The News Report That Sparked a Mission for Self-Care and Childhood Wonder

Welcome back to Stress Busters for Wildly Busy Humans. If you're ready to release your stress and reclaim your joy in life, you're in the right place. I'm your host, Vivianne Winters Israel. Let's get to it.

This is episode four, the news report that gave me my vision. Full disclosure, friends, this episode has been a challenge to get recorded to concisely integrate the whys behind the two paths that I'm taking and my vision, without getting emotionally distracted, that has been a challenge. I decided to go through those recordings and pull together what I want to say and leave out what I don't need to say. And to that end, I have decided to read this to you. Everything changed when it was 2001. We were in the early stages, the early phases of feeling our way through the social aftermath of the

pandemic lockdowns. I'd been among the COVID layoffs a few years ahead of my planned retirement date. I was sitting in my favorite chair, checking emails from my laptop, and I clicked onto a video news report-a discussion of whether children should be attending school in person flowed into my ears. That discussion struck something very deep inside me. Beyond an oo or an aha moment, it felt like a body strike. It was visceral. A tsunami level wave of concern about the possible future ripple effects that the lockdowns might have on our children's social future coursed through my mind and body.

I no longer heard the report. I was in a completely different space. I'd become a magnet for hundreds of thoughts and considerations from what felt like every possible perspective. It was a bit overwhelming. Could these circumstances and whatever time it might take us to recapture some kind of social norm, steal time from what we know as early childhood. Could that cause an earlier loss of the the greatest treasures of childhood, that sense of wonder and natural curiosity? That would be tragic. Something in me had been activated. It launched a commitment to help preserve childhood

wonder and curiosity. Now I didn't have a clue what that would look like, or how I could possibly contribute yet, but I knew I was going to do it. I knew I was meant to do it. After what I guess was a couple or so hours of burning metal rubber, I was left with two questions, each needing its own answer. First, what could be done to prevent or at least minimize any early loss of childhood wonder and curiosity? What could I do to contribute to preserving it, maybe even extending it? Those answers didn't come at the same time, and ultimately they led me down two separate yet aligned paths. That

first path, storytelling. The answer to my second question came first, and once I had it, it felt wildly obvious. Storytelling. Storytelling has captured the attention, the minds, and the hearts of we humans for eons. Oral storytelling is practically baked into our DNA, and children especially love stories. I'd write adventures and mysteries for children. That was something I'd wanted to do in my retirement ever since my first travel internationally with my daughter several years earlier. But now, these books needed to be more than a kid's eye view of other countries, cultures, and. Regional

peoples. Now I was called to help children work through today's social and emotional challenges. That meant very relatable, contemporary peer characters managing real life issues, or at least going through real life issues that children can experience from the safety of engaging fictional adventures, stories that also illustrate positive character traits and transformative life lessons. These stories need to be very good to achieve the reach and impact I envision. Good enough that teachers, educators, and librarians want their charges to read them. That parents and grandparents want them

for their families, and that children want to share them with their friends. I envision a core web of characters children can grow up with. First in a series to trilogies of for middle grade readers, ages nine to 12, then teens, 11 to 13, followed by young adults, 13 to 17, and that followed by a six book series for new adults, ages 20 to 25.

Did I mention I'd never written fiction or a children's book, unless you count the unfinished Trixie Beldon-like mystery I wrote in eighth or ninth grade, Mystery of the Twin Valleys, cue the mysterious background music. I had published four books, but each of those was nonfiction. Writing fiction is an entirely different animal, and writing children's fiction is yet another animal aside from that one. So I had everything to learn, and I would learn it. I am learning it because I need to contribute to elevating the experience of children's lives in what feels to be advancing towards a

fracturing society. In the years since, I've immersed myself in the study of fiction writing, uncovering what I didn't know. I didn't know everything, and studying the changes in publishing industry since I'd last published-that's meant many, many 812, even 14-plus hour days of classes, courses, reading, and practice. At the time of this broadcast, I am almost done detailedly outlining each individual scene for the Standalone Printl novella, and beginning to manuscript it for my Abbey Hart series, and I'm finishing outlining the first three books, the first trilogy for the upper middle

grade readers of ages nine to 12. I'm also weaving educational content into my books, into my stories. Each book will have a robust teacher parent resource guide, free to download for teachers and homeschooling parents, so they can make the most of the social, emotional, cultural, historical, and fun facts content in each story. It's my way of lightening their load and helping them help our children. Then came an unexpected bridge. It gets me ultimately to the second path. While researching what teachers would most want in such resource guides, I discovered something that was incredibly

sad and actually painful: the magnitude of increased workload, curriculum demands, and stress on our teachers since the pandemic was and continues to be enormous. It would be a few years before my first books are published, but I couldn't wait to help. Teachers needed more than resource guides; they needed help now. I started raising awareness about benefits of self-care, creating free master classes, so I could share with teachers, parents, and others the self-care self-care practices that made such extraordinary differences in my life. Then I started to build a community with a

newsletter that would also have news about upcoming books, and even more recently, something came. Into focus, that second path was more than raising awareness and helping guide in the realm of true self-care. The second path is that that true self-care of adults protects the wonder. Children don't lose their wonder in a vacuum. They absorb the stress of the adults around them, the teachers, parents, and caregivers, and so many of them are running on empty. If we want to protect our childhood wonder, the childhood wonder. We have to start with the grown-ups as well as the children. That

was the answer to that first question a long time in coming. What could be done to prevent or at least minimize an early loss of childhood wonder and curiosity. It has to be both paths. The scale of the answer is huge, but the answer itself is simple. Widely share the simple yet powerful true self-care tools I've learned and used so successfully, it became the second path, separate from my storytelling, yet in full alignment with my calling to protect the joy of childhood wonder and curiosity. I focus on the methods that take less than 30 minutes to serve the wildly busy humans among

us, and among the self-care practices I favor to take only two minutes to perform once learned. Two minutes-they can be done anytime, anywhere. Yet most people I talk with have never heard of tools like these. These true self-care practices go beyond simple me time. They enhance your everyday life experience cumulatively, and the two-minute practices they can fit into a teacher's crazy demanding schedule, so they can fit into anyone's wildly busy schedule. And this answer isn't for teachers alone; it is for caregivers, nurses, and homeschooling parents, for parents stressed by lost work

hours, lost income, lost jobs, or the ever rising costs of well everything. It's really for anyone who is stressed, overworked, overwhelmed, and comes in contact with our children. Why this matters to everyone, even with the great intentions and our best efforts to provide a loving, joyful, safe life for our children.

Circumstances can bring heavy, life-shifting stress. They can even drop kick your family into a crisis. We all know crisis can come when you least expect it, our entire species was dropped into one with the COVID 19 pandemic. Society is still feeling its way through the ripple effects of that, but there are tools that can enhance your everyday life experience cumulatively. You simply need to explore a few, see which resonate with you. Choose one and practice it regularly. Remember, I know a few great ones that take only two minutes. It's important to understand. So important to understand

that true self-care is something beyond me time, and it is not selfish. It is the foundation for taking the best possible care of your loved ones, children, patients, students, partners, everyone you encounter. It's the ultimate win-win-win, and this is true no matter your age or generation. You may not be a parent or a grandparent, but you are someone's child, as were your parents and grandparents. The factors that have shaped their lives may have been different, but challenges and disruptions remain a fact of life, seemingly even more so of late. The vision I want you to see, the

rally I want you to hear. So much can be gained in a world where we each show. Better for ourselves and others, a world with more ease, more kindness, and less destruction. A world that continues to hold space for the joy of childhood wonder and curiosity, without the temptation to rush children past that. Isn't it time we each take conscious action to truly care for ourselves, to elevate our everyday life experience, diffuse our smaller issues, and empower ourselves to move through crisis level disruptions with more ease. I'm sorry, almost done. How grand would it be to be an active part

of shaping that world? That world starts with one small doable step, and it can start today. Visit wildlybusyhumans.com. That's where you'll find the teachers stress eraser experience, and launching in March 2027, the two-minute stress buster for wildly busy humans, where I'll teach you one of those two under two-minute practices step by step. You can also join my newsletter there for true self-care tips, updates, and news about my upcoming books. Two minutes-that's all it takes to begin. Ultimately, we each choose how we show up in the world, each and every day. Our choice affects

those we love and each person we encounter. Choose wisely. A tougher now.