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Chapter 2

Nature, Nurture, and the Calmness Battle
Why Our History and Culture Shape How We React

The Chaos We Inherit

We all swim in deep water.

That’s something I often say in my teaching and in my book Parenting A House United. When I was on a triathlon team as a swimmer, I learned that swimming in a deep lake with low visibility was unpredictable and overwhelming at times. Yet swimming the deep water was a vital capacity building experience. It taught me that no matter how deep the water was, I only needed to focus on the goal and the skills needed to move through the water. Focusing on the water was a distraction to my calmness and my progress.

We may not always realize it, but each of us is treading through a personal ocean—deep, unpredictable, and sometimes stormy. The “deep water” is different for each person. For one, it may be childhood trauma. For another, a constant sense of pressure or a quick temper. For another, the invisible pull of perfectionism or comparison. The list could continue. Each of us has our own deep water that we must navigate through. In order to maintain our strength and poise during a deep water swim, self-awareness and calmness are required.

The water we swim in is made up of two major forces: nature and nurture.
And both have a powerful impact on whether we feel calm—or whether we feel like we’re constantly drowning.

Some of It Is Just How You’re Wired

Let’s first talk about personality, or nature; those traits and tendencies that seem to be “built in” from birth. You’ve probably noticed that some people are naturally more easygoing, while others are more intense or reactive. Some need a lot of social interaction to recharge; others need solitude and quiet. Some love rules and routines; others resist structure unless they see the bigger picture.

Gretchen Rubin’s Four Tendencies framework is especially helpful here. It categorizes people based on how they respond to expectations, both internal (what they expect of themselves) and external (what others expect of them). The four tendencies are:

Upholders – who meet both outer and inner expectations
Questioners – who question everything, and only meet expectations they believe are justified
Obligers – who meet outer expectations but struggle with inner ones
Rebels – who resist both outer and inner expectations

Understanding your tendency can explain so much about your reactions and struggles with calmness. A Rebel, for example, may feel frustrated by any attempt to follow a structured calmness routine, while an Obliger might excel with outside support but struggle to stick with it alone. On the Teaching Self-Government YouTube channel, I have in depth videos talking about Rubin’s Four Tendencies from a Teaching Self-Government perspective.

Likewise, being introverted or extroverted also affects how you handle stress. Extroverts might need verbal processing or connection to calm down, while introverts might feel overwhelmed by too much interaction. If we don’t understand our wiring, we can mistake our natural responses for character flaws, or worse, assume we’ll never change.

But even if certain traits are natural to you, they don’t have to define you.

Self-government means you don’t just accept your wiring, you lead it.

But Much of It Was Learned

While your personality gives you tendencies, your upbringing gives you patterns. And many of those patterns weren’t designed with calmness in mind.

Maybe you grew up in a home where yelling was normal. Or maybe emotions were never talked about, and you learned to suppress your feelings until they exploded. Maybe you were never taught to identify your triggers or walk yourself back from the edge.

Yelling doesn’t need to be normal.
Emotions are signals that something needs to be addressed, not suppressed.
Knowing your triggers can help you choose productive, not nonproductive, thoughts and emotions in order to help you identify and embrace true calmness.

Here’s the hard truth: most of us were not nurtured toward calmness.

We were nurtured toward reaction.

I remember working with a father, “Derek,” who had grown up in a home where emotions were either mocked or met with rage. He came to me after struggling with his teenage son, saying, “I just don’t want to be like my dad. But I don’t know any other way.”

Derek carried a deep fear of becoming what he’d seen modeled. He wanted to be calm—but his default setting, the pattern nurtured and imprinted on him by years of chaos, kept taking over. We worked together to understand his triggers and retrain his responses. I’ll never forget the day he told me, “I stayed calm during a major blow-up. And afterward, my son came and hugged me. That’s never happened before.”

He didn’t just break a cycle. He rewrote it.

Skill development and planning for calmness can re-script us, so that we can nurture a new version of ourselves. A version that we choose.

The Culture We’re Swimming In

It’s not just our homes that shape us. Our society is constantly influencing us too, often in the wrong direction. For instance, our modern society has created an urgency addiction culture that prays on fears and anxieties, and insists that things must be fixed or acquired right now! Patience seems to be a taboo principle of the past. This urgency addiction leading to forced anxiety overload captivates our attentions so that we spend most of our days rushing around in the urgent/unimportant (but perceived important) Covey Matrix quadrants, instead of recognizing what can wait and what is truly important to spend the most of our time focusing on.

We’re living in a culture that glorifies emotional entitlement. If you feel something strongly, you’re told you have the right, maybe even the responsibility, to express it fully and instantly. We see it on social media, in TV shows, and even in advertising: “Speak your truth!” “Don’t let anyone silence you!” “Be unapologetically you!”

But here’s the problem.
Not all emotional expressions are productive or honest.
And calmness isn’t about silence. It’s about choosing how and when to communicate, in a way that builds rather than breaks.

Another person I worked with, “Sophie,” a twenty-five-year-old woman, came to me feeling constantly anxious, easily offended, and overwhelmed in her relationships. As we explored her patterns, she realized how much social media had shaped her expectations.

“I scroll through people venting all the time,” she said. “It makes me feel like I should be venting too. Like I should never have to explain myself or slow down. But it’s exhausting.”

Sophie had been nurtured by a digital world that rewards intensity, judgment, and immediacy. But she began choosing calmness instead. She learned to slow her thoughts, to ask herself whether reacting would build trust, and to take full ownership of her emotions. She challenged her immediate thoughts and compared them to her communication and emotional health goals. Then Sophie took deliberate and assertive action. She stopped posting in anger. She chose to move her online conversations from the “urgent” to the “not urgent” category in order to give herself time to think and respond in a healthy way.

That simple pause for reflection allowed her to analyze what would be the healthiest action to take. Most times she scrolled past the inflammatory posts that had previously sucked her into anger-posting. She told herself, “I don’t need to control their thoughts and emotions. I can’t. I can only control my own thoughts and emotions. And I choose to be okay with others not feeling the same way as me. They can have an emotional outburst and express their point of view. It doesn’t need to affect me. I don’t need to give it my attention.”

Sophie started deliberately choosing and acting as well as listening more than talking. Her relationships deepened her, happiness increased, and her problem solving skills improved. Life was better on the optimistic, self-governed side of issues where open-mindedness and calmness prevailed.

The Culture of Hurry

“Nature never hurries,” Jordan reminded us. “Hurry is the scourge of America.”

Hurry deceives us into thinking we’re accomplishing more when we’re really just scattering our focus. It is the opposite of calm self-government. Hurry creates chaos in our homes, fuels irritability, stress, and robs us of peace. When we hurry, we trade quality for quantity and relationships for results.

In families, hurry communicates that speed matters more than presence, that performance matters more than connection. But calmness reorders our priorities. It slows the heart so that the mind can see clearly. It gives us permission to pause before reacting, to think before speaking, and to let love, not worry, lead our actions.

When we choose calmness over hurry, we are not falling behind, we are leading deliberately. As Jordan said, “Everything that is great in life is the product of slow growth.” Calmness is one of those great things. It can take years to perfect.

The Myths of Effortless Calm

First Myth:
Too many people believe that calmness just “comes naturally” to some personalities and not to others. But the truth is: even the most naturally calm person can become reactive if they’re nurtured poorly. And even the most intense personalities can become calm when they learn self-government.

Calmness is not a passive trait. It’s an active choice.

It’s the decision to sacrifice pride, old habits, and even comfort for something better.
For peace. For connection. For self-mastery.

Calmness requires you to say, “I don’t need to win this argument. I can honor their choice to behave poorly. I don’t need to raise my voice to be heard. I don’t need to feed this emotional spiral. I simply need to focus on my own calmness, choices, and personal power.”

That kind of calmness isn’t weak.
It’s powerful.
It’s freeing.
It’s choosing to govern yourself when everything in you wants to explode or retreat.

Second Myth:
Others think that calmness is controlled by the environment they’re in. The belief is that if a person is on a beach with waves making white noises in the background and the sun is shining down on them while eating and drinking their favorite treats, then they can be calm.

Calmness is not passive, and can’t be controlled by the environment. It’s a power that comes from within each person when they choose self-control.

Environment is influential. If one person introduces a power struggle to an environment, the tone affects everyone negatively. It takes conscious effort not to give in to the negative emotions in a boomerang effect, but to instead choose to lead your own thoughts and analysis towards calmness during that emotional time.

Of course, a calm environment will also have a boomerang effect and possibly encourage others to be calm as well. So that perfect beach moment could help a person settle down. But a person could have a storm raging within or stress and confusion creating inner turmoil while sitting on the same beach as well.

The focus of our calmness needs to be more on what is happening within our minds and hearts and less on what is happening around us.

I have engaged in family policy debates for many years on a state, national and international level. People don’t always agree about what policy approaches are best for families. Heated debates and even embarrassing emotional outbursts occur. No matter what is going on around me, I know calmness is my responsibility, not the product of my environment.

What good would it do to blame my out-of-control behavior on a place or a person? Would that really help me find more power? No. Excuses are false power. They are temporary and don’t lead to any additional empowerment. We know when we make excuses that we are trying to shield ourselves from our own weaknesses.

Calmness is a choice. We need to honestly face that fact. Without honesty, there is no self-government or calmness; only excuses and emotional panic.

Rewrite the Narrative, Nurture a New Culture

We don’t have cultural back up for choosing calmness. Some people don’t even recognize calmness as strength. Many people don’t respond well to calmness, because they see it as being passive, so they become more aggressive to attempt to take control.

You can’t be controlled unless you allow it to happen. That’s right. You have to allow yourself to be sucked into a power struggle or attacked. They can say or do whatever they choose, but you don’t have to use your mindset to allow the attacks to be attacks on you. What if you simply told yourself, “That’s just a behavior. I don’t need to take it personally.”?

When I was a girl being raised with three brothers close to me in age, I often felt annoyed, teased, or picked on. I tried to assert myself and fight back to the teasing. This seemed to only increase the power struggles.

My father pulled me aside one day and said, “You’re playing right into their hands. The teasing will stop if it doesn’t work. You have to see it for what it is and choose not to care about the behavior. You must choose not to engage. Then you will have more power than they do. Try it. I promise you that it will work.”

Thank you, Dad! That changed my standing with my brothers at the time. But, that good advice also helped me with bullies at school and teachers who I didn’t get along with. It still helps me today as I appropriately disagree my way through protecting children and strengthening families in my family policy advocacy work.

Either society and our culture nurtures us or we choose to nurture ourselves, thereby changing the culture around us.

Sure, we are nurtured by our parents and teachers and people around us, and sometimes that nurturing can lead us astray. But, one of the best bits of nurturing that most adults used to share with children in my day was “You have a choice.”

If we don’t feel like we are effective communicators because we don’t have the skills that we need; we have a choice.
If we find ourselves tearing ourselves down for personal bad behavior or reactions that we regret; we have a choice.
We can choose to remove the skills that aren’t working for calmness and effective problem solving and replace them with new skills that help us keep our calmness goals.
We have a choice.

If your upbringing didn’t teach you calmness and if society is modeling emotional chaos, it’s no wonder you struggle. But that doesn’t mean you’re doomed.

You are not just a product of your environment.
You are a leader of yourself.
And you can create a new culture; first in your heart, then in your home.

In the chapters ahead, we’ll explore how your brain, your habits, and your expectations all interact to either trap you or free you. But for now, I want to leave you with this truth:

You don’t have to swim in chaos forever.
You can step out of the storm.
And it starts by learning to make a deliberate choice, to self-govern; even in deep water.