Quiet Parenting

Quiet Parenting - online parent courses
Learn practical, easy-to-use strategies to improve your relationship with your children. Your family life will become more peaceful and less stressful. Best of all, you will be teaching your children important life-long skills to help them to regulate themselves and manage their emotions.
Join a small group of parents and an online presenter for an online session each week for four weeks. $99 Special booking code SAV-QP
Quiet Parenting courses start soon – book now!
www.parentschool.com.au, 1300 130 700, info@parentschool.com.au.

AUSTRALIA’S FIRST ‘LIVE’ ONLINE PARENT EDUCATION COURSES
A psychologist and an aircraft engineer have teamed‐up to design Australia’s first ‘live’ online parent education program. Michael Hawton and Brett Drinkwater – with their respective spouses – have seven children between them. Hawton has over 20 years experience and his company has trained over 4,500 family services workers in parent education nationally and Drinkwater is an e‐learning expert, who has experience in the corporate sector.

• Quiet Parenting is an engaging interactive e‐course, taught to parents as a “real‐time” parent education program – of groups of up to 20 parents.

• The Australian Institute of Family Studies has found support for this view in its recent surveys of parents, finding that over a quarter of parents would prefer to learn about parenting online.

• With the arrival of the National Broadband Network in Australia, the time is ripe for expanding into this type of format for online parent education. Quiet Parenting equips parents with easy‐to‐use strategies they can apply immediately. Family life will become more peaceful and parents will feel less stressed. Best of all, over the longer term, parents will be teaching their children important life‐long skills that will help them to selfregulate.

As the first in a number of courses, Quiet Parenting is aimed at helping parents of 2‐12 year olds to manage their children’s difficult behaviour – quietly. The program is tailored to teach parents practical strategies for dealing with children’s difficult behaviour, without having to raise their voices to gain cooperation from their children. Two other parent courses – one for parents of teenagers ‐ are in development, and Indigenous and on‐English‐speaking parent’s online versions of the Quiet Parenting program are to be released in 2012.

Held as both morning and evening programs, Quiet Parenting courses begin, nationwide, in October 2011 and easy enrolment is found at http://www.parentschool.com.au/ Michael Hawton, MAPS has created the Quiet Parenting for parents who would find it difficult to attend face‐to‐face courses. “The program is easy to sit‐down to after getting the kids off to school in the morning or after they go to bed in the evening. We believe that this format will be particularly useful for parents from rural areas who would have less access to parent education classes. It would also be useful to parents in city environments, where parents find it difficult to go out again after a hard day’s work,” Hawton said.

Quiet Parenting courses are facilitated by parenting experts, who are also virtual classroom leaders, so parents have the benefit of online education but also opportunities to exchange ideas in a “real‐time” learning environment. According to Drinkwater, “the program is full of interactive learning experiences. Parents meet online for one‐and‐a‐half‐hours sessions, once a week over four weeks. They’ll learn lots of great new skills and gain knowledge to better understand their children’s behaviour by way of expert commentary, whiteboard exercises, slideshows, videos, work sheets, and group activities – all aimed at making this type of learning as engaging as possible”. “The latest findings in neuroscience show that the brain is somewhat plastic and that connections in the brain can improve in response to repeated behaviour. Parents who give their
children practice at ‘toggling’ (or switching) between their old reactive brain and new rational brain, will help their children to become better at self‐regulating”, Hawton said.

Many people say that interactive e‐learning is more suited to a better learning compared to non‐interactive parenting online courses in Australia, because parents learn together and have the opportunity of exchanging ideas and experiences.

Written by a psychologist, but less expensive than seeing a psychologist* on a one to one basis, Quiet Parenting uses internet technology to bring the best of parenting advice within easy reach wherever you live in Australia.
http://www.parentschool.com.au/

* Based on the APS recommended fee

Building Your Team From The Inside out in 2011

Irrespective of the size of your dance school, as soon as you decide to employ or contract staff, the nature of your communication and leadership skills is critical.
Many of us school owners started our schools with a purpose to teach dance our way. We prided ourselves on our creative and technical differences by striving to out do our own training, passing our passion and dreams onto the next generation.

So how do you employ the right staff who will share the vision and ethos you have for your school? How do you convey your standards of practice to your staff and ensure they deliver their best practice? Over the next few months we will be exploring these very topics, but firstly, I will let you in on a secret:

The Pain Story
Every person is motivated by a past pain story! If you want to know how to best inspire your staff, you need to know what motivates them. I have found that often motivation is driven by pain, sugar coated with an inspiring vision of why someone loves to teach. You have your own, I have mine, everybody has a pain story whether they realise it or not.
What is a pain story?

A pain story is an unresolved misperception from the past and if you want your teachers to be the best, you need to know how to weed it out and assist them in transforming their pain story into a power story. For example, for the first four years of owning Dance Dynamics in Byron Bay I was secretly ashamed that I didn’t pursue my dream of being an accomplished ballerina. Instead of focusing on all of the fabulous training and performance experiences I had had, I focused on creating excuses as to why I didn’t achieve that goal. I needed someone to blame in order to feel justified in staying small and not pushing through my own emotional fear of failure.

How does this affect your students? As teachers we not only train the body, we train the mind. Assessing the student’s physical weaknesses and strengths is what we are good at, however as the mind governs the body understanding cognitive thinking patterns of our students will further assist them in achieving their goals. Understanding our own patterns of thinking and learning to transcend limiting patterns (including pain stories) will enable us to become highly effective. So what is your secret pain story? Where do you feel inadequate? Not good enough? If you still don’t know, observe your language for one week and notice where you constantly need to talk yourself up to others or even to yourself in your own head? Where do you put yourself down? Use yourself as the experiment before you begin your team building process. After all, how can you build a team without knowing how to build up yourself?

1. Once you have identified what your pain story is, ask yourself ‘what the benefit is to having that story’? How is it keeping you small? What is it assisting you avoid?

2. See the other side to your story. If you perceived yourself as unsuccessful see where you were/are successful. An emotion is seeing one side of a situation. When you train your mind to see both sides you can turn emotion into purpose and power.

Building your Team Starts With You!
Once you know the pain story and how it limits you and you have flipped your pain into power revisit your dance school goals for 2011. What would you like to achieve for yourself? For your students? For your staff? And for your school? The function of your school is a direct reflection of you. Anything you have not emotionally resolved in your mind and heart will be expressed by means of conflict within your school through your staff, students or parents.
Once you have completed this process on yourself then take your staff through the same questions. Observe their language and behaviours to detect that both are congruent.

Additional questions to ask staff and yourself
1. Why do you most love about teaching?
2. What do you most dislike about teaching?
3. What is your biggest strength as a teacher?
4. What is your biggest weakness as a teacher?
Stay tuned for next month’s issue of Building Your Team From the Inside Out In 2011 –Linking Staff Values.

This article is © copyright to Kate Histon 2011 on behalf of Dance Life Australia. To copy or distribute any part of this article you must first seek permission by the author Kate Histon

More Than The Dream

So you think you can dance? That’s not enough! Do you know you can dance? Still, it’s not enough! The real question is; what are you going to do about it? Not your mum, not your dad, not your teacher, not your agent, not your manager, not your friends - YOU!
With Dance growing to be a strong influential culture on Australian television over the past few years, the dream of becoming a dancer has evoked the hearts and inspiration of many viewers. Dance schools are filling up with aspiring wannabes, some just want to have fun, some want to stand out and some want to be stars! My question to the more serious dancers is this... WHY? The Why factor is what sets you apart from your competitor. If you have a big enough reason WHY you want to achieve your dream then you will have more momentum, energy and persistence to actualise it. It will become more than just feeling special on a stage; it will become a way of life and define who you are as a person.
Talent alone is not enough. Dreaming is one thing but making the dream a reality is a totally different story. Real success, which is the actualisation through achievement of goals and personal self fulfilment, is created from these three powerful dynamics;

1. Dream - Your ability to dream begins with a correct relationship with yourself and your world around you. Self love is the basis for this correct relationship and that is in knowing your strengths and weaknesses and respecting who you are as a person and those around you. These attributes are important to help overcome adversity in your career and in life. Your mental and emotional health derives from your capacity to know, love and respect who you are.

2. Action – Dreaming is not enough yet keeping your dream and passion alive is what motivates you to take action. A goal without enthusiasm remains just that a goal and is unlikely to be achieved. Action propelled by enthusiasm creates momentum, habit and in turn, more action. What can stop people from taking consistent action is FEAR. False Evidence Appearing Real. If this is you, find one of my previous articles on FEAR through this blog to assist you overcome that limiting mindset.

3. Completion – Being persistent in your action steps leads to only one thing... completion! However, completion is not about arriving. It is about the ability to take on the new responsibility that comes with that achieved goal. It is the ability to complete a project then start all over again.
2010 is drawing to a close. Are you where you thought you would be?
What were you goals for 2010? Did you achieve them?
If not, why not? Were your goals realistic? Was the timeframe too short? Did you get distracted? Were you too hard on yourself? Were you too easy on yourself?
If you have not check it out yet, take a look at the Dance Life 2011 online guide for full-time at the link below! There is a lot of information in the guide to help you further develop your talent, mindset and performance ability.

http://www.dancelife.com.au/blogs/entry/DANCELIFE-S-ONLINE-GUIDE-TO-FULL-TIME-COURSES-2011

You CAN DANCE! So how are you going to make it happen?