?Hello, hello and welcome to the Big Hearted Podcast. My name is Victoria Edmond and I am your host. Our aim here at the Big Hearted Podcast is to nurture a community of heart centered educators to change the perception and delivery of early childhood education and care in Australia. and ultimately around the world.
We want you to be inspired by our guests and the topics we bring to you to think of new ways of being as an educator. We want you to feel a sense of belonging via this podcast so that you can engage any time of the day or night in any place that suits you. We want you to become an educator that delivers education from the heart, as we believe this is how we create great change within our world.
So join us as we discover new ways to inspire each other here, the big hearted podcast.
?Hello, hello and welcome to this week's podcast. It has been a couple of weeks since I've been on the podcast horse, and I will tell you that it feels a little bit strange jumping back in, but the cat's out of the bag now. So you all know that we have just today officially launched the very first for educators in family daycare in australia the very first and it's going to be inaugural family daycare virtual summit now i'm so excited to share this information with you and to share the whole summit the whole process with you but i will admit to having drunk a huge can of V this morning because I had so much stuff to get done and I went and moved like I love myself at the gym today and I possibly was excited this morning, went a little bit hard and was like, Oh my goodness, I'm crashing.
I'm crashing. So I had to pull out the big guns. I don't often do that, but there we have it. So if I end up getting really excited and talking really, really quick, you know, that's why. So congratulations, excitement. I hope you've gone in and jumped and got your free tickets already. If not, pause the podcast, go back to the email and go and get your free tickets because you do not want to miss out on this.
The very first one, you can say you were there because it's history in the making. And that probably sounds a little bit dramatic, but I haven't released it at the time of recording this podcast. It's 1pm. I haven't released it out to everybody yet because I had the moment that I actually just wanted to sit in the juiciness of Having come up with this idea, like it was born when I was on the Kristen R.
B. Peterson Summit, and I thought, oh, we could do that here in Australia. And then I went through all these processes of, well, who do you think you are to go and do that? And Who's going to want to listen to the things that you put out there? And why do you think you can do it? Like what's so great about what you do and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all those silly stories that come up in your mind when you go and do things outside of your comfort zone.
And then I had moments, I had like two weeks of procrastinating because when I finally decided on the topic, that I wanted to share, I really had to sit in it for a number of weeks and think what was going to be of most value for you, because I always want to share things that are going to be helpful and encouraging and supportive and confident built confidence building and All of those things like I just want to give you massive, massive value in everything that I do.
I don't want to waste your time. I want to make sure that when I provide things for you that you can get the most out of it that you possibly can. So I really was stuck for a number of weeks as to what would be the best topic and I came at connections and community because I've noticed and I realized and all the feedback that I've been getting for them for the last couple of months is everyone's feeling exhausted and tired and burnt out.
And for me, the biggest and the best thing that I did when I got to burn out after the accident at Brian's work. Like I, I separated myself from everybody. I wasn't going out like I just couldn't emotionally do it, which is fine. And I honor that. And I, I respect that. Um, but what it meant was that I found it really difficult to connect with people and it was very challenging, but it was when I finally started going back out and making those connections again, that I actually started to feel myself breathe and.
I know that's one of the biggest ways to recover from burnout is to have connection. And then I was like, well, we can have connection in family daycare, but what comes from connection, connection grows community. And so we can't have community if we don't have a solid connection. And so there came the.
story behind the Connections and the Communities Summit in family, for family daycare. So that's a little bit of the behind the reasoning, or that's the reasoning behind why I have chose that particular theme for this year's summit. And I really hope that you get from that after you've attended the summit a sense of you're not alone and a sense of there is something out there just for family day care educators because all of the conferences I've been to All of the workshops that I've been to, all of the things that I've done, it is always directed at long daycare, like always.
And I can't always afford to go to the conference that we have. It's, it's a lot. It would have cost me nearly 3, 000 last time. So what I wanted to do was provide something that was going to be able to be accessed by everybody. And that's why we have The free tickets to our summit. So if you have a friend, um, that is a family daycare educator, please, please share with them so that you can go through these things together.
And the more that we have on the same page, and the more. that we can create these wonderful conversations that everybody can be a part of, the stronger we get in our profession, the stronger family daycare becomes as a community that's united, because our community needs to be united. We need to be on the same page, or at least in the same book.
We don't all have to be on the same page, but if we're all in the same book, We can pull strengths from each other and weave this beautiful tapestry together that we are creating in family daycare within Australia. So that I, I want to like, one of the reasons why connection is really important and community is really important is because that very topic of professional growth and development.
We often operate in a silo within our own family daycare, and depending where you are, it might be really challenging to get professional development to be part of that. So you have to seek that yourself. And if we're all doing these different things, that's, that's great. But if, as a big community of family daycare within Australia, We all did something similar.
What kind of conversations are we going to be having when we get out into the social media field? We've all had access to the same information. We all perceive it and integrate it differently, and we all have different perspectives on what was shared, but there's a common theme there, and that really lights me up and really excites me that we could perhaps be having these.
national conversations between educators and when we do that, we, we really kind of open and broaden our mind and our perspective to then have these really wonderful, valuable conversations and that we can then see from other people's perspectives that we can then grow and build upon. But if we stay within our little silo and we never get out of that.
We, we, we don't know what we don't know, so when we can have these wonderful professional growth and professional development conversations, then it brings about increased connection and when we have increased connection, because as humans, we are community driven beings, this brings really positive impact into what we do, and of course, everything that we do, you.
First and foremost, we must be meeting our highest needs. If we can meet our highest needs, then we can provide really valuable and wonderful warm hearted interactions with the children and the families that we work with. All of a sudden, we have this greater sense of patience and awareness and understanding.
And that flows into our work, so everything that we do filters down and trickles down into the children. And there's a big piece of what we do that's missing in terms of, and it's really important after coming back from burnout, in terms of meeting us first. And, and that's a really important topic that I want you to really sit with, that everything we do does not have to be about the children.
If we meet our needs first. inherently and as a byproduct of us meeting our needs, the children's needs get met too. We have more space. We have more capacity. So I really want us to start having that conversation too. Um, and in fact, there is a VIP, uh, bundle. If you want to upgrade to the VIP, there will be a masterclass in there.
that's only for the VIP people, uh, that I will be talking about, um, that very topic because I truly believe it's so important and Every time I sort of touch on that, the feedback that I get from all of you is that you want more. So that's, that's going to be a bonus in the VIP bonus for those who choose to upgrade.
So when we can open these conversations and start this critical reflection and start this discussion around the professional and growth and development, We can then start sharing best practice. We can then start looking at, well, things are different now after the pandemic. Things are different. Children are different.
Families are different. We're coming back from this trauma that of, of isolation and all the things that happened during the pandemic. So, you know, best practice is different now to what it was before. So, we can have these, these conversations, um, and, and be engaged with each other in a really professional way that, that I feel like is just, On the cusp of happening and we can really have these wonderful dialogues with each other.
So these connections, they foster continuous improvement mindset, and I know that can sometimes get tiring and when we're feeling on the brink or on the verge or on recovery of burnout, taking more on. Is is really challenging, but by having these connective conversations, it actually will provide more space for us and and we'll start to feel more able to have room, and when there's more room, there's more space to be able to contribute to back to your community.
And that's where we can start having these wonderful. Um. conversations. And when we have these kinds of conversations, inevitably good things come out of them. So there's that improve, you know, that continuous improvement mindset there. And we can enhance our teaching skills and positively impact the children that we work with and the families that we work with.
So resource sharing and support too is a really big part of this picture. When we come together, someone might find a bonus, or someone might find, you know, something that, that they're doing and just share, but then another educator goes, Oh my goodness, that's exactly what I was looking for. That's exactly what I need.
Or someone can come out and ask, you know, I'm really struggling with X, Y, and Z. Has anybody got any strategies? And a lot of that happens now already, but. It's really wonderful when we can have this baseline understanding of connections and community and if lots of people have done the same course as us, it's really helpful to be on that puts us on the same page.
So it's this wonderful symbiotic relationship where we can share our experience and we can share tangible things with each other too. Uh, you know, someone says there's a sale on X Y and Z and a lot of people go and support that hopefully small business too. And, and there's lots of educators that have side hustles as well.
And so we encourage that kind of sharing within our community as well. But that resource and support, knowing that you're not on your own, knowing that there's somebody else out there who knows exactly what you're going through and has that same experience and is prepared to feed that back to you and help you overcome those feelings when you're feeling a little bit down or you're feeling a little bit disconnected.
Just that lovely top up, that lovely friendship, that lovely collegial. connection that we're looking to create through our summit is going to be really, really beneficial and helpful for educators. So any space that I'm involved in too, I hold a really high standard of professional, yet warm hearted connection.
And I don't stand for any kind of nastiness. Everybody can have an opinion and a voice, but it must be shared in a way that is adding to the conversation and not taking away from the conversation. So it's a safe space, the place that I provide because I've been in those spaces where it's not been safe and I've really had to draw a line and hold a line there.
So anyone who comes in looking for support and sharing, sometimes you may not hear what you want to hear, but you get told what you need to be told. So And that's not in a meh, meh, meh kind of way either. That's in our, well, really let's look at what's happening with that particular child. Are you feeling triggered?
What is it in you that is rubbing the wrong way? Let's have a look at that and, and sit and breathe into that for a minute. Rather than trying to work out exactly what it is, we need to change in that child. So this is the space that we'll be coming from in terms of connection. And one of our guest speakers, um, Dave Jerrab, really, really brought that home for me, uh, when I was doing his interview.
And it was just so incredible. Um, And, and Lillian Rieke too, uh, on the heart connection to her, her topic and her conversation with me. She actually made me cry right at the end. Um, that heart centered approach was just so beautiful and I could really identify a missing piece in my education and my connection with.
in general, not just children but people in general. So that was really, uh, touching and a great experience to have. So that sharing of resources and support is really vital and important and something that you will definitely get out of the summit, um, and the collaboration and interdisciplinary approaches, you know, there's not one way of doing anything.
There really isn't because the way we, you and I. will listen to the same conversations. However, what you take from it is going to be, um, through a lens of your life experience, just the same as what I take from things is through a lens of my life experience. My understanding will always be different to your understanding based on the experiences I've had in my life.
And that's the beauty of working in family daycare, because when we go into long daycare settings, we're told we have to do it a certain way and we've, we've got to come in alignment with the people that we're working with. Because that's how we be harmonious. But that doesn't always suit people if you aren't with another educator who is in the same book as you.
Some, some, um, philosophies and, and ways of being are completely incongruent to how we are. And... I found that a lot when I worked in long day care, there weren't too many other educators that I came across that had a similar outlook as what I did to how respected children should be. And I understand that I could potentially be a little bit pedantic about that, but I'm unashamed.
To say that I believe children deserve 100% the best and that sometimes means I have to look at my own self and my own feelings and things that come up and be accountable for myself. before I can ask anything different of the children. And that takes a lot of courage, and it takes a lot of work to do.
But it is work that we need to do. When children live in that emotional realm, they're very connected to their emotions and their feelings. They may not be able to verbalize exactly what it is that they're feeling, but they're definitely able to express it. So sometimes that can be triggering for me personally, you know.
Sometimes there's a certain thing that might happen, and I just go, Whinging, whining, can't deal with it. But then I've got to look at what the underlying need is in that and recognize that there's a part of me that I haven't come to resolution around that. So, understanding that, that. And I need to understand that too, that not everybody is going to think that way either.
For some people it's not as in depth or emotionally charged when it comes to caring for children. Some people keep it a lot lighter than what I do, and that's totally okay. And I can learn from those people and they can learn from me too, but a lot of us who work in family daycare to come to this and really enjoy this because we get to really explore that for ourselves.
In doing that, when we get to do things the way we want them done all the time we can sometimes then run the risk of becoming rigid. So having these really great conversations and collaborations means that we can then keep questioning ourselves. We can keep looking at what we're doing and asking why.
Why are we doing that? Why are we doing it that way? Why, why, why am I doing it that way? Why do I perceive it to be this? And these are questions that we need to come back to. I'm not saying every moment of every day because that is exhaustive. Trust me, I have been that person. But we do need to have periods where we ask that of ourselves.
And this is the perfect opportunity by joining into the summit to ask those questions of yourself. So we can look at diverse perspectives, we can take diverse perspectives on, and we can create cross circular learning experiences too by taking these other ideas and experimenting and then seeing how that affects other parts of what we do.
And it just creates this beautiful rhythm and flow of new things and new efforts and new ideas coming into your service. And then you might then take a moment to breathe and let those ideas settle and embed and give things a chance. Sometimes when we bring new ideas into our, into our realm, into our way of thinking, we can get impatient with wanting to see change straight away.
But sometimes it can take a little while for that to filter down. And we need to be consistent in these approaches when we're bringing change in for, to, to the children too. But we need to have patience and let things unfold beautifully. It's like, you know, when we can ask a child, and sometimes it takes them a little while to respond to our question, And we want to jump in and answer for them and put words in their mouths when really we need to step back and just allow them that time to process the question, think about their response, and then get it out.
So it's the same when we bring new ideas into our service. We should never bring an idea into our service and then expect it to just happen. Some things will, but there's a lot of things that require time to filter. Like sediment in in the creek, you know, your kids will be running in the creek. They stir it up.
It's cloudy, but then it takes a little time for that to settle back down to become clear again. And that's what we need to allow for ourselves as well. Advocacy and collective impact. This is going to be really huge after the summit. We're going to have a lot of ideas. We're going to be a lot more connected.
Than what we've ever been as a profession, because I'm really hopeful that every single family daycare educator in Australia will jump onto the free summit, because why not? It's free, and you can dip your toes in and watch what you want. You'll have 24 hours access to each day with the free ticket.
There'll be more longer.
Um, and, and that that'll be an hour's worth of. new ideas and perspectives. So what it does though, is when we can all have that same conversation, we can then start to advocate for each other and for the children on a collective level, which is really powerful. It's super powerful. And it has the ability to bring really wonderful results into our profession.
And to solidify these beautiful connections that we have with educators across Australia. So we're not just limited to the educators within our service or within our suburb. We can then branch out our, our connections and relationships and conversations to across Australia, which is really great. We had a great conversation a little while ago, um, in WA.
I know the educators over there talk about six seasons instead of four seasons as in winter, spring, summer, autumn. So it's, it's very interesting because that was a wonderful conversation that we had about that and why they do that and how that can be seen across Australia and actually you, you really feel it.
Like we're probably only going to have another couple of weeks of, of cold here in Queensland. before we shift into spring weather and it's not the end of winter yet. So, you know, when you learn these new things, you can then apply that learning to what you're doing. So that comes across too when particularly we've had quite a big change with services.
Um, needing to be accountable. They always were. But now there's, um, things in place now with collecting the gap fee. And I know there's a, a, a, a shuffle happening within our profession now because some educators don't want to move to services collecting fees for them. They don't want to have to provide evidence and all this sort of thing.
So there's a little bit of. It's like when the CCS came in or when JobKeeper, oh my gosh, I'm so traumatized by that time of our lives, as I'm sure so many of you are, there was so many different ways to do things and how much more supportive did we, supported did we feel? There was a lot of you here that were on the truth page, you know, and just having that collective voice, that, that, that one tone.
That gave several options. for services and educators to take on that information, it just made so many people feel like, okay, even though I don't like what's going on, I can actually breathe in this now. Like I, I feel like there's an understanding. I feel like because there's a common thread here that I can latch on to that, you know, and I can just hang on and, and I think it's.
The summit is going to bring that for a lot of us. We're going to have this lovely, beautiful connection and we're going to be able to add our own thread into the greater collective and then we can pull things out and we can tease things out too and we can really feel a sense of belonging and ownership over what we're doing.
So this advocacy when things come up, and they are going to come up, I've been doing family daycare for 10 years now, and it feels like every two years something comes along. The government pulls the rug out from underneath us. First it was the loss of funding and then it was We had to have service approval in each state and then we had the CCS transition and then things were good for a little while.
That were really good for a little while and then we had COVID and now we've got this gap fee thing. So like this is business, this is the world, this is life, this is what happens and we have to be adaptable. But it's so much easier to be adaptable when there's a collective. Advocacy for the highest good of our profession for all of us.
So this is what I'm really aiming that we can really come together and create this really cohesive community that we're all a part of, and we can support each other when things don't necessarily go to plan, which happens. All the time. I'm just going to have a sip of tea.
And lastly, the biggest thing that will come out of the summit is the support for, for, for children, the support for the families that we work with, the support for your own family, that's going to be such a massive thing for. Everybody because when you're filled up, when you feel like you've got space and room that flows onto the children, the children relax more in your space, they are more able to engage in what they're doing for longer periods of time because you're more relaxed when you're more relaxed that has a positive benefit for the children and for the families, which then has a benefit back to you.
So when you change your dynamic, it changes the children's dynamic, which then flows back to you and changes your dynamic again. And it creates this really lovely, beautiful flow on effect. And it's because you actually took the time to invest in yourself. And that's a really beautiful thing. So. I think it's going to be really worth everybody jumping into the summit and, uh, really being a part of it and as much as you can and, and really sharing with the community.
There is a Facebook group that you'll be able to join, which will open just before the summit, and we'll be able to have great conversations in there. Our guest speakers, some of our guest speakers will pop in at night time and there'll be live Q and A's so that you can ask them all the questions that you want.
Based on the topics that we talked about that day, um, there'll be challenges in there as well. So it's going to be really interactive and fun. fun. So I really hope that you do come on board and join us because it's so much fun and I cannot wait to share with you all of the beautiful things that we have in store for you at the Connections and Communities Family Day Care Summit.
So that's it for me for now. Um, I am very excited to share this all with you and have you join us and come on board and see you as we get into the summit because I know you're going to get a lot out of it. Uh, and, and I'm just super excited. And like I said, at the very beginning, uh, I did experience a lot of procrastination because I was stretched right outside my comfort zone and I took that leap of faith anyway, because connection and community within our family daycare profession is more important to me than worried, being worried about.
Who am I to do something? And I had to ask myself, well, who am I not to do it? If I've had the idea and the seed was planted and I have the means and the ability to do it, why shouldn't I do it? And I really feel that you will get so much more benefit out of, out of what we share and what is shared already that, um, It, I just couldn't not do it.
So there you go, my friends. I hope that, uh, you, you might give us some feedback on this podcast, share how excited you are about the summit and, and, and joining in. And, uh, I really look forward to sharing this with you very, very much. So that's it for me for now. Big love ?Hi friends, thank you so much for joining us today. I hope you got a lot out of today's episode. When we work on our own we can sometimes be in a silo so having new perspectives and different ways of looking at things is vitally important for the growth of our individual selves and our professional selves as well.
We love feedback so if you felt compelled to share what you thought of today's podcast we would love to read your Thoughts You can leave us a review on podcast that helps our podcast to get out to the wider community. And the more that hear what we have to share, we think the better it is. Thanks so much, friend.
We'll see you next time. Till then, big love.