NOT ALL WHO WONDER ARE LOST

Dr. Becky Bailey and Conscious Discipline

By Josh Duke

Dreams are life’s compass. Even if you feel lost and don’t know what comes next, you can still head in the general direction you want to go. The trick is to know how to read that compass. Sometimes you have to study your map diligently, retrace your steps and make difficult treks. And sometimes you just need to follow the sun.

Literally, in the case of Dr. Becky Bailey.

Bailey is the founder of Conscious Discipline, a company known around the world for its social-emotional learning curriculum and classroom management strategies. The methodology she developed has been translated into more than 20 languages and has helped students, teachers and administrators through her research-backed approach. She has earned recognition from a number of organizations, including a lifetime achievement award at the 2017 SPLASH Conference and the 2020 Professional Development Teachers’ Choice Award from Learning magazine.

To an outsider, her prolific accomplishments seem to indicate that she had always known what she wanted to do in life. But she will be the first to tell you that wasn’t the case. “When it came time to go to college, I didn’t have a clue what I wanted to do,” she says with a warm laugh. “I got my bachelor’s degree and still didn’t really know what I wanted to do. So, then I went to

Appalachian State, and I just wanted to learn. I learned a great deal from that school, including the fact that it’s very cold in Boone [North Carolina]! The honest truth of how I got to FSU is because it was warmer.”

She explains that she likes to tell that story to dispel the idea that everyone has to stick to a path and know exactly where they’re going. People all too often believe that they don’t have a path, or they feel a pressure to know exactly what comes next, who to follow, or how to find a path. Her journey might “not sound like a great path,” she says, “but I also don’t believe in accidents. I think that’s part of the entrepreneurial mindset, that everything that happens to you happens for a reason, and the reason—even though it doesn’t look good or feel good at the time, it’s also a very expansive reason. Something to expand your mind to get rid of some limiting beliefs you have in yourself.” While the nice weather brought her to Florida State University, she found something even more nourishing than sunshine at the Stone building: her life’s mission.

“I also don’t believe in accidents. I think that’s part of the entrepreneurial mindset, that everything that happens to you happens for a reason.”

THE BEGINNING OF THE BEGINNING

Bailey came to FSU to earn her doctorate in early childhood education. Her studies quickly brought her out into the field, and what she discovered focused her passion for learning and teaching into what she calls her quest. Her fieldwork brought her to a local childcare center, and she was surprised at what she saw. After learning so much about the impact early education can have on the life of a child, she was surprised at what she saw when her fieldwork brought her to a local childcare center. The childcare center, although meeting and exceeding state requirements, had what felt like a high ratio of children to teachers. “At the end of the day I thought, ‘You simply cannot meet the needs of those children with one teacher for every twelve or so 2-year-olds.’” With the ratio as skewed as it was, toddlers weren’t receiving the one-on-one attention critical to their early development. Immediately, she thought that she had to find a way to do things differently. This one assignment changed everything for Bailey, and decades later, she still attributes that moment as a turning point for what came next. “If I hadn’t been at FSU, if I hadn’t had that assignment, if I hadn’t been sent out to the field to address some real-life

Rock Island Head Start celebrates its use of Conscious Discipline on a billboard in the early 2000s.

questions—which I admire FSU for doing—if I hadn’t had all that happen, I wouldn’t have discovered why I am where I am right now.”

Looking at this problem inspired her to write her dissertation, which eventually became her first book in 1982. The book did not immediately find an audience. She believes that “back then, people weren’t that interested in infants and toddlers. We hadn’t come along with all the brain science. They just kind of thought, ‘just watch my kid until I get back.’” But she did not let book sales discourage her; she had something more valuable. She had her big question: “How do we meet young children’s needs in social settings when optimal development requires so much one-on-one?” However, despite knowing what she wanted to investigate for the rest of her life, she knew even back then that addressing problems that large would take her on an unknowable journey.

THE NEXT STEP

After graduating with her Ph.D., she thought she was ready to change the world. Unfortunately, the world she discovered at her first job was one of paperwork and bureaucracy. She found an opportunity working at Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico, a Native American village outside of Albuquerque. Bailey took this chance to help children and their families more directly, and recognizing her desire to help, the tribe brought her on as the first Caucasian person they ever hired. She spent eight years in New Mexico, and while the tribe had funding for early childhood education, she discovered that there was another challenge, which she would soon discover to be a nationwide issue: a lack of training for early childhood educators.

Realizing early childhood professionals needed training resources as much as they needed financial resources, she joined the University of Central Florida as a faculty member and helped start the first early childhood education degree at that school. Even then, she ran into issues as the field of early education continued to evolve. “Back then, we were still moving from babysitting to brain development,” she explains, and she often found herself defending her studies and field of research. “I was still justifying the fact that we’re not babysitters, that there’s something critical happening in early childhood, especially from birth through age three.” So, in 1996, she took the next step in her life’s journey. She left education—a field that she loved—and decided to take a leap in a new direction. Her colleagues cautioned her that she was doing something reckless and giving up a good job, but she knew what she had to do next.

She started a business.

HUMBLE BEGINNINGS

Bailey says she had “no business sense, no idea of how to run a business, no desire to have a business.” She just knew that the hurdles and the institutional roadblocks she had encountered had to be approached from a different angle.

Like so many entrepreneurs, she started her business in the bedroom of her house, uncertain of what would happen next. She decided to take a new approach with this venture: to help the needs of the children in group care, what if she focused on the skillset, training and knowledge of the teachers? “We have to actually go back and give ourselves the skills we were missing when we grew up before we can give them to another,” she explains. “It’s almost like we have to re-parent ourselves.”

Despite not having experience running a business, she knew that what she wanted to create would be something that could be embedded within the early childhood and elementary school systems. Without knowing how to market the idea, she focused on grassroots growth, because she knew if people could see her way of thinking, her approach would take off. “I had a heart and a concept and the mission and the vision, and from that I created a skillset that teachers found useful, and they then marketed it all over the world. They told another teacher who told another teacher.”

Bailey says the success of Conscious Discipline’s first few years can all be attributed to this grassroots belief in her approach. School administrators and teachers would often ask Conscious Discipline to work with children after other methodologies had failed. “When we were able to reach that child through creating a healthy relationship by helping the adult learn a specific skillset, it was like ‘Wow! We can reach those [children],’ and once we make that connection with them, they come along,” she says. Seeing this success where so many other approaches had failed created a buzz around Conscious Discipline and its approach. Bailey’s vision had become a reality.

EDUCATOR FIRST, ENTREPRENEUR SECOND

Despite all the years of success, Bailey says that she never felt like she “turned into a businessperson.” This is not an admission of failure, but rather just an acknowledgment that her strength has always been in the field. “I always think of myself like a player-coach,” she jokes.

Bailey wants people to know that she never grew accustomed to running a business because she thinks “that’s important for those out there who think that they can’t follow their passion, or they can’t have this vision and see it complete because they’re not a businessperson. My message would be, yes you can. You’re going to have to start out with some social trust.”

Dr. Bailey keynotes internationally, yet also enjoys leading small-group learning sessions.

She acknowledges that running a business is not always easy, but she stresses the importance of finding joy and fulfillment where one can. “I go back out into the field and recoup myself. Then I have to come in and talk about things like 401Ks, and I could nod off in the middle of the conversation,” she laughs.

As the business grew, she knew she needed to bring on more people to help manage the operations, but again she credits her nonbusiness background for taking a different approach in the hiring process. “I’ve had wonderful people who believe in [Conscious Discipline’s] mission, and we are a mission-, vision-driven company,” she says. “The bottom line is the number of children, teachers and communities we serve. It’s not the dollar we make. And sometimes hiring people into that system is difficult because they come in with a different mindset.” She admits that looking for potential employees who put these principles first made hiring more challenging, but she also says that it helped Conscious Discipline stay true to her vision.

Keeping in mind people and not profits helped her never lose sight of her mission to address the systemic issues facing our youngest students in classrooms. Even during unexpected challenges like the COVID-19 pandemic, Bailey has tried to keep the focus on those she has always wanted to help. “How can we support teachers? How can we help parents who’ve got these kids and are trying to work? How can we help? Our first go at that was that we got everybody to chip in and make free resources for everyone.”

When the pandemic persisted longer than she (or any of us) had hoped, Conscious Discipline began making courses online, and Bailey realized that some of the company’s processes that had been done in-person could be moved online. “What we’ve learned is that we could actually meet the needs of more people by combining that hybrid approach, where some of it is online and some of it is in-person.” She believes that this discovery will allow Conscious Discipline to reach more rural classrooms and other areas that they weren’t able to reach before.

“The wisest person you know is yourself. You just have to get out of your own way.”

THE IMPORTANCE OF TRUST

Regardless of how she feels in the board room these days, Bailey has seen tremendous success as an entrepreneur and as an educator. She has taken Conscious Discipline from a single room in her home and turned it into a successful business that works with children, teachers, and early childhood, primary and secondary schools around the world.

Her advice for people interested in following their own dreams and getting into business? “Trust the process and trust yourself,” she says. “The wisest person you know is yourself.” When a person is just starting out following their dreams, “they’re not told that, but I don’t care if you’re three years old, seven years old, 22, 55—the wisest person you know is yourself. You just have to get out of your own way.”

Trusting in yourself and your instincts is not a guarantee that things will work out, of course. You might find success, you might encounter challenges, but by believing in yourself, you gain a sense of fulfillment that is hard to find otherwise.

And when you learn to trust yourself and your instincts, you might find yourself doing surprising things, like enrolling in a school because you enjoy the weather, leaving a comfortable faculty position to pursue your dreams, and changing lives around the world. Your life’s journey might not take the path you expect, but it very well may take the path that you need to find your way.

Dr. Bailey and some of her talented staff pause during filming of the Powers of Resilience: Social Emotional Learning for Adults eCourse, which was released this January.