When you're running on empty, so is everyone around you
Kaizen, the Japanese philosophy of continuous small improvement, became less of a business concept and more of a personal permission slip.
Let me be honest with you: I didn’t fully understand self-regulation until I sat in Teacher Ana Quijano’s self-regulation workshop and experienced Kaizen in Leadership Excellence Achievement Program (LEAP) innov8 this weekend.
I thought I did. I’m a physician. I know the science. But knowing something in your head and actually living it are two very different thing—and Teacher Ana and LEAP have a way of making that gap impossible to ignore. I attended her workshop on self-regulation and co-regulation for parents and teachers as part of my personal goal for LEAP, the leadership program I’m doing with innov8. I went in thinking I’d pick up a few frameworks. I came out rethinking how I show up at home, at work, in every room I walk into.
And then the LEAP Second Intensive happened.
One of the most memorable shifts for me during that experience was learning to kaizen that s**t, to take the messy, uncomfortable, imperfect parts of how I operate and, instead of judging them, just improve them by changing my mindset. One percent at a time. Kaizen, the Japanese philosophy of continuous small improvement, became less of a business concept and more of a personal permission slip. You don’t have to overhaul everything overnight. You just have to be willing to look at it honestly and move, even just slightly, in a better direction. That experiential program cracked something open in me. The mindset shift wasn’t dramatic. It was quiet, and it was real.
Which brings me back to what Teacher Ana taught us: We cannot give what we don’t have.
In medicine, we talk about homeostasis, the body’s ability to return to balance. Self-regulation is essentially that, but for your whole self. It’s your capacity to manage three states simultaneously: physical, emotional, and mental. Not one. Not two. All three. And when any one of those is running on fumes, the others collapse too. Your teenager says the wrong thing at dinner, and suddenly it’s World War III. But was it really about the teenager? Or were you already depleted from a full day of decisions, emails, and just… holding it together?
This is where triggers come in. A trigger isn’t just what made you snap. It’s the thing that cracked open something deeper: exhaustion, an old wound, a fear you haven’t named yet. The parent who loses it over a messy room might actually be drowning in guilt for not being around enough. The executive who can’t stop snapping at her kids after work isn’t really angry at her kids, she gave everything to the office and had nothing left when she walked through the door.
The brain, brilliantly and inconveniently, cannot tell the difference between a real threat and an imagined one. A worry spiraling at 2 a.m. feels as physiologically real as an actual crisis. That’s not weakness, that’s neuroscience. Which means we have to stop being so hard on ourselves when we get deregulated. The question isn’t why am I like this, the real question is what’s underneath this?
Co-regulation reframed everything for me. Young children don’t come into the world knowing how to self-regulate. They learn it through us. Their nervous systems are literally reading ours. When you are calm and grounded, they feel it. When you are anxious and unraveling, they absorb that, too, not because you said anything, but because the body broadcasts before the mouth does.
This is why the most important parenting intervention isn’t a new technique for the child, it’s working on yourself first. A deregulated adult cannot regulate a child. Full stop.
What does that look like practically? It starts with attunement, becoming aware of what is happening inside you, without judgment. Not that I’m a terrible person for feeling this way, but simply: I notice my chest is tight. I notice I’m already at a six out of 10 before anyone has said a word to me. That pause between the trigger and the reaction is where everything changes.
For parents especially, the shift I find most healing—and one Teacher Ana kept coming back to—is moving from what’s wrong with my child? What’s hard for my child right now? Because children don’t misbehave to give us a hard time. They misbehave because they’re having a hard time, and they don’t yet have the skills to tell us differently.
Neither do we, sometimes. And that’s okay. That’s the kaizen. That’s the work.
So here’s a small invitation this week: sit down with your coffee and write out your triggers. Not to analyze them to death, but to bring them into the light. What really sets you off? What might be underneath it?
You deserve to understand yourself that well. And the people who love you, especially the small ones, deserve the version of you that does.
