{"id":14551,"date":"2022-05-19T17:00:33","date_gmt":"2022-05-19T16:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.franchiselocal.co.uk\/news\/?p=14551"},"modified":"2022-05-19T16:17:28","modified_gmt":"2022-05-19T15:17:28","slug":"the-beetle-in-your-shoe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.franchiselocal.co.uk\/news\/the-beetle-in-your-shoe\/","title":{"rendered":"The Beetle in Your Shoe"},"content":{"rendered":"Reading Time: <\/span> 4<\/span> minutes<\/span><\/span>

Putting up with stuff that is not the way it should be, is a bad idea. If you need to find some motivation to get you doing the getting-things-on-track stuff, then just keep on reading\u2026 Once upon a time, a long time ago, I was working and working and working and working. But I was not doing it in a particularly effective way. As it happened, there were certain things about my life that were probably starting to go a bit wonky, but it felt like I was too busy to do anything about them. Now, the reason why I\u2019m telling you this story is that I speak to lots of parents, I\u2019ll be honest, I speak to a lot of headteachers who say \u201cWe have a problem, but now\u2019s not the right time to sort it out. Let me put it off for a little while. I\u2019m too busy to attend to that problem right now. We\u2019ll circle back to it a little bit further down the line.\u201d I fully understand that mindset, because that\u2019s the mindset that I was in a few years back.<\/p>\n

In fact, things got so bad. I was firefighting. Do you know the game, whack-a-mole? You have a little mole that pops his head up from a board and you whack it but then it pops up somewhere else? That was basically my life, but the mole was a metaphor for my problems. I refer to it as firefighting because it\u2019s as if you put out one little fire in one place and then another one sprouts up somewhere else. But some of those problems might be slightly bigger problems that are not getting properly attended to because you\u2019re too busy doing the firefighting. I\u2019ve spoken to parents who have said that their child is anxious and school refusing but now\u2019s not the right time to deal with it because they\u2019re very busy with work. I can understand how that happens. Your attention gets zapped by the thing that seems most demanding but when you deal with the big quiet thing that\u2019s also going on, the firefighting stuff and the little whack-a-mole stuff start taking care of themselves a little bit more, or at least you feel like you\u2019ve got more energy to deal with them. This is because you dealt with the big monster that\u2019s over there in the corner. It\u2019s the big scary thing that really needs looking at. We\u2019ve had teachers say \u201cWe\u2019ve got children struggling very badly with mental health issues at the moment, but I can\u2019t get you in to see the SENCO because she\u2019s too busy dealing with the mental health issues in our children at the moment.\u201d And it\u2019s frustrating because if you got us in to deal with it, then you wouldn\u2019t have that problem anymore!<\/p>\n

Anyway, back to my story! I was firefighting and I was running around like a headless chicken, trying to take care of too many different things, quite a lot of the time for other people. (But not always, some of it was my own things) and I wasn\u2019t dealing with the big stuff. I realised that for about three weeks, there had been something in my shoe. Okay, now, we\u2019ve all had that, we\u2019ve all had a time in the past when you\u2019ve been walking down the street and there\u2019s a stone or a pebble in your shoe. You could stop and deal with the problem, take off the shoe and get the stone out but maybe instead you do that thing where you tap the toe of your shoe. Then you just shuffle the foreign object down to the front of the shoe and you don\u2019t really deal with the problem. You just shuffle the problem out of the way. I was doing that. I had something in my shoe for three weeks, three weeks of shuffling, whatever that was down to the toe, telling myself I\u2019ll deal with it on a day when I can deal with it. I was getting ready for work one morning, and my client had cancelled my morning appointment, but I didn\u2019t know until I was about to leave. So I thought, \u201cYou know what, I may as well get in early and just have a bit of a chilled morning and sort some of those things out that have been on my mind.\u201d I put my shoes on to leave for work and I realised there was still something in my shoe but now is a good time to deal with it. I shook my shoe upside down, and out came a dead beetle.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d been walking around with a dead beetle in my shoe for three weeks. That is not acceptable. That is not an acceptable way for an adult to function.<\/p>\n

So, here\u2019s the moral of the story. If there is a thing that you\u2019re experiencing with a child or a young person in your life, don\u2019t put it off. Don\u2019t turn it into the beetle in your shoe, that you just kind of shuffle away. I don\u2019t mean you\u2019re shuffling your children away; I mean that you are kind of side-lining the problems and firefighting around it, dealing with it day by day, but not really doing the thing that would solve it and resolve the issue. That might mean that you need to cancel an appointment or take 10 minutes to spare so that you can sit down and send that email, make that phone call reach out to whoever you need to reach out to, to be able to help that young person. Putting up with a beetle in your shoe is exhausting and it is unnecessary.<\/p>\n

You are causing yourself to continue to deal with pain that you do not need to have. And so, if you can take the time to address this properly, you can get rid of that pain forever. And that young person who is probably going through the pain on a very different level to you, will also get to deal with that pain and get rid of it forever. That is entirely possible. But you\u2019re probably going to need to pause to put the planning in place to be able to deal with this thing.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t make it a beetle in your shoe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Putting up with stuff that is not the way it should be, is a bad idea. If you need to find some motivation to get you doing the getting-things-on-track stuff, then just keep on reading\u2026 Once upon a time, a long time ago, I was working and working and working and working. But I was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":14554,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[525],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14551","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nlp4kids"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.franchiselocal.co.uk\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/IMG_0204-1.jpeg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.franchiselocal.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14551","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.franchiselocal.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.franchiselocal.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.franchiselocal.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.franchiselocal.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14551"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.franchiselocal.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14551\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.franchiselocal.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14554"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.franchiselocal.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.franchiselocal.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.franchiselocal.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}