I’m having a breakthrough! The mental kind. Not a break-down, a break-through, which can be almost as disturbing to integrate. And I’m excited for this one because it feels like a spiral moment, where everything comes full circle and you jump up to the next level to restart the learning process with your new foundations. And what’s making this even better is that I’m seeing the results of my big unschooling experiment in my grown-up kids and what I’m seeing is blowing my mind!

I’m having a breakthrough! The mental kind. Not a break-down, a break-through, which can be almost as disturbing to integrate.

Working 9-5

For a long time I’ve wanted to be self-employed. I am, as I saw it phrased recently, “chronically unemployable”. Which isn’t surprising considering my motorbike instructing, HGV driving, unschooling past, and my creative, ADHD fuelled present. I really struggle to fit into other people’s boxes so I’ve decided to create my own. For real this time. 

What’s this got to do with unschooling, I hear you say? Let me explain. I’ve been building businesses for a while now. And I’ve been hyperfocusing and spending HOURS (hundreds of them!) creating ‘things’ for my businesses. Tweaking and changing and redirecting and altering. Because that’s what makes you successful, right? Working longer, doing more, doing it past the limit of exhaustion and into the success zone. 

10x it!

I’ve watched the business gurus telling me to 10X IT! And I took it to heart. I tried doing 10x more than the imaginary ‘successful’ person in my head. But here’s the thing. I’ve been operating from conditioning, and I couldn’t even see it. That successful person in my head was imagined by my conditioned brain, just like my pre-deschooling brain used to imagine a successful private school student speaking Latin, and beating my Home Ed kids to all the jobs. 

I’ve deschooled myself over the years, to the point that I’ll often say something amongst uninitiated, ordinary school folk, and the world just freezes for a second. And they all just look at me with their brains buffering, and I realise I’ve just jolted their world view. Oops! I can see a different way because I’ve done the work to release my conditioning around education and parenting. 

More work to do

But now I’m seeing that I need to apply that deschooling process to work. I need to de-employee myself!  And again, just like de-schooling, before I actually lived through it, I thought that wanting out of the system was enough. But it’s only the start. So, back to my kids…

I chose to unschool because I wanted my kids to develop internal systems of self-control, self-motivation, and internal measures of right and wrong. And I’ve just realised something big. IT HAPPENED! Let’s look at exhibit A – my eldest daughter. My eldest is self-employed, and she’s doing really well. Like a lot of adult kids, she and her partner are staying with me while they save up for a house deposit. So I see how she operates, and I am continually provoked. Not in a bad way, but in a spluttering, indignant, ‘What?! How is this even working for her?!’ way. 

Preconceptions holding me back. Again!

You see, she rests. She makes no apologies. She does her work. She advertises, organises, visits, and then does whatever she feels like doing! And, holy shit, that’s been pushing my buttons. How is she succeeding in self-employment when she watches Game of Thrones re-runs on a Tuesday afternoon? She said to me on Wednesday that I could do what I needed to do by 11 the next day and we could go out afterwards. And I said how lazy that felt and she just gave me a look and I could feel some things coming loose. I went away and slept on it and I woke up knowing that she’d broken through a barrier I had in my head. 

Do the real work, then rest

Growing a business, or Home Educating a family, or building trust are all the same. You do the things you need to do and then you wait. Like growing a garden, it won’t help to keep re-digging the same soil, or watering a few more times because you have finished the planting. What I’ve been doing is just busy work, but the important jobs are done. It’s time to enjoy the garden a little bit while the seeds grow. 

And my daughter knows that. I didn’t specifically teach her those things. Through unschooling, I just created the conditions for her to grow into what she was always meant to be. She’s got good roots now and she knows how to rest in the sun and just allow without the scrabbling I’ve been conditioned for. I’ve just noticed that one of my favourite flowers has bloomed, and it’s so much better than I could have hoped for.