Episode 116 How to be hopeful with Bernadette Russell

Zoe Blaskey: Hi, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Motherkind Podcast with me, your host, Zoe Blaskey, where each week I chat about all things motherhood and well-being. My mission with this podcast is to help you reconnect to you—to feel happier, more joyful, calmer and a little bit kinder to yourself. Because I think life as a mum in this hectic modern world is hard enough as it is. I believe becoming the happiest, most alive version of ourselves is the most important and inspiring thing we can do for our children.

Hi everyone and welcome to this episode of the Motherkind Podcast. I hope you are really well. This week, today, we are going to be chatting about all things hope and kindness. How beautiful is that? And don't we need a lot of that at the moment? I know that I need constant daily reminders and practices to keep me connected—compassion for myself, compassion for others and hope.

And Bernadette Russell is my guest, she is an expert on hope and kindness. She's written a Little Book of Kindness, a Little Book of Wonder and her new book, which is called How to be Hopeful, which is a celebration of the power of hope.

So in this conversation, we talked about kindness about how one small incident totally changed the trajectory of her life. And we really deep dive into hope, and how actually Bernadette, very wisely says that hope is daring, and it is daring to hope because we might feel that if we don't get what we hope for, we'll be disappointed. But she shares how actually being hopeful is the only way to be, if we want to connect with those beautiful feelings like joy and positivity. We also talk about the news and have a fascinating discussion about treading this line between knowing what's going on in the world, but not feeling all consumed by it. And also the positivity bias of children, and what we can learn from our children.

You know, I loved this conversation. It really brought home to me something that I deeply believe, which is that it's the small daily actions that we take that make the difference in our lives, not the big acts that we do once a month, or once a year, even. But actually, it's the small daily things that interwoven into our busy lives that make a radical difference on how we feel. So I hope you really enjoy this conversation. As ever, please do share the conversation.

Also, if you want to look up any of the resources that Bernadette or I mentioned, or maybe you prefer reading than listening, then there are full transcripts on the website, motherkind.co. Just search, under Podcasts, you'll see this episode and there is a full transcript, show notes, timestamps, which shows you what we were talking about at different times during the

conversation, and there are tons of freebies on my website. So I have a guide for how to start to reconnect to you. Many of those small daily actions I was just referring to are in there.

There's also my reading list. If you're a regular listener of the podcast, you will know that reading is my thing, learning is my thing. I average a book a week, and I have pulled together the most powerful books I've ever read on parenting, transformation, healing, feeling happier, defining our own version of success and a vision for our lives. They’re all in there, so please do have a look at the website. It’s totally free, so you can download it at motherkind.co. Here is the episode.

Welcome to the podcast, Bernadette. I'm so excited to be connecting with probably the most beautiful energy in the world in this conversation, which is hope.

Bernadette Russell: Oh, it's really lovely to speak to you. In fact, I've been looking forward to this conversation.

Zoe: So I've read your book, which I found beautiful and just underscores to me so many ways that I tried to live my life. And so I'm really curious, how did you come to think so deeply about hope and its importance, particularly in the times that we find ourselves in now?

Bernadette: So I've been focused on sort of compassionate practice and kindness and wonder and beauty and joy and all that kind of thing for the last 10 years. And I would say around a year ago, I started to notice increasingly, when I was doing workshops, or when I was connecting with community groups. I thought people are doing amazing things, amazing community initiatives or kindness or self-compassion practice. They were still expressing a sort of hopelessness, and I have to say, this was largely connected with the needs to that it kind of sought really big issue for me.

And then I remember hearing that wonderful Greta Thunberg, talking about how she didn't need our hope because the house was on fire. And I thought about that—I love her, and I absolutely champion her and all the other many amazing young home activists. I was like, ‘I don't know about that. I think I need to be hopeful. I think I need to think that in order to affect change, whether that's in my life, or in my community, or in the wider world, that there's a possibility it might be effective’.

So I started thinking about all that; my thought when I think of it, ‘People need hope’. Because otherwise, despair can freeze you and immobilize you, and that's the last thing we need at the moment, again, whether that's on a personal level or community level, on a global level. So I thought I really want to focus on this, prepare, and the first thing I did was re-read a story of Pandora's box. Do you remember that story?

Zoe: Yeah.

Bernadette: Yeah, that is exactly what I expected. So most people are like, ‘Kind of’. So I think it's one of those stories that basically, very simply, it's one of the Greek myths that was recorded by Hestia, did it in the seventh century.

And he wrote down the story that Pandora gets given a jar—it actually wasn't a box in the original story—and she told not to open it. And being a brilliantly curious young woman, she does open it and outflows all the troubles of the world—greed and misery and hunger and jealousy and envy and violence and she's like, 'Oh, no, that's torn it'. She puts the lid back on and then she hears whispering coming from it. Again, she decides to open it, she's like, ‘Really bad things have already happened’. And inside it nestles hope, and described as a tiny, plucky little hope and this beautiful, tiny little creature to battle all the evils of the world. And I was just like, ‘That's an amazing story. That hope is the light that helps us, helps human beings combat all of those difficulties’.

So that was my starting point, and I really liked it that it is a young woman that released those things and released hope. So I just started a journey of talking to people and I made those conversations, and that journey is wide and broad as possible. So I just looked for people who were doing hopeful things or used hope, and I thought about children and hope and how hopeful and optimistic they are, and how and why we lose it as adults. I looked at people that were doing stuff in their community and how they utilized hope and where they found hope. So I just spoke to as many people as possible from all over the world and researched as many people as possible all over the world and to sort of develop a journey to discover hope and to find out how it can help those.

Zoe: That was amazing.

Bernadette: I finished the first draft and then lockdown.

Zoe: How is that?

Bernadette: I’m laughing because I was like, ‘First draft. Amazing’, sort of, ‘What an amazing journey’. But none of us—I didn't see COVID coming. So lockdown happened, and I was like, 'Oh, wow. Okay, so I have to accommodate this. It's really important. Obviously, it's a global experience’.

What happened actually was, I was incredibly moved, as I think many people were, during that period by this absolute explosion of compassion and kindness and good humour and generosity and time for thinking and time for people, time for more times with friends and family and people getting to exercise or think or dream. And they just seem to be suddenly, a reconsidering a time for us to reconsider in the pause, how we live, or how we might like to live and also loads of kindnesses. People were really looking up to each other, loads of mutual aid, groups springing up and people doing things.

I was like, 'Here’s hope here on abundant display’, and actually, even though obviously, we're only short way down this long journey, we don't know how we're going to emerge on the other side of it. I think there's a lot to hold on to from what we experienced in lockdown. Do you?

Zoe: Yeah. And I think, things like, there are seven times more volunteers for the NHS than them are actually needed in the end, and for me, that is hope in action. I think hope is a—you talk about this in the book, I think it's an action. I think it's something that you can learn and embody and do. I think you can be hopeful about things and I want to get into kind of why, and I know there's lots and lots of science and research behind why that is such a positive force in the world to be hopeful. So I'm wondering as well, I'm really interested in you talking about kindness, and you have a fascinating journey around kindness. So can you tell us how? I think I heard you say was, the August the 11th. Tell us how that date changed the trajectory of your life?

Bernadette: It's August the 18th, 2011, which is nearly 10 years ago now. So I mainly work in theatre, which means that I often end up in the Edinburgh Festival in August, which is fabulous. And that year I was at the Edinburgh Festival and it was in my favourite cafe in Edinburgh, the morning of August the 18th of 2011 and the TV was on in a cafe, but the sound was turned down in a way they sometimes do in cafes.And on the screen was just these horrific images of like London on fire.

And I don't know whether people will remember but it was the beginning of the riots that raged in London, as a result of the killing of Mark Duggan in Tottenham by the police. So they've been a peaceful protest by his family and friends, which had exploded into these riots, which then spread to Birmingham and Manchester and Bristol and elsewhere, and it was horrible because I live in London and I was a long way from home. At a festival, it seemed really incongruous to be enjoying myself drinking coffee, whilst my friends' homes were on fire.

But it felt like the straw that broke the camel's back or rather the thing that motivated me because I've been thinking for a long time, as we all had about climate crisis and famine and war and all those kind of big headline, terrible problems of the world and thinking in the background as always, ‘What can I do about these? It’s so massive. What on earth can I do in the face of these enormous troubles’?

So I came home from Edinburgh, came to London. London's strangely quiet in the days afterwards the riots in Stockton. Loads of beautiful things happen, like people made this thing called Peckham peace wall, where they put up beautiful post-it notes, declaring their love of Peckham and their love of that community. And Dan Thompson organized riot cleanups, and people just swept the streets clean and people were taking care and looking after each other. So good stuff happened.

I was still troubled. I was like, 'What can we do? What can I do'? And then I went to the post office—my local post office in Deptford—and there was a boy in front of me in the queue, and I sort of noticed him because, in the aftermath of the riot, there's been a lot of deeply unpleasant, anti-young, anti-poor, racist rhetoric in the press, horrible response to the riot. And I was looking at him, and I thought, 'I bet people looking at you thinking you one of the rioters', because he had

his hoodie on and his trainers on, and that's kind of how everything was blamed on people who had that kind of appearance. And I heard him say he didn't have enough money to pay for stamp. So I said, ‘Oh, what. Got 50p’. I gave it to him. 50 pips, nothing, and he was so grateful and so sweet. And I watched it, and I've kind of managed to fit this one in his face. It was just 50 pips fine.

But on the way home, I thought, 'I'll just try doing that every day. Maybe I'll just try doing a little kind thing, but it has to be for a stranger every day, for a year, and I'll see what that does'. I see little act of kindness can change things. It’s a little bit impulsive. I didn't really make a plan, and it was a strange date to start a new project because, I guess... January is the usual response. But I started without much of a plan. I am an introvert. So I didn't find it particularly easy to do that every day, but I did it every day and made myself a set of rules. I tried to make it creative in a different thing every day. And I'm still on tour with lots of dates of shows, so I have to take it around with me if you liked the project. And it was utterly transforming, a truly life-changing, occasionally exhausting, initially expensive.

Zoe: What sort of things did you do?

Bernadette: So I tried to sort of do different things every day. I started posting quite early on social media. So lots of people gave me suggestions. It was nice. In the first few days, I did quite eccentric things like I made a jar of sweets with a little label on saying, ‘Please take these’, and left them in a phone box and Deptford. I sorted out a load of books that I'd read, wrote reviews in the front little message, and I gave them out to strangers. I wrote some notes inside a book in the Self-Help section in Waterstones.

I decorated a complete strangers pathway with flowers and a message for when they came home. I helped a lady carry her shopping, which was extremely strenuous. I had no idea how she carries her shopping normally. My arms are like a Gibbons by the time I got to stretch out. I left notes on park benches.

I kind of did loads of different things. People would send me suggestions. So like one time, I rang some twins—twin brothers. His birthday wasn't sung on both happy birthdays, which must have been very strange for them, but it was really good fun. I wrote letters to complete strangers on other people's suggestions, sent presents to people, and re-gifted things I had, sponsored people.

On Valentine's Day, I ran around all over London and I gave away in total 150 Valentine's cards to complete strangers with the help of my friend, Cristina Anasi. Yeah, we did loads of things.

Zoe: It was a beautiful, beautiful moment. The amazing thing that I find about kindness is it's so reciprocal.

Bernadette: Yeah.

Zoe: I'm kind, I make someone else feel good. But it kind of is selfish in some way because I feel so good when I'm kind. And there's so much science behind that. It triggers serotonin and dopamine, doesn't it, in your brain? It's not that it's just fun to do, which absolutely is, but it's also such a stress reliever. It lowers cortisol, the stress hormone, doesn't it?

Bernadette: Yeah, you're absolutely right and I'm really glad that you framed it like that. Because I think sometimes—maybe unhelpfully—we tend to separate self-care or self-compassion, and kindness to other people.

Zoe: Yeah.

Bernadette: I understand why that happens because I absolutely support the need to look after yourself. However, exactly as you said, it’s, actually—they're the same. As you said, you do something kind for somebody, you get this. Well, first of all, you get this sort of really nice knowledge that, ‘You know what, I've just done a good thing, I've just done a good deed, that was a nice thing to do. Well done, me’, and there's nothing wrong with that.

But also, as you say, to get this rush of oxytocin, and it's really lovely and good for you. ‘We give you a little help as high’, I think it's described as. So yeah, really lovely. All the feel-good hormones, as she said, it counts as cortisol, which is a stress hormone. So being kind to other people as you so beautifully put is a way of being kind to yourself; they're not separate practices.

Zoe: And those are amazing. It's coming to me that you'll know it, I'm sure, the famous—is it Harvard study or the Stanford study—where they separated the students into two groups. Do you know this one?

Bernadette: Carry on. I might do.

Zoe: And they gave one student one—I may say it wrong because it's, I haven't researched this, it just come out, I must have read it years ago. But they gave one set of students the grade that they wanted in their exam, and then they gave the other set of students the ability to help another get the grade that they wanted. So one set just got the grade, the other set out to help someone else get the grade. And what they show by—I think, image mapping the brain—was the group that helped someone else get the grade felt far happier about the result than those who just got it themselves.

Bernadette: I love that. I hadn't heard that, and I love that. And you're right, as well, it's really worth sort of flagging that up, in that science and scientific research has really supported the sort of lived experience of people who practise self-compassion and kindness, and hopefulness and it's really useful, I think, for those things to coexist. You feel like you've got this really robust scientific evidence based on the research like you just mentioned so brilliantly, and you can experience it yourself for real without being in a lab, without conducting experiments.

Zoe: It's so true and important that because I think, intuitively, a lot of these things we know works—as you say, lived experience. It is helpful to have that kind of, ‘Actually, this is a thing this is how my brain is responding to this’. And I love the underline that you're sharing, which is around self-compassion and other compassion.

I've studied with Dr Kristin Neff who came up with Mindful Self-Compassion, and the three pillars. You know one of the pillars of self-compassion is common humanity. It's so like interwoven, that being kind to ourselves, is part of seeing ourselves as part of a whole. That's the way that we're wired, isn't it?

Bernadette: Yeah, I think that's a really great point as well because again, that can roll back to what we were discussing earlier. That interconnectedness, that common humanity that we are not alone, is highlighted and underscored and demonstrated during lockdown. It was really highlighted, I think. We are all connected, we sort of really profoundly understood that our lives are made richer and easier and actually possible by the person that delivers the parcels, by the doctors and nurses, by the refuge collectors, by the posties. We understood that interconnectedness.

And I remember thinking for the first time, ‘Wow, this dinner that I'm eating, the chain of connectedness, the chain of kindness, the chain of care, tracing right back to the farmer, but all the other people throughout really demonstrated just this little dinner I’m having. It’s nothing special’.

Zoe: Yeah, exactly.

Bernadette: What you're describing is interconnectedness and our beautiful interdependence, I think.

Zoe: And I think it's so powerful to remember that I do this thing with Jessie, my four-and-a-half- year-old, where when we unpack the shopping because I hate unpacking the shopping. I want to make it more fun, so we say thank you. And you know what? It makes a chore absolutely delightful. So we'll get the strawberries out and I'll say, 'Who do we need to thank, Jessie?' and she'll say, 'Thank you, farmer,' and I'll say, 'Thank you, Lorry driver.' For every single item, and we pack away quite a lot because there's four of us living in the house.

And I feel like when we do that tiny little activity—we'd be doing that anyway, we'd be unpacking the shopping anyway—but just thinking about all the people that have helped bring us this food, I always feel amazing when I put the shopping away. It's just such a brilliant challenge to think about these small, as you say, seemingly the kind of just everyday humdrum of our lives—getting places, doing things. But actually, when we stop and think about how many people have worked hard and sacrificed to bring us that. It's mind-blowing, and I think it's such a powerful way to ease anxiety and stress.

Bernadette: I like your exercise because I think that sort of a really fantastic example of being in the moment you're in and making the most of your moment, the moment you're in. And kind of being creative and mindful in your just day to day life, I mean. Also, there's no such thing as ordinary, is there? Everything is extraordinary in a way, even unpacking with your daughter, you've made that into this beautiful, creative, therapeutic practice. And you can do that at any moment, and it doesn't mean that you have to make enormous efforts or really work hard or everything. It's just a question of allowing yourself to make the most of all those moments like unpacking the shopping or waving to your neighbour.

I'm a big fan and a believer in small, achievable actions. Because most of the time, it's all, most of us have got time to do. So, I think it's important to encourage people to take small actions like you've done with your brilliant shopping unpacking practice, which I'm gonne o borrow.

Zoe: Yeah, it's good. And I think so many people will think we’re mad.

Bernadette: I love it.

Zoe: Also, when we get out of the car at school, she always says, ‘Thank you, car’. Sometimes I see some people thinking, 'Why is that little girl thanking our car?' but it's because I always do it, ‘Okay. Thanks, car’.

Bernadette: Reminder of sort of how fortunate we are. You don't have to be self-flagellating about recognizing privilege. I think it's really important. I think sometimes people think recognizing what we're fortunate for can be self-punishing, but it's not. It's just like, 'Wow, this is amazing'.

Zoe: Yeah. How amazing is that? I didn't have to like walk slash I would have ended up carrying her because it's a really long way I get to drive in a car to school. I love that you pulled out in the moment you're in, because it brings me right back to the present. Otherwise, my mind's probably rushing off into what I got to do, bla bla bla, my day, the stress, yada, yada, yada.

Whereas in that micro-moment, tiny moment of just remembering, actually, ‘I'm really grateful that I could drive us to school’. I think like you're describing when you can piece your day together with those tiny moments, your experience of life shifts. How is your experience of life shifted now that you find yourself doing this work and living this way?

Bernadette: Well, I think the main shifts that happened to me in the very first year, the year that span 2011 and 2012, was that there were experienced lots of attitudes, lots of fantastic hormones. It was the result of this daily practice. The main thing actually was noticing kindness. So I noticed other people being kind to each other, and I noticed when I received kindness, and I noticed the frequency of that, and actually thought, ‘Well, the world is actually run on this’, which you could call love, which I do call love.

Zoe: Yeah.

Bernadette: The world is run on love and the world is predicated on love. And actually, that's the dominant, that's the common experience. And that because we're sort of programmed to notice the negative in order to survive, we actually can miss the fact that the world is run on love and kindness and that's the main experience. So it gave me a great appreciation and sort of love and admiration for human beings, and it got a lot of confidence and faith in human beings. So that was life-changing, really, that experience.

And so, continuing on that to sort of think about hope and active hope, as you said, people taking hoping for something and taking action on it, that reconfirmed and deepened patchy because, again, the world is full of people, some of them—and what you might say dire or very challenging situations—hoping for a brighter future and just getting on up and doing it, getting on with it.

And so I'm encouraged even in the face of really big challenges like we have with the climate crisis at the moment that we are—we can see it throughout history, we can see it in the present— massively inventive, and courageous and imaginative and active and we also are pro-social. We try to help each other, we work and thrive and survive because we work in groups. And so I think focusing on kindness and hope just made me have faith and believe and know also—have a very deep knowledge, proven knowledge—that is going to be alright. We'll be alright.

Zoe: And children are incredible at this.

Bernadette: Yeah.

Zoe: They are naturally hopeful, right?

Bernadette: Yeah, absolutely. So I work with children a lot. I'm really lucky towards children, I do storytelling, theatre, making creative writing workshops, all sorts, I'd say mainly with primary school, but not exclusively, sometimes younger. We're up sticking. And I took it to really notice this is like, ‘Wow, kids are so optimistic’. And also they'll say ‘yes’ really easily, and they imagine the best possible outcome. So it's interesting, that.

So I then chatted to my friend Marian Dugan, she volunteers, a performer for Clowns Without Borders, and they work in refugee camps, with refugee children and families, so like in Kali, in Greece, in very different circumstances to the schools I work in. And Marian was the same, she was like, ‘The kids will find joy wherever they can find it. They'll transform anything into a toy. They'll laugh; they just look for the joy and the fun had to be everywhere. They have this rose- tinted glasses’, and I was like, 'Wow, that's amazing’. One, how come children have that? And two, what happens to us poor grownups’?

Again, I turned to science because I was like, ‘Let's see if anyone studies this’, I came across this amazing professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina known as Janet J. Boseovski, and she talked about children's rose-tinted glasses or their positivity bias. And she described it as a tendency to focus on positive actions or selectively process information that promotes positive judgments about self, others, or even animals and objects. And it's not conclusive now, yet, why

children are like that. But she thought it was due in part to positive social experience that most children are lucky to have early in life and though lots of children who don't have that experience, also are optimistic.

And there's lots of conversations about, maybe it's because children have to learn. They're in full- on learning mode; they have to pick up loads of stuff. So their priority’s learning rather than survival, because they're protected by adults. And that's what happens, they lose it around mid- childhood, which is eight years to 12 years.

And then as adults, as I discovered from studying Dr Rick Hanson, we kind of get the opposite, we develop a negativity bias, but ballot simply puts, because we have to notice negative things, because they might threaten our survival. That he talked a lot about that may be true if you were an assertive hunter-gatherer living in quite extreme circumstances in ancient Britain, for example, but it's not necessarily true. Now, you don't have to remember all the negative things because they're not life-threatening in the same way.

And he talked about retraining yourself. So allowing yourself to focus on and recall and remember, the good things that have happened in a day, so they can be transferred to your long term memory. And you can have a certain library of hope to draw on. And I realized that without knowing his studies before, this is what I've been doing. So I'm very resilient, I would say, and I bounce back from even quite terrible news because, for 10 years, I've been gathering this library of hope, even though I didn't know that's what I was doing. Because every day—because of my practice, I was just noticing hopeful things and kindness every day. So I've probably got quite a big library now. So I think that fascinating, like you say the sciences, really useful, isn't it?

Zoe: I've had a daily gratitude practice for a long time now. Same as you, like 10-11 years. When I learned about negativity bias, it made absolute sense to me that left unchecked—without taking any counteraction, our brains are wired to focus on what's wrong. I think that's so powerful for us to understand, because then it's like, 'Okay, so that's the way that I'm wired is to focus on what's wrong', but we know, there's tons of stuff going right, we just don't notice it. And it always takes the judgment out because it's not your fault. You don't notice it's just the way your brains work.

However, if you want to feel all the juicy, lovely things that you talked about in the book, happier, more joyful, more hopeful, more curious. We have to do something to counter our brain chemistry, which is what you're describing: looking for hope, looking for things to be grateful for, my silly little shopping unpacking. And I think the gratitude practice, sometimes when I talk about I get met with a bit of an eye roll, I don't know if you have the same thing, oh, God, but there is so much evidence now, the profound impact it can have and how simple it is.

Bernadette: I don't know what you think about this. But I know I sometimes, in fact, got that eye roll, that gratitude practice. And I think it's probably, it's quite important to say, ‘I get it’. I think some days, certainly in the hardships that some people have experienced recently, gratitude can be hard to get to. On those days, there's no point beating yourself up because you can't think of anything.

Another thing that's worth doing, I think, really particularly relevant to carers and mothers actually is, particularly grateful now, but it's sort of self gratitude. So acknowledging that that day, the day that you're in, you did this thing well, whether that was get dinner on the table, or manage to have a shower, however, I'm serious, however small.

So sometimes, if you can't reach for gratitude, because the day's really challenging, or you having a very difficult day, I think it's good to take it back to yourself and say, 'Actually, I did really well today because, you know what, I managed to brush my teeth', or, 'I did really well today because I've tried out a new recipe', or, 'I did really well today because I managed the grumpy teacher who was in a bit of a bad mood with great patience', or, 'I did really well today because my kids were being really challenging, and I remained patient'. I don't know what you think about that, but I'm quite interested in sometimes bringing it back to yourself if you can't reach the gratitude on a particularly bad day. What do you think?

Zoe: Well, I think this is where the gratitude kind of idea has got a bit lost in how mainstream it's come. Because I think some people say to me, 'Well, my gratitude list often will say things like I have a bed, I'm sat here writing this gratitude list in bed. I have a roof over my head. I'm breathing right now. I have access to clean, fresh water, that's not going to kill me. The majority of the planet do not have that privilege’.

So I think you're absolutely right. I think gratitude, people often think about having to have big things. I don't think that's the power of it for me, the power of it, for me is really specific, tiny little things like often on my gratitude list will be someone smiled at me and I connected with the smile in that moment.

Bernadette: That's really lovely. I guess it's one of the benefits that comes of a long practice. You've had that participant over 10 years, and you get better at it. That's not to say you can be bad at it, but you get a more profound understanding of it. So I think it's really important what you said about having had that practice for 10 years. It's like saying, ‘Maybe this is gonna be my life's work, just supporting my own positive mental health by just doing this every day’. And being in the day, but sort of knowing that you'll do it, and you'll get better at it, which isn't strange, ‘but I certainly got better at being kind and I've certainly got better at being more hopeful, because I've forgiven myself’, when it hasn't gone quite right, whatever that means, or haven't quite managed it, and just done it again next day.

Zoe: Yeah, exactly. So, what I wanted to ask you about was hope and courage.

Bernadette: I think that it can sometimes take courage to be fruitful.

Zoe: And I'm really interested in how you feel about this because I've had some friends who have been desperate for a baby, for example. And they've said, I'm not hoping because if it doesn't happen, that would make it harder. Now, I've got some lived experience and some science behind

that I think hope is always helpful. I'm so interested to hear your view on that. And this kind of idea that sometimes being hopeful people can feel that it might make things harder.

Bernadette: Yeah, it's interesting. The philosopher, Nietzsche, spoke quite a lot about that and framed in terms of it could be quite cruel, because, in some instances, it can sort of prolong the pain of some inevitable disaster. So he—I think he changed his mind in later life, but he was quite… in the beginning.

And I also acknowledge fear, I think at the moment, we're living almost in an epidemic of fear, to the small personal fears of, ‘I won't manage what I want, I won't get what I want’. And then there are the largest sort of global fears of what is to come and the end of the world is nigh sort of editorial and newsreels that were beaten up by every day, so we're in this sort of atmosphere of fear, which isn't very helpful. So I absolutely acknowledge and applaud and send lots of love to anyone who's trying to find and act on hope in the midst of being bombarded by fear.

However, I do think that hope gives us the energy and the fuel, to take action and continually to keep making steps and to keep taking steps. It requires both courage and imagination to say, ‘I want to get here’. And also the getting here, that having the courage and imagination to imagine the future that you want to get to, is useful, I think, because sometimes there's more than one route. So it might be, you don't get that route to where you want to get to, but you find another route. So I don't think anything in human endeavour, whether that small and personal, or enormous or world-changing, has ever happened without imagination first, and imagination takes courage.So I acknowledge those things.

I think hope’s always helpful. I think if you're trying to do something, and you're hopeless, you're probably gonna suffer. And I don't really want anyone to suffer, and I don't want to suffer myself. So then we can feel like you're protecting yourself from disappointment. It can deny you pleasure, and joy. So I'd recommend being hopeful, though, at the same time, I acknowledge that it takes courage because it's daring to imagine a future that you might not get to the way you hope to get to.

Zoe: Yeah, that's such a good word. It is daring, and it takes courage. I have like a vision board above where I'm recording. And I have a really big quote, which is a Brené Brown and it says, ‘Courage over comfort’. Because I think humans have a tendency—I know, I do, actually and I know the science behind this as well as—that we do have a tendency for comfort. We have homeostasis, which means that our brains actually don't like changing. I think it's such a good word that you use daring. It is daring, to wish and dream, and hope. And I think when you talk about fears, that's so wise as well and I'm wondering, what fears are you working to overcome at the moment? And how are you?

Bernadette: Thank you for asking that. It's a good one. It's a big one as well. For me, it's the main work at the moment. A friend of mine contacted me yesterday, and she was like, I need to speak to you because the news is terrifying me and I can't get past it and this is really common. It comes up all the time. And I'm doing workshops with people in lots of different contexts.

So I think you have to pay attention to how the stories you're receiving and making you feel. When I say stories—because, for me, everything's about stories—when I say stories, I mean literally the BBC News, if that's what you watch, or your Facebook feed, if that's what you're connecting with, or stories that your partner tells you over breakfast. If they are making you feel anxious, or despairing, then they absolutely need to be limited, because your unhappiness will never improve the world. Nothing is going to be improved by you being unhappy or despairing. So that has to be controlled and limited.

And I think a very, very powerful way of combating it, your own despair or fear is, ‘I'll do this’. This is just doing a daily practice of looking for something hopeful. So at the moment, actually, I'm doing this thing called 21 days of hope, which is for 21 days, because my friend said, and I know this is hotly contested, ‘it takes 21 days to change a habit’. So we could do this and change the habit of always noticing bad news.

So I've been posting hopeful news stories every single day for 21 days. And actually, the process of doing it was really lovely. Sometimes it takes a little bit more time, the stories have been amazing. They've really cheered me up and sometimes made me laugh. And after the third day, people started sending me hopeful stories and prose.

Zoe: Doing your work for you. Beautiful.

Bernadette: That was really good. So that's been really useful, I think. It's kind of noticing when things make you feel despair or put you in a place of fear.

And the other thing is, if you're scared of something, whether that's a personal thing, or a larger thing, I would say to walk towards it. So it's a bit like when you're little and you think there's a monster in the wardrobe. I remember I had this and my mum was like, 'Come on. Come to the wardrobe and have a look. There's not a monster in there'. There's something really powerful about walking towards your fear.

So, for example, I was really worried about the amount of plastic pollution in the sea. I kept worrying about it. I was like, 'This is ridiculous. I just need to get into it'. So I researched it and I found an amazing amount of incredible innovation, dealing with plastic pollution, dragging in plastic—loads of Dutch and Pakistani and Indian scientists and innovators using all sorts of things with mushrooms, to giant ships to trawlers to deal with the plastic and sea. So suddenly, from being scared of this terrific problem. I was like, 'Oh my gosh, there's people all over the world just sorting it out'.

So I'd say if you're really scared of something, walk towards it and see what people are doing. There will be someone doing something amazing and if you are noticing that the stories you're receiving are making you feel fearful or despairing, find the other stories because they exist.

Zoe: It's so important. So important. And thank you for talking about the news and our minds are literally—we get to choose what we fill them with.

And I had such a brilliant experience of this because I decided I wanted a natural pain free homebirth. One of the things that I knew, that was my intention, I had no idea if it was possible, if that's the way things were going to unfold for me, and I was actually holding it quite loosely. But I knew that I could not pollute my brain with negative stories. So I became like—absolutely the most boundaries—I think I've ever been an evangelical about not letting any negative stories pollute my thinking about this experience and I flooded my brain. I was speaking to people, I would watch YouTube non-stop, have these beautiful, natural pain-free births that I intended to have. And you know what, I think that was the biggest thing that enabled me to—that's why I had. Because our minds are so powerful, they are more powerful than I think even the top scientists understand that, and many will say that we know so little about the brain.

You know, I was reflecting on this the other day, that I need to take more of that ruthless boundaries around what I am putting in my brain. Is it polluting me? Or is it helping me get to my intention. If my intention is yours is to feel joy and hope, and imagination and curiosity, I can't have that if I'm watching the BBC News. Because to me, they focus on the negative, that's just what sells, so I actually don't really consume much news.

Bernadette: It's really tricky, isn't it? Because there is a middle place, I think, where you can go, 'Okay, that's going on, and actually, I do need to know about that. Because I don't know, for example, it's worth knowing if there's an environmental disaster, because then you might know people there’. I think we do need to sort of know what's going on in the world. And we also need hope, so that we can experience that we can have happy lives and so that we can be proactive and have the courage to take action. But finding that middle place is really difficult. And I think it's really understandable and okay to just gonna disengage with that.

And also, what you said was really interesting, because actually, the news is really shifting in that there's an enormous, growing demonstrable appetite for different kinds of story. And so in some ways it accepted to the truth that bad news sells. It’s actually beginning to shift a little bit because there's lots of people like yourself, and lots of people who are just fine. Yeah, 'I'm not gonna look at that because how can I engage with that and be a happy person'? Or, 'How can I gave you that and just go about my daily life'?

And so I think, in a way by disengaging, and certainly not by sharing those stories, we might start to see a shift so that there's a bit of a rebalancing. So it's not all negative, fear-driven stories, ‘By all means, tell us what's going wrong in the world. But please present us with solutions or ways we can engage positively’. And so I support a number of organizations. I'm a co-owner of Positive News, which is about promoting solutions-driven journalism.

Zoe: I love Positive News.

Bernadette: Yeah, and I'm compiling this directory of hope. I've got a small version in the book, but I'm making a bigger version, which has got basically going to have all the resources that I can possibly find. Just saying go here, if you want to find out.

Zoe: I think that's such an important distinction. You’re absolutely right. You know, it is not about disconnecting from reality. I'm trying to live on this kind of pink cloud and putting our metaphorical fingers in our ears and saying everything's fine. I don't think that's what I'm doing. Maybe I need to check in with myself. But I think what is the difference, as you say, is that we can—we know what's going on around the important things in the world that interest us are our passion. And then the kind of second piece of the puzzle, which kind of is a beautiful loopback, actually, to start to close is that what your book really talks about is hope is action.

So yes, I can read about the fires or the floods or the wars, but I can also think about, ‘Okay, what is a tiny thing that I might be able to do to help’? And I think that's where the hope comes from. Isn't it? To overcome that and that currently isn't covered in mainstream media at all. I really would love to see that change, but I think it will, as you say.

Bernadette: Yeah, it’d be interesting.

Zoe: Yeah, I follow some amazing activists on Instagram and they will share horrific things. There's a collective of these women, and they have this boundary that they will only share with an action.

Bernadette: Yeah.

Zoe: This is what's happening and this is what you can do about it. And that action is really small, often.

Bernadette: Yeah

Zoe: And it's really doable.

Bernadette: It's incredibly important. I think you're absolutely right. Because otherwise, what you getting from that, ‘Oh, there's a really horrible, terrible problem that I am absolutely powerless to do anything about’.

Zoe: Yeah.

Bernadette: It's kind of pointless, it just makes you miserable and it doesn't help the suffering. Whereas absolutely, there's always something that can be done, there's always things that you can do and those things, they need to be small, they need to be doable, they need to be things you can do at home without needing loads and loads of money. And there's loads of them. So I've tried to sort of really encourage that and talk about that in the book. Like you, I'm a big fan of

small, doable actions, there's always something you can do, and you can have fun doing it. That's the other really important thing.

Zoe: It’s so beautiful to get our children involved with.

Bernadette: Yeah, so I do a lot of tree planting as well and there's always kids involved with that, there's all ages actually involved with that. So that's really lovely because it's like planting a tree is a definite, ‘Okay, this is, in a small way going to help towards combating air pollution, etc.’. And helping wildlife biodiversity etc.

But it's really lovely with kids, because there's a few kids actually, with trees that we planted a few years ago who've come back to the tree they've planted in the trees, like three times as tall as them. It is the ultimate metaphor for hope, right? Planting a little seed for a tree, which may grow may mature after the person who has long gone. It's like the ultimate paying it forward. It's so beautiful and I love this conversation this morning. I feel really connected to this idea that we are one on this living, breathing planet. And actually, self-care is other care. It's such a beautiful message that I'm going to take into my day.

Zoe: Thank you. And I always ask the same question at the end of every episode, which is if you could give just one gift to every mother in the world, and mother in its broadest definition, what would you give and why?

Bernadette: So it's such a brilliant question and it made me think in a really lovely way of those kind of fairy tales. You're like the person at the party who's allied to bad people; the mums a gift. I'm going to be ambitious thing.

So I would like to give every mother a period of time in every single day to herself. Nobody's demanding anything of them. Nobody's asking anything of them just a little bit of time for themselves. And in that moment, they have some time to acknowledge what they've achieved that day. The ones really marvellous, most of them what they've achieved, what they've done, how amazing they are and also to sort of recall the joy and the beauty of that day.

And I'd like to do that because I think time and space are so precious. I know it's difficult, probably sometimes blooming impossible if you're busy, like nearly all human adults busy to get that. But I'd like to give that to all mothers because we need it. We just need a moment, even if it's a tiny moment, say, ‘I'm here at the moment, nobody's asking me for anything. I'm just sitting with myself. And this is what I did today. And this was the beauty of today’.

Zoe: So beautiful. Thank you.

Bernadette: Thank you. It's been so lovely to speak with you.

Zoe: So that was the episode. I hope that you really enjoyed it. As ever, if you did, please consider sharing it with your friends and leaving me a review on iTunes. It really does make a difference to the number of mums that we can reach with the brilliant wisdom of the guests I have on.

Also, just a reminder about the Family Reset Plan. It's my latest offering to parents. I think that we are living in probably the challenge of our lifetimes—well, definitely so far. And as parents, we not only have to support ourselves, we also have to support our children, and that is a lot. So the Family Reset Plan is myself and two brilliant psychologists, and we give you step-by-step simple, applicable ways that you can support yourself emotionally to feel stronger, calmer and, therefore, to support your children in a different way. It's all grounded in psychology and neuroscience. It’s just £25 currently. And if you work for the NHS, it is totally free for you. So check out the website, familyresetplan.co.uk. Take care. I'll see you next time.