death of my brother.

Liz: Really?

Sharon: Absolutely. And it took me maybe a little time to figure that out because you’re still processing, you don’t realize. I was a full-on workaholic. I still had my job. I was commuting all over. Henry would have been in second grade. And his death really, really, really triggered a need for family in me. I just felt that San Francisco wasn’t home, the West Coast wasn’t my home. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was working a lot. So that’s why we moved to Chicago. We picked up and left San Francisco. And it started our pattern of not settling down and just picking up and continuing to move. I thought Chicago would fill some void that I was having with the loss of him, but it didn’t.

That was a catalyst in realizing that my family was just me, Richard and Henry. And I was going to do everything just to protect that, …nothing else mattered.

So that started the journey of, “Okay, what’s the best thing for our family?” Richard had grown up in South America. He lived in Peru when he was in middle school and just thought that was a really, really great experience. So he thought that would be fun for Henry. So we chose London as a path of least resistance.

What is that Yiddish proverb? Man plans. God laughs. Once settled into their life in London…

Sharon: Henry had the courage at age 13, in eighth grade, to say to us, “I want to go to high school in America.” And it caught us off guard because that was not in our plan.

I was actually proud of him. He wanted to come back because he wanted to play American football. You say to yourself, I’m uprooting my life. I’m changing everything that we have planned for so my kid can play football, which I have avoided. I’ve always put him in a school where there was no football team. I’ve always kept him out of any contact football league because of the statistics you read and the head injuries. So it’s like, my kid’s never going to play football. And lo and behold, when your kid comes to you and says, “I want to play football,” because he says it in the way of It’s all I want. And when your kid has never asked for anything, says, “It’s all I want,” you move back to America and you let him play football.

Liz: And did he? He still plays?

Sharon: He still plays, yeah. And he loves it. I mean, he’s not Tom Brady, and he’s not going to play in college, but there’s something about the sport that he just absolutely loves.

I do have to hand it to him for having the nerve… for him to be able to express that he wanted something different for high school. I really admire that. So we honored that. And here we are in suburban Michigan.

Liz: After moving everything across the Atlantic.

Sharon: Across the Atlantic.

She doesn’t see the similarity. I do. Sharon had the courage to step away from an ivy league education. That same courage echoes decades later in her son Henry, who at thirteen had the clarity to ask for what he wanted most. There’s something profound about how the capacity for brave pivots can pass between generations, not as learned behavior but as inherited permission to trust your own compass.

Liz: I feel like there are two directives you need as a parent. Listen and love them. And if you do those two things, you make mistakes, but you’ll get it right.

Sharon: And I’m thankful that I’ve caught it just in time because he’s still at home. But being a working mother while a child is growing up and having a pretty demanding career and being an older mother, I feel like so much of his younger years, I was managing him like an employee… if I could take it all back, I would spend so much more time loving than managing. It’s the sleep schedule… it’s the right food… They have to be eating this. They have to be reading this. They have to be in this club sport. They have to be doing this. And none of it matters. Absolutely none of it matters.

I saw a man holding his son’s hand the other day, crossing the street. And it made me cry. One, because I don’t have that young child anymore, but almost longing for opportunities I missed at some point to hold his hand rather than to make sure he was doing the right thing.

Liz: And yet, he says he didn’t know you ever worked. So maybe he didn’t feel managed.

Sharon: Maybe he didn’t feel managed. I think my take on parenting has also just evolved since I’ve also jumped off the big treadmill. You just have a different perspective on what’s important, and what matters, and what doesn’t matter.

Liz: Some nights, I put my head on the pillow, and I’m like, What did I do all day? And then there are other days… I probably did more this morning sending that email than I did some days, but I was in an office. So it felt like I achieved something just because of where my body was.

Sharon: Where your body was, right. But it’s the quality of what you do. I’m an example of that. So when I was working at Gucci, I was burned out. I’d been doing the job for a while, and it’s based out of New York.

Liz: And your job was to design and open new stores?

Sharon: Design and open new stores. And it was very demanding in different cities globally all the time and with big teams of people. But I was just burned out. I was single. You’re in your late 30s. You’re never going to meet somebody. You’re tired. You’re working all the time in the office till nine o’clock every night. And so I just went to my boss and I said, I need a change of scenery. The head office is based in Florence. So I want to move to Florence.

So I moved to Florence, and it was very quickly living there that I learned you could work far fewer hours, you could get just as much done, and you could have a much better quality of life. You stop, you have a coffee, talk to somebody, and get to the office by 9:30. Whereas in New York, you’re at the office at 8:00 and your coffee’s at your desk. In Florence, there’s no such thing as a to-go cup. You talk to the people that you’re having coffee with. You talk to your favorite barista that you see every morning. And then you go to the office, and then you work hard, you get your work done, and then you go have lunch. They go to lunch every single day. They don’t go get a salad and bring it back and sit at their desk. And then 5:00, you’re off. You go have an aperitivo, and you go socialize with people, and then you go have your night. You get just as much work done, and it’s just a better quality of life. I had the exact same job in two different locations, and I worked far fewer hours.

So when I was in New York, you’d get back into the grind of getting to the office early, sitting at your desk, not talking to anybody, never going outside…and I would catch myself like, Wow, I’m back in the rut again. I’m back on the treadmill.

You don’t know what you have not experienced. Life cannot be lived in the rearview mirror. If only we could bottle hindsight and give it to ourselves when we need it most—but maybe that’s the point. Maybe we’re supposed to stumble through blindly, doing our best with what we know, so we can appreciate the clarity that comes with distance and teach the next generation of women to be gentler with themselves in the fog.

Sharon: The irony is after living in New York 18 years and being single for much of it, I met Richard the minute I moved to Florence.

Liz: Are you willing to tell that story?

Sharon: What story?

Liz: How you met Richard…

Sharon: Oh, sure.

Liz: It’s one of my favorite meet cute’s of all time.

Sharon: Meet cutes? Oh, sure. So I was working at Gucci, and I was going back and forth between Florence and New York.

Richard had been divorced for 10 years, hadn’t really dated much, never felt ready. And then he woke up one day, he’s like, You know what? I’m ready. And so he asked Kelly, Do you know somebody? And she said, As a matter of fact, I do,

And I think Kelly just sent me an email saying, Oh, I work with this great guy. You need to meet him. And I was like, Oh, yeah, right. People say that all the time. When you’re single, people are like, Oh, I know somebody for you. I’m going to set you up with somebody.

Liz: Yeah, that’s part of the club membership. You got to bring somebody else in the club.

Sharon: You got to bring somebody else. So lo and behold, I actually get an email from him and after probably only two or three emails back and forth he said, “I’m going to come to New York. Would you like to go to dinner?” I said, “Okay, sure.” He said he was coming on Valentine’s Day, and even though I wasn’t busy. I said, “No, I’m busy. I can’t. It will have to wait until the next day.

I can hear the theme to Love Story even as I write this… or is it the music of Love, Actually…

Sharon: He had bought play tickets for the 14th, just in the event that I might be free. And I said I wasn’t free. I only found out later that he had theater tickets, and he went by himself because I feigned that I was not free.

Liz: And you owned up to it?

Sharon: I owned up to it. Oh, yeah, for sure. So we met for dinner the next day, which was February 15th at my favorite restaurant, and we had a great time. And then I was like, well, “I got to go. I’m going to London. I got to leave” because that was the reality of my life in those days. I was never really anywhere for very long. He said, “Okay, it’s nice to meet you.” And then we texted a little bit, or he emailed me. I guess we didn’t really have text. So he said, “Where are you going to be next?”

“Well, I’m in Florence.”

“Would it be okay if I came to Florence, I’ll come to Florence to see you.”

“Sure, come to Florence. I don’t care.” So he came to Florence and we went to dinner.

And we had a great time. And then he said, “When can I see you again?” And I said, “Well, I’m going to be in London in April. My brother’s running the marathon.” He’s like, “Okay, I’ll meet you in London.” So he came to London, and my mom was there, and my brother was there. And they’re like, “Who’s this guy?” This is Richard. And we had a great time.

Now this is a Lather. Rinse. Repeat. cycle I could listen to forever.

Sharon: He said, Can I see you again? “Well, I have a week off. Do you want to come to Italy? We can travel.” So I picked him up at the Rome airport. We went to Puglia. We had a great time.

Wait for it…

Sharon: And one day, he said, “I think I’d like to marry you.” I said, “Well, you’d have to ask me.” He said, “Okay, I’m asking you.” I’m like, “Okay, let’s get married.”

Three months since they had met.

Sharon: So the next morning, I was driving him to the airport because he had to go back. I drove down from Florence and he flew out of Rome. I said, “So are we getting married?” “Yeah.” 

“Okay, let’s call my dad.” So he called my dad and starts telling my dad, “I really love your daughter. I’d like to marry her.” And my dad said, “Oh, you can put that marketing material back in your suitcase. If my daughter loves you, it’s okay with me.”

When Sharon again strayed far from the prescribed path—when she stopped chasing the next rung on the ladder and started chasing what felt right, when she took a year off, when she moved to Florence not for career advancement but for a better way of living— it opened the door to everything she’d actually been searching for, including love and eventually the family that sustains her. She remembers,

Sharon: Jim had just died. A couple of years had passed since his death, but it still was with me. And it was a turning point of nothing mattered but my family and my own happiness. So whereas they always say, Don’t sweat the small stuff. I was like, I don’t sweat the big stuff. It’s like, nothing really phases me. Been through family death, then through breast cancer, then through moving ump-teen times, uprooting my life, changing schools, changing this. It all gets done. And we’ll be fine.

I have listened to and reread those final lines umpteen times now, and every time I get a sense of comfort and peace. She is right. We’ll be fine. Sharing Sharon’s story feels like tracing the constellation of a life—how scattered moments of courage, loss, and unexpected moves eventually form a recognizable pattern when viewed from enough distance.

We had convinced ourselves that constant motion equals progress, that being physically present at a desk means we’re achieving something meaningful. In our shared longing for the simple act of holding a child’s hand, we cut to the heart of what we actually lose when we’re too busy optimizing our “serious work” lives to live them.

The story suggests that our most important journeys happen when we’re brave enough to listen—to ourselves, to our children, to the quiet voice that says “something’s off” even when everything looks right from the outside. Sometimes the most direct path to where we need to be is the one that looks, to everyone else, like we’re walking away.

I titled this one A Love Story not in reaction to the meet-cute between Richard and Sharon although you might think that the reason and it undoubtedly fits. Nor is it so titled in reference to a mother’s love that runs so very deep. It’s not even the love between lifelong friends. It is realizing over decades that the greatest love story all along was to fall in love with our own life. 

Sharon: It was meant to be.

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If you are following along with these walks, you know I told you I want to walk with more children. I do. Many more of them… long after the 50 have been posted I would hope. It got me thinking of children I taught who now have children of their own. Case in point: Justin Hinerman. I met Justin when he was at the age of his son: 13.

I was his “computer teacher” in 8th grade, so in his world I was a rockstar.

Justin: That would have been in 1997, I think. Eighth grade. I have a memory of seeing you before I took the class. You were in the computer lab working on the computers somehow. Because anyone that was near the computers, I was locked in to. I was like, How do I get involved here?

Can I just pretend I was a rockstar for a minute? His version makes it clear that the attraction was the computer. Sigh.

Justin: My grandma had a computer, an old Tandy computer. And from the first time I saw it, I was like, this was it. I was glued to it. I had to figure out how it worked. It wasn’t just like I plugged in the disk and played a game…the big floppy floppy disk. 

Somewhere along the line, I got AOL. And in fact, it was early as second I was using AOL without supervision, mind you. There’s no notion of like, “Oh, maybe this isn’t the best thing to do.” I remember even I got my account suspended once on AOL for, quote, impersonating an employee. All I did was go into a chat room and say, “Hey, just keep in mind, if you send 10 messages in five seconds, you’ll get blocked for a minute.”  I learned something, and I wanted to be like, Hey, check this out.

Liz: You wanted to share it and you got blocked. 

Justin: They said, “You’re impersonating an employee.” I mean, I got a letter sent to my house and everything. I couldn’t use it for a month. Those were the days when that was the worst that could happen, right?

Did we all feel that way? Every AOL commercial promised the future had arrived, delivered through almost primitive means in hindsight. It was clunky and impossibly slow, yet somehow still revolutionary. Access to this brave new world required a ritual: loading software from a CD-ROM that arrived unsolicited in your mailbox like digital evangelism, then surrendering your phone line to the shrill screech of a modem negotiating with forces beyond our understanding.

It feels absolutely foreign now, and ridiculously taxing—waiting minutes for a single photograph to materialize line by line, getting kicked off when someone needed to make a call, paying by the hour like we were renting the future itself. But none of that mattered the moment we heard those three magic words: “You’ve Got Mail.” We didn’t know we were training for a world where a dopamine hit would come from every buzz, ping, and ringtone. We just knew that something fundamental had shifted… but to what extent we had no idea. 

Liz: You have a 13-year-old. I have a 17-year-old. Not that big a difference. So I feel like I should be much more aware of what she’s doing online. With all the knowledge you have, what freedom or restrictions do you have?

Justin: Well, first of all, he does not have a phone. 

This is the same person who could wander around AOL at an age younger than his son. As a computer programmer AND a father, his son does not have the same free range.

Justin: That’s the biggest thing. Even though all of his friends… I mean, he’s begging. He needs a phone. Everyone in his school has a phone. Whenever it’s time to have free time in class and it’s like, Hey, the teacher says, Get out your phone, and you can look on YouTube for 10 minutes. He doesn’t have a phone, so that’s hard. I take the approach of, okay, just almost teaching by talking to him about what’s appropriate and what’s not, and then monitoring that.

Liz: When will he get a phone?

Justin: That’s the question, isn’t it? I don’t know. We thought about eighth grade – next year. He’s just left seventh grade. And then we thought about ninth grade… eighth or ninth grade, probably he’ll get a phone.

Liz: And will social media be part and parcel of that? 

Justin: No. That is one thing we’ve talked to him about, is even once you do get a phone, I’m going to… Whatever Apple restrictions work, they’re going on there. I have to approve all apps. I have to… On and on and on.

Liz: Is Snapchat a social or a text?

Justin: Oh, I consider that a social.

Liz: My kids wouldn’t… that is the only way they use to communicate with friends. 

Justin: Really? Snapchat? Wow.

Liz: Because I’ll say, “Text your friend…” “I snapped her.”

Justin: “I snapped her.” See, I feel like I’m falling behind.

Liz: Oh, God. If you’re going to be behind, there’s no hope for the rest of us.

Justin: It’s terrifying. I mean, you know.

We’ve gone from celebrating that first “You’ve Got Mail” to locking phones away as if it were possible to put the digital genie back in the bottle. The data is stark: rising rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide among young people who came of age with smartphones welded to their palms. What we thought was connection turned out to be isolation with better graphics. What we celebrated as progress turned out to be rewiring developing brains in ways we’re only now beginning to understand—and regret.

Liz: So you’re in the industry? What would you do if you could have an impact on it?

Justin: Well, that’s tough. I think part of it has to be to slow down, particularly when it comes to AI, because the Silicon Valley mindset is just fast, fast, fast, iterate, break stuff, whatever, let’s try again, boom, boom, boom. And that’s fine, but sometimes you need to have some common sense of what are we exactly doing here? And at least give some time to catch up for things like regulations, sensible safeguards, things like that. Because unchecked, the tech mindset will just keep churning stuff out, and particularly with AI, just in an exponential pace of innovation. 

Liz: I’m glad you explained that’s the tech mindset, and it is, and not in a negative way. We want it in all the other technological advances.

I think we can all agree we need the speeding bullet train of AI to slow down. But… it already left the station and a slow pace is antithetical to the technology mindset. Justin describes it accurately – go fast, get it wrong, iterate, try again. That is the way to get your MVP – your minimal viable product – to the market, but it is not the way we want a technology we hardly understand to impact our lives and our children’s lives.  However, speed is not the only polarity – yes, I am frightened by its potential, but personally, I am already dependent on AI as a resource. As is Justin.

Justin: On the other hand, I use those tools on a daily basis to bounce ideas off of, to brainstorm, particularly working remotely. It’s not like I can just turn to someone next to me and be like, Hey, what do you think of this and that? And get a whiteboard or whatever. So oftentimes there’s this term in programming… there’s this thing called rubber ducking, where if you can explain the problem you’re trying to solve in your code to a rubber duck, typically, as you go through the explanation to the rubber duck, you’re like, I can’t figure this out. This happens. You solve the problem in your head, that’s rubber ducking.

Liz: You actually have your hand out. Is there a rubber duck?

Justin: Well, it’s like, I’m holding a pretend rubber duck.

Liz: Okay, so there’s not a rubber duck on your desk.

Justin: There’s not a real rubber duck. No.

Liz: Well, there should be.

Justin: Right. There should be a rubber duck. So to me, it’s like a modern version of rubber ducking, where you ask the thing like, This happens, or whatever, quick answers. That, to me, is…

It’s not only acceptable, but the tool is there. It’s like the calculator. Use it. But yeah, with some appropriate guardrails. But that’s the crux.

Liz: But I’m old enough that early in my Linsly career, we were discussing whether we were going to give kids demerits for having calculators. Because that was cheating. And now we don’t see it that way.

Justin: So to me, it’s a tool, but it’s a much more powerful, dangerous tool. And there’s lots of opportunities for abuse there that we need to reckon with.

Liz: So I feel like it’s 1996, ’97 all over again.

Justin: Okay.

Here we are again. Facing another brave new world, another promise that the future has arrived. This time it’s not AOL’s friendly voice saying “You’ve Got Mail”—it’s AI saying “How can I help you today?” The same breathless excitement, the same wild predictions, the same sense that everything is about to change. We’re installing apps, learning prompts, marveling at machine learning.

But we know this story now. We’ve lived through the arc from wonder to addiction to regret. We know that every technological revolution promises to solve our problems while creating new ones we never saw coming. The question isn’t whether AI will change everything—it’s whether we can hold onto both the wonder and the caution. 

Liz: And you were there. You were at the beginning of it. And as you said, it was a great time to be you. 

Justin: Sure. 

Liz: We were basically putting the world at the fingertips of kids, so you had access to everything. 

Justin: Right. 

Liz: I was fighting the battles in the administration. If I can get whatever manual I need for anything online, why do I have to have manuals on a bookshelf in my office? Let’s put the curriculum online. No, then they’re not learning responsibility. They’re not learning organization. Well, they’re going to need a different level of responsibility and a different level of organization. Now, here we are again. I mean, somebody who is in eighth or ninth grade today, like your son, has the world at his fingertips in a creation way the way you did in a user way.

Justin: Very much so, yes.

Liz: But now you’re a parent afraid of it? 

Justin: For sure. 

Liz: Instead of a fearless teenager. 

Justin: Just diving into it.

Liz: Just diving into it. Are the stakes higher?

Justin: It certainly feels that way for sure. I mean, everything’s… With your own children, it’s a whole different- Isn’t it? It’s a whole different thing. It’s remarkable. Because with your own kids, you’re just fighting this. You just want to keep them here. And yet you need to also give them the freedom and growth and all that. It’s scary.

Liz: There was a line in Finding Nemo where Dory and the dad are in the whale’s mouth. And the dad says, “I promised I’d never let anything happen to him.” And Dory, in that amazing voice, says, “Hmm. That’s a funny thing to promise.” Marlin responds, “What?”

Dory: “Well, you can’t never let anything happen to him. Then nothing would ever happen to him. Not much fun for little Harpo.” And I didn’t have kids when I was sitting in that movie theater watching that movie. I’m pretty sure I was watching with Lisa Bryson Ames. And it just hit me. That’s part of the process. And you hope, as a parent, that those failures, those challenges, aren’t life-ending or life-altering. Well, I can’t even say life-altering. You want them to alter. But in a way that still gives them the possibility of a future.

Justin: Right.

Liz: It’s hard to let go of that control. 

We are not in control. Even if we think we are. Once we accept that, we stop spinning plates, chasing what-if catastrophes, and living with the twin thieves of fear and regret. We have to trust that they may just fly when they get pushed out of the nest.

Liz: The number one thing you want is communication. Period. At work, at home, everything. Because if they can talk to you, if you and your wife are talking in front of them, then you’re going to make it through all kinds of challenges. I guess you have to talk to more than a rubber duck. 

Justin: Well, yeah. Machines are simpler than human beings.

I wasn’t a parent in 1997, I was a teacher. I was Justin’s teacher. I trusted him. I trusted Matt…and Erik and Steven. For me machines weren’t simpler… children were. They trusted me. In our mutual trust, I handed over control.

Liz: I like that you made the comment that you went into that chat room because you wanted to help people. And that’s the way I think of you. We used to call it “just in time” training because it was Justin training. That’s the way I think of you – you could slow down and really talk to a Luddite.

Justin: How did this even come about? Because I just… Again, I tell my kids, Oh, yeah. I worked at my high school. 

Liz: I saw your strengths, Steven’s strengths, Matt’s strengths, and fill in the verb. I exploited them. I empowered you.

Justin: Well, I mean, empowered for sure… It’s almost like at the time, I didn’t appreciate it enough. It was just like, Oh, this is fun. Like I said, anything with a computer, I’m there. But also to have a feeling like, Oh, this is my thing as a middle schooler going into high school, trying to figure that out. I see that with my own kids now, right? Trying to figure out where they fit in life and with other people, to have that opportunity starting in eighth grade, ninth grade. That’s huge.

It’s funny. I remember even getting pulled, not just summer, maybe after school, whatever, but getting pulled out of one class to walk down the hallway to help another teacher. It was just like, “Let’s find Justin to fix this computer thing.”

Liz: I remember that very well. I remember one day being asked what I was doing to monitor you guys. I thought, oh, my God, they’ve passed me up. I can’t monitor them. We just have to trust them. 

Trust—informed trust, earned trust, trust with guardrails—remains the antithesis to our fears…even today. Not blind faith, but something wiser: the ability to remain open to transformation while insisting on our humanity. The courage to believe that we can learn, that we can do better, that the future doesn’t have to repeat the past’s mistakes… but also to cherish the moments from the past that weren’t mistakes at all, but unexpected joys.

Liz: I think back to the video you made me for softball at the end of your senior year. 

When I think back to that now, I think that is the seed that you planted in my life, that everything, anything, could be a multimedia experience. Not a lot of head of schools do videos the way we did. Not a lot of schools would even consider some of the things Country Day did early on. And I can’t find where it begins except for that year in softball.

Justin: Okay. Wow. I remember being down in that Linsly basement in that cement room.

Liz: Oh, you mean my office? Yes.

Justin: Was that your office? 

Liz: Yes. 

Justin: Lovely views. 

But just waiting for that thing to render. Because I remember it would get like hours and hours, and then it would fail, just on and on. But yeah, I was…

Liz: And now it gets one rotation, whatever it is, and it damn well better be finished, downloaded, uploaded, whatever the case may be. 

Justin: Yeah, it’s remarkable.

Liz:  It is remarkable. 

So what does it take to succeed in this fast-paced world of computers today?

Justin: I think to me, it all gets down to trust. And it might sound… I don’t know. But psychological safety to me is so important that it took me a long time to be able to say, “I don’t know.” Not to just be like, oh, it’s… Because not knowing something is curiosity. And that’s how you learn and grow. No one knows everything. So it took me a long time to get to that point and a long time to recognize that everyone is pretty much in the same position there. Because it’s difficult over remote… I can’t read body language. Tone doesn’t come across in your Slack, or text messages. I could put it in my head through my processor and it’d be like, Oh, this person is really pissed at me… even though they weren’t. All of this is to say the biggest thing to me is just the trust aspect.

Liz: I learned “I don’t know” in college, but I really learned “I don’t know” in practice with you because it was fine to say to you, “I don’t know how that works.” And we’d figure it out. 

Justin: See, it took me years to figure that out the “I don’t know”

Liz: Well, that might be an apology that I owe you. You were my answer guy. So I didn’t make, “I don’t know,” acceptable. So I’m sorry.

Justin: Well, don’t sweat it. I think that for a long time, I felt like I had all the answers. Certainly when it came to my software and things like that, my profession, that not having the answer was so uncomfortable. And a really vulnerable place to be.

Liz: Oh, you said a lot right there. What age is it that it’s okay to be vulnerable? Have you hit it?

Justin: I hope so. I feel that way on a daily basis. I try to… When you talk about building a culture in a team at work, I try to be very upfront now. “I don’t know. I’ll have to check into that. I don’t know.” Instead of just trying to hide behind some fake answer, pretending. 

Liz: Well, maybe that’s the best gift we could give our kids.

Justin: Yeah, for sure. 

Twenty-seven years later, Justin sits where I once sat—the adult making choices about the intersection between technology and children. He talks to AI the way he once talked to me: bouncing ideas, solving problems, finding answers. His rubber duck has gotten smarter, but the need for trust hasn’t changed. He won’t give his thirteen-year-old the same freedom he had at thirteen, and maybe that’s wisdom, not fear.

I think about that basement office, waiting hours for a video to render, working alongside a young man who didn’t know he was teaching me to be present – that the future was already here. Now we’re both older, both saying “I don’t know” easily, both trying to figure out how vulnerability makes us authentic and relatable.

Maybe the most important lesson we learned together wasn’t about technology at all—it’s about trusting each other enough to admit we’re all just figuring it out as we go.

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A Special Detour Q/A with Liz Hofreuter & Carole Ann Al-Din

Ever notice how a good walk can clear your head? There’s something about that rhythm—left foot, right foot—that seems to untangle our thoughts. That’s no accident.

Back in 1987, psychologist Francine Shapiro discovered something fascinating during a walk. As her eyes moved back and forth while processing a troubling memory, she noticed her distress decreasing. That simple observation eventually became EMDR therapy, now one of our most effective trauma treatments.

Given the nature of Walk with Me, I’ve been thinking a lot about this connection, so I wanted to learn more about it. I turned to the person who first introduced me to EMDR, Carole Ann Aldin.

Our Q/A reminds me that healing is about movement, rhythm, and the courage to walk through our stories in the safety of someone who truly sees us.

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Carole Ann Aldin: EMDR stands for eye movement desensitization reprocessing. It was discovered by a woman named Francine Shapiro. Apparently, she had cancer a number of years earlier in the ’70s, so she got into mind-body healing. She was researching how our physical symptoms are related to our emotional life. She was working on her dissertation for a PhD in Clinical Psychology, so there was something in her mind that she was trying to think about, which was maybe troubling to her. She went out, going to a lake or park and walking. She noticed when she came back that her mind was clear and she was calm. Because she was mindful and using herself as a laboratory, she was curious about that. So she went out again and noticed that when she was walking, her eyes were moving back and forth or on a diagonal. And so she was thinking it might have something to do with her eyes. And so when she came back, and over time, she started using a hand motion to create something that would have the eyes moving back and forth and on a diagonal.

Liz Hofreuter: So why does the eye dart when you walk?

Carole Ann: I guess it’s just our movement, especially if you’re looking at trees, right? You’re walking and the eyes are just taking it in. And that’s how it is- they’re moving.

Liz: More so than when we sit and talk.

Carole Ann: Exactly.

Carole Ann: The emotional part of the trauma gets stuck and lodged in our emotional brains, and it doesn’t get connected with our logical brain. And trauma can be small traumas, big traumas and what this process does, it doesn’t erase the memory of the trauma, but through the process it starts to connect the logical brain to the emotional brain, so we could get informed differently. 

We are one body. We’re body, speech, and mind. So trauma gets lodged in us neurologically. It’s not just psychological. And it becomes physicalized a lot of times. That’s the beauty of something like EMDR is because you are addressing the cognitive distortions that happen. You could have been in a fire or something like that, and you would feel powerless. Let’s say that would be the cognition, “I’m powerless” so that cognition then can permeate other situations. We take these internalized thoughts like I’m powerless and then you feel like that in other situations in your life. You don’t see that you have power.

Liz: So powerless then becomes an easy feeling to arise because you didn’t deal with that powerlessness feeling.

Carole Ann: It was overwhelming. The situation, let’s say, was overwhelming. If you were a child or something or in a fire, right? It’s so vast. It’s so big.

Liz: So could that be why imposter syndrome is so prevalent? That at some point someone spoke over us or certainly as a child, your opinion doesn’t count for anything. And so you feel in every situation like my opinion won’t count for anything.

Carole Ann: Definitely. Disempowered. You might think, “I’m worthless.” or “ I’m dumb”. People are told they’re dumb as children. And no matter then, because it was not just psychological, It was neurological because it became embedded in the neurology of the person.  No matter how much you tell them differently, it doesn’t change.

Liz: But EMDR actually can change it. It can change it. Because it changes it neurologically.

Carole Ann: Well, it builds new neuropathways in the brain

Liz: To me, there’s also something about walking and talking because you don’t look at each other. 

Carole Ann: I haven’t thought of that, but I think it probably gives you a sense of safety. Meaning you’re not looking at the person. You’re in your own space. It might even be almost a sense of anonymity.

You’re not interacting. It’s almost like parallel play. Yes.

Liz: That’s a good metaphor.

Carole Ann: And in parallel play, you’re in your own universe. The other thing, though, with EMDR is once you get the negative cognition that is attached to the trauma, then you want to find out the antidote to that. So the antidote would be, “I do have power now”. And once you can see that there are many other situations in your life. Once you connect with the neocortex, you can see, I made this decision, and I came out of this. So you can then start to install that positive cognition, even with that first memory.

Liz: Even though it’s behind you. You can’t change the outcome.

Carole Ann: Well, what’s interesting about that, in some ways, obviously, So you can’t change the outcome. But when you change how you see it, you do change the outcome.

Liz: Yeah, you change the way it affects you. You change that. And the way you do something differently next time. Absolutely. It’s funny. I’ve felt the need just recently to apologize to people. So it’s almost like I’m going back to moments that I didn’t process the way I wanted to and working on them again. 

Carole Ann: And so when you do that, what happens to you and what happens with the person?

Liz: I just did it the other night, and the relationship I had with the person was fine, but there was just this bur. And I didn’t even call her. I just texted an apology, and she said, What in the world would you want to apologize for? And I told her specifically what it was. And she was like, Well, it turns out you were right. But I wasn’t right in the moment. And I held on to my rightness. And that’s what I was really apologizing for. And immediately, that moment’s gone. It didn’t bother me anymore. It didn’t haunt me all the time. It wasn’t that big of a moment. It was a small little thing, but it was gone.

Carole Ann: And that’s what this can do. And in that way, it actually does change the past. It’s really… And the other thing- It’s just an event, not an effect. Right. It doesn’t hold the emotional charge in the same way. That’s the thing. You remember it, but it almost then just becomes part of the narrative.

Liz: So now that I’ve done… I’ve actually done 30 walks, the last couple of people I’ve walked with were really really afraid to walk with me because they would tell me things they didn’t know if they wanted to talk about. So what is it about, or is it the EMDR that makes walking tap to. One gentleman said, I’ve never talked to anybody about my dad, and he talked to me a lot about his dad. Is that the EMDR at work, too?

Carole Ann: I think it’s you at work. So one of the things about, I think, even with the EMDR is you really have to have a sense of safety. Because we really heal from the inside out. And that’s what EMDR shows us, that we have to heal from the inside out.

Liz: So then I go back to what makes somebody like Francine come home from a walk and invent EMDR. 

Carole Ann: It was the cancer and making herself the laboratory. She was her own experiment. It wasn’t anything external. She was careful, aware of looking at herself. She looked at how her eyes fluttered. She looked at herself in detail. She was just attentive to all parts of herself.

Liz: The attention to the little things.

Carole Ann: And it was about her. So I think it’s like when we tell our stories,

Liz: So it’s simple enough, let people tell their stories and love them unconditionally.

Carole Ann: Let them be who they are, whatever form that is.

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There are moments in life where there’s nowhere to hide. Something has happened in your life or your child’s life and you can’t quite put yourself back together just yet. You don’t have the energy to present a polished version of yourself that the world expects. Heck, you don’t even have the energy to hide your emotions. The best you can muster is to slump over and say, “I got nothing left.”

What a gift to have a safe space, a friend who sits across from you when you show up completely undone. Where the worst version of yourself isn’t a deal-breaker—it’s just another Tuesday. I am blessed by two or three of these friendships, but one has been present at the critical junctures of my life and in hers. She arrived at my mother’s funeral before I did.  I took her to the courthouse to secure the death certificate after her husband died. She took me to the Penguin Encounter after the judge declared me divorced. Wait. That was an odd choice we made. Penguins mate for life. Don’t they?

Anyway, you get it, with Anne Chen I don’t need to be anything other than exactly who I am, soaking wet and all. I don’t even have to apologize when our first walk failed to record. We got a do-over. 

Liz: I did a sit-down coffee with my therapist who explained to me why the walking part of this is so important because you don’t look at each other and your eyes dart. And that has a lot to do with revisiting emotional traditional places and unlocking them in a different way. And when you talk about it, you allow somebody to be a witness, and it makes it less triggering. I wish I understood it better. 

Anne: That’s interesting. I mean, I just feel like I can talk to you.

Liz: You can sit and look at me and talk to me.

Anne: I can sit and look at you and talk to you, and it would really be helpful for me.

Liz: You know, after I walked with Gregg Behr and I was completely soaked, we met for dinner. I dried off, and then I got completely soaked by my spilled water. There are probably – maybe just two – two people in this world that I would have been okay with all that happening in front of, and you’re one of them. When I feel like, okay, it can’t get much worse than this moment. There are only certain people you’re willing to just slump over and go, “Okay, pay for it. I got nothing left.”

But here’s the thing about that “I got nothing left” moment—it’s not actually the end. It’s this weird paradox where you think you’ve hit bottom, where every reserve has been tapped out, and then somehow, sitting there with someone who truly sees you, you find another gear you didn’t know existed. Maybe it’s because you’re not carrying the weight alone anymore, or maybe it’s because being witnessed in your lowest moment reminds you that you’re still here, still breathing, still worth fighting for. That determination doesn’t come from pretending I’m fine; for me it comes from being completely vulnerable. 

Anne: You started to say, When you say something to someone else, it makes it… I don’t remember what exactly…

Liz: That somebody bears witness?

Anne: Someone bears witness. Yes. I was thinking about manifesting the things you say… it’s one of the reasons people don’t like to talk about death and preparation for dying, because there’s a fear that if you speak it, you manifest it. But on the other hand, if you’re aspiring to something, you want to talk about it, at least I do, because then it makes me accountable. Like someone else has heard it, so now I have to f..king do it. So I guess two sides of the same coin.

Liz: There are things you and I talk about that I feel like, okay, I said it. Now I got to go do it.

Anne: Yeah. I mean, I think that’s actually important. I think it’s important to have that. It’s important to acknowledge it. It’s important to acknowledge that when you make a choice to say something to someone meaningful, or maybe even not that meaningful, it means that there’s part of you that needs to hold yourself accountable.

She holds me accountable. She also holds me up. As I do for her. Two sides of the same coin. We have been that way since we met on the fifth floor of Witherspoon on the Princeton campus in the late summer of 1985. At 58, our beliefs and values remain very similar, but the life experiences that got us here vary widely. What is interesting is how we find ourselves on similar professional paths now – not just bearing witness but adding to each other’s experiences as we boldly reimagine what comes next – building on a foundation of What if? by adding floors of Yes And.

Let me explain. Not only did she witness my grief and pain, she had a front row seat to bear witness to my big swing – translating a tutoring program to a virtual platform to serve students in Boys & Girls Clubs while incubating a math software to further support learning. She showed up. For every presentation I did in Pittsburgh, she arrived early. She made introductions to friends that led to foundation meetings. She joined zoom calls to offer a distinctive outside voice. She supported me, but she made me accountable to keep moving the idea forward.

Now it’s her turn. She has a vision of something new.

Anne: So I wanted to talk about… Can I talk about something that is making me so excited? So I think that the last time I talked to you, I mentioned this business that I’m pursuing with a partner with manufactured housing. So we have launched the business.

They started with a question.

Anne: How can we bring the housing units to market really quickly, affordably?

Anne is an architect. Perhaps you’ve seen the Hillman Library at the University of Pittsburgh or passed by Steel City Squash. If you have been to my house, you’ve seen her work. She has a lens on the world that I don’t even have the vocabulary for. As she discussed the solution that she and her partner have envisioned, I asked sophomoric questions.

Liz: What’s the difference?

Anne: Manufactured housing is the descendent of mobile homes.

Liz: And what’s modular?

Anne: Modular is similar, but manufactured housing is almost fully built in a factory. They will then truck it over to a site and install it.

Liz: Assemble it? so paint by numbers?

Anne: And there’s very little that is done on site. The foundation is done on site. You bring in utilities. There might be a little bit of finish work that’s done on site. So when we think about modular or manufactured housing, mobile homes, we think about single wides, which are the least expensive way. That’s the least expensive housing unit. So they are limited in size, and right now, they’re very limited in size. When I started looking at this, it was like, “Oh, my God, this is the answer.” This is the thing that no one has done. Because I started looking… Is there manufactured housing in urban areas? Nope, nothing. You see them in suburban areas, you’ve seen them in the rural areas. Manufactured housing has now evolved so that there are multi-sections, so it doesn’t look like a… It’s not a single wide anymore.

They are good quality homes, two bedroom, maybe two baths or one and a half baths with sustainable features so that there are going to be low energy costs and require no subsidy. The reason that no subsidy is so impactful is not just because you can deliver it faster. It’s that when you sell to the owner, they get all the equity. So oftentimes, when you have a subsidy, the owner is limited when they sell it. They can only sell to low-income buyers, so they don’t realize the equity. And so they don’t have the power of upward mobility… and that’s huge.

This was not anywhere on my agenda or strategic plan, although I was thinking about it. When I quit GBBN, I had been telling them for three years,  I’m not really happy here. Then after you’ve been saying it for so long, you just got to do it. It’s that accountability piece. 

There’s a profound liberation that comes with stepping away from the endless cycle of doing what’s expected—the corporate ladder, the predetermined milestones, the status quo. It’s like finally exhaling after holding your breath for years. 

But the real rush isn’t walking off the well-trodden path—it’s in the pivot toward creation. There’s a fundamental difference between thinking outside the box as an intellectual exercise and actually laying the groundwork for something that didn’t exist before. One is theoretical; the other is transformational. When you move from “what if” to “what now,” you shift from being a consumer of other people’s visions to an architect of your own.

What amplifies this excitement exponentially is when your bold leap serves something bigger than yourself. There’s an alchemy that happens when personal fulfillment meets community need—suddenly your work isn’t just about you anymore, it’s about the ripple effect you can create. You’re not just building a business or pursuing a passion project; you’re addressing real problems that real people face every day. Your success becomes intertwined with others’ wellbeing.

This kind of purpose-driven building creates a different quality of energy.

Anne: The gap between people who own homes and who rent has just gotten bigger and bigger. Home ownership still is a means by which people build wealth. And the fact that it has been denied to the people at the lower end of the… I mean, 80 % AMI is like, $86,000. I mean, those are people who are working. They still can’t afford them. 

You know it really is this static framework that has prohibited this from being seen, from even being identified as a solution. And if we can just push to walk through all of those obstacles, which frankly, they’re not… that big. I think we can really make a difference.

Liz: So it’s trusting systems thinking that limits you from seeing opportunity. 

Anne: It is really about having someone new come in and say, wait a second, why is no one doing this? And then to have the persistence to do it and the resources.

I started some conversations with a bunch of manufacturers. The key is finding the right one. 

Liz: What else makes it the perfect manufacturing partner?

Anne: They just have to get it. I don’t know. I think they just need to be able to deliver within budget what we want. They need to be relatively close by because of the fuel charges, the freight charges can get up there. I don’t know. I think it’s just the right person. You have to have the right person with the decision making authority to be able to say, “Hey, factory, let’s do this.”

Liz: I’m pushing you on what makes the right partner. And I think you hit it when you said they have to get it. They had to have an open mind. They had to be willing to see a gap in the market and not just the formulaic, which is what we’re talking about when we talk about health care and government and everything else. You have to see beyond the formula. It’s just got to be for those people…

Anne: …people who are willing to be creative. 

Liz: Like finding the right partner. Yes, and. 

Anne: Not everyone is going to be willing to do it. You have to accept that. 

Liz: And not everyone should.

Trust me, there’s something electric about that moment when you realize you’ve stumbled onto something real—a genuine gap in the market that’s been hiding in plain sight. 

Anne: He (her partner) was like, “I’ve never been the first to do something”. And I said, “Really? This is really this big of an opportunity?”

It’s a “baited breath” feeling where every conversation, every brainstorm session, every “yes” and even “no” seems to build momentum.

What makes it even more powerful is finding the right partner to explore it with. There’s this beautiful “yes, and” energy that emerges—where one person’s idea sparks another’s, and suddenly you’re not just adding thoughts together, you’re multiplying them. The accountability keeps you grounded while the brainstorming lifts you up.

It’s that rare combination of complementary skills meeting untapped opportunity. You know you could probably tackle it alone, but together there’s this amplification effect—you’re both better versions of yourselves when you’re building something that feels genuinely needed in the world. I could just as easily be describing my partnership with Luke Hladek as I am the interactions between Anne and Jeremy. Quickly, my own breath is once again bated. I am reliving those early days of recognizing what’s possible. It is electric and contagious.

Anne knows complexity will creep in…but there’s something intoxicating about being in that sweet spot where market need meets personal passion meets partnership chemistry. It’s like catching lightning in a bottle. 

Liz: The baited breath of, “I think this can work” …it starts to feel like a snowball, doesn’t it? It does.

Anne: And it is so important. He was saying, I work better with a partner, and I do, too, because there is this accountability.

Liz: But the brainstorming, the bopping of… I’m going to say it again. Yes, and.

Anne: Yes, right. I mean, the things that I bring to it… they’re really complementary. And I know we’re in the honeymoon phase. And at some point, if this gets going, and it will…it’ll get more complicated. But really to get this… I could do this by myself, but I wouldn’t do it as well.

Liz: I believe we’re right back to stepping through the door, being prepared when the opportunity presents itself.

Anne: I mean, that really was it. I was telling Xing recently, you have to set goals for yourself. And then when you achieve that goal, you don’t just say, oh, great, I did that. You set your bar a little higher.

Liz: Set a new goal. Or maybe it’s a tangential path. 

Anne: Exactly. Maybe it’s taught you something that tells you, yeah, it’s a tangent. It’s this other goal that you’re going to try..

Liz: And you can follow the path too long, and that’s not bad either. 

Anne: Well, it’ll teach you something. As long as you are willing to pay attention to what you have experienced, what that journey has taught you.

Looking back on this journey—from those raw moments of showing up alone on a college campus to witnessing the electric spark of new possibility—I’m struck by how much this friendship has taught us about the architecture of becoming.

What strikes me most is how vulnerability and vision aren’t opposites—they’re dance partners. Those “I got nothing left” moments didn’t diminish our capacity for dreaming; they deepened it…  we have to be the person who can’t stop dreaming….there’s too much fear and too little dreaming. Especially now when America is afraid of its own shadow.

But perhaps the most valuable lesson is this: the path rarely looks like what we expected when we started walking it. From Princeton dorm rooms to divorce penguins to manufactured housing breakthroughs—the beauty isn’t in the predictability of the journey, but in our willingness to keep setting new goals, to pivot when we learn something that changes everything, and to trust that sometimes the most important step is simply being prepared when opportunity presents itself.

For all of it—the mess, the manifestation, the moments of pure possibility—I am deeply, endlessly grateful.

---

In the 100 days of May, time stretches like taffy with the weight of expectation before that starting pistol signaling summer freedom.  When the calendar turns to June there is a collective sigh of relief from teachers and administrators that can be heard across every neighborhood. What is it like for children? Hollywood would have us believe that doors explode open and students are launched as if from a confetti canon with the accompanying screams of jubilation.

Are they all swept up in that triumphant swell of celebration?

Picture the quiet fourth-grader who started mentally crossing off calendar days back in April, white-knuckling through each math class, each teacher interaction, each morning announcement—just desperate to reach the finish line. Imagine the third-grader with dyslexia who has spent months watching classmates effortlessly decode words that, for her, remain stubborn puzzles on the page and will have to pull a chair up to that desk all summer long.  And what of our classroom enthusiasts—those front-row sitters whose hands shoot up like fireworks before the question is fully formed? Do all children count down to summer break? Is there something to the promise of unstructured discovery that they need more of? What would they tell us?

We educators craft elaborate theories about what children need, want, and feel, but have we stopped to truly listen? What revelations might emerge if we gathered around in that final circle time and simply asked: “What does learning mean to you?” The answers might revolutionize not just how we end our school years, but how we design them from the start.

I asked Palmer, age nine, what she wished teachers knew about learning. 

Liz: So when you learn, who’s doing the talking?

Palmer: Our teachers. And us, too.

Liz: That sounds a little problematic to me. If when you’re learning, the teachers are doing the talking, how do I know you’re learning? Do you ever sit in a classroom where a teacher is talking and you’re not learning anything?

Palmer: I don’t know. I’ve never thought about that. Usually, I learn, but… Wait, that’s a tough one. How do you know that you’re learning? A teacher is talking. Usually, you know by… If you pay attention enough and… Wait, wait. This is a tough one.

Hazel, a second grader, couldn’t agree more when I asked her who was talking, she explained…

Hazel: Mostly the teacher and some of my classmates because they do talk during lessons.

Liz: If your teachers are the ones talking, how do you know you’re learning? 

Hazel: Well, because they’re explaining something, and that’s going to go into my long-term memory. This one’s a hard one. It’s a hard answer. If they’re talking and you’re learning, then I’d…

Liz: You know what? What? I bet it’s a hard one for your teachers, too.

Hazel: If the kids are talking, but you’re talking the most, then how are you learning?

I have a hero when it comes to education. Sir Ken Robinson inspired me throughout my career to focus on learning. In his Ted Talk: How to Escape Education’s Death Valley, he puts it this way.

“Teaching, properly conceived, is not a delivery system. You know, you’re not there just to pass on received information. Great teachers do that, but what great teachers also do is mentor, stimulate, provoke, engage. You see, in the end, education is about learning. If there’s no learning going on, there’s no education going on. And people can spend an awful lot of time discussing education without ever discussing learning. The whole point of education is to get people to learn.”

He tells the story of a philosopher who “used to talk about the difference between the task and achievement senses of verbs. You can be engaged in the activity of something, but not really be achieving it, like dieting. It’s a very good example. There he is. He’s dieting. Is he losing any weight? Not really.

Teaching is a word like that. You can say, “There’s Deborah, she’s in room 34, she’s teaching.” But if nobody’s learning anything, she may be engaged in the task of teaching but not actually fulfilling it.

The role of a teacher is to facilitate learning. That’s it.”

When Robinson concludes that “the role of a teacher is to facilitate learning. That’s it,” he’s not diminishing the teaching profession but rather elevating it. Facilitation involves creating conditions where learning can flourish—designing environments that spark curiosity, building relationships that foster trust, asking questions that promote deeper thinking, and adapting approaches based on learners’ needs…such as “Castle Rock,” a simulation of global politics inspired by the work of John Hunter. In my experience this was masterfully constructed by educators who placed the focus on experience and not lesson planning.

Liz: So let’s pivot to the positive, as I like to say. Of all the years you’ve been in school, can you name one or two activities where you’re like, Wow, I really learned something doing this? 

Palmer: There is one where it’s in fourth grade. Okay. It’s Castle Rock.

Liz: Castle Rock is a history game that you play. What did you learn?

Palmer: In Castle Rock, Coach Joe usually gives us a quote of the week every time we play the game. And usually I learn from those quotes. I think one of the quotes was, Don’t fight first. Talk. 

I couldn’t help myself. I had to fact check her accuracy. The actual quote from Sun Tzu was “He who wishes to fight must first count the cost.”

Palmer: I think those quotes go hand in hand with the game because it’s usually something that you have to think about while you’re doing it. It’s not like a random quote that you would find on the internet. It’s not like, “You should do this, you should do that.” It’s more of like, “Keep this in mind while you’re playing it.”

Preston: I was the arms dealer. I was excited because that was a job that I basically crossed my fingers, crossed everything on my body for.

Liz: Why did you want that one?

Preston: Well, I love the job. Making people… Well, not making people rage. 

Liz: If it’s supposed to be about peace, why is there an arms dealer?

Preston: It’s a real simulation game. Just to make people not fall in for any rage or anything. That’s most likely my best guess. The only thing, the only real goal, well, is to, one, make sure no country is obliterated into nothing, and two, to have at least one cent higher than you had at the beginning.

Liz: So the threat of the weapons keeps people from raging. Is that what you mean?

Preston: Sort of. I mean, it’s there just in case… so no one falls into any rage. What if you just saw a nuke right there and your enemy was a country’s leader, and you’re really mad at that person. That’s what the arm dealer is just there for, temper rage, so people can’t buy nukes and kill each other, which is not supposed to happen.

Return to “He who wishes to fight must first count the cost.” It seems like a quote we could ask our global leaders to study in real time.

If you happen upon the students during this simulation, you will question if you have encountered a class or free time. Children are huddled in groups except when they send an emissary to negotiate with another party. There is more engagement with the activity than distraction from a teacher’s lesson. Honestly, I have had teachers describe it as chaos. I’ve only ever regarded it as the smartest social studies class ever. Thank you, John Hunter.

Robinson’s insight that “if there’s no learning going on, there’s no education going on” places learning—not teaching—at the center of education. This might seem obvious, but as he notes, many educational discussions focus extensively on teaching methodologies, classroom management, curriculum design, or assessment without adequately addressing how learning actually occurs. Learning is the core of education… and children are the heart of it.

But what of those hearts? How does the process of learning weigh on them? The process of learning includes humbling oneself to learning something new. So I wondered what learning has been like for children.  While Palmer has a hard time pinpointing an example of learning in school, she can easily discuss it within her world of dance.

Palmer: If you don’t know how to do the trick, don’t do it. It’s not something that you just think about in dance. It’s also something that you can think about in school. If you don’t know how to do the trick, don’t do it, or it’s something that you don’t understand.

Liz: So in dance, how do you learn to do the trick? When you first learned to do an aerial, tell me how that happened. 

Palmer: There was someone that was helping me. She was spotting me.

Liz: Did she actually touch and lift you at first? 

Palmer: And then they usually start by saying, I’m going to do it lighter, and you’re going to help me through that. And then you would do it. And then the process gets easier and easier as you do it. And then finally, you get more comfortable doing it. And then they’re going to say, You don’t need my help right now. I’m going to back off… let you do it first. Usually, you would say, If you’re not actually comfortable with the trick, I would say, I would probably start by saying, Can we do one more before I want to do it by myself?

Liz: So you know how to self-advocate that way? And when you do it by yourself the first time, there’s a really good mat there. Are you afraid of failing?

Palmer: I despise failing because it makes me upset, but there’s a world full of opportunities that can happen.

Liz: You got to say more – What do you mean there’s a wealth of opportunities that can happen?

Palmer: Usually when I fail at something, I get upset about it, but then I’m like, I always have another shot of doing it.

Liz: I love that. 

There is a pedagogy of “I do, we do, you do” that many teachers use. The teacher solves the equation, writes the sentence, or shows cause and effect first. Then the teacher and class collaborate – we do – before a student is asked to show what they know independently. While similar, it is not the same as being spotted for a trick in dance. No one begins a new trick by talking.

Liz: I have a question because you said when you learn to do the new stunt, you practice it over and over and over again until you can do it. But you told me in math, you don’t like being asked to do problems over and over and over again. Yeah. Wait.

Palmer: At school, instead of taking it slow, they’ll give you a math sheet, and it’s like, do this. And then there’s always seven math sheets after that. After the third or second math sheet, I get frustrated if I don’t know a problem. I usually go back to that problem, but then my mind starts to shut down after I do seven or eight problems on the second or third math sheet.

Palmer despises failure. She admits that. Is the frustration she experiences a precursor to failure or a necessary phase of learning? The frustration she articulates points to something else. Her zone of discomfort leads to her mind shutting down. The child who self-advocates in dance class does not transfer the skill to the classroom. She doesn’t ask, “Can we do one more before I do these myself?” She shuts down when she doesn’t know a problem.

Liz: How do you feel when you make a mistake?

Hazel: If it’s a small one, I’m like, Okay, I’ll just fix this. But if it’s the entire thing, I’m like, Come on. But if it’s in front of the class, which they are most likely already done with, I’m like, Great.

Liz: So you don’t like being not done when everybody else is done?

Hazel: Well, I just don’t like being not done, personally. Because they get to read, and I really like reading.

Hazel’s comments point to learning equaling being “done.” Checking off morning work as an item on a to-do list rather than practice to learn something new. Have we inadvertently put the emphasis on the wrong part of the educational process? Kids figure out the game of school pretty quickly.

When we hand out worksheets with neat little boxes to fill in, when we check assignments with a quick “complete” stamp, when the highest praise is “all done,” we’re teaching them something unintentional but powerful: learning equals completion.

So children adapt. They learn that education is a series of finite tasks with clear endpoints rather than an ongoing process of discovery. They internalize that being a “good student” means finishing things efficiently, not necessarily understanding them thoroughly. Their natural question shifts from “What does this mean?” to “Is this what you want?” and eventually to “Will this be on the test?”

And we wonder why, when summer finally arrives, they seem so eager to forget everything we taught them.

I am not sure we ever help students reflect and celebrate the joy of learning something new. I am also not sure we ever reflect on the possible suffering of not learning it. At 10, Parker can help us understand a different take on academic anxiety.

Liz: What does it feel like to learn something?

Parker: It feels really good and just leaves all the stress behind. I don’t know.

Liz: So is there stress before you learn it?

Parker: Yeah, because you’ve never seen the problem or things before, and then you actually just do it.

Liz: So the “doing it”  takes the stress of that?

Parker: Yeah.

Liz: Oh, that’s really interesting. Okay, so let’s go back to the teacher talking. If the teacher is talking and you’re not doing anything, is that stressful?

Parker: Sometimes when they just talk for two hours and then we have to do a paper.

Liz: So while the teacher is talking, before they let you do whatever it is you’re learning, you can be stressed by it? 

Parker: Yeah. 

Liz: Oh, wow. I never thought about that. 

Learning is supposed to be challenging – that’s how our brains grow. That productive tension we feel when tackling challenging material helps encode information more deeply and creates stronger neural pathways. Here’s the thing about learning: we’re SUPPOSED to get things wrong sometimes. When the success rate drops below 70%, though, that’s when productive challenge can turn into “why am I even trying?” territory unless provided the right guidance or scaffolding – like having a spotter for a new trick. The brain literally can’t process effectively when panic sets in. Research in educational psychology points to something called the “Zone of Proximal Development”—that sweet spot where material is just challenging enough to promote growth but not so difficult that it overwhelms learners who start experiencing anxiety that interferes with cognitive processing. It’s the gap between what a learner can do independently and what they can achieve with “a spotter” supporting them.

So how much stress is too much? The answer varies by individual, but when stress begins to trigger avoidance behaviors, or lead to naming the anxiety butterfly in your stomach because it’s been there so long – you’ve probably crossed the line.

Don’t get me wrong, failure is not fatal. I can’t even type those words without hearing Reno DiOrio’s voice echo them although they are truly attributed to Winston Churchill. And failure has its place in learning. Even at age 11 Preston can tell you that his favorite learning experience came with his greatest failure. What was that experience?

Preston: Lego Robotics. I was a team captain and a main programmer. My programs were perfect until the day of the competition where they all got bugged. So we got second to last place.

Liz: No. Talk to me about that. How did that feel?

Preston: Absolutely horrible. We were the best team by far. We were done with our (robot) building first. Our programs were perfect. Even the main teacher of the class said, ‘I don’t know what happened with this group. They were perfect.’ And then next thing you know, we ended up getting 45 as a high when the winner got 145.

Our emotions really didn’t show. We were fine, but really, that was probably the worst possible outcome to have from there. 

Liz: And yet it was a favorite class? You didn’t let that outcome change that? 

Preston: No. 

Liz: How did you manage that? 

Preston: Simple. Because all the great teamwork I had, and all the fun it was being the main programmer 

I don’t know what happened at the end. Our programs looked the same, but they bugged our car. They wouldn’t do full turns or do anything. We probably crashed into seven buildings. Yeah, it was bad.

Liz: How heartbreaking. I love that day. I used to call Lego Robotics my favorite day on campus.

Preston: Yeah, it really was. It was the best day.

Failure is part of the equation of learning. When a child struggles through a math problem using three different approaches before finding one that works, she has learned more than the classmate who followed the formula correctly the first time. Her neural pathways are richer, her understanding more flexible. The gift comes when a child can recognize mistakes as information… when failure is a necessary part of the bigger picture… but our grading systems with our red pens rarely capture this. We measure the destination, not the journey. 

Liz: How will you know at the end of the day if it’s been a successful day of learning?

Hazel: Well, the kids will probably be pretty happy, and I will look at all the papers that I still have. I look at them and be like, We got some success. Because if most of the kids had a good score, then I’d be like, Okay. Okay, that’s good.

Liz: That’s a good day. Yeah. Yeah.

Hazel: Because most of the kids are learning, which is a really good thing because you want the kids to learn as a teacher.

Liz: How many is most? If you have 20 kids in your class, how many is most? When you say, If most of them are learning, it’s a good day.

Hazel: It’d probably be like there’s 15 kids that… 15 kids that would have gotten some problems, which if they’re small problems, I mean, I’ll still count it as a pretty good score. Okay.

Liz: You really want it to be 20, don’t you?

Hazel: Yeah, I want it to be 20 kids that have learned everything because I have 20 kids in my class.

Liz: But that’s hard, huh?

Hazel: Yeah, because if they’re not listening.

Liz: Oh, right. Because like you said, learning isn’t just about teaching. It’s about the kid, too.

This particular walk has meandered through so many important tangents about learning. There is so much to learn from listening to children…so many seeds to plant as to ways we might engage with students. Before I turned off the mic, I had to know.

Liz: What makes one teacher stand out as somebody you learn from.

Preston: One thing that I believe I have, a good sense of humor. And yes, a good sense of humor would make a great teacher. Another thing, instead of just doing worksheets all the time, have creativity in what you’re teaching.

Liz: Clearly, coaches don’t make you do worksheets.

Preston: Clearly, they don’t.

Liz: I would hope not.

Preston: That would just be random.

Liz: What would a good coach be like?

Preston: A good coach would be not commanding and screaming at their players. Let’s see. Diversity in what they’re teaching. You don’t need to do… For example, in baseball, you don’t need to do the same batting practice every time. You could do fielding or something else. And also it doesn’t… Well, I mean, this is an obvious one, but… Don’t be a dictator. Don’t be a dictator. Yeah.

Liz: So do you feel like from the people that you consider the best teachers and coaches, were you able to have a voice?

Preston: Yes.

Liz: How so?

Preston: Well, instead of the coaches not letting you talk, you have to tell the coaches what’s wrong … what’s happening with you.

Parker: A good teacher, if someone’s doing something they’re not supposed to, just slightly walk over to them and tell them, “Can you please stop doing this?” Instead of just yelling at them to stop or embarrassing them in the middle of class. If they’re trying to answer a question and they get it wrong, just like, “Nope, you’re wrong.” 

Liz: What does that feel like?

Parker: It feels really weird sometimes because you never knew it was coming or you never knew she or he was going to yell at you like that.

Liz: I’m going to make an assumption here. I assume it would be pretty hard to do your best when you’re feeling like that.

Parker: Yeah.

And what would a good teacher make school look like?

Hazel: We’d start off with a little bit of unpacking and a little bit of free play time.

Liz: What do kids learn about life when you’re doing unpacking? What’s important about that?

Hazel: Staying organized. Knowing what is where.

Liz: Knowing what’s where. I like that. And then play. Why is it important to play early in the day?

Hazel: To get your brain started.

Play. Play to get your brain started. Isn’t that why they are so excited to burst through those doors on the last day of school…so they can have time for unstructured play? Years ago I asked, “Why can’t school be more like Creek Week camp in the summer?” From that question came Lego Robotics, Castle Rock, a Weather Balloon, Zoology and more creative ideas when teachers used their classrooms to incubate innovative ways to learn.

As I listened to 5th and 8th grade students talk about learning during graduation speeches, such were the classes they recounted. Those and of course the teachers who sacrificed personal time to provide the scaffolding to turn failure into learning in reading and in math. 

If we really did gather a group of children or adolescents in a circle and asked about learning that sticks, the answers might not revolutionize a system that hasn’t changed much in a hundred years, but we might just design a lesson or adjust a reaction for the better… if we listen. Learning is the core of education… and children are the heart of it. Are we listening to them?

Liz: When I was leaving last year, you gave me two dolls.

Palmer: It’s because I actually admire you as a leader

Liz: But why the dolls?

Palmer: The dolls? I don’t know. Those dolls are very special.

Liz: They are. They sit on my desk. I look at them every day.

Palmer: Those dolls are a meaning of gratitude towards you and all you do.

Liz: When I look at those dolls, I think about the fact that I’m still walking with children, that in what I do, the child next to me is still the most important part. And I don’t know if you realize that. So when I look at them, I see you and me, and I’m grateful that you took the time to make them and give them to me and what that meant. But I also look at it as marching orders that I have to keep children in mind and what I can do to make things better for them. Yeah. That’s pretty big inspiration, just so you know.

Palmer: Just so you know, I stole those dolls from my mom’s classroom.

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