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We are back with another episode in our Unschooling Stumbling Blocks series and we’re talking about how people are different.

“People are different” has become a common refrain on the Exploring Unschooling Podcast and in the Living Joyfully Network and for good reason! Once we sink into the reality that people are truly so different—their priorities, their brains, their interests, the way they express themselves, their likes and dislikes, their bodies, their personalities, and so on—it becomes so much easier to assume positive intent and to meet people where they are. We can more easily see through their eyes and understand that there’s no one right way.

We’ve been really excited to dive more deeply into this idea. It was a very fun conversation and we hope you find it helpful on your unschooling journey!

THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE

The Living Joyfully Shop – books, courses, coaching, and more!

The Living Joyfully Network

Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube.

Follow @exploringunschooling on Instagram.

Follow @pamlaricchia on Instagram and Facebook.

Check out our website, livingjoyfully.ca for more information about navigating relationships and exploring unschooling.

Sign up to our mailing list to receive The Living Joyfully Dispatch, our biweekly email newsletter, and get a free copy of Pam’s intro to unschooling ebook, What is Unschooling?

We invite you to join us in The Living Joyfully Network, a wonderful online community for parents to connect and engage in candid conversations about living and learning through the lens of unschooling. This month, we’re talking about supporting our children’s autonomy. Come and be part of the conversation!

So much of what we talk about on this podcast and in the Living Joyfully Network isn’t actually about unschooling. It’s about life. On The Living Joyfully Podcast, Anna Brown and Pam Laricchia talk about life, relationships, and parenting. You can check out the archive here, or find it in your your favorite podcast player.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

ANNA: Hello, I’m Anna Brown from Living Joyfully, and today I’m joined by my co-hosts, Pam Laricchia and Erika Ellis. Hello to you both.

PAM AND ERIKA: Hello!

ANNA: Before we get started, I want to encourage you to check out our shop where you can find books, courses, coaching, and information about the Living Joyfully Network, including our new course Four Pillars of Unschooling, where we explore four foundational ideas and paradigm shifts that can help you along your journey. Especially if it’s new and really if not, but especially if it’s new, I think it’s a good framework to start to understand, oh, okay, these are some important paradigm shifts.

The shop has resources and support for really every stage of your journey and different levels, whether you want some personalized attention with coaching, or if you want to work through some courses, or again, join the Network, which gives you a community of people living all over the world. It’s so fun to see their lives and what’s happening with their families. You can find the link in the show notes, or you can visit livingjoyfullyshop.com.

So, today I’m very excited. We’re going to be talking about the idea that people are different. And while it sounds simple, it is so layered and not understanding it can definitely be a stumbling block in our relationships. And once you really embrace it, I feel like it becomes so fun just noticing all the ways and finding ways to apply this lens.

So, we’re going to have a lot of fun talking about that today. I think it takes some of the mystery and frustration out of other people’s behavior when we recognize, oh, this is a people are different thing. We tend to think everyone sees and experiences the world in the same way, and so when they don’t, it can actually cause some friction. So, I’m very excited to dive into this very broad topic with both of you. Erika, do you want to get us started?

ERIKA: I would love to. This might be one of my most favorite topics to talk about these days, and I’m just really excited to see what we are able to touch on today, while also knowing that there will be so much more that we won’t even get to, because it is such a big, rich topic to explore once we start thinking about it.
And so, I really think that we started putting that “people are different” lens into words in the past few years because of some deep dives that we have all done individually and together, probably partly inspired by the deep conversations we have on the Network around personalities and learning about the different people there.

And I think we can, on a surface level, say, “People are different,” and everyone would agree like, “Well, yeah, of course.” But the deeper stuff, like, “No, people are really different,” can take a while to wrap our heads around.

And so, for example, the way our brains work is different and our personalities and temperaments are different. Of course, everyone has different past experiences and maybe past trauma that impacts what they do today, and so that contributes to our differences. Our go-to defense mechanisms and our reactions to things and all the beliefs we have about the world can just be so, so different.

That’s not even to mention fun things like our interests and what lights us up, and our bodies and what makes our bodies feel good, our curiosity and what our curiosity leads us to. So, if you just start to think about putting all these different aspects of ourselves together into one complex human, it’s no wonder that so many times we could feel like it’s so hard to communicate or it’s hard to understand why other people are making such different decisions from what we would do, but it’s just because we’re all so different.

PAM: We’re all so different. And for me, I just love to keep coming back to this idea, like you were saying, there’s just so many layers to it. Introvert, extrovert, just to grab something that’s pretty common for people to consider. “Oh yeah. They don’t like going out as much.” Or, “They like to be around people all the time.” When you just use that lens on its own, when you bring it to any moment, it can help you understand people a little bit more. It can help you understand that they don’t want to hang out in big crowds for long times, but also, when they’re at home with a small number of people, it’s so energizing. To see that lens in each moment helps you understand their reactions.

People are different. Even with an introversion, there are so many differences and layers. What helps them? What kinds of situations are worth it? All those pieces. So, when you just start digging into that a little bit, you find so many nuances.

When we first came to unschooling and I first started thinking about this stuff, when my kids made different choices than me, it would not make sense. Like, “But, A, B, C, like of course D!” Until I actually started to look at them as a human being, as a whole human being, understanding that they are truly different from me and understanding that me reaching D as a conclusion and them reaching E as a conclusion are both absolutely fundamentally true. D would work better for me and E would work better for them. So, now how can we work together and find an F that has enough of D and enough of E that we’re all pretty happy with this plan? And off we go down the F path.

And then, like you were talking, layer after layer after layer. There is just so much that makes up a human being that can be different from us, and it just helped me not be frustrated, not feeling like, oh, I need to explain this again, because they must not be getting it, because it makes utter and complete sense to me.

ANNA: Right. I think that’s what I love about it. And we get at it at different ways, but I feel like this is a really quick thing that comes to mind that pulls me to a place of curiosity, because if I find myself feeling frustrated or like, why are they making that choice? Or if I start taking something personally about the way somebody’s doing something, I can quickly go, wait a minute! Is this a “people are different” thing? And I can just pause a second and give a