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Heart First Leadership
Welcome to Heart First Leadership, the podcast that explores a revolutionary approach to leadership. In a world that often prioritizes success above all else, it's easy to find ourselves leading from a space of fear, doubt, and unworthiness. There is a new way!
Join me, your host Ryan Sawyer, and my co-host and wife, Heidi Sawyer, on a transformative journey as we seek to inspire and guide leaders, parents, and athletes to unlock the secrets to a truly fulfilling life—one that resonates from the heart. In Heart First, we challenge the conventional norms and embark on a voyage together, where heart-driven leadership becomes the compass for a life well lived.
Are you ready to redefine where you lead from? Let's dive into meaningful conversations, insights, and practical tips that will empower you to embrace a new paradigm of leadership.
Heart First Leadership
Building Resilience: Helping Kids Overcome Bullying with Vickie Stolle
Join us for an inspiring episode featuring Vickie Stolle, an engaging speaker, writer, and dedicated resilience advocate. Vickie is renowned for empowering individuals to uncover their innate resilience skills through her work at Dragonfly Paradigm.
Vickie’s journey began within the cleft community, drawing from her own experiences of living with a facial difference. She shares how facing challenges such as isolation, bullying, and low self-esteem transformed her life. When her own child encountered bullying, Vickie realized the importance of addressing her unresolved trauma and building personal resilience.
In this episode, Vickie offers invaluable tools and insights for parents to help their children navigate life's challenges with strength and grace. Her powerful narrative encompasses themes of transformation, resilience, overcoming bullying, and the complexities of parenting. Tune in to discover how to empower your family with resilience and navigate life's hurdles together!
Connect with Vickie
www.dragonflyparadigm.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dragonflyparadigm
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Vicki, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you so much, Heidi. I'm so excited to be here, glad to have you Before we dive in.
Speaker 1:I'd love for you just to share a little bit about yourself with the listeners.
Speaker 2:Sure, yes. So my name is Vicki Stolle and I'm the founder of Dragonfly Paradigm, which is a community and kind of just tribe, if you will, of people that are looking to build up their own personal resilience skills, as well as focusing a lot on parents helping their kids learn all these wonderful mindset skills that will help them as they grow. So I am a speaker, I am a writer, I do workshops and all in the kind of with the mission of helping people learn some of the skills that a little earlier than I did, you know, learn some of these skills to navigate the ups and downs and challenges of life, and so that's where my my passion lies in my work is yeah beautiful.
Speaker 1:Always, our personal story, our experience leads into doing work that is really heart led, like what you're doing. So I'd love to hear from you in your life, a moment, or a moment or two that really were a turning point and you recognizing that something needed to change or that you wanted something to be different in your life, and how did that unfold?
Speaker 2:Sure. So if people are just listening and not watching, I will just explain that I was born with a bilateral cleft lip and palate and I have scars on my lip. And if people that don't know what that is, you know a cleft can be really kind of two things. It's an opening, that is. You know a cleft can be really kind of two things. It's an opening, essentially, and you can have an opening in your lip or in your upper palate or both, and I was born with both. I actually had two openings on my lip and in my palate, and so that required early intervention, as I'm sure you can imagine, with my first surgery happening at three months old and then subsequently 13 more happening by the time I was 14.
Speaker 2:So a lot of my, you know, journey in and of itself was in and out of hospitals and dealing with not only the medical side of treatment but the emotional aspect of being born with a facial difference and a visible difference, and my kind of coping was really to not talk about it, and so for much of my life really to not talk about it, and so for much of my life I did not talk about it. I pretended that it didn't exist because I figured if I didn't mention it nobody else would, and it just ended up being kind of this layer upon layer of armor that I built for myself, between me and the outside world. Fast forward to when I became a parent and my daughter was in first grade and she came home and told me that she was being bullied. And as she was telling me about her experience and all that was happening to her, it was like I was looking at my own six-year-old self and my reaction to what she was going through was level 100, when in reality reality it was probably warranted more like a level 10 response. And so my kind of all that built up rage and anger and pain just came out and was projected onto her and her situation. And it was in that moment that I was reacting and telling her well, this is what you're going to do and stand up to that bully and you're going to save this really kind of you know, in an aggressive way, telling her to behave in that, in that way that she looked at me and she said but mama, I don't want to do that.
Speaker 2:And it was that moment where it was like somebody splashed cold water on my face and I realized that she isn't me, that is not little Vicki that I'm looking at. That is my own child, who is her own person, has her own experiences, and that was the moment that I realized I had some work I needed to do on myself in order to be the best parent that I could for her, and so that really was the catalyst of my own personal growth journey, where I had to go back and I had to delve into all of that trauma that I went through as a child, that I had stuffed down and pretended that wasn't there, in order to then understand, acknowledge and begin the healing process from all of that so that I could move forward Again as a as a best parent I could be for her. But it also gave me a gift of my own sort of giving myself that unconditional love that I didn't give myself when I was younger.
Speaker 1:Yeah, oh wow. What an impactful just image to see. You know, I'm picturing the story and then you recognizing like, oh wow. I think so many times when our reactions are way bigger than that, than the situation actually warrants for it's like such a great mirror to us too. It's like our situation or our child in that case is holding up a mirror and we're saying, okay, wow, I can see that I'm really wanting you to have this big response to this, because there's a part of myself that wishes that I would have stood up to it or I would have said something and been a little louder, a little louder in my voice.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think kind of, in my case it was more like that's what I had always done. I had actually been. I went at it when I was younger. Instead of waiting for somebody to come that I thought was going to come at me with something, I would almost kind of preempt it. Or if somebody said something that, looking back, was probably pretty, you know, harmless, not at all affronting, I went back 10 times harder. So it was more that I was just telling her to do what I had always done, because that's what I thought I needed to do in order to make it through all those years. And so it was the moment of like, wait, maybe there's another way to go about this. Um, especially because she is her own person, that's her own little human being there that does her own things, and how can I help her do the things that feel right for her in order to manage that situation? So it was, yeah, it was. It was a moment, that's for sure.
Speaker 1:And for our kids. You know we want them to have more and better strategies than we had growing up. Right, we always hindsight is can be 2020, right, Look back and go. Oh wow, there's a lot of different strategies I could have used, but I didn't know them then, Right? So what were some of the things that you learned along the way in your own healing journey that helped you to create the ability to model new strategies for your daughter?
Speaker 2:Sure, yeah, as I mentioned, you know I went at it more like. You know I just wouldn't talk about it. I would talk about it with my parents. I had a very good home life. My parents were very supportive. My mother especially did her best in trying to nurture my emotional wellbeing. But it was also the seventies and eighties and so there wasn't a lot of talk about all of this, and there certainly wasn't. You know all the resources that we have now about. You know these are steps that you can take to help your child navigate. You know these are steps that you can take to help your child navigate. You know the ups and downs of a particular challenging time. So I like to think that she was kind of ahead of her time because she really did work to talk with me about it. But I do think that one of the things that I've learned and I try to instill in my daughter now is that it is okay to talk about it and to let out all the feelings, because I know sometimes, even when I was young, like I wouldn't tell my mom everything or I felt like, well, you know I shouldn't cry about this or I'm really mad, but I'm not going to show that. And I've just come to realize that, you know, emotions are neither good or bad. They're just what comes out as a result of whatever situation we're in or the thoughts that we're thinking about a particular situation, and so we've got to let them out.
Speaker 2:There was a moment with my daughter I look back, you know, and I smile on and I hope that she will too but she had a pretty rough day at school. She was having some issues with some kids and she was just really mad, like I could tell, really mad. And we were driving home and I said you know you can just let it out, you know we're in the car If you want to scream whatever. And she's like I don't want to do that. And I, she says I want to, like I feel like I want to hit something. I'm like all right, like hit the back of cause. She's in the back seat. I said hit the back of the. You know she went wild on that thing, but it was like just to get that physical release of all of that pent up, you know feelings and pain and hurt and rage and all of it. And she felt better after. You know it's like well, maybe we need to get her in some sort of boxing class, like, yeah, but you know, to work with whatever it is to get those initial things out.
Speaker 2:And then I fall back on advice that my mom gave me, which is you know, when you're having a bad time or something's going off and just not going the way you want, you know, take the day, feel those feelings. You know she would say, you know, you can mope. That used to be a word that we would use all the time. You take the day, you just feel it, you just do it. But that's what you give it. You just give it that one day and then the next day you pick yourself up and do whatever it takes to take just one step forward. But you've got to be okay with just letting it out and whatever that method may be and this is a challenge for parents because it's hard it's hard to not want to fix, to just sit there and witness your child in pain, in anger, crying. All of that is really difficult, and that was a gift that my mom actually gave me was that when I would feel down and I would be crying about wishing I wasn't born this way.
Speaker 2:I can't tell you how many times I told her that or asked her why I was born this way, and I know now as a parent how hard that must have been for her to hear. But she didn't try to fix it, she just held me, she agreed with me that it sucks because it did, and she would cry with me. And it was in those moments where really like nothing is really happening. She's not getting in there trying to give me all these strategies. She's just bearing witness to my pain and accepting me and all of it for who I am, because they were my feelings. And so I think it's kind of that juxtaposition of what does your child need to do to get out those feelings? But you also have to be okay with being really uncomfortable in witnessing, however it is, that they're going to express that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and sitting with it is. It is a strategy too right, Like being able to sit with the discomfort of what's going on inside as a parent.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's hard, I mean it is not Right.
Speaker 2:The better way to tell you it's easy, because it's not.
Speaker 1:That's right, it's not it's this part of the human experience that's really challenging to have a disturbance going on inside and not try to go distract yourself or make it better or fix it. As a parent, the better we are and I've noticed this with my own kids too in my own journey the better we can be at this at this first strategy of sit with it, then the better we're able to model that we can be not this at this first strategy of sit with it. Then the better we're able to model that we can be not okay, yeah, and not need to go into fixing mode, right if you're feeling whatever we're processing through and and allowing them to witness that. And then the better we get at doing that for ourselves, that we can do like your mom did and and just just be with the person and support them in what they're going through. Just be with the child and support them and what they're experiencing, because we don't always there isn't always a fix right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know like your situation. We can't change certain things. Yeah, it is hard because there are things that you can't fix and, no matter how much we like to think, we can't change certain things. Yeah, it is hard because there are things that you can't fix.
Speaker 2:And no matter how much we like to think, we can't control everything, and we certainly can't control other people and other kids. So when our child was being teased or bullied or something's going on, I mean really, when you get down to it, there's not a whole lot you can do about it in terms of the other people that are involved. You have to just work on your family, your child, your unit and do whatever you need to do, you know, to make that as strong as possible.
Speaker 1:What do you see as the most important factors for mental and emotional resilience in kids?
Speaker 2:Looking at it from the parent side of things, it's listening. You know, just being open, not trying to fill any gaps in quiet with this is what you should do. But the other thing that's really powerful and it can sometimes make people, you know parents feel a bit uncomfortable, but it's something that my mom did for me, which is she shared her own struggles. And this is something that even I struggle with today too is how much do you tell your kids, how detailed do you get about some of the things that you went through? But, on the other hand, you know, my parents were not born with a cleft. There was actually no occurrence on either side of my family, I was the only one.
Speaker 2:And so oftentimes people will say well, you know, how could your mom help you with that? She didn't know. How could she even know what it felt like. Well, she related her own experience of being overweight as a child and being bullied for that. It's not identical circumstances, but the underlying feelings are, you know, the underlying feeling other and feeling different, being called out, you know, to your face because you look different. Those were things that she could relate to and so, again, not trying to tell me what to do based on what she did, but just the fact that she was sharing that, you know, made me feel sometimes that I was on a more like level playing field with my parent. It wasn't, you know, the power dynamic of she's constantly telling me what to do and I have to do it. It was more like I actually do know what that feels like and that really was hard and it is hard, you know. And so it made that communication and that honesty, and then the trust that was built upon.
Speaker 1:that became, you know, the foundation of my resilience, really as throughout my life, and it's still there in successful teams in particular, and individuals, is this sense of psychological safety, being able to have this great sense of psychological safety within ourselves.
Speaker 1:And part of that, I think, is understanding that whatever we're navigating, even though circumstances may be different from person to person, the emotions and and what we're experiencing internally is like a normal part of the human experience. Right, there's highs and lows and there's feelings of not enough, not not good enough, not pretty enough, not smart enough, not fast enough, not strong enough, whatever enough. Fill in the blank yeah, and that's universal. And so when we're able to really normalize that for our kids and go, yeah, sometimes you're going to feel not enough. That's that's a feeling that comes up as a human being and that's that's part of our experience. I think that creates a sense of safety within them to come forward when they are having those feelings, if they know, hey, mom felt this way or dad felt this way before, and they're not someone who is, like you said, above them, having it all figured out Right, and never had a problem with any of these things.
Speaker 2:Right and I think you know that's just kind of a I'm hoping it's changing with parenting, that it has felt like that that, oh, parents are the ones that are supposed to know everything.
Speaker 2:But you know, this is all of our first times on this planet, it's all of our first times doing these things and we don't have it figured out. And I think, kind of again, having those honest conversations with your children just lets them know that you know it's okay to not have it figured out, you know, and to be a little bit more transparent with your own struggles, you know, to a degree and as is appropriate for your child's age and all of that. But it really does help because I knew that I could count on my mom to always tell me the truth. You know that was one of her big promises to me, especially with all of the surgeries that I had to go through. She said she would always tell me the truth about it and that meant being honest about the painful times. She wasn't telling me that, oh, nothing's going to hurt when you go to the hospital, because the minute it did I would not only be upset because it's hurting me, but then I've got the pain of my parent lying to me.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know, and so then that erodes trust, and so it's all these little things that we can do as parents that can really again build that foundation. You know, brick upon brick, block upon block of the resilience that your kids will take with them through their whole lives of the resilience that your kids will take with them through their whole lives.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what would you say has been your biggest lesson in doing the work that you're doing now and just throughout your journey? If you could sum it up into like, this has been my my lesson to learn in this life so far. What has it been?
Speaker 2:I feel like there are so many. But I think really the biggest lesson that I've learned is and it kind of goes along with what I would go and tell my younger self which is don't try to hide all the parts that make you who you are. Don't run from all the parts that make you who you are, because that doesn't serve you and they will eventually come out at some point. But if you can embrace all the parts of who you are when you're young, that is where the true, your true strength will emerge and solidify and help you become the kind of person that you want to be. Solidify and help you become the kind of person that you want to be, because I ran from it for so much but it's turned out to be the one thing that I can gift back to other people. That has really helped others. You know, my journey has certainly helped me, but it's actually through the work of helping others that I've gotten the most reward personally, because it is in that sharing and that's really.
Speaker 2:You know, I believe in the power of personal resilience, but that comes about through connection. It's hard to do on your own. You can do a lot of the work on your own, but you have to connect with other people and if you can get into a space where people are doing the same thing you like to do, or have similar experiences or interests or you know, if it is sports, if it's music, if it's movies, whatever it might be, books try to go to places where there are going to be people that are interested in some of the same things that you are, because that's an easier way to build that kind of connection and because you've got already sort of a common ground of experience.
Speaker 1:I love that, so tell me about the work that you're doing today.
Speaker 2:Sure, yeah, so I do. I have an online course that people can check out. It's called the foundations of resilience raising resilient children and it comes with kind of nine building blocks that my parents use for me to help me build a strong and resilient foundation. I also do workshops, both in person and online, and through that work I've become a certified wisdom coach, which is through the Adventures in Wisdom program. It's mindset skills for kids, but it's all story-based, so it's really engaging and fun and helps instill some of these principles into kids as young as six, you know, all the way up to 18. And so it's really been enjoyable there. So, yeah, and then doing some speaking I've got an event coming up in July speaking at Clefcon in Houston through Smile Trains convention there, so I'm really looking forward to that.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's so cool and and I know you mentioned before in a previous conversation that we had I was blessed enough to have get to have another conversation with you for this. But you mentioned this, this desire that you had within you to really provide yourself as a model for kids, to see someone who looks like them on stage sharing a powerful message, sharing about resilience, like tell me a little bit more about what that means to you to know that there could be a little girl or boy you know, seeing you, a video of you at a convention or seeing one of your videos online and getting to meet you and how that could impact them.
Speaker 2:Sure, yeah, again, you know, growing up in the seventies and eighties, and certainly in a very small town, my entire high school was 500 kids, so very small I never saw anybody else that looked like me, and it really wasn't until I was at an event at one of the medical centers in Portland that I ever saw another kid that had a cleft. And so my feelings, you know, of isolation and loneliness were very real, because I never saw anybody else and how could anybody else understand what it was that I was going through through? And so, again, through this kind of, you know, personal growth journey and how can I, you know, provide value and give back to this community, being on video was very important because, like you said, I wanted to be an example of someone. You know an adult, because we rarely see a lot of that. You know, if you're online or in some of the, you might see an ad. You know, an adult, because we rarely see a lot of that. You know, if you're online or in some of the, you might see an ad, you know, on television it's, you know, for, like surgeries for babies, and you know that's all very important babies born with cleft and things like that but we rarely see the adult journey or the adolescent journey shown, and so it was really about I want to put myself out there, I want to talk about some of these things, and so that's why I created my YouTube channel and trying to talk about various things related to the cleft journey and just things related to growing up and parenting in and of itself too. But that was really, you know, a driver, because even with the, you know the birth of social media and there are a lot of advocates online now, certainly on TikTok, that are doing great things in the visible difference and facial difference community. But you know, I'm on the older side of that and so I've kind of got that sort of Generation X experience and hopefully can resonate with parents now who are raising younger kids that it really is going to be okay. It really is, your child is going to be fine, they're going to be wonderful. But it feels like you know, those first, frankly, eight to 10 years are difficult because you are in and out of hospitals a lot and it can feel really hard to even see the bigger picture.
Speaker 1:But it will be, you know, and your kids will be okay even see the bigger picture, but it will be, you know, and your kids will be okay, yeah, and you're such a great example of how an individual can build resilience and strength upon their story, and so I really appreciate that about you. Tell us about the name of your company Dragonfly Paradigm. What does that mean?
Speaker 2:Sure, well, really, you know, when we think about paradigm, for just to start with, you know it's changing the way you think about something. And one of my favorite quotes is by Wayne Dyer where he says when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. You don't have to do things like everybody else. You know you're going to figure things out as you go.
Speaker 2:The dragonfly part has kind of a funny story to it. It's like personal, because when I was young we lived out in the country and my dad, like we'd see dragonflies flying around and he would always just say you know, watch out, the dragonfly is going to sew your lip shut and you know just running like crazy and it was funny. You know, it wasn't scary, it was just a funny thing that he did. And so I was like I want to put the dragonfly in there somehow. But then when I started researching kind of the meaning behind and the symbolism behind the dragonfly, you know of kind of rebirth and emergence and transitions, and it just all fit together. So that's, that's where it came about.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so beautiful and so many times that you in your own story had to come out of that the difficulty of overcoming surgeries and and that's a long road and so just being able to continually recognize like there's there's good to be seen in every situation.
Speaker 1:There's, there's blessings, there's lessons, there's gifts, there's there's good to be seen in every situation.
Speaker 1:There's, there's blessings, there's lessons, there's gifts, there's gold nuggets if we're willing to look for them. Even in the really, really hard stuff, even in the painful stuff, there's, there's something there and I think that builds that resilience and that builds that character and all of our kids, especially with what kids are facing today, they need these skills and they need more adult modeling what it looks like to do the work of healing whatever past traumas and hurts that we've had, so that we can show up in a way that's a good example for how to handle stressful situations, how to overcome adversity and and how to really step into the light and be who we are meant to be in this world and shine our light. And you're doing a wonderful job of doing that. So I'm inspired by you, I'm grateful to have you on the show and to share you with the parents and listeners, and if someone is wanting to get in touch with you they want to see the work that you're doing or get into one of your programs how can they get ahold of you online?
Speaker 2:Sure, the easiest way is through my website dragonflyparadigmcom all one word and everything is there. My social links are there, but if you happen to search that, it's all dragonflyparadigmcom all one word and everything is there. My social links are there, but if you happen to search that, it's all Dragonfly Paragon too. I made it very easy, so just search that and you can see everything about workshops and the online course and any upcoming speaking events that I'm doing and yeah, and you can join the newsletter so you're kept in the loop and up to date. And yeah, I thank you, heidi, for having me on. This has been really great. I love to talk about this kind of stuff all day, so this is a job.
Speaker 1:Thank you for the work that you're doing and for showing up and shining your light in the world. Thank, you.
