188. How to Improve School Mental Health Today with Charle Peck

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​In this episode, we speak with Charle Peck, a former high school teacher turned mental health professional. She shares her professional insights and personal stories that sparked the need to dive deeper into mental health practices, and how she’s seen it transform students and schools. 

Charle was a high school teacher for 18 years and saw how students struggled with their mental health. She was led to get a Master of Social Work degree to understand what was going on, jump-starting her career in mental health. Her teaching experience informs her current work, blending the teacher and mental health professional perspectives. 

Charle is the co-creator of Thriving School Community and the co-author of Improving School Mental Health: The Thriving Community Solution. 

The Big Dream 

Charle has a lot of hope for the future because she’s focusing on the solutions to the mental health problems we face in schools. Charle believes that by addressing the root causes of mental health challenges and integrating sustainable practices into daily routines, educators can create a balanced and supportive atmosphere for both teachers and students. 

Mindset Shifts Required

To create an education system where mental health is front-and-center, Charle identifies a few mindset shifts that need to occur. The first is that we need to stop getting stuck in language—some states don’t allow words like “trauma” or “SEL,” and the focus on words takes away from what’s actually going on. So the mindset shift is focusing on what’s going on beneath the behavioral issues like absenteeism. 

Another mindset shift is focusing on practical solutions—what are solution-oriented approaches that fit into your daily classroom practice? Instead of adding more and more to educators' plates, the mindset shift is around integrating mental health practices into your daily routine.

Charle shared some real-life stories of students she worked with and the lessons she learned, namely to humanize each person and understand where they’re coming from. It’s an important mindset shift: take time to see people where they are and help them from that place. 

Finally, Charle talks about the mindset shift of educators seeing this as a skill to learn. With the right tools, they can be equipped to support mental health in their classrooms. 

Action Steps  
Improving mental health in the school system can seem complicated, but there are actually some very practical steps educators can take to prioritize it. Charle recommends these action steps: 

Step 1: Ask yourself and other educators what you need to make your jobs better. Mental health starts with the educators, with the adults, before you can make an impact on the children. So check in with yourself and other colleagues to find solutions to problems and meet needs that improve your work environment. 

Step 2: Humanize others and understand their “story spiral.” There’s always more to the story—behind each bad behavior is someone’s home life, relationships, traumas, etc. So, humanize them, and take time to see what’s going on, getting to the route of a problem and not just focusing on the behavior. 

Step 3: Equip yourself with knowledge and skills. Mental health practices, tools, and strategies can all be learned and improved on. Be intentional about learning them for yourself and your students. Charle’s 9 Essential Skills Course is a great place to start. 

Challenges?

One common challenge—perhaps the biggest one—is the feeling of overwhelm among teachers and leaders. Decision fatigue is a very real experience, and educators are overwhelmed with the decisions they face and how to make the right decision. Charle believes that impactful professional development sessions will help reduce overwhelm and decision fatigue.  

The other challenge educators face is how to help others make decisions quickly. Teachers need to be equipped with the tools and dialogue to use with students to help them make the right decisions for themselves. 

One Step to Get Started 

One practical first step for educators is to identify and reflect on what you need for yourself to make your job better and do better. What keeps coming up over and over again? What’s the emotional charge you get when you just think of something? Identify the problem and the unmet need underlying it. Then, bring it to your first professional development session at the beginning of the school year, discuss it with colleagues, and use your collective wisdom to find solutions to these problems. 

Stay Connected

You can find out more about Charle and her work on her website, Thriving Educator. There, you can also access resources, a podcast, and self-paced courses like The 9 Essential Skills Course.

To help you implement today’s takeaways, Charle is sharing a School Mental Health Audit with you for free. It helps you identify strengths and areas of growth in your school to better prioritize mental health. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 188 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript here. 

Quotes: 

• 2:11 “Many of us get stuck in the problem and, trust me, I understand what those major issues are contributing to mental health in our education system. It's stemming from society, from education, and it's stemming from our families, and they're all meshing together. But I'm hopeful because I'm focusing on solutions for that.”  
• 14:25 “One thing we address is our own insecurities. We’re stuck in our own heads there, and that keeps us again from engaging in the role the way we need to do it effectively.”
• 17:43 “I remember being a teacher and thinking, ‘Gosh, I’m not a therapist, I’m lacking tools.’ But as I taught in some of those reframes I did on my own and some of those things I learned to do and then incorporated them, made my teaching practice so much better.” 
• 18:41 “Why are we not equipping teachers better in teachers' colleges, in their courses as pre-service teachers? And why are we not giving them the tools now so they can show up more confidently? That's what they're lacking. When they're having these problems with student behavior, it's because they don't know what to do. So we need to equip them with things that they can easily do that infuses into their everyday practice. I know it, I've lived it myself.”
• 26:17 “I want them to identify the need for themselves that would help them make their job better, and do better. So what is it that’s keeping them over and over, there’s a pattern there, there’s an emotional charge they get when they even just think about the thing. So, what is the problem? And then, what is the unmet need underlying that for themselves?”

TRANSCRIPT
0:00:03 - Lindsay Lyons
Charlie Peck, welcome to the Time for Teachership podcast. I am thrilled to have you today, thank you, Lindsay. 

0:00:09 - Charle Peck
I am so happy to be here. Truly, this is going to be such a great conversation with you and your audience. 

0:00:14 - Lindsay Lyons
Yes, and I am just so excited about the topic that we're talking about. Mental health is so important for everyone, and I just think a lot of people are looking for sustainable answers to how do we actually do this well, so I'm very excited to get your expertise on this. The first question I have, though, is like what should people know about you or kind of keep in mind in our conversation today, beyond the traditional bio sense of things? 

0:00:40 - Charle Peck
Yeah, that's important because I think what's unique that I keep hearing about my lens is that I was a teacher for 18 years in a high school classroom, which led me to this work and because my students were struggling so much with mental health. I didn't understand why. So I kept asking why, which led me to get a master of social work degree so that I could understand structurally what was going on, historically, what was going on the generational trauma and all those contributions from society, childhood, that were contributing to their struggles. So when I was one of those teachers sitting in a PD session and I heard mental health professionals speak to us, I was one of those people, one of those teachers rolling my eyes because I thought you don't have the teacher lens. So it's important that you understand I do have the teacher lens and the mental health professional lens. 

0:01:29 - Lindsay Lyons
That is so critical. I think they're just, in general, pd can really just gloss over the top of people's heads when they're like I just you don't know what it's like in my shoes and it's like, oh, I know I do, I'm speaking right to it. So that's, that's really incredible. I love that you framed that to start. And then I think, conceptually, regarding the content, I one of the big things I really love to ground the episodes in is the sense of equity and justice, and so Dr Bettina Love talks about this idea of freedom dreaming with this quote that I am in love with dreams grounded in the critique of injustice is how she describes freedom dreaming. And so, with that, what is that big dream that you hold for education? 

0:02:09 - Charle Peck
Well, I'm hopeful. I mean, a lot of us get stuck in the problem. Many of us get stuck in the problem and, trust me, I understand what those major issues are contributing to mental health in our education system. It's stemming from society, from education, and it's stemming from our families, and they're all meshing together. But I'm hopeful because I'm focusing on solutions for that, and so what that means to me is we've got to meet the needs of everybody, and I do believe that there's a way to do that, lindsay. So that's what I'm excited about. 

0:02:38 - Lindsay Lyons
Nice, oh, that's great. Okay, so I think with that there's a lot of things that maybe people have their minds wrapped around in terms of mental health that maybe needs a little unpacking, and so I'm wondering if there's any kind of key mindset shifts that you have noticed either teachers or leaders go through and you're like, ah, that's the thing that kind of unlocks the transformation. Is there kind of a mindset shift that you coach on or that you've seen work with folks? 

0:03:08 - Charle Peck
Yes, oh my gosh, there's actually so much there. So let me simplify in a couple of ways. Number one we need to stop getting stuck in language. So there are some states I can't use the word trauma, I can't use the word SEL, I can't. I mean equity, you know. I mean DEI. It's like a bad word in some states these days, and so I said listen, let's not get stuck in that language, let's just understand the importance behind it and how we're going to function better. 

So it's not getting stuck with all the semantics and all again the problems. It's how do we shift our mindset into focusing on solutions that will meet the needs of the people who have an unmet need? So it's showing up behaviorally, it's showing up in absenteeism. So we need to look at what those problems are and shift the mindset about what's going on underneath, and that's really no secret. I mean, we've been talking about that for a long time, but sometimes we need to be reminded about that, Lindsay. 

And so we need practical solutions for this, something that's just going to integrate into our daily practice, and that is the mind shift that usually helps me capture leaders and their educators I'm working with, because they're like oh yeah, so it's not one more thing that I have to do and I said, no, it's not. It's let's wrap our head around something that will integrate right into your daily practice to attack this problem that keeps showing up for you, and then they're ready to adapt it and then actually use it, and then remember how to use it. So that's the key. Those are a couple of things that I coach on all the time. 

0:04:37 - Lindsay Lyons
I love that you said that, because one of the things that I think people in in a lot of spaces, but in equity spaces particularly, it's like initiative fatigue where it's it is one more thing I'm already like my plate is full, I'm already doing too much, and so to just say, well, we're doing this thing, how do we do it better, makes it sustainable so that we don't have to. I mean it. Also really, I think the beauty of our jobs is like it works us out of a job when people can just do it really well, right, like we stick with them, we coach them, and it's like you got this, you don't need more PD because it's now part of how you do things, which I think is beautiful. Like that's the, that's like what we hope for as coaches. Right, it's like you can go do this thing and do it well forever now. 

So I think, thinking about those actions, I would love to know, like, what are those practical things that teachers can do? That Like if a leader is thinking okay, I want my teachers, I want my staff to have these practical strategies. Like, what can they do? What are the things? Tell us all the things, yeah. 

0:05:34 - Charle Peck
So it is based on a framework of nine skills, and those nine skills came out of. Well, what are the nine? Nine just happened to lead to a number in a matrix that we use, but it's like what keeps showing up with regards to mental health. What are the problems? So, if we identify the problem and understand why that's not working, then we can come up with a new solution. So that was the approach we took. 

So one of the problems is negative self-talk. Okay, oh my gosh, if you're a leader, how often do you hear negative self-talk? And, by the way, you might be that person stuck in negative thinking too. So one of the ways we attack that is what is your story? Spiral, what are you telling yourself about a situation that's based on a lie? Typically I mean typically these spirals we get into those narratives. You've heard the word narrative a lot. Same idea story, what story are you telling yourself does make you spiraling out of that control and saying and doing those things that you walk away regretting that you've done. So when we carry that around with us, that affects our function. So the approach I take, lindsay, is how are we functioning and how can we function better? What's keeping us from functioning at our best. So I bring it right down to the human level and that's what their skills are. So the story spiral is one, and then we help people unravel their story spiral and I'll tell you a quick story about that. To help and this is what I talk about in my sessions I always tell about a student named Madison who was that troubled kid right, and one day she got up out of my class, went to the bathroom, I think, didn't come, didn't ask my opinion, she didn't ask me to do that and she certainly didn't sign out and she was gone almost the whole period and then eventually came back. 

I tried to talk with her. Long story short, we had a tumultuous relationship, student-teacher relationship and it didn't feel good. I was kind of not nice to her and she certainly didn't work for me and do all the things she needed to do. It just wasn't good. So at the end of the semester, when it changed over, I went to our school counselor and I said Beth, can you please tell me where Madison is in her next class, because I want to go find her and make amends. And Beth said well, she passed away. Madison passed away, okay, and so I didn't get to make those amends with her and, more importantly, I didn't get to create a space that she could have done well in and had a positive experience in her short time left with us and this is a teenager. She had a terminal illness the whole time and I had no idea. So there's a lot of problems with that, about communication and all that confidentiality. 

But here's what I learned, and this is what led me to thinking about the story spiral and thinking about how can we reflect better upon our teaching practice as a result of something like this. Thank goodness I learned this early on and it was. There's always more to the story. If you think about the kids that are sitting in front of us, or leaders. If you're thinking about the staff who keeps coming back with the same, similar problems, what is it that's underlying that? You're missing something, and here's the key is that we may never know what that is. So we need to give grace to everybody and humanize them, and that's what changed my entire career, so that reframe was huge. 

I actually, in workshops, we use a story spiral. We have people identify their story spirals, or at least one of them, because we're walking around with a bunch of them and then we walk them through a process to unravel that story spiral, say they need to do it in the moment and that way they're not bobbled down with all of those stress hormones all day long. So there's others like power dynamics. It's really crippling us in our roles as leaders is when we feel like there's a power imbalance. By the way, teachers feel that, parents feel that, we all feel it. But when I work with principals specifically, we identify with that power imbalances and I help them realize that they've reached a limit, how they've reached their own limit, and not to expect other people to respect that limit, that they need to do that themselves so they can eradicate all of this expectation and disappointment that they feel. So there's just simple ways to get through it like that and it's actually all based in evidence. It's just a way to simplify it in practice. 

0:09:51 - Lindsay Lyons
Oh my gosh, I love so much of this. I have several connections. If it's okay with you, I just want to ask you. 

0:09:57 - Charle Peck
I know that was a lot too. It's a lot. 

0:09:59 - Lindsay Lyons
It's so good. I thought about the unmet needs first of all, like how easy is it to you're reading a picture book with your first graders or something or you're reading a picture book with your first graders or something, or right? Or you're reading a novel in high school, right? And to be able to like unpack what is this character Like? Why is this character acting this way? What is their unmet need Right? Like there's ways to do this in so many spaces and I don't think it's always necessarily like, like you said, it could just be the personal, like adults do this introspectively. It doesn't always have to be like there's this huge conflict with this child and like you know, like I have to do it right now. Like there's so many ways to sustainably practice this and familiarize students with the practice as well. As what is your story spiral? Oh, I just love the possibilities. Also, I love the phrase story spiral, very cool. 

I also was thinking about Dr Becky. I've been listening to her a lot because of Becky Kennedy, because of the toddler situation I'm in right now, and she's always saying MGI, most generous interpretation of like a situation right, like what is the most generous interpretation of this behavior, right, and it sounds like that's what you're saying, right. So like if I can reframe what's happening in the moment, like what possibly could be happening, or, like you said, if I don't know what's happening, what is the thing that I could possibly like generously ascribe to this behavior to then make me able to respond in a way that is caring and supportive? Does that feel like aligned to what you're coaching on? 

0:11:27 - Charle Peck
It's definitely aligned and I will say this because this is a problem that we all have too is well, I don't want that kid getting away with this, or I don't want that adult, that teacher, getting away with this, and so it's not. It's not about that. It's about let's humanize them, because that way we all soften our approach, and I don't mean we get soft and allow people to walk all over us or the system. That's not what I'm saying at all. In fact, I have a background in trauma and the first thing I say is we don't let trauma be an excuse for behavior and decisions. Right, we do have to have some accountability there, so I'm not taking that away. It's important that we understand that. 

It's about leadership is about how do we grow people we're working with and let them flourish in the strengths that they have and not have all of these expectations of them to be great everywhere all the time. It's what are they good at? What do they need to do their job better? I mean, how many leaders ask their teachers what do you need to do your job better? When I ask teachers this, it's usually nothing huge. Now sometimes they're like well, I need a smart board and that's expensive or I need a 10 day vacation in the middle of the school year. Well, we can't do that. But often I will tell you it's supplies Like it. It's really simple things and they love that. They're just asked and considered it's so it can be so simple. It's really investing in human capital again. 

0:12:50 - Lindsay Lyons
Yeah, even just acknowledgement or, you know, a gratitude like thank you for doing this thing that you're doing, working hard, yeah, totally Like very free, very easy, not super time consuming things. 

0:13:02 - Charle Peck
That's exactly right. We just need the reminder and permission to do some of those things again. 

0:13:07 - Lindsay Lyons
Absolutely. 

I love the phrase that you've been using with like humanize, and it makes me think a lot about the story you shared, and thank you for sharing that story. 

That is hard on all accounts for you, for the student, for you know the whole dynamics. I really appreciate you, your vulnerability and sharing that with us and with listeners, and so I'm thinking about the humanity that sometimes we do lose in the power dynamics in the. I'm overwhelmed with tasks and I'm just thinking about a to-do list of things in the pressures of. You know, my administrator is in my room and the thing that they are probably looking for is obedience from students, maybe not like sense of belonging or other things, and so I appreciate that you named the communication and all of the other pieces, but I love the humanizing portion as like the central piece of that. When we engage with individuals as if they are human beings, right, and have things going on. Like you said, everyone's got a ton of story spirals going on. I feel like if there's a takeaway from this episode, it is like at least remember the humanization of all people, right, that's. 

0:14:12 - Charle Peck
I just really appreciate that, Thank you, oh, I'm glad, and I'm glad you said that, because what's hard is when we get we get wrapped up in all of the things to do and we get stuck in our own insecurities. That's one of the things we address is our own insecurities. We're stuck in our own heads there and that keeps us again from engaging in the role the way we need to do it effectively. So if we could just realize that we're all trying to make these connections and try to create a culture of connectedness and support of each other Boy, imagine what kind of place that would be to thrive. I mean, imagine if we did that in every environment. When we try to do that at home, we need to do it in our schools. I believe we have an incredible responsibility to help raise our kids and help share the burden with parents, and that's where we're going to do that is in our school system. So not everyone agrees with me, but I'm challenging that. 

0:15:11 - Lindsay Lyons
I totally agree with you. I think about the number of times that my toddler says the teacher's name instead of my name. They're like no wait, mom. Or the number of times I've been a teacher and they've called me mom. It's just like interchangeable. 

0:15:23 - Charle Peck
Yes, yes. And imagine, if you're, if the parents in your community knew that you had their back and said listen, I'm going to help you with this. Not you're the problem, You're the reason they're behaving this way. So I mean we've got to look at the different environments that they're engaging in. How many times have you heard of that teacher that that kid really behaves well in that class but not in the other classes? So something in that environment is different, and typically it's the adult leading that environment, and you know that too, as leaders. You is different, and typically it's the adult leading that environment, and you know that too, as leaders. You know that from school to school, you know how people respond to you, and so if we could just check ourselves and be humbled and then reflect on that a little differently than we're used to. 

0:16:08 - Lindsay Lyons
That's kind of what we do. I love that idea of being humble, being reflective, like this idea of curiosity. I mean I think of how many teachers have faced that exact sentiment like oh, it's not happening in this class, and have gotten defensive over that, like, oh well, I'm not doing anything wrong because we take such pride in our work, we work so hard. Right, that makes sense, sense. And if we approach it with all of those attributes that you just described and we're like, hmm, let's go over there, Like let me learn, let me be curious, I think it's a very different vibe for the student and ultimately, for the teachers too. 

0:16:41 - Charle Peck
It really is. They will appreciate that leadership, that style of leadership. And, oh my gosh, so many people are walking around just angry I mean angry holding on to so many things. A lot of that stems from childhood. That is now showing up in their role. I'm telling you, insecurity is a huge piece to this and we work with leaders and excuse me, and help them identify those insecurities that they have brought into their role with them and help kind of just take those away, help them process that. 

It's not a therapy session, it's a let's take a look and it actually doesn't take that much time to do. And it's practice over time where we build proficiency in doing that. And then we do that with our teachers, and then we do that with parents and build these bridges, and then we teach this to students. I mean, this stuff is all applicable to kids too. So that's the reason I know this and the reason I came up with this is and, by the way, Dr Cameron Caswell and I she's an adolescent psychologist she and I came up with the skills together, we wrote the book together, but I remember being a teacher and thinking, gosh, I'm not a therapist, I'm lacking tools, but as I taught in some of those reframes I did on my own and some of those things that I learned to do and then incorporated them made my teaching practice so much better. And in a leadership role I was like, wow, look at the adults who are just engaging with me in a different way. And so here's what I say. 

When those kids got to come to my class you know those kids who are placed in certain teachers' classrooms I was kind of that teacher. 

I had an elective class and they were put in my class, sometimes because they didn't really have any other place to belong, and I always said it's not because I was awesome, it's because I became skilled. And so I think our educators I know our educators just need some more skills to deal with this, to have that practice. I mean, when I'm working as a therapist, I'm thinking why is this so easy to teach kids and adults in a therapy session that they're now using in their lives? Why are we not equipping teachers better in teachers' colleges in their courses as pre-service teachers, and why are we not giving them the tools now so they can show up more confidently? That's what they're lacking. When they're having these problems with student behavior, it's because they don't know what to do. So we need to equip them with things that they can easily do. That infuses into their everyday practice. I know it, I've lived it myself. So again, that's a little bit of a rant with all of that, but there's just, it all connects and it's also possible. 

0:19:13 - Lindsay Lyons
I love that approach of this is a skill thing, right, Like I just have decided to build up these skills and I had the ability to find how to do it. I love that frame and everyone is capable of then doing it, which allows us all to grow and flourish together. Which is like everyone got into teaching because they love people and children and have care in their hearts. So like we just need the skills and then we'll be all set. 

0:19:38 - Charle Peck
Yeah, I mean, think about when you need to take a test. If you haven't studied and prepared, then you're not going to do well on it, but when you are, wow, you walk in there like let's do this. I want teachers feeling good about that and I want administrators feeling good about that, and I want administrators feeling good about their teachers showing up to their classrooms that way. 

0:19:54 - Lindsay Lyons
Amazing. Oh, what a beautiful dream and what a beautiful, like you said practical way to go about that. So I'm curious I think we've talked through a lot of different challenges. I'm wondering is there one kind of big challenge that you've seen people face that's fairly common, and how have you helped, kind of coach them through it or kind of what happens, or what happens with that kind of challenge? 

0:20:16 - Charle Peck
Yes, there's always two. The very first one is overwhelm. Teachers are overwhelmed, leaders are overwhelmed, and one of the things I already mentioned is insecurity. But one piece to this and that negative self-talk is another piece. But one of the pieces is decision-making. We have so many decisions to make in a day. We all know this. This is not new, but it's how do you make decisions that are not mindless? How do you make decisions that still align with who you are as a human and how you want to be seen to the world, and how you can go to bed at night not ruminating on what you did in that day? So part of it is let's have PD, where we help teachers do that well, and I do a lot of leadership conferences too and a lot of leadership workshops. We do this with leaders too, and it is so helpful because it's like it takes that weight or kind of all those cobwebs that are just kind of sitting in your mind and held in your body, right, and it lets those just kind of be released to have clarity, and so now you have a way to respond to that effectively. So one of the things, for example, if you know that you always want to lead with kindness and honesty. There's a process you can go through to constantly make a decision that leans back to that, and then you can create those neural networks in your brain to keep leaning back and make it more reflexive and, rather than having to practice it so much, it can be a reflective or, I'm sorry, very reflexive response, so that you don't have to spend too much time doing it and all those decisions you have to make. And the second one I will mention. So that's about us. So I always look at like, let's manage our own mental health and wellness. Let's start there as adults. That's how we're going to make the biggest change and transformations in our schools. The second one is kind of unique, where, when you have to help kids or somebody else as a leader, how do you help someone else make a decision quickly? A lot of times this can be done in crisis situations too, but sometimes you just need simple tools to do this, and so the very first one I just explained was informed decisiveness, and I wanna just like give you a picture here. It's about thinking about what you want versus what you don't want, and so the decision you're going to make in that moment is it leaning towards what you want or don't want. So you can use this for yourself, but you can also help others make this decision. 

Okay, so I'll tell you about Mason real quick. When I was working in the crisis unit in an adolescent hospital and this is acute care, like this is really tough stuff kids are dealing with and the cops dropped Mason off and they said this guy, if he does not comply to you and your mental health team, then we're taking him back to juvie, like we're just going to take him there. And we're like, well, that's not good mental health practice, so we're going to help him with that. So I said Mason, he was very impulsive, as we know a lot of teenagers are. It's very impulsive, and so he would hit things if he was upset. So I said let's think about what you want. What do you want? And he said well, I want freedom, and what don't you want? Well, I don't want to go to juvie, of course. Okay. So I said the next time you feel like you want to do something, come to me. 

So sure enough, not too much, not too much time had passed he came to me and he said oh my gosh, charlie, I want to punch this kid in the face and I'm like, well, that's not going to help you. So, but I didn't say that out loud, I wanted him to figure it out. And I said well, what don't you want, mason? Well, I don't want to go to Juby. What do you want, mason? I want freedom. 

And I said If you punch him in the face, is that going to lead you to the direction you want to go? And of course he said no. So I said what do you need to do? He said I'm going to. I need to go into my room and use the stress ball, calm down, use my breathing exercises, whatever works for him. And I said great, I will meet you in group in five minutes. And he did. And he showed up and he didn't punch back in the face, the face, and it's so simple. We have to have a simple tool and simple dialogue that we can use it with young kids, adults and anyone who's in the midst of stress and strain, so that it will work and they will remember to do it. And that's exactly what this particular tool did. 

0:24:24 - Lindsay Lyons
Wow, that is so good. I absolutely love that. I love it for a variety of reasons. One, because someone who is listening can just go implement that today, right, like something super easy to do. And also I just love to circle back to your first point too that it seems like very values aligned, right, that decision-making, that's values aligned. And I think about the decisions I've made that I didn't feel good about afterwards. And it was never like a values agnostic decision. It was always like, oh, I feel bad about that because it violated one of my core values, like those are the ones that stay in my head, that stay in my body, right, and so that's. I love that approach because I think that that preemptively avoids all that additional like stress and weight because we didn't think about the values in making the decision. 

0:25:09 - Charle Peck
That's exactly right, and a lot of times people don't take the time and space to think about their values and so they don't have alignment back to them because they haven't taken the time to do that. It actually doesn't take very long, and that's what I love about doing the workshop. So there's a workshop that I do about. It's called Managing your Own Mental Health and Wellness pretty simple for educators and leaders, and it pulls in a few of those skills All about me, right, it's all about me. And how do I, how do I rest with that now, so that when I show up when it's busy and crazy, that I can manage it, and part of that is identifying what those values are and how do I get alignment with my decisions there, and so it does so much, it does so much. So, yeah, that's just one of the pieces, yeah. 

0:25:51 - Lindsay Lyons
Oh, I love it. 

0:25:52 - Charle Peck
Oh my gosh. 

0:25:54 - Lindsay Lyons
Okay, I feel like everyone listening is going to be like all right, give me Charlie's number, Like let's do this thing. So we'll talk about how you can do that in just a moment. But one thing before we move to that close what is one thing that you would encourage listeners to do once they end the episode? I feel like we've talked about a lot of things that they could do right now, in the next 10 minutes, but what's like kind of the one you want them to hold on to? 

0:26:15 - Charle Peck
I want them to identify the need for themselves that would help them make their job better and do better. So what is it that's keeping them over and over? There's a pattern there, there's a an emotional charge they get when they even just think about that thing. So what is the problem? And then, what is the unmet need underlying that for themselves? So, because they're leaders, I'm going to actually say two things. I want them to do that for themselves and I want them at the start, in August, or whenever they're going back for their first PD session, at the very beginning, I want them to ask their teachers what is it that you need to do your job better and you can even say under $10 or that doesn't cost anything, something like that. No-transcript no-transcript. 

It really is. 

0:27:34 - Lindsay Lyons
It's so simple and and I think it speaks to you know Mason's need for freedom, right, like it's just like everyone just wants the freedom and autonomy to be able to like get what they need and decide things and have a voice in their own like space what they need and decide things and have a voice in their own like space? 

0:27:50 - Charle Peck
Yes, and, and your educators will want to be in your space when you do this more, and it doesn't take much at all to do so. Yeah, it's, it's pretty simple. 

0:27:57 - Lindsay Lyons
Amazing. Okay, so my final two questions for you. One, super just for fun, does not have to relate to work, but, ken, what is something you've been learning about lately? 

0:28:13 - Charle Peck
Oh, my goodness, I have been throwing myself at a lot of different things. I keep throwing myself back at new practices with trauma and more neural connections of what's going on in our brain and body connection. A lot of it is refreshing, but there's a lot of new data out there. So that's kind of general. But to me and some people I know you can't use the word trauma, so just think of stress and how it shows up in your body. 

0:28:31 - Lindsay Lyons
So I know that's not that exciting but that's what I keep going back to. I think it's super exciting. Stuff like that relates on just like the day-to-day level very relevant, so I love relevant. 

0:28:41 - Charle Peck
Yeah, it shows up everywhere, everywhere. 

0:28:44 - Lindsay Lyons
Totally, and so the last question that I think folks are probably waiting for is where can listeners learn more about you, connect with you? I think you have resources to share, so if you want to talk about those, feel free to use this time. 

0:28:55 - Charle Peck
Oh, I would love to share the resource because it's absolutely free, of course, and it's a document. It's a 15-page document. Don't be overwhelmed by that. You can section it off. It's for you, as an administrator, to use with your mental health team members, so that's, with your school counselor, your AP, your school-based social worker and that rockstar teacher that has a great voice and a pulse on your whole school. Bring them into that darn meeting. 

And what it does is it has you do checklists of like, what is your school climate like now? So, as you're starting the year, it doesn't matter where you are in the year you still need to look at this, but you can just do checklists. And what it's there for is not to solve all your problems, but it's helping you identify the areas of need, more importantly, what your areas of strengths are, because you're doing a lot of things right. And then it helps you whittle down, kind of like okay, what is it that I need to focus on next or first in order to create a shift that we need desperately? So that is, it's called the school mental health audit. And, again, use it with your team. You also get some posters in the path of possibilities A poster of that. A visual is there that you can just hang up on the walls too. 

0:30:00 - Lindsay Lyons
Amazing and that's free for people, right? They can grab that for free, absolutely free. 

0:30:04 - Charle Peck
Yes. 

0:30:05 - Lindsay Lyons
Awesome. Did you want to talk at all about your course that folks might want to take as well? 

0:30:13 - Charle Peck
Yeah, I actually get a lot of people asking about this, because when they learn about it in the workshops, they're like how can I learn all the skills? So it's called the nine essential skills course. It's all self-paced. Some administrators are either handpicking people to take it because it's all self-paced. It's worth between nine and 12 credit hours. It's about how long it takes. There's a workbook, the slides are there. There's a video of me walking you through the slides. It's got all like some bonus items too. 

So if anyone wants to do that, just go to my website, thrivingeducatororg. That's thrivingeducatororg. Just click on courses and it's there. There's a few packages. People are asking me about coaching them through that course too, and that's an option as well. And some people and these are a lot of school counselors and APs actually want to learn how to facilitate this information to their staff. So there is a plan for that. They just have to ask me about it, because that's in production now. But yeah, just go to thrivingeducatororg. You can check out all that we do. We do speaking. There's courses, there's workshops, but click on the courses page. 

0:31:15 - Lindsay Lyons
Amazing and I'll link to that in the blog post version of this episode for folks, and I have to say this has been so exciting. I am so grateful for your time today and just all the thoughts that are immediately applicable to people's daily lives, no matter what role they hold, so I think people are going to get a lot of value out of this. Thank you so much, charlie. I'm so grateful. Thank you so much, lindsay. 
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