Nicky Lowe [00:00:00]:
I can lead everywhere except the place that matters most. That’s what I was thinking when a few weeks ago my son was suspended from school. Yes, suspended from school. You heard me right. I thought, I can hold a boardroom. I can navigate difficult conversations. I can stay calm under pressure. But that phone call from my son’s school, that unravelled me in seconds.

Nicky Lowe [00:00:31]:
Because within moments, all the leadership skills I teach for a living disappeared. And underneath them was something much bigger. Shame. Fear. The desperate need to still be seen as a good mother and a good person. And what happened next taught me more about emotional regulation, leadership and parenting than any professional training ever has. Because home is different. Home reaches the parts of us work never touches.

Nicky Lowe [00:01:04]:
And I think for many high achieving women, it’s the hardest room we’ll ever have to lead in. Hi, it’s Nicky Lowe and welcome to the Wisdom for Working Mums podcast show. I’m your host and for nearly two decades now I’ve been an executive coach and leadership development consultant. And on this show I share evidence based insights from my coaching, leadership and psychological expertise and of inspiring interviews that help women like you to combine your work, life and motherhood in a more successful and sustainable way. Join me and my special guests as we delve into leadership and lifestyle topics for women, empowering you to thrive one conversation at a time. I’m so happy that you’re here and let’s get on with today’s episode. So welcome back to Wisdom for Working Mums. I’m Nikki Lowe and today’s episode is a deeply personal one.

Nicky Lowe [00:01:59]:
A few weeks ago, my son, who’s 13, was suspended from school for the day. And I’m sharing this with his full permission because this experience has taught me more in the last few weeks about personal leadership than most situations I’ve ever faced professionally. And when I started sharing the situation with my team here at luminae, because if you’ve heard me talk on this podcast before, myself, my team, we have our Voxer chats, which is like this walkie talkie chat where we just message each other each day about what’s going on in our lives. So as you can imagine, the week that this happened, it was getting shared a lot in that chat and they kept reflecting something back to me and they were saying that what I was navigating was really useful for them because they’ve got slightly younger children and that actually there was nobody better that could navigate it. And they were learning so much because I’ve got so many tools and frameworks to move through the situation. And that’s not because I’m smart or clever. It’s because I’ve done a hell of a lot of work on myself, and that kind of stopped me in our tracks because I realized that this isn’t just a story about my family, and this is a story about emotional regulation, about shame, about triggers, and about what happens when the people we love the most activate the deepest parts of us. And if I’m honest, there is still part of me that feels exposed sharing this publicly.

Nicky Lowe [00:03:43]:
There’s still vulnerability in this. There’s still some embarrassment. But I’ve decided to lease into that comfort because I genuinely think what I’ve learned through this process could help you, too. Especially if you’re someone who holds everything together professionally but finds that perhaps home is the place that undoes you most quickly. Or you also have situations where, when you become dysregulated, it’s really hard to stay connected to your own leadership. So in this episode, I want to take you inside what happened, what got activated in me emotionally, and how I found my way back to my personal leadership to navigate my family through the situation. Because whether Your children are 2 months old, 2 years old, or even 22 years old when you’re in a difficult season, or whether you simply just want tools for the future, this kind of situation matters. Because here’s what I know for sure.

Nicky Lowe [00:04:41]:
The people we love most can trigger us most deeply. And emotional regulation is a leadership skill and a parenting skill. And here’s what I’ve come to understand. Leadership is relatively easy when we’re operating in environments where we feel competent and respected and emotionally resourced, but put us in situations where we don’t. For example, this situation, for me, and particularly at home, because home can feel different. At work, we usually operate from our strengths, and at home, we can come face to face with our triggers, our fears, our conditioning, and our need to still feel like we’re doing a good job. And layered over all of that is an enormous amount of judgment and shame that still surrounds parenting, particularly motherhood. The pressure to get it right, to raise brilliant children, to somehow hold it all together while making it all look effortless.

Nicky Lowe [00:05:35]:
And that’s why parenting can feel so emotionally exposing. And it’s rarely just about the situation itself. It’s often about the meaning we attach to it. And. And that’s exactly what happened to me. So let me take you back to that phone call from the school. So, I was at home, and I just finished a meeting, actually, and I got a call from the school to say that my son had got into a fight at school. What I didn’t know at that point is that he hadn’t started that fight, but he hadn’t walked away from it either.

Nicky Lowe [00:06:13]:
So let me give you some context. His school had actually had a brand new headteacher that week. So literally three days into his role, this situation happened. So on the Monday, this head teacher had held a school assembly and made his kind of leadership position really clear and the culture that he wanted in the school really clear. And one of the pieces of that culture was that he had a zero tolerance on fighting and had said to everybody, anybody involved in fighting would be suspended. And, you know, I love that approach. I still do. Setting the culture from day one, like, it’s.

Nicky Lowe [00:06:49]:
I really respect that policy. But fast forward to the Wednesday of that week, and I got a call from that head teacher, and from the moment he told me the news that my son was being suspended, I literally didn’t think rationally I had an emotional hijack, Jack. Or what we know is as an ambiguity, amygdala hijack. Because what flooded my system wasn’t logic, it was shame. Like this hot, instant, visceral shame. And what shocked me most was how quickly it took me over. Within seconds, I wasn’t responding as a grounded parent or coach or leader. I was responding from a much more emotional place.

Nicky Lowe [00:07:40]:
Because underneath all the leadership work I’ve done on myself, there’s still this deeply conditioned belief I didn’t even know I was carrying. And that was all about me being a good mother. And in that moment, I thought, good mothers don’t get calls like this, that good families don’t have children who get suspended, that good girls don’t make trouble. And even saying that out loud now makes me feel uncomfortable because I have this kind of conditioner. I suppose that children who got suspended when I was at school came from what I would have called, like, bad families. And I know that’s just such a horrible term, and I know there’s no such thing. I know that consciously. But in that moment, emotionally, that’s exactly what went through my head.

Nicky Lowe [00:08:27]:
And that’s the thing about triggers expose the gap between what we consciously believe and what our nervous system has learned. And my people pleaser came online immediately, like, what would the school think of me? What would the other parents think of me had I failed somehow? And if I’m honest, in that moment, I just wanted it all to go away, that I had this kind of reaction of like, don’t bring trouble to our Door response, thinking about my son, like, I want to control this, contain it, make it okay as quickly as possible. But luckily the work I’ve done on myself over the years eventually kicked back in. Not instantly, but enough to recognize that I was being triggered and that that moment required leadership, not reaction. And I’ve got to be honest here, it was actually my husband who helped me access that place because he wasn’t triggered in the same way. He went straight into logic and fact finding mode. And actually being around him doing that really regulated me and helped me find like my own regulation. And that’s really how nervous systems work, isn’t it? That they’re contagious.

Nicky Lowe [00:09:45]:
You can look composed on the outside while internally spiraling and you can kind of sound measured while your nervous system is in complete overdrive. And I think like children feel that, teams feel it and everybody in a room with you can feel it. Because I think our nervous systems communicate far faster than words ever do. So actually with my husband being able to access that logic place, we slowed the whole situation down. We were able to start talking and reflecting and we got to a place of like genuine curiosity with our son and what we were consciously trying to do and creating that conversation with safety. Like not interrogation, not punishment, not emotional intensity, but like safety. So we asked lots of open questions and we really, really listened. I mean, really listened without jumping in, without rushing to solutions.

Nicky Lowe [00:10:39]:
And it took me, you know, a good, good little while to get there. But actually as we started to talk to my son and over the kind of, the coming kind of minutes and hours, we started to get a much fuller picture and it really started to emerge and actually that this wasn’t an isolated incident, that there had actually been an ongoing provocation from another child for a long time. So quite a few months of comments, of tension, months of ass and trying to manage it himself and trying to walk away until. Until eventually he couldn’t. And honestly hearing that was heartbreaking. And it not that I didn’t think my son should be held accountable, like he absolutely needed to take responsibility for his part in it, but because underneath the incident itself was a child had been quietly carrying far more than we’d ever realized. And if I’d just reacted and without regulating myself, I would have missed all of that and I would have missed being able to kind of uncover it and support him in that moment. And I been reflecting on that since about.

Nicky Lowe [00:11:51]:
In the context of leadership, because ever so often, whether it’s our children, our teams, our partners, or ourselves, we react to the behavior we see without often understanding what’s been building up beneath it. And we respond to the visible moment, not the unseen weight behind it. And if I’d stayed in my own shame response, if I’d gone straight into that reaction mode, I don’t think we would have ever got to his experience, because people rarely tell you the truth when they don’t feel safe. They tell you what feels safest to say. So my son had a day of suspension, and then we had a reintegration meeting back in school. And so I took my son into school, and I won’t pretend that this was the easy part, because before we even got into the room with the meeting with the head teacher and the deputy head, we had to walk in to, like, the. The reception area. And as you walk into the reception area at school, I had to walk past my son’s class.

Nicky Lowe [00:12:56]:
So they were in. I don’t know what I think it was like a science class. And you see the science classroom. And as we walked past the window, every single child in that class looked up because this fight had become the talk of the school. And every one of those faces looking out at us was like another invitation to my people pleaser, to my ego, to that, like, good girl conditioning to feel ashamed. But before we walked in, I’d made a really conscious decision about who we wanted to be in that room. To not be defensive to. To not to kind of go into defending my son or reacting.

Nicky Lowe [00:13:38]:
But I wanted to go in really grounded, really curious to be accountable, but also open. And I think that distinction matters because accountability is very different to shame. Shame collapses us, but accountability kind of steadied us. And I told the head teacher as soon as I got in there that I genuinely respected his zero tolerance approach, and I meant it. And what was really interesting, what I kind of loved about what the head teacher had done, he had also suspended children that had encouraged the fight, like, we’re cheering it on. He’d also given detentions to every single person watching. He really had clamped down on this. And I was really like, I just respect you for that.

Nicky Lowe [00:14:23]:
And I think he responded really well to it. But he actually was like, well, this is going to be a simple meeting. Then, like, we’re on the same page. But I kind of went, well, I think there’s more to this than we’re perhaps realizing. And I raised the broader context so that there’d been this pattern of provocation and the teachers weren’t actually aware of it, or this new head teacher wasn’t aware of it, even though it had been reported. And I flagged that I thought it was a safeguarding concern. The fact that my son had spent a long time trying to do the right thing before he reached his limit and that if I sent him back into school, I’d got no reassurance at this point that this other child wouldn’t try and provoke again, and that I didn’t feel that my son had got the resources yet to know how to de escalate or to know how to walk away and keep face, you know, the fact that he’d spent a long time trying to do the right thing before he’d reached this limit. So we then started talking not just about consequences, although I thought they were important to have, but also about support.

Nicky Lowe [00:15:24]:
Like, what did he need now? What would help him navigate this situation differently? What would accountability with growth actually look like? And I developed his focus to flourish plan. And we were going to hold my son really accountable for his behavior at home. And there were going to be consequences, but that we felt that there was also support that was needed. And at the end of the meeting, the head teacher said something that really stayed with me. He said it was really rare. And he said this to my son. He said, you don’t know how lucky you are to have parents like this. And I laughed because I was like, I tell my son that every day, but he doesn’t believe it.

Nicky Lowe [00:15:59]:
But you know, in all seriousness, I said he was saying it’s genuinely rare to have parents who can come in so kind of open and accountable and not kind of go, my Johnny’s not the problem here, or, and I didn’t do any of that, that we took clear ownership, but that there were clear boundaries and it would like it was without blame or kind of emotional escalation. And I left that meeting feeling really proud of how I’d conducted myself and really proud of how my son had conducted himself. And I thought, and in the drive home, me and my son would like debriefing about, like, what went on and what enabled us to do that. And I think he really got to see that personal leadership being role modeled. And that actually when you can stay emotionally regulated, it’s not about never getting triggered, but noticing when you are and leading yourself back to center before you try and kind of engage. So I want to just kind of share what I took from all of this because I think it matters beyond just my family. And that’s why I’m leaning into kind of sharing this and why I wanted to get My son’s permission to do that. Because the closer the relationship, often the deeper the activation.

Nicky Lowe [00:17:14]:
Our children, our loved one can reach parts of us that no colleague perhaps ever can. And that isn’t about all weakness. That’s about love and attachment. The work isn’t to stop feeling. The work is learning to notice where kind of you’re getting, activating and choosing where you want to go next and connecting to that. So much of what gets activated in us isn’t actually ours. It’s inherited or conditioned or learned. And those beliefs I was carrying about, like what good mothers, good families, and what suspension meant about me, none of it was kind of true.

Nicky Lowe [00:17:55]:
It was just a story I was telling myself. So when shame or fear floods us, it’s really worth asking, like, what story is this? Or whose voice is this? Is it actually true and is it actually helpful? And the thing that made the biggest difference in all of this, and I’ve said it already, but I want to say again, was like regulating before you respond. And I think we live in such a world where our nervous system are constantly engaged between our drive system about getting stuff done and then our kind of protect system, which is that fight and flight. It’s actually really, really difficult to regulate ourselves in our. In our everyday lives, because our regulated presence is really the most important things we can offer our children. And I think when I was able to do that, thanks to my husband, I didn’t do it on my own. But when we could do that, I really feel like that made the biggest difference to our son. It meant that we could understand him and we could bring that into the school meeting.

Nicky Lowe [00:18:59]:
Because here’s what I know to be true. Our nervous systems walk into a room before we do and before our words do. And the state we’re in shapes what that room becomes. And a reactive, flooded nervous system tends to create more reactivity. But a more grounded, steady presence really invites somebody back to be steady back. And that’s not about performance or manipulation, but that’s leadership. So my son, thankfully, is now flourishing. And I want to say that because I think the ending of the story matters as much as what happened.

Nicky Lowe [00:19:40]:
Not that we just got through it, not that we just survived a hard few weeks, but actually that our relationship and our connection deepened and got more open because of it. And I think it’s because he experienced something really important. That he could make a mistake, that things could get messy, that he could struggle and still be met with love and steadiness and support. And it wasn’t, you know, an absence of consequences. There were absolute consequences. But that I didn’t go into shaming him in that moment because I felt ashamed. Because as we know, shame rarely helps people grow. In fact, it’s not rarely.

Nicky Lowe [00:20:19]:
It never helps people grow, but safety does. And I’ve been sitting with that because I think that’s the thing that matters most. Not just in parenting, in leadership, but, like, in all of it. So here’s what I want you to hear. What I’ve just described. Navigating that phone call, that conversation with my son, that school meeting, none of that happened by accident. It happened because of the work I’ve done on myself deliberately over time, whether it be coaching, therapy, you know, the amount of, like, development that I’ve done over time. Learning to notice when I’m triggered, learning to regulate before I respond, learning to lead myself first so I can show up for the people around me from a place of genuine groundedness rather than fear.

Nicky Lowe [00:21:07]:
That’s what I call leading on all fronts. And that’s the work I do with women I coach. It’s not just about leading in the workplace. It’s about leading in home as well. And what I’ve seen over and over again is high achieving women who are brilliant at their jobs, they’re capable, values led, deeply committed, and yet at home with their children, their partners, the people they love the most, they’re still operating from the same old triggers, the same old conditioning, the same old need to be good enough or perfect. And no amount of professional success changes that until you do the inner work. Leading on offerings is about bringing your leadership home. Not in a way that’s polished or performative, but in a way that’s real so we can be regulated, grounded, and genuinely present for the moments that matter most.

Nicky Lowe [00:21:58]:
So here’s my question for you this week, and I want you to sit with this rather than push past it. Where in your life right now are you leading from shame? And what might be possible if you led from safety instead? And if something in this episode has landed for you? If you’ve recognized yourself in any of what I’ve shared and you’re thinking, I want to learn how to do that, that’s exactly the work that I do. I work with women in complex, high pressure roles to lead with more clarity, confidence, and sustainability, both professionally and personally. And if you’d like to explore what leading on all fronts could look like for you in your leadership, in your home, in your family, in the way you show up for the people you love, come and find me over@luminate-group.co.uk and we can have a conversation about what would be most useful for you in this season of your life. And I genuinely would love to hear from you. But until next time, take care of yourself because you’re doing more than you know. If you’ve enjoyed this episode of Wisdom for Working Mums, I’d love for you to share it on social media or with the amazing women in your life. I’d also love to connect with you, so head over to Luminate, blow your phone, wait to stay in touch, and if this episode resonated with you, one of the best ways to support the show is by subscribing and leaving a review on itunes.

Nicky Lowe [00:23:31]:
Your review helps other women discover this resource, so together we can lift each other up as we rise. So thanks for listening. Until next time, take care. Sam.