Turbo Mode
Turbo Mode
I bought an e-bike!
If you haven't ridden one, here's the secret. There's a little button with settings: eco, tour, sport and the glorious one, turbo. Press turbo, and hills disappear. You fly past people on normal bikes, grinning like you've discovered a cheat code.
Then, about forty minutes in, you glance at the battery.
Here's what I keep coming back to. I've led in turbo mode more often than I'd like to admit. Every meeting, every email, every conversation at full assist. It feels unstoppable, right up until I'm pushing a very heavy bike up a hill with a flat battery.
The riders who go the distance aren't the ones with the biggest battery. They're the ones who choose their setting.
Eco for the flat bits. Not everything needs your full power.
Turbo for the hills. Save it for the conversations and decisions that really need it.
Charge before you need to. Don't wait for the warning light.
Energy isn't something you find; it's something you choose how to spend.
What setting are you riding on today?
Eco. Turbo. Charge. Repeat.
Ngā mihi,
Mary-Anne
She'll Be Right
She'll Be Right
There's no phrase more Kiwi than "she'll be right."
The car's making a funny noise? She'll be right. The tent's got a hole in it? She'll be right. Number 8 wire, a bit of duct tape and a good attitude, and off we go.
Love it. Optimistic. Unfussy. Gets things done.
Until it sneaks into our conversations.
"She'll be right" is brilliant for fixing a fence. It's terrible for fixing a relationship.
And we do it constantly. The meeting got tense? She'll be right. A colleague's gone quiet? She'll be right. That comment's been bugging you for a week? Ah, she'll be right.
Sometimes she is. Often she isn't. And the small thing we didn't say becomes the big thing we can't.
Making it right doesn't need a big sit-down. It needs four small moves:
Check in. "Hey, are you ok? Or is everything all good?"
Notice it. "That's been sitting with me."
Name it. "Things felt a bit off after Tuesday."
Mend it. "Can we have five minutes?"
Start with the check-in. Thirty seconds, no drama. Sometimes the answer is "yep, all good," and you both carry on. Sometimes it opens the door you didn't know was shut.
"She'll be right" keeps the peace. "Let's make it right" keeps the relationship.
Great attitude. Just not a plan.
Check in. Notice it. Name it. Mend it.
Ngā mihi,
Mary-Anne
The Gorilla in the Room
The Gorilla in the Room
Before you read on, watch the one-minute video and count how many times the team in white passes the basketball.
View the video here
In a famous experiment, researchers Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris asked people to do exactly that. Halfway through, a person in a gorilla suit walked into the middle of the scene, thumped their chest and walked off. About half the viewers never saw it.
They weren’t careless. They were focused. Psychologists call this inattentional blindness: missing something obvious because your attention is fully taken up elsewhere.
What we’re busy counting decides what we never see.
In a team meeting, the gorilla is usually the conversation nobody is having.
All of us have default settings. Some of us scan for risk, others for people, others for the task list. Each setting is useful, and each can hide a gorilla.
Emotional intelligence is a question of focus. Inner focus helps you notice your own default. Other focus turns your attention to the people around you: what they’re feeling, what they need, what they can see that you can’t. Outer focus widens the lens to the whole scene: the pressures, systems and conditions your team is working in.
Four ways to spot the gorilla:
Notice your default. What do you notice first when you walk into a room: risk, people or task?
Ask someone with a different default. Before a big decision, ask one colleague what they’d flag. They’re a gift, not a nuisance.
Pause before deciding. Ask, “What might I be missing here?”
Change your vantage point. Sit in a different seat, walk the floor or read the email as the person receiving it.
Questions to sit with:
What are you so busy counting that you might be missing something?
Whose perspective would help you see the whole scene?
Where has a gorilla walked past you before?
Ngā mihi,
Mary-Anne
The Skill We Teach and Forget We Need
At the supermarket last week, I watched a dad crouch beside his toddler, who was mid-meltdown in the cereal aisle. He said softly, "Let's find our breath together." Within a minute, the storm had passed. Then his phone buzzed, and I saw his jaw tighten as he read the screen. Most of us would recognise ourselves in that moment. I certainly do.
Whether we're parents, teachers, coaches or aunties, many of us know how to help a child find their calm. We name the feeling, model the breath and offer a strategy. Then we walk into a hard conversation, a high-stakes meeting or an overflowing inbox, and forget to offer ourselves the same kindness.
Self-regulation isn't a children's skill we grow out of; it's a leadership skill we grow into.
Roche Martin's Emotional Capital Report frames this through competencies like Self-Knowing (noticing what we feel as it happens) and Self-Control (choosing what we do with it). Both can be learned, and in any team, whether it's a classroom, a boardroom or a building site, both shape how safe others feel around us.
A few things that help most of us:
Name it to tame it. Dan Siegel's phrase holds true for adults too. Saying "I'm feeling defensive" quietly to yourself creates a little space between the feeling and the response.
Use the physiological sigh. Take two short inhales through the nose, then one long exhale. It's one of the quickest ways to settle your nervous system.
Ask: is this feels or facts? This question helps separate the story you're telling yourself from what's actually in front of you.
Borrow Lucy Hone's question: "Is what I'm thinking or doing helping or harming me?"
Move before you respond. A lap of the office, a walk to the car or a refill of your water bottle all count.
Questions to sit with:
What are the early signals in your body that you're starting to wobble?
What do you offer a child in distress that you could offer yourself this week?
Who around you is steadied by your steadiness?
Ngā mihi, Mary-Anne
Hold the seat and teach the balance
Hold the seat and teach the balance
"When I feel my tummy go funny, I do my breaths and it gets small again."
A Year 2 student at St Joseph's Catholic School in Paeroa said that. This was a child who had found transitions hard and often withdrew, or had big outbursts, during group activities. Nobody managed them into calm. Their teachers named emotions out loud, kept routines predictable, used visual supports and practised short co-regulation strategies every day, until the child could spot the signals in their own body and ask for help.
That's the whole idea in one small moment, and it's what Cognitive-Affective Learning (CAL) is built on.
A student can be well managed and still not be able to manage themselves.
The bike
Most of us have taught a child to ride a bike. A hand on the seat keeps them upright, but it's only when we teach them to feel their own balance, and then let go, that they can ride alone.
When the classroom gets hard, most of us reach for the hand on the seat. We want calm rooms, safe playgrounds and teachers who aren't running on empty. Cognitive-Affective Learning is after the same calm, and it goes further, because it teaches the balance too. That's why I think it's the better answer to challenging behaviour.
Three reasons
It works on the cause. Ross Greene's line says it best: Kids do well if they can. When they aren't, a skill is missing or a problem is unsolved, and skills can be taught. Compliance can be managed from the outside, but self-belief has to be grown from within. The routines, visual supports and co-regulation in that Year 2 story also line up with what trauma-informed practice calls for, so this way of working is kind to the learners who find school hardest.
It's done with, not to. Managing behaviour leaves students and whānau in the audience. Cognitive-Affective Learning makes them partners. Russell Bishop and his colleagues found that dialogue-rich teaching was only observed in lessons where whanaungatanga was strong, and that's the thinking we build on.
It sits within how you already teach. Cognitive-Affective Learning isn't an extra to squeeze into a full timetable, and it isn't a separate lesson or a programme on the side. It sits within current teaching approaches and gives them a relational foundation to work from. At St Joseph's, teachers wove emotional and relational learning into literacy and maths, with character emotions in shared reading and perspective-taking in comprehension, and it dovetailed with the school's structured literacy professional learning. The refreshed New Zealand Curriculum (Te Mātaiaho, September 2026) points the same way. It names self-management and self-regulation as capabilities developed through everyday learning, not taught separately.
And we can show it
Here's our point of difference. Cognitive-Affective Learning lets us assess growth in the "soft skills", so it can be seen as well as felt, and whānau are part of how we do it. A triangulated approach brings together a standardised assessment for students from senior primary up, teacher observation and whānau voice, with alternative means for junior and middle primary that also draw on whānau voice. When the strands tell the same story, we can see a student's growth, and whānau help tell that story.
The research points the same way. Durlak and colleagues found an 11 percentile-point gain in achievement across 213 school-based programmes, and follow-up work found benefits still visible up to 18 years later. At St Joseph's Catholic School in Paeroa, Reading at or above expected went from 65% in 2021 to 94% in 2025, with Writing and Maths rising too, and the students' own words tell the same story.
Let's have a chat
I've pulled the thinking, the curriculum links and six questions to test any PLD into a white paper, Social-emotional PLD is the better answer to challenging behaviour. Sign up for the free St Joseph's case study on our Cognitive-Affective Learning page and you'll get the white paper as an extra.
If your school or cluster is weighing up PLD for behaviour, I'd love to talk about what Cognitive-Affective Learning could do for your students, teachers and whānau. Bring the classroom scenario your current approach doesn't touch, and we'll work out how to do it with the people at the centre.
Email me at mam@momentumlearning.ac.nz.
Ngā mihi,
Mary-Anne