Rachael Maves: Hello everyone. You are listening to the Rachael Maves podcast and I'm Rachael Maves, your host. Today we are talking to Chuck Fisher, director of transformational learning at dovil learning. Chuck has dedicated his career to fostering well-being and resilience in diverse communities. As a founding director and former executive director of dovetail learning, he has championed the vision of a connected world through his role in developing the we are resilient approach anal program, widely adop Ed across the US. Chuck also played a pivotal role in creating toolbox, an award-winning K through six Seal program used in over 36 States, including my girls elementary school when they were young.

He is also the co-author of the Heart of Resilience, nurturing your inner strength of a joyful life. Chuck, thank you for joining me today.

Rachael Maves: [speaker uncertain] Oh, Rachael, such a pleasure is super exciting for me because I used to sit on the board for dovil learning, find huge value in the work that you guys have done and I can speak from when my kids were young and they were in elementary school and using a lot of the concepts that you guys put through of just how do you manage your emotions and communicate well around it. The work that you do just has such an impact. So I'm excited for today and that I get to have this conversation with you.

Chuck Fisher: Thank you, Rachael. That is so kind of you and so good to see you again.

Rachael Maves: I we always start out with the question of why education, Chuck? Why did you choose this crazy path that you've been on in this journey?

Chuck Fisher: Well, once heard an educator say Educators either hated their schooling or they loved it. I was in the first category. I had an absolutely horrible experience in K-12. I moved all the time. I was in 10 schools by the time I got to 10th grade. I lived in an alcoholic family.

I EXP experienced a whole bunch of abuse. I ran away from school in third grade because I was sent to the office so much I failed sixth grade. I got lost in drugs and alcohol in high school. I mean goes on and on. Yeah, you know, I mean it. My life was Havoc.

But you know what, while my upbringing seemed like a disaster, I learned that I wasn't a disaster and that's resilience, you know. I mean it had a huge impact on me. I thought I was a slow learner, my self-esteem was in the gutter, but then I've learned to succeed in life in so many ways and that's what I get to teach others and it's such a blessing.

Rachael Maves: What you said there, Chuck, really just resonated with me of the your upbringing was a disaster but you learned that you weren't a disaster. And I just gosh, if anyone like I feel like we could end the podcast right there and everyone would have a nugget to be able to take back. Because I think about our K-12 kids and when we look at the statistics of kids who come from homes like what you went through, I mean it is significant what they're bringing into the classroom and the narratives that they then tell themselves or that are projected upon them from external places of validation and what that does. And I' I'd love to just hear a little bit about finding that path of resilience and what that looks like for you.

Chuck Fisher: Oh, absolutely, you know, and you're talking about the key, which to me is the adults. Who got to see, who saw me clearly. I mean, if there's a lesson for any teacher, it's: look inside that messed up kid and you'll find a miracle happening. And you know, for me it was key places along the way where there were adults who saw me and got you know what happening and we nurturing and U and really, when it comes down to it, they opened their hearts and gave me the love that I needed to get through it all.

Rachael Maves: Yeah, I love that and I just think about there in our Summit last year. So every year, Parsec does an annual Summit and it really is meant to bring forward and highlight student voice and not in the sense of them putting on a show or performance, but truly engaging in their experiences and their stories and the impact of K-12 education. And we had a speaker, Jamie, who had gone through the foster care system and I do have a point to this, I promise. But one of the things that she said, as she was sharing with all of us listening to her just really incredible story, was how much trouble she got into in elementary school and what was so impactful was even from that age. She said I was just this eight or nine-year-old kid that wanted someone to see how angry and scared I was and it like I think about children and as we talk through the ways in which they manifest emotion. It's not always in this place where they can come and say: here's what I'm struggling with and I need your help.

And can you just see my heartness? It's going to be coming out in all of these crazy ways and how do we see the kids, which is the kind of the lifeblood of the work that you've been doing.

Chuck Fisher: Chuck, yeah, it reminds me of Dr Gabor Maté, and all his work on trauma, where he talks about the trauma isn't the event that happens, it's not being able to talk about it and not being honored for what you're. The emotional experience that you're having. Yeah, and we can talk more about that because it's so part of what I'm interested in.

Rachael Maves: Yeah, and I know this connects really well with the book that you guys just launched: the Heart of Resilience: nurturing Your Inner Strength for a joyful life. Do you want to tell us a little bit about the book, where it came from, the impetus behind it, how it intersects with all the things we've been talking about so far?

Chuck Fisher: Sure it's, yeah, it's. It has the pulse of this conversation in it. So. The Heart of Resilience is a book of people's stories my own story and my co-author, Mary McCoy Thompson, her stories, then a hundred other people's personal stories that illustrate how they got through difficult things and pulls out and refines the distinctions that allowed resilience to occur, resilience being the ability to bounce back. I Heard a great quote yesterday. I'm I'm a black belt and Aikido, and one of my Aikido instructors was saying: you know, every day I get thrown off balance.

You know I have a reactive pattern of some kind, but what's happened is I've learned how to get back to Center faster and faster. Yes, and that's really what the Heart of Resilience is about is: how do we get back to Center? And, equally important, what throws us off center? So there's two things: what gets in the way of our resilience? And we unpack that very clearly and then we go into three aspects of how to gain resilience. First is centering: how do we Center ourselves?

Second is, how do would be in authentic relationship with another person, and that's connecting. And third, how do we collaborate together, as a partnership or as a group or in our communities? And all of that is such Rich. Yeah, you said something a few minutes ago about the work that you're doing and telling people's stories. Just a caveat: when I did my own research, when I was getting my dissertation from my PhD, I was studying the self-acceptance of teenagers and I did it, of course, because I had so little of it and the one thing that came out of my research and it was a surprise, I thought it was going to be other things, but what gives teenagers self-acceptance is hearing each other stories H in an authentic, open, vulnerable way. You know, if you tell me the story about your life and I, of course, will see myself in your story, then I feel like I'm okay and I tell my story and other people feel like they're okay.

And so it's that sharing of those stories which we do in the book very deeply as a way of illustrating what gets us off our resilience and what brings us on.

Rachael Maves: I love that. I'm I'm sure we'll get even more into the weeds and that when we talk about how you're thinking about moving forward and in all of the crazy that we have going on in our society right now. But I want to start with kind of your thinking around just the state of education as we see it and what keeps you up at night when you think about all the things that students are facing and what they're holding and even teach teachers in the classroom and what's going on with them and in trying to hold some of this space for kids. What is it that really keeps you up at night?

Chuck Fisher: Well, this goes right to the heart of what we were talking about earlier, which is. People being seen and honored for what they're going through emotionally. In my work I keep discovering more and more completely how The Human Experience is really centrally an emotional experience. We're feeling beings, and you know, what keeps me up at night is my grandchildren not having a healthy world to live in. And then that goes to all children really, because that's been my life work. I was a school counselor for 25 years and I've worked with schools for the last 15, and I love the quote by Marc Brackett from Yale Center of emotional intelligence.

He says being out of touch with emotions is the root cause of most, if not all, of our. Ills, our ills in relationship, in family, in groups and community, and maybe even most importantly, our health, because we know from science, you know fundamentally, that most illness rises from emotional difficulties and stress. We call it stress. But what is stress? Well, stress is feeling emotionally tense or anxious or afraid. You know all that difficult stuff.

And going back to what we were just talking about and what Marc Brackett is saying,. Is we have to actually feel our feelings in order to resolve them. If they get stuck or stuffed and we don't have someone to hear us or listen to us or to talk to, we are harmed by it and it goes in our body, it gets literally, it gets, becomes a problem in the gut. You know all the gut issues: gastrointestinal stuff in the heart, the constriction of the heart in our lungs and our skin. I mean, it's just. You know, if you look at psychon neuroimmunology, which is the study of how our thinking impacts our neurology and our immune system and our emotional system, it's just all.

So I'm on a band wagon if you will, maybe I'll say it differently I'm to helping Educators and adults generally to understand that emotional intelligence is literally the intelligence of their emotions, of their feelings. And if we don't get that, we push our feelings away, like, oh, we don't want to feel, that we try and manage our emotions by pushing them away rather than really truly listening deeply Into the Heart of what our body is trying to us. And there's the answer.

Rachael Maves: Yeah, I have to give you a funny story about this, Chuck, and then I'd like to unpack a little bit more about like practical ways that Educators can like AB. But so you and I have known each other for a while. It probably doesn't surprise you that I'm one of those like:. Emotions. Let's shove this back down. No, we don't need to play with those feelings.

And we just moved my eldest to college. She's the first one of our family that's leaving and, of course, all of the feelings that come with that: the excitement and joy of seeing your child launch into the world and Brilliant and beautiful and successful. You feel so good, you know that she's going to be okay, and the shift and the change in that family, Dynamic, and the grief and loss of that. It will never quite be the same again. And you know I throw myself into work and you'll laugh at this. So I because I wasn't dealing with it and I'm like I'm just going to be busy and I don't have time to have the sadness that I want to feel I ended up with a sty on my eye and it just explod, exploded and got infected and made it even worse cuz my body was like, if you don't deal with it here, it's going to come out someplace else.

And I see that as I the byproduct of when we don't give ourselves that space to really acknowledge and hold and let the those emotions come out in a really healthy way.

Chuck Fisher: It a beautiful. Illustration and personal story. Rachael, the words I heard you say were: I didn't make room for the sadness I wanted to feel. Yeah, because we do want to feel it and we've been taught culturally not to that's. It's such a cultural pattern that we learn intergenerationally from our families, from our culture, from all the people around us, and thank you for sharing that it's. It's so, Germaine.

To the health and well-being of teachers, Educators, administrators. You know the stress that people carry and the physical ailments and difficulties that we all get. I know. You know I had a heart attack in 2021 and had to have open heart surgery, but I have to say that was one of the most important, revealing experiences I've ever had, because it taught me so much about how my heart had been broken. Emotionally and what I needed to do to heal it. So my body was calling out to me, as yours was saying: pay attention.

Rachael Maves: Yeah, feel that's right.

Chuck Fisher: Slow down, hello, I'm here.

Rachael Maves: Yeah, exactly so when you think about the classroom, when you think about Educators and everything, I mean where we are at right now just in our society, and the stressors and the tensions and coming off of a pandemic and the ripple effect that still has, and some of the things that you've even shared that keep you up at night. What are ways that we can move forward, specifically in the education? Sector.

Chuck Fisher: Well, it comes down to CASEL collaborative for academic, social, emotional learning, their area two Focus, which is how do we strengthen adult seal, adult emotional intelligence? Because it is the presence, the being presence, the ability of a teacher to be centered and whole and to receive and accept whatever a child's going through. Not to say we don't have hold healthy boundaries, because that's part of it. Absolutely an unhealthy adult doesn't hold healthy boundaries. And kids need us to hold healthy boundaries but they also need us to be able. To be there with them in what they're going through.

So that's that's probably the first thing is how do we help adults strengthen their social emotional development in wisdom, the ability to bounce back faster. You know something throws you off and you go into the classroom and you're mess all day. You know how do we get from being a mess to being back to our whole selves. You know in a couple minutes rather than all day. So there's so much to learn about that and so much that's healthy learning. So, for instance, in our work, which we call the we are resilient approach, we first teach about what gets us off center and the first thing we teach are a whole set of protective.

Patterns protective patterns are reactive patterns that every human has and I didn't know that growing up. I didn't know that when I get defensive or I get judgmental or I want to be aggressive or I just want to avoid something completely, that is normal, healthy approach. Those are normal healthy approaches to difficulty. That's right. And if I don't know that, then I don't know the other side of that, which is if I do them too much, they get in the way. If there's a problem with a child in the classroom and I just avoid, it's just going to get worse.

So I have to understand that, oh, I'm avoiding something, or I'm avoiding a difficult conversation with my administrator, or I'm avoiding a difficult conversation with my spouse, and we know that unfinished business creates distance. So if I've avoided, it's causing a problem. So the first thing that we do is teach adults how normal it is to have reactive. Patterns and secondly, that all of those reactive patterns truly come from our inculturated learning, intergenerationally. How did my grandmother act? How did my parents act?

How did this happen in what did? How was it modeled in my family? And when we get it for ourselves, then we can completely have compassion for the children we're working with, for their parents, the way they come into the classroom and, you know, want to fight for their kids. You know well, that's their reactive pattern. Instead of thinking the parent a jerk, we can open our hearts to that parent and go: oh wow, I totally get it, I want to be your ally here, which is:. Yeah, I love you know I could go on and on.

Rachael Maves: So no, I love what you're saying about this, Chuck, and that, and then I'll I'll sa this piece and then we can segue into the final question. But what really resonates with me is holding that balance right. It's the emotional, actually. I feel like it's emotionally intelligent classroom management. I mean you're like bringing a whole different layer into the ways in which you're engaging with your kids in the classroom.

Chuck Fisher: Yes, and I appreciate you saying, but it also means holding strong boundaries, like it's. It's not as if that means everybody just runs rampant. There's an order and an expectation and there are healthy boundaries, and boundaries are really good to have and there's a way to develop empathy and compassion, first for yourself and then for others, and it's not just something that magically happens. It's a skill that has to be practiced and. Taught well. Modeling Theory tells us all about this.

There's three basic models. There's the dysfunctional model, where the teacher isn't holding healthy boundaries and things are a mess. There's the perfect model on the other side of the spectrum, where the teacher acts like to have it all together and you know, everything's perfect and children can't learn from that. And the center point, the strong model, is the coping model, where the teacher can hold healthy boundaries, can say how he or she is being impacted by the classroom. So the kids are getting the emotional intelligence of how their behavior is impacting and it's. It's just a.

Profound way of seeing that we as adults have to go first in our development so that we can show up in a healthy way, so that kids can learn from us. Yeah, in fact you were talking about our initial program toolbox. We did seminal research with UC Berkeley and found that kids who got emotional intelligence only got it from teachers who already had it. H the teacher can teach an SEL curriculum through the Gazoo, but if they don't have their own ability to be authentic and whole, the children don't actually learn it. Yeah, and that's been replicated at Harvard and Stanford and you know all over the, you know the top. Universities Penn State, University of Virginia.

You know all.

Rachael Maves: Yeah, that, and it makes complete sense. You can't give what you don't have. Yeah, exactly as you think about. As we wrap up with this final question and I'm always intrigued to hear what people end up saying with this one what question in education? Are we not asking that we really should?

Chuck Fisher: Be well. I think I already talked about this, but let's, let's, let's put an exclamation point on it. That sounds: how do we best help Educators strengthen their emotional development? And I have a lot to say on this, because a lot of the programs are very intellectual and they teach, you know, different aspects. Even CASEL, you know, has their own model. I forget what all the parts are.

I had it here somewhere. You know it's like a being able to recognize feelings, being able to identify feelings. You know communication skills, strong decision- making. You know that group of five, what I call competencies. Having decision- making is a competency. Having communication skills is a competency.

It's not the central thing, which is emotional. Intelligence, which is the practice and learning of How Deeply valuable it is to listen to that sadness that you were feeling about your daughter going away to college. And I remember just balling when my daughters went away to college. You know, it was just like you know, and if we don't let that out, it gets stuck in our bodies. And so there we are. How do we teach it?

What does it take for a school or a district to prioritize truly the wellness, the well-being, the healthy well-being and the emotional. Well-being of teachers and administrators and everyone who works children.

Rachael Maves: I well said, Chuck, I just want to say thank you for joining me today on the podcast. It was one just great to catch up and hear about the work that you're doing, and I can't say enough how impactful it is and important it is, and so thank you for joining me. Today.

Chuck Fisher: Thank you, Rachael, such a pleasure to see you, and all the best to you and parek education and your family. Thanks.

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This transcript was created from the episode's captions and lightly edited for readability. It may contain small errors; please refer to the audio for exact wording.