The show’s guest in this episode is Dr. Carol Scott. She’s a nationally respected thought leader in early care and education. She has a BA in anthropology and child development. She has master’s in childhood education and a PhD in developmental psychology. I love that she’s here to talk about leadership. And from her foundation came the self aware success strategies she offers her clients today. She’s a TEDx speaker, an author, a coach and a trainer. Tune in, and be transformed!

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Self Awareness Strategies for Success with Dr. Carol Scott

Hey there, I’m super excited to be here with you live today. And I’ve been at rearranging my office today. That’s it’s sort of an interesting, it’s sort of interesting. And I’m sharing it because I’ve literally been thinking about how I would do this for a couple of years I was I work at home. And then during COVID, I kind of moved to the living room, and everybody was kind of around. And I was pretty interesting. And then, and then I went off to the US for three months. And when I came back, I just kind of moved back into the living room, and my office has been this weird space for me. And I’ve wanted to flip it, I have a really big office, it’s the old living room of my 1867 house. And so it’s quite long and big. And I just wanted to flip the two sides so that I would have a sitting area on one side and my desk on the other. And you might be wondering, like, what does this have to do with leadership, Melanie, but I think sometimes things get in our minds around our work. And they just kind of poke at us every now and then we have these sort of dreams, I might even call them abandon dreams, you know, things that we think about once and then we don’t ever do anything about. And then sometimes they come up again, or sometimes there’s just a day like I didn’t plan on doing this today. But I had an extra couple hours. And I just thought what if I just did it now. And and I don’t know what had me like getting gear. But I think it’s time I moved back into my office and, and so I flipped it and it feels really nice, and it feels really fresh and new. So I’m just curious, and I just want to talk with you about the relationship you have with yourself your own dreams. And I just want to ask you a question, which is, you know, do you have any abandoned dreams that you should seek out and follow through with right now. I think that the end of COVID has left us with abandoned dreams. And so I just really want to challenge you to look around your life, your mind, and to think about where you are hungry for something that you’ve already thought of something that you want to execute on now that you had to walk away from, you know, 20 months ago. So that’s, that’s my challenge for you.

And just shifting gears, I am so excited about our guest today. Her name is Dr. Carol Scott. And she’s a nationally respected thought leader in early care and education. She has a BA in anthropology and child development and an MA a master’s in childhood education and a PhD in developmental psychology. And that’s near and dear to my heart, my heart because I’m married to a developmental psychologist. So that’s sort of what I talked about at the dinner table. But I love that she’s here to talk about leadership. And she has, from her foundation came the self aware success strategies she offers her clients today. She’s a TEDx speaker, an author, a coach and a trainer. And I am so excited to have Dr. Carol Scott on my show today.

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Welcome Carol.

Melanie, thank you so much for having me. And I’m so excited by your introduction about those dreams set aside that’s an awesome way to begin this conversation.

Yeah, do you have any dreams that you did? Did it spark anything in you that you thought oh, I need to go and you know, dig that out?

Well, you know, I’m actually living it i This what I do now is the dream that I had for many many years. So I think I just sort of left in and decided to go for it.

That’s amazing. Well tell me what that life? What’s the dreamy part of your life now ? I’d love to know more.

Well if partly the dream is to teach people about child early childhood development and what it means to them personally in their adult life. But also a part of my dream is to take that show on the road so I sold my I don’t own a home on made out of sticks and bricks anymore. I have a home on wheels and I traveled the country as an RV nomad. So the country I’m currently in Mount of Baja.

Wow, that’s amazing. Now, sorry, say that again. Where are you now?

In Mexico on the Baja Peninsula in a city called Ensenada.

Oh, wow. And I know this isn’t about leadership, but I’m like a huge foodie. What’s your favorite thing about eating Baja?

Well, I’ve only been here for about About 10 days so my sampling has been limited but we had the most delicious shrimp the other night. I mean, they’re right here on the bay. And all the seafood is fresh. It makes the this is like the home of the fish taco if you like fish tacos, love fish tacos come the end Sonata Baja and eat a fish taco.

Oh, that sounds amazing. I am really curious what you’re up to in your work right now. I’m guessing you’re working remotely since you’re you’re traveling. Yes. What’s going on in your world in your leadership?

 

I have a making a move, I hope to expand my audience. I have been listened to for many, many years by people who work with young children, parents, early childhood educators, people who teach in Head start preschools, childcare centers, and, and to the people who support the whole system that supports that birth to kindergarten entry education. And they love what I have to say about what early childhood means to us as adults in our relationships. And I think there are a whole lot of other people who would like to hear it, and that it would be meaningful for them to and so I am doing a business building phase two, develop coaching services, and have an opportunity to talk with people like you and get my message out to people who haven’t really thought about, Gosh, my first seven years, Hmm, maybe I should think about those.

One I am. We talked about this just a little before we got on but I use DISC profiling a fair bit to look at personality development, you know, sort of, I always think we’re charting neuro pathways to try to understand sort of how people’s brains work. And we often I often come up against some react what I call reactivity or something where people kind of go down. I think of it as like going down a chute. It’s like they’re out of choice. And they end up going down, you know, a pathway, usually from fear. And I’m curious about what you know about that, as a developmental psychologist, like, how do how should people be thinking about those things?

If I understand your question correctly, this kind of goes to the earliest success strategies that we could develop as young children, we learn how to trust as a successful strategy, not just trust everybody, no matter what, and not, never trust nobody, no matter what. But trust in a healthy way, trust in a smart way, trust as a strategy that helps you helps other people, and what I call independence, which is, those are the success strategies of the infant and the toddler. And if you’ve ever met a toddler, you understand why it’s called independence, because it’s about knowing who you are. And bringing that to the world. And toddlers are really trying to learn how to do that. And they’re very raw, that they’re, they’re like diplomats in training, trying to teach us who they are. And they’re really as crummy as they are at learning to walk. When they first start doing that. We tend to get frustrated. And so we push that down, we we build a fear in the toddler, about being who they are about being authentically themselves about saying what they think expressing how they feel, and saying what they want. That’s key. I know an awful lot of adults who if you ask them in the moment, what do you want, they have no idea. And that lack of aware of that lack of self awareness about who I am, what I think what I feel what I want, what I need, that lack of self awareness, I think builds the core of our fear of going for ourselves, expressing ourselves, bringing all of the rich, unique gift that we are to our leadership and to our families, you know, to our romances to all of our relationships.

And if  you’re working with a leader who, you know, you’re seeing that sort of pushing like they’ve been pushed down, they might be I always see behaviors, like they erupt or they yell or you know, like, I always say that that reactivity is when somebody doesn’t have another strategy about what else to do. How do you work with them to help them change? Like, what are you looking for in terms of change? Or is it something once you’re once you’re that way? Do you just have to stay that way?

Goodness, no, you don’t. And I would like to save it. As an adult person at about, you know, 21-22 entered my adulthood with absolutely none of the success strategies that I talked about. Now I teach from these first seven years, none of them and I have worked to develop all of them, so it’s never too late to begin. And the processes that I use are about learning our behavior. Mostly. I use something that I call development do overs. So we first look at we first asked, What do you do now with trust? How do you trust people? Now let’s take a look at it. Understand what trust is that it’s relying on other people to meet your needs. And then look at the needs that you have interpersonally at work or at home, or wherever you’re concerned about your relationships. And then let’s take a look at how you’re getting those needs met, because that’s where you’re trusting in your life. That’s the way you’re using it now. And is that working for you? And if not, let’s repattern how you use the strategy of getting your needs met. So for each of the success strategies, I’ve created these processes that I offer to people to let them repattern.

And I know we talked about this before, too, but what if someone has trauma? Like what if, you know, we have both traumatic events that happen in our lives? We have institutionalized trauma, you know, institutionalized racism, institutionalized sexism, and institutionalized homophobia, like there’s so many sort of institutionalized traumas that I certainly have seen, you know, people get really protective of themselves, because of what then how should someone think about that? If I mean, maybe all women have have experienced institutionalized sexism. And certainly, I mean, these institutionalized pieces are so heavy for those populations.

Yeah. And, you know, one of the things that I think everyone should know a little bit about is the effects of something other than even mildly optimal. So, you know, we think that this, that there’s this optimal family, it’s mythic, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen one. And so somewhere between the mythic optimal family and the most dysfunctional, most oppressed, most stressed family, you can imagine, there’s this huge continuum, right? Yeah. And so we have to understand the the sort of episodic trauma that can happen from an event in a community or in a household, the death of someone, an explosion in a nearby building, you know, there’s something that is episodic one time trauma, and that there is PTSD, there’s post traumatic stress from that. And also, children grow up in situations where they’re traumatized in their own homes over and over and over and over and over again, and cannot get away from it ever, until they grow up. And that creates an adult version of PTSD that is often called Complex PTSD, or C, PTSD, because and the complexity is, you cannot escape, you’re you’re experiencing the PTSD, while you’re also being re traumatized over and over again, that when that happens in a middle class, or an upper middle class background, because it does people drink and behave, behave badly and treat children badly in all classes. When that happens in that kind of family, that child has some resilience factors. Usually, they go to a good school, maybe they go to summer camp, they have other adults in their neighborhood that they learn differently from. But if you live in a neighborhood that is toxically, oppressed by racism, by classism, by the kinds of things that take away resilience factors, there aren’t any parks, not only are there they’re good schools, there aren’t even you don’t even have a grocery store, you’re not food secured most of the time. So when poverty and racism and systemic issues in our culture add on to the whatever the dynamics, interpersonal dynamics are, it just makes everything harder to recover from.

 

We come in at birth with 100 billion loose neurons that need connecting to each other. And it is our moment by moment experiences of the world. It’s our sensory intake, that makes those neurons connect to each other.

 

Well, and you work with clients, I work with clients, what do we do when we come across? When we I mean, I’m not a psychologist, so I’m not going to diagnose someone. Right? I do recognize this when I see it. What do we do?

You know, I really recommend that people get familiar with the list called the Adverse Childhood Experiences list or ACEs, AC E. And they are 10 experiences that have been documented by research to be oppressive and toxic and traumatizing to children. And 52% of the the population in the US has at least one or they did at the time of the research, which is now a few decades behind us. So probably higher now, I would guess. And about 17% have four or more on the list of 10. I had seven. But I grew up in a middle class community, a kind of almost upper middle class schools. I had great teachers that were neighbors who showed me something different. My father, my grandfather had money my mother did not she was a single parent with five kids, but he sent us to summer camp. So we had experiences that counterbalance Balance the trauma inside our walls. And even though we had a lot of trauma inside our walls, we survived it because we had those balancing factors. So what we have to do is look at is it just about repattern in your behavior, or is it about rewiring your brain, because the other piece besides besides that sort of background, toxicity, and general traumas, specific trauma in a young child, especially under three wires, the brain, it creates brain architecture, we come in at birth with 100 billion loose neurons that need connecting to each other. And it is our moment by moment experiences of the world. It’s our sensory intake, that makes those neurons connect to each other. And so your brain is wired differently than mine. It was wired by whatever experiences you had, mine’s wired by mine, everybody has a different brain. And so for some of rewiring the brain through things like EFT tapping through applied neurology through what’s a neuro, what’s it called when you put the feeling into a object, part of my therapy, and now I forgotten the name of it. But the tools that actually can shift the wiring of the brain, the brain is plastic and can be rewired. But just repatterning behavior, that takes a long time to sort of back back wire, do other things that actually work with vagus nerve stimulation and tools that will make big change fast for people who have had complex trauma.

Your brain is wired differently than mine. It was wired by whatever experiences you had, mine's wired by mine, everybody has a different brain. Share on X

This is such an interesting conversation. What do you think the top three tips are for someone who wants to improve their strategies for success? Just just like, where do you start?

I think first comes a big gulp of self honesty, being willing to look at the actual behavior that you bring into the world, and how it affects people become more aware of what you’re doing. And we use the development do over tools to help us do that, for example, listing the things you need from other people and asking yourself the question, Am I getting these things from someone who, or am I trying to meet all my needs myself, or am I simply letting my needs go unmet altogether. And so developing that self awareness and then starting to think about consciously using tools that help you change the patterns, one of the things that I love to do is kind of use what I would call imagery, art, and almost metaphysics, but allow the allow the inner self to guide what you do. So put out a display that tells you this is the way you do it. Now arrange a bunch of objects in front of you pictures, stones, shells, flowers, whatever tells you this is the way I do it now. And then this is the way I want to do it and set up a whole different set of, of items, and gradually replace the way you’re doing it now with the new things that make symbol, imagery, in your mind, help repattern your behavior. So I use a lot of that as well, it makes it more fun.

Interesting, and you have a third,

Then give yourself a break. Don’t be so hard on yourself. You know, it’s like it’s so easy to beat ourselves up when I first started looking at my behavior. And I saw what I thought was, you know, I’m kind of a hot mess here. I really am kind of abrupt with people. And I’m kind of, I’m kind of difficult to get along with in these ways. And I don’t want to be like that. And to say, and, gosh, I come by that honestly. And I am so incredibly amazed that I’m just standing up and alive right now. Because the prediction for somebody was seven aces out of 10 Just like what it should have been in jail or dead or, you know, seriously addicted to living homeless on the streets by the time I was 30. And here I am. I didn’t do that. I turned that. And I did that because I had good treatment. I had good options and good resources. When I finally decided to say enough. This isn’t working. I need to look at this Be honest and not kind of shoot myself in the foot and say, Well, I look so bad. I don’t I don’t mean ya know how bad it looks. I just I’m not going to talk about it. We have to talk about it. There’s lots we can talk about lots we can do. So that’s the third step is just take a step.

Give yourself a break. Don't be so hard on yourself. Share on X

That’s just amazing. Where can people find you Carol?

My website is www.lcarolscott.com. I’m offering some coaching sessions coming up online virtual coaching in small groups of women. This is a women’s coaching for success. And I’d like to offer your listeners a little gift to I have a tiny little 20 pages cover to cover that describes all the success strategies and how they develop in US and a little bit about how we can create them in ourselves as adults or strengthen them. So anybody who wants to send me an email at carol@lcarolscott.com, I’ll send it back.

Amazing. Thank you so much. I love your generosity. And it’s just been a joy to get to talk to you. I’m leaving just thinking, wow, she’s really smart. Like she’s been thinking about these things for a long time. So I really appreciate you sharing with our listeners all this great wisdom.

Thank you so much, Melanie, I had a good time.

 

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Well, that was so much fun. It was great to be here with Dr. Carol Scott. And I love this idea. These ideas that are super practical that she shared. And it it makes me think about how we experiment as leaders, with ourselves with our own thoughts with giving ourselves a break, but trying something new the next time learning to repattern is an experimental process. So I think that I love the idea of having you know, objects that exemplify how you are now and other objects that exemplify how you want to be because those are touchstones for evaluating the change or the shift, or the target condition or the desired end state that you want to achieve as a leader. I feel like today we’re talking about, you know, sort of who we are from the inside out as leaders not so much what we show but what do we look at inside ourselves? What are our abandoned dreams and what are those new dreams for who we want to be as leaders. It’s been so great being with you here today. Go experiment!

Important Links: 

Dr. L Carol Scott

Dr. L. Carol Scott integrates more than a century of theory, practice, and research on early learning and brain development; lessons from a lifetime career with children and families; and tools from her own journey of recovery after a childhood filled with trauma.

A committed Jayhawk, she earned double-major BAs in Anthropology and Human Development, an MA in Early Education, and a PhD in Developmental Psychology at the University of Kansas. Since 1985, she has held leadership positions in her field, starting at the local level and rising to become a national thought leader and influencer.

For her final act before life’s curtain, Carol has a dream: to change for the better the way we treat each other in America. That dream is achieved as she teaches you something you have both been desperate to understand and never knew you wanted to know. Yes! You can finally understand “what makes people tick,” by learning more about the universal patterns in your own internalized mechanics, ticking away.

Carol’s seven Self-Aware Success Strategies–the SASS–are her foundation for coaching Women on the Rise to greater success, no matter how they define that success.

 

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