In Conversation

Julia: I was understanding going beyond the cognitive neuroscience into the heart’s intelligence and understanding more about nervous system regulation and also how the neurochemistry and everything, I was kind of going on a, on a deeper sort of journey and realizing that, you know, for us to get into flow lights on is really important, but for us to really grow lights off is really important. So I had moved from thinking we want to get as many children into lights on as possible to realizing the importance of being lights off. That actually that’s where the hidden potential hangs out. And then the exponential potential hangs out in radiance. So I was beginning to understand our human potential and our soul potential on a much greater level.

Manda: Hey people. Welcome to Accidental Gods to the podcast where we do still believe that another world is possible, and that if we all work together, there is still time to lay the foundations for that future that we would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. Amanda, Amanda Scott, your host and fellow traveller in this journey into possibility.

And yes, there is a cat lying on a cat bed right behind me purring very loudly. So if you can hear that cat contentedness is part of what makes my heart sing, and I have decided not to move her. Because as we watch the old system crumble around us, as we step every day more deeply into the great transformation, one of the most exciting changes taking place around us is in our capacity to find what makes our hearts sing, to find our flow, to find what it is that we can do best, that we can do with all our hearts and souls, that leaves us radiant, that lets us lead with our heart minds, letting our head minds relax into service to life. But getting here is not a trivial pursuit, and finding ways for parents to lead their children into this place of discovery and switched on Joy is a critical step in our evolution as a species.

So when I read the book Lights on Learning a Parent’s Blueprint for Happy, Fulfilled, and Curious Kids by Julia Black, founder of the Lights On Learning Program, I was genuinely delighted. Julia is a mother of two young adults now, a BAFTA and Greeson nominated documentary director, social entrepreneur, educationalist, and Master Neuro Coach, as you’ll hear, along with having written that book, she hosts an online global community for parents who want to bring the latest thinking from neuroscience, positive psychology and passion led learning into their homes, her vision of a world where all children love learning and she sees parents as key to that future. She says, I’m a social entrepreneur to my core, driven by a deep passion to give children the freedom to learn through their strengths. When we find that thing we were born to explore, we enter a realm of infinite possibility. This is where I love to play with the potential beyond the edges of our comfort zone. I love this book. It’s full of examples of young people and their parents who have found ways to switch on their flow, their love of life, their gratitude, compassion, and joyful curiosity. It’s really clearly laid out. It expresses the science of neuroplasticity and flow clearly and easily and more to the point. It opens doors by which each of us can step into what Julia calls radiance, the fullest expression of our being. And it does. So not expecting us to stay there all of the time, but so that we can see this as part of a sine wave, a curve, a spectrum. And sometimes we need to step into darkness to see where our blocks lie, and to find the courage and resilience, to keep pushing through the hard stuff, to find where our edges are and that we can step beyond them. Lights on learning. The program has the core values that courage counts, authenticity rules and growth spirals, and all of these together feel like essential values for our time. So I was really looking forward to this conversation with Julia, and I hope it inspires you as much as it did me. So here we go, people of the podcast. Please do welcome, Julia Black of Lights on Learning.

Manda: Julia Black, welcome to the Accidental Gods Podcast. How are you and where are you on this beautiful summer’s day?

Julia: I am here in rural England in Somerset, near Glastonbury. Um, and I’m feeling really good. Yes, on my own, in my own semantics. I’m definitely feeling radiance today.

Manda: Excellent. And as we’ll get to later, you, you do, you still check in daily of how you’re feeling on your, on your scale.

Julia: Yes, absolutely. And, and not just daily. Sometimes it’s moment to moment, right? So it’s, it’s that constant sort of like, oh, just felt something, uh, shift there. Um, where has that taken me?

Manda: Oh, interesting. We’ll definitely get to that. All right, so Lights On Learning. Tell us a little bit about how that came into being, because it does seem to be one of a really, really good, very inspiring spectrum of ideas and that it is applicable to everyone, whether they’re a parent or young person or anyone trying to navigate this world as we head into. The great transition is the kindest way we could put it. Transformation shifting from one way of being to another, and definitely how we approach that where we are on your scale feels really important. So tell us how it came into being.

Julia: So I would have to go back probably about 17 or 18 years, which is when I really began this journey into what I call being an accidental educationalist, someone obsessed with human flourishing, and really kind of on a quest, I guess not only to, unlock and answer the questions I had in my own life since a child. Like, why am I here and what’s the bigger reason and the bigger purpose, but also how to keep my children’s passion and love for learning alive. So it really started back when my daughter was three and four and she was a very hungry learner, curious an early speaker. And when she started school at age four, as we do here in the UK, she was a summer born, so she’s just four. I began to notice a real difference and she began to get frustrated and angry. And because she was so articulate, she would also talk about how bored she was sitting on the carpet, you know, sort of having to go, ah, ah, ah, you know, reciting the phonics. But what really concerned me then was more the change in her demeanour that I saw. And also, again, you know, as we’ll discover on this conversation, like the semantics of starting to see her own light go out. And I remember thinking, well, this isn’t going to work, so what can I do to enhance and enrich her journey through education and. It all really began with a phone call to the local, um, educational authority where I was asking could I sort of have her staggered learning continued so that she –

Manda: Can you tell us what staggered learning is?

Julia: Yeah. So when, so when they start in reception school, they kind of eased them in a little bit. So they might do mornings, you know, just three days a week or, you know, afternoons or then they might ease into whole days, and it was, and that takes. That took in this school about six weeks, but it was when she went full-time that I noticed the real difference. And so I just phoned up and said, look, is there any way I can continue that, this sort of, you know, part-time arrangement to have her not in school full-time, expecting the person on the end, end of the phone who I have given a name to, I call him Simon, just because he was so, such a, it was such an important conversation as it turns out. And I was expecting him to say no, and he said, yes, it’s called flexi schooling. And I was like, oh. And he said, you just need to get the permission from the head teacher. And that really, so which, which I did. And she said, oh, I haven’t heard of that. So I had to put a proposal together and she did a, you know, a bit of asking around as well, but here in the UK it’s a legal right for us to be able to share the education with our schools, which I’m a huge proponent of.

And that’s really what we did. So that was, she’s now 22. Just 22, but that kept me very, very much involved with her as a learner. And then also with my son. But it also got me really involved in the school too, because I began to think, well, if it’s my daughter’s feeling this, chances are there’s a lot of others.

Manda: She’s not on her own. And there’s a lovely story right at the beginning of your book about her running towards the road and people are shouting at her to stop and she just turns around and smiles at them and keeps running, which I have to say reminds me a lot of young dogs so that they get to that stage where, you know, they’ve been coming to you when you, when you offer the cue, and now they just go, no, bye, I am off. Much more exciting things happening there. And the teacher said, I think she’s bored. And that also well done. That teacher who recognized that this was a symptom of an underlying energetic thing, rather than she’s just decided to ignore us, which we put on people, kids, dogs, everything.

Julia: Yeah. And it stayed with me because exactly that. It could have taken a, a turn to her becoming a, labelled as a naughty, defiant child, which as I say in the book, my dad was definitely the naughtiest boy in his school when he was growing up but it didn’t, she really understood that he was a child that was wanting to run and skip and hop away through learning and so I look back at that and really grateful to Claire for giving me that gift as a parent to realizing actually, when we take our lead from the children with where they are with their learning, , they, they do flourish. They want to learn, you know, they, they run and they can take full ownership of it even as young, you know, as 3, 4, 5. And in fact, the younger they are, the more ownership they normally take until they learn, you know, otherwise. But yes, that was a really important moment, which also then helped me realize when she went into school, the teachers didn’t see that now there was this set path which she had to follow, even though she was already, you know, 10 meters down the road, for example.

Manda: Right. And I’m curious before we continue to look at the path. She’s just 22 summer child and now she’s a summer young adult with her prefrontal cortex developing. How does she view her education looking back

Julia: She’s in her final year now at university, she’s at University of Leeds doing natural sciences. She is the most phenomenal learner. Both my children are phenomenal learners, and what I mean by that is they take full ownership of the, of where they’re heading. They take full ownership of the work that they have to put into achieve. You know, jump the hurdles as high as, as they want to jump them. Um, and I think they’re both grateful. Her and my son are both grateful to the time that I, where I took them out of school when my daughter was nine and my son was seven. And I had my own creative learning centre because they truly were able to explore their, what I call their switch, the thing that lights them up, their natural gifts that they’ve been given, and really find their voice to develop who they are. I think they’ve both got a really strong sense of who they are as human beings and that so far is carrying them through, through life. So yes, I think they’ve, they’re both extremely grateful that as a parent I saw a problem but didn’t hang around in the playground, moaning about it. I went in and started, um, finding solutions for them, but also for the school. Um, and then for my own creative learning centre for 15 schools in the local area and for thousands of children that came around and then later on for families all around the world. Um, and. I feel hugely proud actually. I feel hugely proud to look at them and, and say that, yeah, I saw a problem and I set out to find solutions for it. Rather than go down the sort of the road that’s very easy to go down, which is what is wrong with them? Nothing.

Manda: Yeah, or, or the education system is broken, and we can’t fix it because we’re only one parent. What can we possibly do? And you’re a single parent. You’re on your own trying to fix this. I am. I am genuinely in awe of your capacity to do exactly what you said and to recognize that finding what we’re here for. It feels to me, as part of essential human development that our culture does not give space for. We are still basically given the option that we’re here to pay bills until we die. And as long as we slot into the capacity to earn money, to pay the bills, to keep the banks happy, that’s our function. And it’s not, and everybody knows it’s not at a core level, but with the shamanic work and the Accidental Gods work, we get a lot of adults right up into their late seventies and eighties who are still searching for what am I here to do? What is my soul’s purpose in life? And you are helping people to find that when they are six. And it doesn’t mean it won’t evolve, but at least they know that it’s a thing and they have the tools to go and find it. And you got an award from your school for being one of the parent governors who made the most difference.

So take us a little bit further along the line. I would really like to know more about the centre that you ran, but let’s have a look at how you got there and then what the principles were underpinning it over to you.

Julia: Yes. So this will take me to, I used to be a documentary maker and I guess I chose motherhood. So it was, it was very apparent for me that as a woman who’d been told I could have it all. And then I had become a mother that, I didn’t like the way that all looked because I really felt the pull to be there with my children. And before my children I’d been making films around young mental wellbeing for channel four news and things. So I was spending a lot of time with families, with children who were suffering with mental health. And I remember making that decision that actually no, I don’t want my children to be at home with someone else. I want, want to be with them. But when I let go of that part in me, that creative expression as a filmmaker, I felt this big void. And it was that question, well, who am I now then, right? So this disparaging view I had, I guess, of just being a mum. Who am I now then if I’m no longer a filmmaker, and almost when my daughter started school, I suddenly found a community that I could pour this creative energy in and, and ignite my creative energy again, really, and bring my kind of director hat into the mix. And I found myself, I became a parent governor, and I found myself chair of the PTA, which was at the time, it’s just like I could never have imagined I’d have been there. But I kind of sort of fell into it and I thought, well, what can I bring into the mix? And I began to think of all the skills and the talents that the school community had within the parent base. We were a small school, I think there was something like 80 families, 106 children. And we decided to put on a circus. The head teacher had said, why don’t we hire a circus in and that will be a fundraiser? And I thought, well, why don’t we turn the children? Why didn’t the children become the circus? Because then it’s an educational enrichment opportunity rather than just a show that we are going to buy tickets to see. That’s when I think I realized that would’ve been back in 2009. That’s when I realized, um, the enormous amount of talent and gifts and superpowers that surround our schools that just go untapped. They never make it into the school gate because many PTAs, parent teacher associations are focused on cake sales or summer fades.

And so I said, right, we’re going to do a circus. And I found a parent who had just joined the school who was in drama, juggling and clowning. So I went to her and said, would you be one of the co-directors with me? And then another parent that was Emily and another parent, Liz, came up and said, I used to transform clubs, um, like Ministry of Sound and Cream into these incredible landscapes, you know, from an empty room into an environment, you know, that people would have an experience in. Can I join two? So the three of us kind of came together. And, and then we mobilized the whole parent base really. And we took every single child, 106 children performed in a 90 minute show in a big top up in the field. And we had boys on motorbikes, we had trapeze, we had clowning, we had a father did learn the unicycle. We had children on stilts.

Manda: They must have had so much fun, the adults. I mean, just learning the, Hey, hey, I have to learn the unicycle for my kids’ school.

Julia: Exactly. Exactly. Um, and you know, that tapped into his passion for, for cycling and, and what was so incredible about it. I remember sitting sort of backstage after the first show and almost being in awe of like, oh, that little 9-year-old that was asking my dad like, how will I find my thing? What am I here for? And him telling me, you’ll find it, and me being slightly frustrated because I wanted the answer here. I was at sort of 40 going. I think I know why I’m here. I’m here to help people shine. I’m here to help people have the courage to really step into the unknown and put themselves in the spotlight and, just feel that sense of awe of who they are. And it was phenomenal and it really mobilized the community, and yet we won the National Parent Teachers Association Award in the school.

Manda: I bet you did because other people don’t do circuses. I had a question because that was in the book and you were pink wig, corset, and fake eyelashes. And did it ever happen again or was it a one-off?

Julia: Yeah, so it happened. So we did two shows for that. And then, then we got the bug and people, parents who hadn’t been involved were coming up, going, right, what are we going to do next year? So the following year we did a musical. So again, me, Emily, and Liz, we wrote the script and, and then we put on this musical. And we had a big, it was, we had a big communal feast as well. So that was the next year. And then we also sort of, we did other things. We had like a Trashion show, so the parents, their children and the parents worked together to recycle clothes. And we had this sort of catwalk fashion show. So we, we did loads of enrichment, um, uh, activities and I then was beginning to my ambition because I could see how alive the children were coming. So I, by now, I knew all, all the kids in the school, right? I knew them really well, and I could see the disparity between how we would talk about them in the governor’s meeting, almost as numbers and SAT levels. So this one’s, you know, how are we going to move these up? Three sub levels. And I was kind, I was kind of like, where’s the human in this? Like, who cares? Really? Because parents don’t really understand what 3.1 means, and if they go up to 3.3, you know, the shift that’s happened and also we can’t really lead people to excel through, through numbers. It’s through passion and it’s through the energetic exchange. So I was beginning to get more and more ambitious of how we could weave this educational enrichment into the curriculum. And I think I just became a bit annoying into the governance. But the way I like to think of it is I outgrew them. I became my, my, my vision became too big. So then the next year, the next event was, was called tree play and I took it into the woods and we basically put these nets up, like sort of to 15 minute, 15 meters high in, in the trees. And I got some friends of mine who were the natural history filmmakers to come down and we put on this day for a school and a different school came along for the day where it was sort of blurring fact and fiction. So we had camera traps set up and we had, you know, cameras on dollies that were tracked down these tree avenues and all of this amazing kind of real world filmmaking. But we had this beautiful narrative in the mix of an actor saying, right, I know there’s this bird in here. There’s this Dino bird. And so 40 children and their teachers and the head teacher, we spent the day in the woods tracking this Dino bird for which we had created like, you know, um. Scents and different markings on trees and scratches on trees. And you know, we had this massive puppet that was, you know, it was phenomenal. Again, a really nice blur of theatrical expression, um, and immersive experience. And that head teacher, she was a head teacher of an outstanding school, she said this was the most incredible educational experience she’d ever been on. And actually they used it to fuel the children’s learning for three weeks following. It was in the maths, you know, well, what if that Dino Bird met another dino bird? How soon would there be a sustainable population, for example? And these were children, you know, again, from I think year one. So four or five through till year, I think it was year four or five. So sort of from yeah, four or five years old to 10 or 11. Again, I just kept getting those, that affirmation back, you are on the right track. There’s something exciting here. Um, and that then led on to a, a, an adventure in Canada Family Adventure in Canada where I took the children out of school and then I saw their learning explode and with little or no need for me to do very much at all. And that’s when I began to think, actually, you know what? I think I can see an alternative way for how we could, um, really encourage children to learn at phenomenal levels. So that’s, that’s sort of all the sort of the pre-story to me coming home to the UK and setting up my creative learning centre.

Manda: Because what I am hearing from you and what I’ve heard from other places is that the obvious fact that for 300,000 years schools did not exist and children learned what they needed to know because kids are like sponges and they love learning. I remember a long time ago watching a video of a gentleman in India who set up the school in the cloud, and he just basically put a computer in a wall.

Julia: Professor Mitra.

Manda: Yes, yes. Or left it under a tree in an Indian village, and it was in English, and the kids taught themselves English. I remember the second lot taught themselves genetic engineering. And he came back at the end of two months and said, what have you learned? And they went, no, we haven’t learned anything. And he said, no, you must have learned something. Tell me something. And this little girl at the back of the class puts her hand up and goes, all we learned was that improper replication of the DNA molecule leads to disease. That’s you taught to yourself that on a computer that you didn’t even know what computer was two months ago and he had the pedagogy of the grandmother, and the grandmothers go, but we don’t know anything. He goes, no, no. You don’t need to know anything. You just need to sit there and go, that’s amazing. I didn’t know that when I was your age. And the kids will learn because they love learning. And we managed to stick them in schools and crush all of that, which is quite an achievement, frankly, but not useful and particularly not useful in a world where they’re going to, Google’s going to give them every bit of data point they ever need. And what they need to learn is, what am I here for? Where’s my spark? And everything that I read in your book, every single child, you were able to help them find the spark of creativity and they were all creative. Nobody was going, well, what I really want to do is learn how to sit and recite verbs. That’s going to be a lot of fun. Never. Not a single one.

So I’m ranting. Tell us a little bit about, yeah, you came back from Canada. Your kids are like, we don’t need school anymore. We are learning. Fine. Without that level of indoctrination, where did you take it from there.

Julia: Yeah. So again, as we always know when we’re on track because, uh, something comes along and says, here you go, here’s a gift from the universe. Um, the school, old school that had been closed down in my village came up for sale. Uh. And one of my directors who I’d managed to get on board said, okay, well I’m going to, I’m going to buy that school then. So we have this beautiful, beautiful rural location in Somerset Levels of this perfect building for my creative learning centre. And we started with home educating families. And then we began to get parents who had children in school, but wanted to use the flexi schooling. So the kids would come to my centre for one day a week with permission of the school. And then we began to get the schools coming to us as well. And the schools would always come to us and say, we’ve got the bottom, what they would call the bottom, 30% of academic achievers. You know, the ones who are, are kind of struggling or failing or being very, very disruptive. Um, can you work with them? And then there’d be, and we’ve got the top 5% who, you know, uh, we can’t really extend because they’re way beyond where we need to go and they’re getting bored and possibly disruptive. So we would kind of work with those. Um, and as groups of children.

Manda: Either end of the curve.

Julia: Exactly. And then with one school or maybe a couple of schools, we actually worked with the entire school. So I was now beginning to, I’d gone from being the home educated mom that was, you know, that parent in the school, you know, bringing in talents, working with 106 kids to now seeing children humming as learners on in volume. And that was really exciting because by now I had kind of locked into an obsession, I guess, about how we learn. I had started already understanding that neuroscience and the actually learning, you know, is the, to, you know, neurons and the synaptic sort of, you know, gap between the two neurons and, and how we create those neural pathways. So I’d kind of started looking at the neurobiology of it. And also just the learning actually is. Making mistakes. That’s how we learn. But the, the sort of, the, what happens in schools is there’s a right way. So children learn, oh, we don’t get it wrong if we want to get it right. And I guess when, when they came to my centre, it’s like, I would say I would, I would say like, you know, I’m going to expect you to like, make a lot of mistakes. And they would kind of smile at each other and, and be sort of quite, you know, a bit, sort of puzzled.

Manda: Let’s, let’s just unpick the cognitive neuroscience partly because I’m a neuroscience geek and I love it. And partly because I think it’s useful because we’re talking about everybody. Neuroplasticity is a thing throughout life. I think when I was growing up and being taught neuroscience in the eighties, everybody thought that your brain was static pretty much after 20. And that’s so completely not true. Now we know that our prefrontal cortex is only just beginning to come online when we’re in our mid twenties, and that by the time we get to our sixties, our pattern matching capacity has changed and that neuroplasticity is and should be a lifelong thing. And actually what we are quite good at in western culture is trying to turn it into something static, because that’s easier.

So you’re a neuro coach, I don’t really know what that is. Tell us what it is and how you trained. And then let’s have a little bit of a deeper dive into the neuroscience of learning as you understand it.

Julia: Okay, so I’m a, yeah, I’m a neuro coach. And that came about because, as an entrepreneur I reached that glass ceiling within myself and I began to feel this real sense that there was something that I didn’t. Have a grasp on in terms of how to use my brain to I guess, achieve the results that I felt were in my grasp. So it was almost like they were always out of my grasp. And I met with Dr. Shannon Irvin, who was a neuropsychologist and basically began working with her to rewire my brain. And it was so powerful because in that process I began to look at my own negative, automatic negative thinking. So my ANTS – and realize that my big strong one was, I can’t do this. It’s too hard. And so this was my glass ceiling. So every time, but also not only I can’t do this, it’s too hard, every time it kind of looked like I might be achieving it, I would pull the brakes again and almost sort of self-sabotage. So I began to feel this huge expansion of my own potential and understand how we can harness our brains now on that neuro, you know, neuron level, um, in a, in a totally different way. And I began to see the shift in me, almost that emotional rollercoaster that I had just accepted. Life was about, began to even out. And I didn’t have to have the highs and the lows. I didn’t have to, you know, feel invincible one day and then vulnerable the next, I could actually train my brain to calibrate to a much more aligned, harmonious rhythm, if you like. And because it was so powerful for me, I was like, I need to take this to the parents in my community. Because I’d also then realized that actually no matter what we did in my centre or what schools do, the real difference is when what happens in the home. So by now I’d started working with parents online and really seeing that their own glass ceiling, their limiting beliefs were being passed on generations, right? So they’d got it from their parents, who’d got it from their parents, and they were sort of passing, passing that on. So I began to work with, with the mothers to rewire their brains. And that’s when I began to see something extraordinary happen because. It was like they were stepping into leadership rather than micromanaging. And their children were beginning to, create their creative energy of their children was being expressed almost without the parent having to do anything. So we’re not talking unschooling, we are talking the power of what I call the lights on effect. We’re talking brain to brain synchrony. We’re talking, you know, when we entrain to, into love and joy and gratitude and abundance, that becomes the energetic tone for, for the whole family.

Manda: So just tell us a little bit more about the cognitive neuroscience of this, that you did a training. Can you tell us a little bit about what training you did and, and how that panned out? But then can you just say a little bit more about what you see as the science of what’s happening, and then the energetics of what arises out of that.

Julia: Yes, sure. So I trained as a master neuro coach. So it, it was, it was kind of learning how to use the neuroplasticity of our brains to help our clients, in my case, mothers parents, to be able to identify the neural networks that have become so automatic that we don’t even, we are not even aware we’re thinking of them. So sort of 95% it said, you know, of our thinking just happens on autopilot. And, um, because we have a negativity bus, a lot of that is like, oh, I can’t do this. I’m not enough. You know, I’m not, I’m not lovable, I’m not safe. All of these patterns and what I, what I learned to do is help  people identify that. So almost go into your subconscious to see what are the, what are the automatic, um, thinking patterns that are running the show. And how is that linked to your identity and how is that impacting your nervous system? And then ultimately, how is that impacting your behaviour and how you show up in the world and the results that you get. And it makes sense of those repeating patterns we always get to, just to that point. And then never further, for example, or always just make just enough money, but never anymore, you know? So I help them do, and where I’ve got to now in terms of the cognitive neuroscience, I talk about our learning circuitry being the ‘heartset mindset and skillset’. And this is really the hearts intelligence, you know, the power of our minds and the brain’s neuroplasticity and our, and our nervous system all really needing to work together in order for us to really create, I call it the energetic signature within our bodies that allow us to truly flourish and to express our creative energy with, with freedom and flow. And so the way I think about it, I guess, is that we have this incredible human technology that we just don’t know how to use. So it is like, I don’t know about you, but you know, we get, we buy a washing machine and it has all of these things and you spend a lot of time being told everything it will do, but you always just put it, or I do always on the, same wash, and never even think about it. And I think it’s a little bit like that with us in our human technology. You know, we have our heart’s intelligence, we have our nervous system that will really give us clear signals as to, you know, what we are feeling. And then we can sort of look and go, well what’s the thinking behind that? And when we get to the thinking, we can really look at is that serving me?

Manda: Right. And if it’s not, I have tools with which to change it. And it seems to me that if, I mean, you are already scaling this, and I’m really interested to understand how the ripples are going out because this level of emotional intelligence is our birthright. And if you look at what Francis Weller calls Initiation cultures around the world, they have this level of emotional intelligence and our culture has, has shut it down. And you’re opening it up and you’re opening it up at scale. And my feeling is that if, if this scaled and scaled to the point where all 8 billion of us had our lights on, in your phrase, had our heart set mindset, skillset alive and delight, and the creativity of that, our world would be transformed in a way that we cannot begin to imagine just now. We would no longer be heading off the edge of species level extinction because, because it would not be where our creativity, where our hearts want to go. And so this feels really exciting. So I dragged you off into, into that particular rabbit hole. Let’s bring us back on track and you’ve got your centre.

I had a quote, there’s something, I just wanted to read this. This is Ollie who was 13 and he said, the person I want to be has never made it into school. And just being aware of that at age 13, I look back at me at age 13, I don’t know that I would’ve had the capacity to express that. And his mum said, everyone focused on what was wrong with Ollie. And then I believe he came into your centre. You don’t have to use him as an example, but talk us through the kinds of things that you were doing to help people switch their lights on parents and their children.

Julia: Well, let’s, let’s stick with Ollie because he’s, you know, he’s such a powerful example of a child who was hungry to learn, you know, went into school, and became obvious. He wasn’t able to necessarily go at the speed that the prescribed curriculum or teachers or educational pathway wanted him to go. And he began to feel stupid. He began to feel what something was wrong with him, but he began to feel that because the adults around him began to go, well, what’s wrong with Ollie? Why can’t he keep up or why can’t he do this? Or he seems to be, you know, zoning out. And so he kind of talks about that really being happening at year two. So this is about six, six years old. And I met him in year nine when he was 13. And so if we imagine a child going into school every day with the spotlight on them, like, well, what is wrong with you? You know? And then going under investigations with educational psychologists that tell him that he’s got slow processing, you know and, you know, he will be able to learn, but you know, never really at the pace of others and, you know, all of this stuff happening. And then his, his mum feeling like, you know, well, what’s wrong with you? Why can’t you just do your homework? And, and so when I met him, and as I always meet them, I always, my first step is to find out, well, what do you love to do?  And this is what’s exciting is a lot of children really know,

Manda: Right. And if they don’t, you can help them. I think that’s important because some kids, you put them and it’s like, oh my God, this is another question I have to get. Right. I can feel my little inner 6-year-old would’ve been like a rabbit in the headlights. That’s, I don’t know what’s the right answer? Because by that age there was a right answer. And you’re able to help parents and children work through to something that feels right for them.

Julia: Yes, exactly. And one of my tools, um, was a learning carousel. And, and that really came about because as we began working with school groups, the children would arrive in dribs and drabs. You know, we’d have 30 children, say, for example, turn up at my centre. And I, I began realizing, well, I don’t really want one of my mentors to have to, you know, for the kids that arrive early, have to sort of step in straight away. And so I used to set up these tinkering stations. So we’d have Lego in one corner, dressing up in another, some iPads for animations, painting, you know, we’d have all these sort of oh, tinkering stations. And that’s when I began to observe. Gosh, when the children arrive, they self-select where they want to go and explore. And I began to observe that. And sometimes the children, I just remember one boy I’m bringing up in my memory. He would, it was a Lego. He would just go there. He had eyes for nothing else but the Lego, others would explore and go all around and others would begin to merge the two. Well, maybe I’ll do a painting and I’ll film and time-lapse it as I’m doing it. But what I began to realize is that actually when the children were self-selecting something that they love to do, they didn’t need us managing them at all. They didn’t need us kind of, you know, sort of like, you know, be quiet now. Everyone was just sort of self-absorbed. And this was obviously in line with all the stuff I’d read about the best pedagogical practices around the world, you know, with project race learning, real world learning, and all of that. So with Ollie, he came into my centre and I had a animation station set up, and so he started animating and I went over and had a look at what he had done, and it was really good. So instantly, you know, so I’ve only just like met him now. So schools had him for like, what, since he was six to 13. And he was still feeling a failure. He was failing academically. Within five minutes I knew, oh, okay, he’s a visual creator. That’s where we need to focus. And then asking him, well, what do you love to do? Did he know? He did, he loved taking photographs. I said, well, will you bring some in and show me? And it became really clear that he had a really good eye for, um, for framing and for telling a story actually in, within an image. And that’s what I’m always looking for. I’m always looking for like, where’s the natural? Where does the natural creative expression come easy to us? Whatever age. And that’s where we begin. And sometimes as an adult we overlook that, oh, well that’s easy for me. It’s like, brilliant.

Manda: Yeah. Yeah. Go with what feels good.

Julia: Yeah, it feels good. And so with Ollie, what was glorious about it was within 12 hours, he was a totally different child and he started now showing up very differently in the school. I have an interview with him, with the head teacher who talks about, he was now looking at her in the eye before he would just try and be invisible, the teachers said he’s now participating in the class, and what Ollie got from Lights on Learning and was the discovery of himself back, the discovery that actually there was something that he was good at, that he had the potential to become great at if he focused and, and, and explored it and was brave enough to go down, you know, dead ends and get things wrong and hit that frustration point that’s so important for learning, and to keep going.

Manda: Yeah. Yeah. So tell us a little bit more about the getting things wrong in the frustration point. I’m particularly thinking of the person who drew the impossible triangle. I can’t remember who that was, but tell us a little bit about, I think that’s really important is that the frustration point is okay. Because again, I think people try and fight shy of that.

Julia: Yes, exactly. And I think the mistake that this generation of parents are, are making, um, is that when our children get frustrated or angry with learning, they try to appease them and they try to take them out of those emotions to get them back to feeling good again. And actually what Lights On Learning does is like, oh, brilliant: You’ve hit your edge. This is the point where you are about to break through and learn. This is the point where the old new networks that you’ve got don’t serve you anymore. You’ve got to create and carve and, and hire, you know, wire in new ones. And so with Oscar, he was six years old and he came to our centre. But, and he had been kind of being described by the teachers as lazy, you know, he should be doing better. But he’s not really showing up, you know, as he could be. And his parents kind of felt this was out of sync with what they thought of their sparky kid who was obviously very switched on and, you know, and capable of extraordinary things. So he came to my centre, as a flexi school day, and again, we discovered like, well, what was he really naturally good at? And he was, he loved drawing houses. Now his dad was an architect. So again, no surprises there, you know, I mean, we can, we can literally sometimes join the dots up. But he was, he was obviously very good with his, you know, hand-eye coordination. And his was a skillset that we wanted to develop, was the technical drawing. And we used, wanted to use the process, or we were using the process of draft critique as kind of really bought into the educational world by Ron Berger who was this teacher who really believed that children were capable of excellence. Here’s an amazing book, the Ethics of Excellence. And he wanted to bring that sort of craftsmanship back into the classroom. And he has very specific guidelines for critique, which is kind, helpful and specific. And we used that with Oscar, who was six years old to learn to draw the Impossible Triangle. And by bringing in the drafts, Oscar was able to go through, he went through, I think it was six, five or six drafts before he got to the one where it, we were all like, wow.

Manda: Yeah, this picture in the book, and it is a 6-year-old drew that it’s amazing.

Julia: It is amazing and I think it was when I really discovered the draft, the work of Berger and draft critique was when I remember standing up, I was in Canada standing up almost declaring this is why our education system isn’t working because we are accepting the first draft and none of us should ever look at our own work and worth based on our first.

Manda: No. You know, as an adult, you know this, if you ever read the first draft of my book, I would bury myself. It’s dreadful. So yeah, of course. That’s what you do, is you iterate and iterate and iterate and yes. Wow. And there’s a little girl in the book who tell us about the writing about the dinosaurs. That was gorgeous.

Julia: Yeah. So Briony was another, another example of, um, a 6-year-old. So again, this is what’s exciting about this is. Uh, you know, uh, four or five, six year olds are, you know, are capable of such extraordinary things that our education system or even sometimes our home education isn’t drawing out of them. But when, you know, some simple tools, oh my goodness, they will be blown away by what they can achieve. So Briony was starting to get anxious about going to school. She was what you would be considered a high achiever. So she would’ve been in the sort of, you know, that top band, within the school.

But she was starting to go an get anxious and complain of stomach aches and not want to go in. And then lockdown happened luckily for Briony. And her mum found me and started working with me online and I said, let’s just, let’s first find out what’s making her anxious. And we discovered, again by simply asking, because like you say, it’s the level of self-awareness of our children is actually really high. It’s just we never really ask. We make assumptions. Oh, she’s got anxiety. Whoa, okay, but there’ll be something that’s causing that. What is it? And it turns out she felt she was rubbish at writing. And of course, what happens every day when you go to school is you spend 10 minutes in your book writing. And she was getting, she was, um, tripping herself up because her best friend was sitting there and it was all flowing. And she would write like a whole page. And Briony just, you know, caught up in this, I’m rubbish. I can’t do this. So that same neural network that I discovered when I was, you know, started rewiring my brain, I can’t do this, it’s too hard. Briony was already telling herself that I’m rubbish at writing. And so what I love to do is, is go, okay, great. Well then it makes sense. If you believe that about yourself, it makes sense. You’ll feel anxious. So there’s no problem actually your body, your heart, your nervous system, your mind is all working perfectly well to keep you safe and to keep you safe. You want to avoid doing the thing that makes you feel like that. Um, and so then the next question really was, okay, so you feel your rubbish at writing. Do you want to get better at it? Because if they say no, we just pause for a bit and we, and we, you know, go down a different avenue. But of course she said yes. And so we then started looking at, well, what was she really, um, what really lit her up? And it was, she was, she was a communicator and she loved learning facts about, um, dinosaurs and, and, you know, um. Space and the universe. And so, and she loved then communicating and, and sharing that knowledge that she was gaining with her younger brother.

So then we gave a brief, which we do with Lights on Learning. We gave a creative brief because what I found was when we give a creative brief that has some parameters and, and a tangible outcome of creative expression, that’s when we begin to see the, the learning really take on the next level. And then when we bring in draft critique and, you know, some other tools and techniques as well. So we gave her a brief to, um, did she want to make a book that she could then give to her younger brother? And she did. And so what was really exciting about that is then the next step was to help her overcome and move through that fear and that anxiety that she could, that she couldn’t write. That was her anxiety, that she was rubbish, and her mum learned to hold space for her to push on through that frustration, that moment that she wanted to quit, she was, she got to six words and she’d agreed to write 10 words in, you know? And she wanted to give up. It was too hard. And it was like her mum was like, can you do one more word? Yeah, I can do one more word. Yeah. And then can, do you think you can do another word? I can do another word. And that celebration of that post struggle success. When she got to the 10 words, that was the win. And that was the moment that she was able to realize, actually I think I can’t, but it turns out I can. And that’s learning

Manda: Right, right. Yes. And that’s also then the cognitive neuroscience. Again, the, there’s whole circuits of getting to the edge of myself is actually quite exciting because then it can move through, Yes. which is, huge. So I want to talk about your, your spectrum of, of lightness, going from darkness to radiance, because that feels to me like an incredibly interesting spectrum. I’m also really interested just a write a perspective that you went for pairs of alliteration and you dared to break it at the end. I was thinking last night I would’ve gone from bright to brilliance. You went from brilliance to radiance, which is great. So tell us a little bit about that spectrum and about the fact that it’s, it’s not a binary, it’s a spectrum and that we, we move across it in a sine wave.

Julia: Perfect. Yes, we can sort of move fluidly and dynamically through it all. Let me go back to you then where the whole Lights on/Lights off came as a- first we’d start with the binary metric and that was really when I was looking for a way to really know when we as a team were leading children to a place that was ‘Yes, that’s it. We’ve got it’. And I had a meeting with a business strategist and he said, well, how do you know when, when you’re, you’re kind of, you know, when you’re there. And I said, well, you see it in their eyes, it’s like their lights come on. And he said, well, there you go. Lights on, lights off. So that was really exciting. That was back in 2016, because it felt so simple and children of all ages and adults of all ages understood it. Oh, that moment when you see it, you see it in someone’s eyes, they light up and, and, and you just can’t stop smiling because you’re looking at them. But equally you can see it when they, when they, when they’ve switched off too. And then when with my community, online community of parents, I asked them if they’d begin tracking because by now I was understanding going beyond the cognitive neuroscience into the heart’s intelligence and understanding more about nervous system regulation and also how the neurochemistry and everything, I was kind of going on a, on a deeper sort of journey and realizing that, you know, for us to get into flow lights on is really important, but for us to really grow lights off is really important. So I had moved from thinking we want to get as many children into lights on as possible to realizing the importance of being lights off. That actually that’s where the hidden potential hangs out. And then the exponential potential hangs out in radiance. So I was beginning to understand our human potential and our soul potential on a much greater level.

So the parents said yes to tracking, and it became really obvious that the binary was just too limiting because we weren’t always lights on and, you know, and it felt really depressing to always say we were lights off. So it felt really natural for us to have three, what I’ve ended up calling signatures of lights off and three signatures of lights on so that we had this sort of, this sort of scale or this spectrum. So from darkness, to dimness, to glimmer – the three lights off signatures, and then from Glow to Brilliance to Radiance. And what became really powerful,you know, co-creating this with my community was that not only was it a self-awareness tool that we could see like, oh, actually I am lights on, but I’m at Glow. So I could go either way. I could step into being lights off, um, you know, and get and, and sort of cascade into, into glimmer. I’m not sure I know how to, what radiance feels like for me. So we began to get real sort of minute awareness of how the different emotional and energetic landscapes within our own bodies, so the internal learning environment felt. And so it’s a self-awareness tool. But then Sarah, I could include her quote in the book, said, I realize if I use it as self-awareness, I can just get stuck there. Like, oh, I’m at Glow, or, oh, I’m in Dimness, you know? Great. That I know it. But, okay, I’ll just settle here. But she realized, but if I link it to something that I want to achieve that day and I ask where do I need to be? Oh, I’m in Glow, but this would be so much easier if I got into Radiance. Now it becomes a calibration tool. And that’s the power of where we, where we are as a community at the moment, is that, yes, self-awareness is the first step, but then when we really know how to calibrate and to where a place that’s going to enhance and enrich our experience in the moment or help us achieve something it becomes, it just is just such a powerful tool. And sometimes that means hanging out in darkness intentionally, or dimness or glimmer in the lights off spectrum to really see, go a layer deeper. What’s calling my attention? What can I let go of? What’s the fear that I’m holding onto and where am I holding onto it in my body? And that’s really when we can enter into the letting go and the surrendering, um, and the dissolving of past traumas and pains and heal

Manda: So this feels really rich because this is, this is definitely every human being on the planet. And you have wire, which is, uh, a witness. Talk me through wire witness. Can’t remember the ‘i’ bit.

Julia: uh, um, identify, I’m going to have to remember now. Um, rewind. Reframe. And then, um, yeah, I’d probably have to-

Manda: Witness, I’ve got it here. Witness, identify, reframe, and energize. Because it seems to me that capacity to take inner agency, I meet a lot of adults who could witness and identify and would freeze at the reframing and the energizing of another part would be going, no, it’s too hard. I am stuck in darkness and there is no way out. And what you have done is help people to smoothly and presumably without that self-judgment and the, oh god, it’s another tick box that I have to tick shift their inner state. So can you tell us a little bit about the process of the reframe and energize when people have identified I’m in a dark place. I’ve got a lot of parts of me that are telling me I’m hopeless and useless and stuck and nothing is going to get better. And the world is going off the edge of a cliff and total catastrophe. It’s all horrible. And I’ve identified that. How do you reframe and energize so that we can move back into flow state? Because you had, I was looking for earlier, a wonderful quote from Mihály Csíkszentmihályi and I can’t find it. But he’s the flow guy. So if you can tell us a little bit about that, that’d be great.

Julia: Yes. So once you’ve identified the thinking, and again, if I go back to, I can’t do this, it’s too hard, which was, which was my big automatic negative thought. I like to kind of go to where was the first time that you remember thinking that? So that you can see, if you can’t get there, it doesn’t matter. But for me, what was interesting when I was asked that is I was, went up, I was about two or three meters up a yew tree. I was seven years old and I was trying to jump on a, on a swing or a rope swing that would take me across a pond. And my dad was up there with me and my legs were shaking and, and I was scared. I’m going, I can’t do this. And he’s like, yes you can, sweetie. I can’t. I can’t. Yes you can. And we must have been up there for about half an hour. But that was my childhood. It was a very, very physical, riding motorbikes, horses, on swings, you know, and my dad was always there really as that mentor to push me, I guess, beyond my edges, constantly. So I hardwired in, I can’t do this. It’s too hard. And it, and then it began to show up to everywhere. So when you kind of can see the origins of it, and, and it’s not that important, but for me, instantly was like, oh, it makes sense then. It makes sense it’s then about looking at, for evidence of, well, where has that been the case? And then you’ve overcome it. So again, if we look at Briony we gave her a really good example of six years old. I can’t write, I’m rubbish at writing. We, we gave her an, an experience, a learning experience where she could absolutely refute that. Well, that’s not entirely true. And all we need to do is find one bit of evidence that well actually, you know, that time when you thought you couldn’t do it and you did and you kept going and it was really hard and painful, but you did, you emerged out the other side. For us to be able to start dismantling that as a universal truth in our, in our mind. And so once we can see it and go, okay, it can be true. And a lot of the time it is true, but it’s not always true.

Manda: I’m wondering with adults, because your dad, in the story, he actually did put you on the swing and swing across, and then later you were able to jump. But, but the, I can’t do it was still locked in, which I find really interesting. Even the fact that in within a day you’d learn to do it, that Oh, no, I can’t, was in there. So with adults who’ve lived with, oh gosh, I can’t, how do you help them to create a chink in armour that might not otherwise be there?

Julia: I guess by, yeah, by looking at it and finding that piece of evidence of I can do it.

Manda: As an adult, would you do what you did with Emily and go, okay, let’s create the evidence because you, I can imagine circumstances in which it would be very hard to find the evidence.

Julia: Well, I guess you can, I mean. I haven’t yet found worked with an adult who hasn’t been able to find at some point in their life that moment of celebration of being able to achieve something. So for example, um, so again, we, if we play with our timelines, we’re just looking for something that will allow your brain to start kind of, um, believing it is possible for you to do hard things. And then sort of we can dive into that or we can start stacking the evidence. So again, if we can find one piece that’s great, but maybe we can find 10 pieces where actually we felt it was really hard and I can’t do it, but we did keep doing it. And, and part of then bit further down the line is the, is moving from that sort of very masculine energy or push on through, you know, a brute force to do it. We want to kind of dissolve that and create more flow, you know, and, and feminine energy coming in. So it’s, we are not burning out to be able to do it, but we’re, we’re sort of finding that evidence. And then another really powerful part of, of how I help adults rewire their own brains is to think about their own children. If they’re a parent or a child or someone vulnerable and imagine kind of going up to them and going, well, you can’t do this. You’ll never be able to do that. Oh, you’re so pathetic. Like, look at your writing. It’s rubbish. So we externalize the internal talk that we’re saying to ourselves. And I can see your reaction to that.

Manda: No, it’s horrible, isn’t it? And you have to be really broken to want to do that to a kid.

Julia: Exactly. And, and so when you really realize like, gosh, I would never do that, and then you realize, but I’m doing that to myself, that also dissolves something because it brings in the compassion

Manda: Right. You can begin to have self-empathy and self-compassion, which is again, a very hard thing in our culture because it’s been trained out to us.

Julia: Exactly. And so we want to find that turning point and that realization of, if you keep believing this and, and repeating this, you know, on autopilot you’re going to keep feeling the same things. And so once we’ve got that, then we also can look and go, right, well, what if you heard someone else say that to your child or someone who was vulnerable? What would you come in and say? And of course it always comes down to like, no, you know, you can do anything, you know, if you set your mind to it. And we start stacking the evidence for them. And then the energize part is really tuning into that radiance, tuning into that. Um, that sense of, uh, love that sense of gratitude if we can get there. And again, part of the process of learning this is even learning to, to feel gratitude and to be connected with love. So that’s important, but we get to a place where a memory, so I help parents, as a thinker when people would say to me, drop into your heart, I couldn’t do it. I didn’t really know what it meant. And that inner smile. And so I realized with the inner smile memory, I can use my brain as a thinker to bring a memory up that instantly floods my body with that sense of smiling inside and outside our love or gratitude. And that was my gateway into being able to become a feeler, I guess, which I think is crucial to this work. And really what we want to do is when we, we want to create a brain prime that’s energized with that emotion. So we might not go from, I can’t do this. It’s too hard to, I can totally do this, but we could go, I am learning to be able to do it.

Manda: And I’m grateful for the opportunity to learn and I’m loving the learning process.

I think one of the many things that was really exciting in your book is within Accidental Gods, we have the three pillars of the heart mind, which are gratitude, compassion, and joyful curiosity and, and you haven’t named the joyful curiosity, but it’s absolutely shining through your book. When lights are on, you have that joyful curiosity of, wow, I wonder what happens next. Yeah, I could do this. I can draw dinosaurs, or I can draw an impossible triangle, or I can build Lego, or I can do lots of your children using iPads to do amazing film work and. That with the gratitude and the compassion as part of it is what lets us be heart led and, and it’s integral to what you’re doing and you’re without necessarily using the same nomenclature, we’ve got to the same place, which I find fascinating and really encouraging because again, I think these are the keys to our entire culture. Growing up I found the Mihály quote, which I still think is really, really interesting. So he says. This is the person who basically discovered flow states, and he says, “if engaging in a passion brings positive effects, are there negative effects of not engaging in a pattern?” And they did a study which found that when participants were instructed to remove all sources of flow from their lives through the duration of the study, there were significant impacts on their ability to function mentally. By the end of the first day, participants reported feeling sluggish about their behaviour. They began to experience headaches. They had difficulty concentrating and felt either sleepy or too agitated to sleep. And after 48 hours, the general deterioration in mood was so advanced that prolonging the experiment would’ve been inadvisable two days into restricting flow and they had to drop their study because they were destroying people and those headaches and either too sleepy or not able to sleep. How many people in our culture are walking around with that all the time? Because we’ve created a system where that flow state of I know what’s mine to do and I am doing it to the best of my ability and I’m surrounded by people who respect me for what I’m doing. And I think that’s what Ollie found. He began to be able to look people in the eye because he felt respected, because he was doing what he was good at. And that reciprocal respect is so crucial, and you have, with your Lights on Learning system, found an avenue into that and you’re giving it to parents and children. What really struck me, one of the many things again in your book was that you’re helping parents to find their flow state, to be able to model what it’s like to have a flow state for the children. As many of the, of the Ollie and Briony’s as there are in your book, there are also parents and you’ve helped them to go out and find what they love to do. And it’s always creative. It’s making music or drawing or making films or doing a podcast or something. It’s, it’s not, oh, I just needed to go into the office more,

Julia: Yeah. And I think that’s what’s really exciting is that when we accept that we are creative beings and that learning is as natural to us as breathing, and that actually it’s the blockage of our creative energy that creates our mental ill health or our unhappiness and lack of fulfilment or even the constant searching and never finding it, and actually what your work and my work is saying is, is that return back to self. What am I here to express and what’s my preferred way of expressing it? And that’s, I think for me is the, you know, the real answer I guess I’ve gifted myself for that 9-year-old that was like, why am I here? There must be something bigger than me. It’s, I just believe I’m here to absolutely learn how to be in the resonance of love as often as I can and to lead myself and others from that place. And, and I think this is, I think where, you know, our passions kind of meet because like you say, imagine then if we could bring more families to that place rather than the baseline of fear and the question of what is wrong with me? And, and just to pick up on your joyful curiosity, I just think curiosity is such a powerful opening of a portal for children. Let’s find out what they are and for adults, let’s find out what it is we love to do. What are we interested to explore and um, and what would we push on through, you know, or not even push on through. What would we move on through in terms of obstacles and frustrations and all of those lights off emotions to discover the answers for.

And I think that’s what we’ve lost with humanity. I think we think there’s a set path that we have to, to walk on, and I guess the, what I try to be excited about the point that we, in history, that we find ourselves with everything that’s been disrupted is that it’s a chance for us to look and go actually, what is the reframe for us as human beings? Why are we here and how do we, you know, survive and safeguard our future for not only this generation but their next generation and the next generation? And I think the powerful thing about when we really come down to the simplicity of being human, if we can learn to, like you say, lead from that heart, heart space, and then we can learn to harness the power of our thinking to really be able to create from a place of abundance and gratitude and love, and then we can use our fears for growth rather than get stuck in them. It would change how we show up as parents, as educators, as teachers, as employers, as creatives, as artists, as engineers, you know, scientists and, in the web of life.

Manda: Yes. So, so I realizing we’re, we’re heading towards the end of time, but this feels, where do you see us going from here? Because we’re clearly the old system is breaking apart. It’s, it’s gone. All of the things that we thought when we were younger, the world was going to be for, for the younger generations is not a thing anymore. And yet we are learning for our headlines to be in service to our heart minds rather than our head minds just doing their own thing.

I am thinking you’ve been doing this. Nearly 20 years now. There must be young people that you helped to switch their lights on who now have children of their own who are helping them to switch their lights on. That’s question one. Is that the case?

I’m also thinking that this is a spiritual expansion as much as anything else, and it’s also in the end, the personal is political. It’s a political movement. In a way it’s, it’s saying what we are here for is finding what we’re here for. What we are here for is letting our joyful curiosity and gratitude and compassion be. Why we are here in the world and what we do in the world, and we’re recording this. Three days after Jeremy Corbyn and Zara Sultana set up the potential start of a new political party. And it seems to me that what we need is a political movement. And I’m really curious to know how many of the parents and young people that you’re with are engaging in changing the communities that they’re in. Because you, you started, it must have changed your community to have a circus from the school. It just must, people are engaging in a different level or, or a musical or the amazing tree play that you did. It must have changed the way that people interacted with each other. And that was a long time ago. So two questions. First of all, what are the next generation of, of lights on young people being like? And second, what are the political, spiritual implications of this in the world that you are seeing?

Julia: Okay. So in terms of the young people that I would’ve worked with, what I’m seeing now is that they, I see a really clear connection between the thing that we help them discover is where they’re pursuing their careers. So, yeah, so I’m thinking in particular of an, of another Ollie who’s just got a job with Foster’s Architects, but it was like he loved drawing houses and so we gave him space to, you know, draw houses and you do a picture of the school and we got that on the wall.

So that recognition of where our natural gift is when we give opportunity to follow that thread. And that can be weaving with other threads, as you said earlier. It’s so beautiful to see where they end up, you know, still with that really lit up. So that’s, that’s the one thing that Lights on Learning does, is it once that switch is on, and once the child can recognize this is the thing that I love to do and it’s valued, and actually when I do it, I feel good. And when I feel good, I achieve beyond anything I could imagine. I want to keep myself attached to this and connected to it for life. So that’s the power of Lights on Learning from, for the trajectory in terms of a spiritual and political movement. What the vision that I have is, as a social entrepreneur, I want this to ripple out throughout the world, but I’m also very conscious about, I don’t want to build a big corporation those days I feel are over. Or I’d like them to be. And so what I’m looking at is this idea of a social franchise model where we, the, the mothers who have come through, I have, we, we have what we call Sparkies, which are the mothers who have come in and transformed to such a level that they want to give back. They’re like, I want to lead a group of women to feel like this. And to, to walk this path from, you know, from, from really not knowing how to lead her family to inspiring and switching on the whole potential of her whole family. And so what I see is that the, our sparkies become the sparks within their own community and that then feels limitless. Because we’ve then, you know, each sparky could have their community of a hundred or a thousand families, and then from that community could be a few sparkies that might go and, and set up theirs.

Manda: Exponential growth happens and it’s all around the world because we are online now.

Julia: Yeah. And, what’s exciting about that, and I can really feel it as a vision, is we are not compromising our values as a business by suddenly becoming so big that we become part of the problem. Um, but we are enabling through the entrepreneurial, um, energy, which I love and creative energy, the power of lights on to spread exponentially, as you say. So that would be sort of the political, like how can we do business differently? With real values at the heart of it and community led and, and passion and you know, really strong core of ethics that we are a business to serve humanity. So that would be one thing.

And then the other, from a spiritual perspective, I really see once we get mothers or, or families connected to the radiance, that for me feels like the gateway to the spiritual growth. It’s, it’s really beautiful to see the parents go from sort of being quite hard with this wall up to this softening and opening and become much more consciously aware of who they are and how their own energetics impacts their family. They see evidence of it, they start getting affirmation about, and they start then using their own gifts for small businesses or for podcast or to make music, like you said, to create their own expression. And that for me is where it fits in with the being able to bring more and more people into that conscious awareness through a model that, um. Can guide them to their own radiance because once you, once they open up to Radiance, then they’re already there. The portal is open to more spiritual growth, but without alienating the people who aren’t yet ready for some of the conversations that we have at that sort of higher, you know, higher level of awareness or consciousness. So I really hope that through this social franchising model, through more and more parents believing that actually whether the system is broken or not, I choose to not be part of that narrative because it’s not helpful for me. And actually, it just holds that narrative in place rather than dissolves it. And I choose to be a parent that learns to live and lead my family in a different way. And by doing so, my true purpose is here to give back and, um, for not only for my family, but for my community and for families all, all around the world. So that’s the big vision.

Manda: That’s, that’s a pretty amazing vision. I so hope it works. So how do people who want to engage with you? I’ll put your website lights on universe.com into the show notes. Is there any other way you would like people to, to connect with you?

Julia: Yes, you can find me, um, at the Lights on Mom, across the socials, on Instagram, Facebook, and, and LinkedIn. And yes, I’m sort of hanging out there and I’ve got a scorecard and a free mini course that you can again, find from my website. But what that does is it just helps you make that first shift as a parent if you’re, if you’re listening to this as a parent to thinking there’s something wrong with my child to realizing, no, there’s nothing wrong with our children. They’re  beautiful just as they are. But, are you ready to step into leadership of yourself and they’re your family? So then I’ve got a free mini course that really helps us really look at disengagement isn’t a problem at all. It’s the biggest gift that we could harness right now with where the future of humanity is going.

Manda: Brilliant, brilliant. I will put everything that I can find into the show notes and it feels to me whether people have children or not. This is something definitely to engage with because we all hit that moment of disengagement and you have a really flowing way of moving through it that that isn’t sit on a meditation cushion for 10 hours a day or you have to go and sit in the hill. I am guessing that when people get to Radiance, they are naturally more connected to the Web of life and, and the natural world outside the room, but it’s not where it starts, which I think for a lot of people it’s going to be really useful. So Julia Black, thank you so much for coming onto the Accidental Gods podcast. I can feel that there will be another conversation at some point and probably about six months to a year we’ll come back and see where you’ve got to because I think it’ll be really exciting. But in the meantime, thank you very much indeed.

Julia: Thank you very much for having me.

Manda: There we go. That’s it for another week. Enormous thanks to Julia for all that she is and does, and for bringing such radiance into the world. Genuinely, whether you are a parent or not, Julia’s book is well worth reading. This is that place where neuroscience and spirituality both become accessible. That’s an absolute key to Julia’s writing.

This book is really straightforward. It’s got a lot of quite complex concepts, but they’re presented in a way that is so easy to read. It really flows. The stories are genuinely inspiring and the concepts feel really accessible. I genuinely think this is the next step in human evolution, this finding what we’re here to do, finding what makes our hearts sing, finding how we can become fully conscious nodes in the web of life so that we can express the best of ourselves. And there are times when that can feel hard, and there are times when it can feel completely utopian. And what Julia does is to make it obvious and accessible. So I put links to her book, to her website, to her socials. They’re all there in the show notes, and I genuinely think it’s well worth exploring. Just read the book. It’s not expensive. And when you have, wherever you found it. Please remember to go and put a full review on the giant vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity. It’s not our favourite place in the world, but reviews there definitely make a difference to the algorithms so we can use them in our favour. And yes, that applies to every book you read. If someone can make the effort to write it, you can make the effort to go and write half a dozen lines on Amazon and good rates. It is worth it. So that’s your homework for this week. Writing reviews for everything you read unless you hate it, in which case don’t.

If someone’s made the effort to write a book, the least you can do is say nothing. All right, we will be back next week with another conversation. In the meantime, enormous thanks to Caro C for the music at the head and foot to Alan Lowles, of Airtight Studios for the production, to Lou Mayor for the video, and this week for the transcripts. To Faith for the website and the tech and all of the thinking behind the scenes that keep us moving forward. And as ever, an enormous thanks to you for being there, for listening, for engaging, and for sharing. If you know of anybody else who wants to switch their own lights on or to help their children do so, then please do send them this link.

And that’s it for now. See you next week. Thank you, and goodbye.

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