Get practical guidance and hear fascinating discussions that will help you cultivate greater self-compassion in the face of everyday stress, transform generational patterns of reactivity, navigate mental health challenges, and discover your own pathway to mindful, conscious parenting.
408: Raising Good Humans Summit Roundtable
Hunter Clarke-Fields
Get a taste of the Raising Good Humans Summit! We’ve come together with New Harbinger to hold an event in July, 2023, and you can listen to a sampler of it here. You’ll get practical guidance and hear fascinating discussions that will help you cultivate greater self-compassion in the face of everyday stress, transform generational patterns of reactivity, navigate mental health challenges, and discover your own pathway to mindful, conscious parenting. In this episode, Hunter talks to Carla Naumburg, Chris Willard, Mr. Chazz, Cathy and Todd Adams, Dr. Shefali, and Alyssa Blask Campbell.
Raising Good Humans Summit! [408]
Read the Transcript 🡮
*This is an auto-generated transcript*
[00:00:00] Hunter: You are listening to the Mindful Mama podcast, episode number 408, and today is a super special episode. We are giving you a sampler of the Raising Good Humans Summit.
Welcome to the Mindful Mama Podcast. Here it's about becoming a less irritable, more joyful parent. At Mindful Mama, we know that you cannot give what you do not have, and when you have calm and peace within, then you can give it to your children. I'm your host, hunter Clark Fields. I help smart, thoughtful parents stay calm so they can have strong, connected relationships with their children.
I've been practicing mindfulness for over 20 years. I'm the creator of Mindful Parenting and I'm the author of the bestselling book, raising Good Humans, A Mindful Guide to Breaking the Cycle of Reactive Parenting and Raising Kind Confident Kids.
Welcome back to the Mindful Mama podcast. So, so glad you are here as always, and love being able to connect with you in this way. Listen, if you haven't done so yet, please hit that subscribe button, and if you get any value from this podcast, please just do me a favor, go over to Apple Podcast, leave us a rating and review.
It just helps the podcast grow more and it takes like 30 seconds, and I hugely, hugely appreciate it and so does my whole team who works on this podcast. In this episode, we have seven awesome experts that have been on the podcast before, and I'm so excited to introduce you to all of them if you haven't met them yet.
And we're gonna give you snippets of our conversations from the Raising Good Human Summit. And if you don't know about the Raising Good Human Summit yet, This is a special summit that I'm doing in conjunction with New Harbinger, the publisher of raising good humans and raising good humans. Every day we do a summit with 16 awesome guests, including everyone you're gonna hear here.
And when you buy two copies of raising good humans every day, one for yourself, one for a friend, you're gonna get complete full access to the summit, the summit's free. You can just join up anyway. But when you get the two books you can get and keep all of the conversations, and you can learn more about the summit at Mindful Mama mentor.com/summit, it'll take you right there.
You can sign up for free. It's awesome. And so let's dive into this episode with my friends and experts from this summit. This first snippet is from my conversation with Carla Berg. Carla is a PhD licensed clinical social worker and a mother. She's the author of five nonfiction books, including her International bestseller, how to Stop Losing Your Beep With Your Kids, as well as You Are Not a Beepy parent, and the forthcoming How to Stop Freaking Out, completely swear, free middle grade adaptation of how to stop losing your Beep with your kids.
In this clip, Carla and I talk about mindfulness and self-compassion and about her being really skeptical of these things, so join me at the table as I talk to Carla Berg.
[00:03:28] Carla Naumburg: When my daughters were little and they were 20 months apart. So I had two under the age of two and I was losing it all the time. And pretty soon after, you know, um, I decided I need to get it together. And so I, I ended up like, sort of against my, I was like a, what do you call those people who were testifying in court and they don't wanna be testifying.
Hostile witness. I was like a hostile attendee at a, uh, mindfulness-based stress reduction course. Right. I was like so annoyed and nobody was making me go. I signed up because the logical side of my brain was like, this is the right thing to do. Mindfulness and meditation are what it's gonna help you through this.
And like the, you know, infinite child side of me was like, I don't wanna gamble, so, but I'm trying to be a grownup hunter. I really am. So I went. And, you know, I was down with the brain science. I loved that stuff, and I was down with the neurobiology of mindfulness, and I could understand the focus part.
And then on like week three or whatever it is, the teacher was like, now we're gonna learn about self-compassion. And I swear to God, hunter, if I had not been on the opposite side of the room from the exit dorm with like, you know, 30 people between me and the door, I would've been like, gotta pee. And I would've run out of there.
But like trying to be a grownup. And then they start to putting, oh my God, it was like they were talking about putting your hand over your heart, which I know is actually a super effective strategy for so many people, but I can't. I just can't. And so they're talking about self-compassion and I, I rolled my eyes so hard, I swear to God they almost rolled right outta my head.
But I was like, mm, you know, I took a deep breath and I'm thinking to myself, Hey, the stuff I've been doing so far isn't working and I'm here. So like, take a deep breath, get over it and listen to these folks. Now, hunter, I am here what, almost a decade later to admit to you and the world and proudly proclaim that Self-compassion has been the number one biggest game changer of my Parenting and my life.
More than mindfulness, more than meditation, more than like peanut m and ms. Really more than anything. Self-compassion is what helps me get through the day with like a modicum of grace, which helps me be more present with my daughters and myself, and helps me forgive myself and helps me have more compassion for my kids when they're going through really hard times.
And I'm, I'm tempted to just be like, oh, get over it. You know, there's like these moments when I wanna be like, stop whining. There's a war on Ukraine. What are you whining about? Your dinner? Right? Not helpful. Um, self-compassion is the game changer. It's like, it's the thing. So yeah, that's my self-compassion story.
[00:05:58] Hunter: Yeah. Yeah. Because we are all inevitably gonna be human. We're all inevitably gonna make mistakes no matter what. Happens. Even if you're meditating an hour every day, you're still gonna be human every day. Yeah, I'm totally
[00:06:11] Carla Naumburg: doing that.
[00:06:13] Hunter: And if you have kids, you're probably not meditating an hour every day.
I'm not, I wouldn't know how anybody would have time for that. Okay. So for the, the parents who are like, that's ridiculous. I should not be, you know, the, i, I sh you know, who are in that mode of self-flagellation of like, it's good for me to be hard on myself when I make mistakes cuz that's how I'm gonna not do it again next time.
What about, what do you say to those people who are, are in that mindset? How do, how do you talk about self-compassion?
[00:06:47] Carla Naumburg: So first of all, if you are a parent who actually realizes that you are speaking very poorly and meanly and rudely to yourself on a regular basis, on some level, good for you. Cuz you're actually a step ahead of where I was when I started this process.
I was so wrapped up in my anxiety and sort of my frantic desire to get everything done and check all the boxes off and make sure I had water bottles and snacks, wherever we went, et cetera, et cetera. I had very little awareness of the voice inside my head. And so one of the first things that started happening when I was learning about self-compassion, and I started paying attention to what I was saying to myself is I was actually horrified.
Like when I really noticed this voice saying, you're screwing this up. This is the most important work of your life, and you are screwing it up and your kids are gonna suffer. They are never gonna have a job, they're never gonna be happy, they're never gonna be partnered well because you can't find the right baby music to play for them.
Like seriously, that is the level at which, like the chaos was happening in my brain. I was really obsessed with baby music. Um, and so if,
[00:07:50] Hunter: yeah, go ahead, hunter. Yeah. And like, so then how did you, how did you start to hear that voice? Like, and that is a thing, like, we're so busy, we're like, we gotta do the next thing, get the next thing.
We have to puree the organic beets for the, you know, forever, you know, whatever we're doing is the next thing we're doing. I
[00:08:07] Carla Naumburg: know you puree
[00:08:11] Hunter: crap. We're, we're steaming the large stock of broccoli so that our baby-led weaning can. That's what I was doing.
[00:08:20] Carla Naumburg: I don't know what I was doing. It's all, it's all a giant, you know, dark hole in my
[00:08:23] Hunter: brain now.
Okay. But we're so busy, right, that we don't even hear that. So that's where that foundation of mindfulness practice can come in to play. Is that, is that what happened for you anyway? It was oh hundred percent.
[00:08:35] Carla Naumburg: Yeah. It was the mindfulness and had I, you know, if, if your readers, sorry if your listeners, readers, viewers, everybody isn't familiar with mindfulness based stress reduction for those of us.
If you like me, are, um, an uptight, neurotic person who likes things that are like very structured. A mindfulness based stress reduction, or M B S R course is a fantastic introduction to mindfulness and meditation and loving kindness and all this amazing stuff. Self-compassion, because it's, there's a huge amount of research behind it.
So for us, uptight academics out in the world, we like seeing that, um, it's super effective and it's, it's really thoughtfully, um, drawn out, created because first you learn about mindfulness and these strategies for really taking a step back from the chaos in your own mind and sort of watching that, you know, crazy parade go by.
And so for me, being able to really notice my own thoughts was a game changer, right? So I'm noticing my own thoughts and I'm like, not thinking that this is actually a good way to be in the world. You know, I can't imagine, like this was the voice that was coming out at my par at my kids. Sorry, coming outta my kids.
Although the wording was slightly different. And so, um, it wasn't hard for me to make that connection between like, oh, if this is what I'm thinking all day, this is like the words that are gonna come out. You know, if I'm speaking English all day and thinking in English all day, that's the language I'm gonna talk to my kids in, right?
So, um, the other thing I did, so first of all, I was noticing these thoughts, um, in my head, and then I was practicing self-compassion. When I use the word practice, I mean like, I was given an assignment by the MBSR course to go home and repeat these at the time, what I thought were stupid phrases over and over again in my brain, and this is how you learn a new language, right?
Like if you have to go to the media lab or the language lab, I don't know if they still have those, but that was in college. That doesn't anymore. Yeah. You had to go to this like language lab and put this thing called like a cd and a cd. What? I
[00:10:28] Hunter: once did a thing in the library with microfiche. Who does that anymore?
[00:10:33] Carla Naumburg: Oh my. Oh yeah. Nobody knows what that is. I bet we have listeners who don't know what that is. No, that's true. Um, so anyways, uh, I was practicing these phrases over and over again, and for me it was, may I be happy? May I be healthy, may I be safe, may I live with ease? And I didn't believe them. I didn't understand them, but I was like, Ugh, the lady told me to do it.
And like, I'm a rule follower, so I'll do it. And then Hunter, one night, it was a Friday afternoon, just got the girls back from swim lessons. I was slicing a red bell pepper at the kitchen counter. And they were actually had like five minutes of playing nicely together. They were little. They were like three and four.
So please don't assume this was always happening in my house. And out of the blue, this thought popped into my brain, Hey, I'm a good mother. And it was so shocking to me that I literally dropped the knife. It didn't hit my foot. We were okay, but how sad is that? Like just thinking I was a good mother, first of all.
I hadn't had that thought, I don't think ever. And secondly, it was so unbelievably shocking that I dropped a knife. Right. And I don't think that thought came outta nowhere. I think that thought came out of, um, me noticing and trying not to think such horrible things about myself. Mm-hmm. And me trying to have compassion for myself.
So noticing when I was suffering and finding ways to forgive myself and me practicing this new language of actually speaking kindly to myself. And as I did that more and more intentionally, uh, the compassion started to just kind of show up more and more in my brain for me. And now years later, I'm at the place where if I make a mistake or if things get outta control or chaotic, or if a child of mine is suffering or struggling, uh, my brain no longer goes to You are a terrible mother, which is where it used to go.
And now it goes to, Hey, Parenting is hard. It's hard for everyone. This is a rough moment. What do we need? What do I need? What do my girls need? Right. Which is such a more compassionate reaction, but it took practice.
[00:12:23] Hunter: Yeah. Yeah. It takes practice and, and those words that you were saying, like these are words that are like phrases of loving kindness, right.
That they, they, we talk, they talk about in the mindfulness community, like may be happy, may be peaceful and things like that. And one of the things that I have heard told in, in a couple different contexts is that when the practice of loving kindness, which is an ancient practice, was brought to the west, to like western cultures like United States and, and you know, in, in European cultures, that was, that specifically, they had to change it some, a lot of times.
And because it can be easier for us to think, oh, the second part, which, which is traditionally the second part, may you be happy, may you be safe with someone that we really love. And then, then maybe, maybe we can feel comfortable offering it to ourselves. But it's just so telling that it's not just you.
It's like, it's a big cultural thing. That feeling of like, I'm this self. Negating harshness, harsh voice to ourselves is, is really, really common, unfortunately, for, for us.
[00:13:30] Carla Naumburg: Yeah. It's just, it's, and, and the way I think about it is it's just not a language. We were raised speaking and my parents weren't raised speaking it, and, and obviously goes deeper than just the words, because it really impacts our mood and our ability to be present, to engage with other people and to, to move forward without kind of losing our tempers and all those things.
Um, but my parents certainly weren't raised with that language. My grandparents weren't, you know, and so, um, yeah, it's a big, it's a big cultural shift and an important one.
[00:14:04] Hunter: Stay tuned for more Mindful Mama podcast right after this break.
My next conversation is with Dr. Christopher Willard, and I'm lucky enough to call him a friend. He has been practicing meditation for 20 years. He's a psychologist and he has led hundreds of workshops around the world. He teaches at Harvard Medical School and he's the author of a number of great books for parents and children about mindfulness.
In this conversation, Chris and I talk about helping kids develop emotional intelligence and emotional regulation, what we parents can do to help them do that.
[00:14:53] Chris Willard: I do think when kids are comfortable being themselves and feel accepted by others and have that self-acceptance, the kind of natural good human that we're looking for, raising good humans, it just starts to. Starts to come through when they feel safe. We know that when we feel safe, physiologically, our nervous systems get those cues of safety, right?
Our, our social brain opens up, our critical thinking, opens up our impulse control fires back up online and all of these kinds of things. So as parents, I think the first thing we want to do is help our kids develop that sense of safety, or as caregivers, or as schools or as therapists, right? That's our job, is to create a sense of safety.
A place where it's safe for our kids to, to calm down, open up, do the developmental, emotional learning, social learning connections that they need to do. And in then addition, we wanna model it, right? We wanna model kindness, we wanna model compassion. We wanna model mindfulness, whether it's people, those of us that have a sitting practice, or whether it's like pausing at the red light and taking a few breaths, or in the middle of the heated backgammon game with our kids.
Or we take a few breaths before we move impulsively that these are really important. And then talking through in terms of compassion and experience. I was just talking with someone, um, about the writing process, someone I supervise and, and the importance of things like when we're reading books to kids, like reading first person narratives, actually, we know that that increases empathy, writing, first person narratives, that that increases empathy and perspective.
Taking that ways to build social and emotional intelligence don't have to be like, buy this curriculum, do this thing. It's like, have conversations. Why do the character on the show act that way? Even just picking up a picture book. My kids are still picture book gage and like, you know, what's this character feeling?
Well, they're smiling, so maybe they're feeling this or maybe they're feeling that. We know that when we do that with kids, just how we read a book to children, actually, they have pro-social behaviors later. They're likely to share in second grade if we ask them those questions about reading a book when they're younger.
So these kinds of things, talking in emotional. Language building their emotional vocabulary. All of these are really well correlated with self-regulation. When we name it to tame it with our emotions, well we need to know what to name it. So learning the names of emotions is just as important as learning are.
ABCs the one to 10, the, you know, the, the colors of the rainbow. And I think bringing that in to families and even into schools and other places to teach that emotional literacy, emotional fluency, I think doesn't have to be hard. It can be fun. And I think we forget that sometimes that it feels like, oh, is this char I have to teach Mike.
It's like, no, this is fun. Like let's just bring it into life.
[00:17:44] Hunter: And kind of what I'm hearing you say is that is something, something about normalizing it. Right? And that kind of has to happen like in our culture, in our families, but we can do that in our family culture. So, And this idea of like, you know, yeah.
Like, you know, we go around with our little children, we say, oh look, that flower is yellow. You know, that's a, that's what this is and that kind of thing. And we can do the same with our emotions. And, and that always, that all kind of starts with us. Like, uh, you know, us getting out of the old school methods of like repre repressing our feelings and trying to block them and pretend we don't have any feelings, even whether it's like, you know, whether even if it's irritation or it's joy or whatever it is, we sometimes we te we wanna hide those things from our kids.
But I'm hearing from you that like, this is what we need. Right. We know that our kids are incredible sponges, which is why we don't drop the f-bomb in our conversations with our kids. So we talk about here. Well, yeah. And so, you know, if we can start to name the feelings in our own lives and just kind of make it a normal part of life.
Then it becomes something that we can make it help create a generation that they're just a little more comfortable with that.
[00:18:59] Chris Willard: Right? Absolutely. And, and, and again, I think like I love, you know, so like that flower is yellow. It's like that, that person is ang angry or how do you know when someone is angry?
Or how do you know when someone is sad? What might their face be like? I think things like charades, like a game, like charades mm-hmm. Is a wonderful way to learn different emotions. Like show a mad face, show a sad face, like act it out, show us the, like these little things that can be, it's fun family bonding.
It's a fun little theater game if you're in school. It's also really learning how to. Embody and recognize emotions in these different powerful ways or listen to happy music. Listen to sad music, listen to angry music. How does your body feel? What do you know? Like the, these are teaching this emotional fluency and there's a direct correlation, hunter.
I was reading recently between the number of words you have for emotions, How well regulated you are as a human being. Mm-hmm. And the English language, I know this is a global audience, but the English language has like 150,000 words. It's got like five times as many words as any other language. And this is why it's so hard to learn.
But for those of us that do have the privilege of knowing English, we have so many amazing words for emotions. And it can be so fun to play with them and try to learn them. And again, like colors, like you learn first the primary colors. And then, you know, watching my daughter in preschool, like they're literally like learn what happens when you combine these with red and yellow together.
Oh, you get orange. It's like we have emotional blends too, and like really like wouldn't it be amazing if we started teaching emotional blends? The way we teach color blends and emotion wheels, like we teach color wheels. I mean, I don't, now I'm just really thinking about this stuff. But again, it can be, it can be fun.
It doesn't have to be boring. It doesn't have to be like, oh, my kid is in trouble. They need to learn this stuff. It's like, no, we can all learn this. And I think when we model it as parents, as you're saying, when we name what we're feeling, I'm feeling frustration with the traffic today. And I can tell cuz my heart is pounding.
Just dropping that in occasionally just helps kids start to be aware in a, in a really different way. And then they can learn how to regulate more effectively, make better choices with those emotions.
[00:21:06] Hunter: Um, yeah, I think a lot, sometimes parents come to me and they're afraid to name the feelings, right?
They're afraid to name the feelings in front of their kids, especially if they're feeling irritated at their child. Right? They're afraid that they don't wanna, they don't wanna dump their feelings on their kids. Right. Which is a natural fear. And, and we don't wanna do that. Right? We don't wanna like dump all our stuff on our kids.
We wanna have friends and, and therapists and people that we can talk to about big issues. But then I, but what I think is, so I important to understand, like for parents, when we think about this idea of. Like our emotions and our kids, and that if, if we're feeling irritated with our kids and we're starting to get to that point of feeling frustrated, our kids can see it anyway.
Like they have amazing BS meters. They can feel what they can see anyway. And so then if we start to say, no, no, I'm fine. I'm calm. I'm calm, whatever. Like mm-hmm. They're, they're, they're like, they start to not trust us, right. And not believe what we're saying. And they also learn like that it's not okay to have these feelings, but if we can then Right.
Name the feelings, if we can say, I'm feeling certain, to feel really frustrated. And then for us, oh, it's like this bell of awareness, right? And that's what you're talking about, right? Is tuning into awareness rather than distraction, which I think is. So, so needed. Right? But this, this bell of awareness for us, and then we can say, oh, that, name it to Tam, it kicks in where it's like it takes down the temperature.
We can start to, we can start to get off the, the track towards losing it and onto a, a calmer track. And then if our kids watch that, that's brilliant. Right? That's exactly what they need,
[00:22:43] Chris Willard: right? Absolutely. Absolutely. And it's that like, I'm feeling frustrated and I love you and I need to take a few breaths.
It's like saying, naming it, modeling what we're feeling, telling them that emotions are safe, that they don't mean that we're gonna never speak to them again. That we can feel two things at once, love and frustration, and showing them a skill for how we're managing that emotion. That's not addiction or distraction or self-harm or avoidance or those other things we fall into, but.
I'm doing something that helps me manage this emotion, taking a breath or giving myself a moment to think or whatever it might be. So there's so many lessons happening when we make it explicit. And as you say, hunter, there's so many lessons happening when we avoid it, like, right, like, like you said, like when we repress that emotion, they can see it anyway.
There's still learning a lesson, but they're learning not the lesson we want them to learn. So we might as well try to make it explicit for them with, with what some of the process is. And then they see it and they absorb it and they learn how to manage their, as you said, their relationship to themselves and their relationship to other people, um, so much more effectively going forward.
[00:23:59] Hunter: My next conversation snippet is with Mr. Chaz, and he is a teacher and a podcaster and a talker, and he is a teacher of teachers that is helping adults truly see, guide, and trust their children. In this conversation, we're gonna talk about the idea of when kids are disrespectful and how to deal with those situations.
So if you have ever wondered that how to deal with disrespectful kids, this is the conversation for you.
[00:24:38] Mr Chazz: Yeah. You know, it is ongoing work of just unlearning, uh, lots of the mental models and strategies and ideas and, um, that. Are largely harmful, um, and kind of swapping it out for healthier, more helpful, uh, strategies. So it is an ongoing process. I always say avoid being a perfectionist, be an improve. This the, because the goal isn't to be perfect every day.
The goal is to improve a little every day. And a lot of times we get kind of bogged down in our own. Shame when we make mistakes, right? Especially a lot of people on this journey who are like, okay, I'm gonna break a lot of generational cycles. I am going to break all the generational cycles and then, hey, right.
Exactly. Today in this generation. And, and then what happens when we inevitably make mistakes or, um, we are not in the place that we hope to be, is that we beat ourselves up and we shame ourselves. And, um, that's one of the cycles that we really need to break. That, you know, mistakes are a part of the learning process.
Um, you know, we see our practice, conscious discipline, and we always say, oops, uh, stands for our opportunity to problem solve. And so it's a real, it's, it's another paradigm shift that, uh, we have to start to learn and start to
[00:26:07] Hunter: practice. I love that. Oops, is our opportunity to problem solve. That's really a great acronym.
I love that. Okay, so let's get into it. So what is happening? What's really going on when kids are being disrespectful?
[00:26:20] Mr Chazz: So that's kind of a two-part question. You know, cuz it's like, what is going on in them and then what is going on in us? Right? And you know, there's this thing called emotional contagion, which is a tendency that we have to kind of catch each other's emotions.
What happens a lot of times because children are, you know, because of their brain development, they're not able to self-regulate like US adults. The capacity for self-regulation is limited and you know, uh, A lot of times us as adults are, you know, because we have fully formed brain that if you're above the age of 25, 26, you have the capacity for self-regulation.
But you still might struggle with the ability for self-regulation cuz it might not be something that you practice. Uh, it's something that most of us haven't grown up with it. This might be the first time you're really hearing about it. Um, for children, their capacity for self-regulation is very limited.
So a lot of times something in their environment triggers them. It could be, uh, the frustration of. Something that happens with the pier, with the friend. It could be the frustration of not being able to put a puzzle piece in a, uh, in a puzzle. It could be the frustration of us telling them no for, you know, wanting to go outside or wanting to have dessert, or wanting to have more screen time.
But whatever it is, they get triggered and they get kind in their emotions. They might feel disappointed or frustrated and they act out their emotions. And a lot of times, sometimes young children have more of a tendency to act out their emotions physically. Um, as we get older, we get a little bit better and we're able to act out our emotions.
I mean, and sometimes some of us, a lot of us, especially depending on trauma, will still act out our emotions physically, um, you know, through things. Behaviors, like sometimes hitting or pushing, um, you know, behaviors like that. But as we get older, A lot of us that kind of lashing out of the emotion comes out a lot of times more verbally, right?
And it comes out sometimes with blaming, sometimes name calling, attacking, uh uh, gossiping, all these things. Um, And sometimes it's, and especially with us adults, it comes out in the form of pissing someone out. Right? Um, it is us really kind of discharging our emotion on another person. Now we want to teach children to self-regulate, to recognize what they're feeling, to regulate, and then have a kind of a better, more helpful response.
They're not able to do that yet. So what comes out is, you know, they may or may not cuss this out, but it's like, it might be a, I hate you mom, or I don't like you, whatever it is. Um, yeah. Or the attitude, right? And, and attitude. Right. And then we interpret that as disrespect. And because of all the way that a lot of us were brought up is like, you can't tolerate disrespect.
Like, no, don't talk back to me like these. Phrases are ingrained, programmed into our mind. So a lot of times that becomes our reaction. The same reaction that we received is a reaction that we give back to children in these moments. And so that we are kind of programming them with the same kind of like, if you, if I perceive you're disrespecting me, then I have to lash back out at you, right?
Mm-hmm. And so what happens is the child catches the emotion, they put it on the adult because of, they don't really have, they're still learning the process of self-regulation. The capacity of self-regulation is limited. And they, so they put it on us adult because, and then we, because we're the adult and we've been kind of programmed as children to like not tolerate disrespect and.
Disrespect has to be met with aggression. We then put our emotions back on the child and becomes this vicious cycle of just us really just kind of really just attacking each other, verbally, um, or with aggression or with power, uh, to try to get our way. And it's kind of ironic because our intentions are trying to, are really, they're trying to kind of shut down the behavior or teach them that, Hey, this isn't the way that you get what you want.
But simultaneously we, because we're not getting what we want. Right? Maybe it's an obedient, compliant child in the moment we are doing the same thing that they're doing that we don't want them to do, right? We're just lashing out with our emotions. Instead of what we would hope that they would do is to take a moment to breathe to, to, to do some perspective taking, to maybe have a conversation and collaborate on how we can kind of move forward, right?
Or maybe just express their emotions and how they're feeling and get help kind of dealing with them. That's what we'd hope for them to do, but we don't model that. So how will they ever learn how to deal with their emotions if when we get triggered and again, in our emotions, we're doing the same thing that we don't want them to do.
Right? And so that is what's happening in these moments of disrespect. Um, and nothing is, nothing is taught. Nothing is, and now, What we really want to teach is how to yes. Self-regulate, but also how to advocate for yourself in a more helpful way without attacking someone. Right? Yeah. And there's no opportunity to do that if our reaction to their reaction is aggression and I will not tolerate this disrespect.
Um, you need to go in the corner and think about what you did if we're meeting their, uh, emotional dysregulation, uh, with just really verbally attacking them.
[00:32:14] Hunter: My next conversation was with Kathy and Todd Adams. I love them so much. They are co-hosts of the Zen Parenting Radio podcast, which is great. And Kathy Adams is the author of Zen Parenting. She's a clinical social worker and yoga teacher, and she teaches and in the sociology criminology department at Dominican University.
Todd Adams is the co-founder and executive director of Men Living and a Life and Leadership Coach for Men. He is a member of the Mankind Project and a blogger for The Good Men Project. Todd and Kathy are married and are the parents of three wonderful teenage daughters. In this clip of our conversation, Kathy and Todd and I talk about what does Zen Parenting mean and how do we deal with the stress and uncertainty of Parenting?
[00:33:13] Cathy Todd: Two different things I wanna say, like, why Parenting is stressful. Um, why wouldn't it be? Um, there's, it's constantly uncertain. It's constantly changing. Um, you are in charge of other people. Uh, you can't control other people's behavior. It's un, you know, so there's a million reasons why it's stressful and, but it's interesting, the word zen, um, it doesn't really mean calm, it just means that you are allow for that uncertainty that you pay attention to the moment and that you know that everything changes all the time.
So, you know, our description of the word zen, it often people kind of take it to mean like that everything is chill when really the truth about zen is everything is paradoxical. So it's an acceptance of that constantly changing situation, which is Parenting. I think
[00:34:06] Todd Adams: I'll add to that, uh, our kids are really good and generally speaking at forcing us to look at things that we haven't had to look at in either a long time or ever.
So they're just really good at finding our triggers, forcing us if we're going to do it the way I think we should do it and look in the mirror and Cathy and talk a lot about self-awareness. But, uh, yeah, our kids are really good at finding just the right thing to help us grow or drive us nuts depending on what point of view you're
[00:34:30] Hunter: talking from.
Yeah, I completely agree. And in fact, the reason I found you guys in the beginning, and I probably told you this before, was that I was actually looking for like Zen Buddhists, like Zen Medi Zen Parenting. And I found, I found you, which you are Zen Parenting. So if, if Zen Parenting, if zen is that everything's changing and we're accepting it and things like that, then what does, then, what does Zen Parenting mean to you and what does it look like?
Because that sounds like very broad.
[00:35:01] Todd Adams: Hopefully this helps, but it's just noticing, noticing cuz there's no zen, kind of what Kathy said. We get, we get emotional, we get frustrated, we get happy, we get sad, we get reactive. And it's just the idea of do we have the discipline, do I have the discipline to notice when I'm in this reactionary place versus having the ability to respond and how do we do that?
Um, lots of different ways, but my best way is breathing consciously and I rarely do it. I know that that's what I'm supposed to do. It's really hard to remember. So that's my
[00:35:34] Hunter: 2 cents.
[00:35:35] Cathy Todd: Yeah. And on the other side of that, like Todd's talking about how we, how we take care of ourselves as parents, how we make ourselves a priority and focus on self-awareness.
And focus on our ability to be emotionally, um, regulated or at least emotionally agile. Where we're moving from. You know, we're kind of moving into different places in our emotions, but it's also about noticing our kids. So, you know, the practice starts with us, but the, the zen aspect of it is, are we paying atten attention to the people in front of us?
Because a lot of times we have a belief about what our kids, what they should be like, or what we think they will be like, or how they are like their siblings. But really our kids are their own unique people. They are not us. They are not their siblings and they aren't the kid down the street. We have this kid that we have to pay attention to who has their own unique needs.
And being in that frame of mind where you're not boxing your children in to be something other than what they are, is an aspect of zen as
[00:36:30] Hunter: well. Yeah. So it's like this seeing with fresh eyes, you're really talking about the, the mindfulness attributes of kindness and curiosity. Like not judging or not bringing in these preconceived notions, but just being available for what's here.
And that's really different from the way we normally live our lives, right? Like we're just all, you know, we're taking mental shortcuts cuz the brain wants to take mental shortcuts, right? We're, we're using labels, we're ahead in the future, we're trying to get things done and all of that stuff. So the idea of.
Being curious and, and being available and noticing that requires things like slowing down and stopping and questioning our, just the thoughts maybe that even pop into our head. And those are all things that like we don't normally do on a regular basis. Yeah.
[00:37:19] Cathy Todd: And it's, it's about, you know, you're so right, hunter, that we're trained, you know, through our educational experiences, through our career experiences, that there's a path, there's a right way.
There's an absolute answer. There's, and we are, our brains are trained to believe there is a way things should be going. And versus we become parents and we literally have to like, you know, go backwards and be like, now wait a second, there are no absolutes here. There is no exact answer. Everything is paradoxical.
And so instead it's like you said, we just have to be curious. And that's why, you know, as far as mindfulness when it comes to Parenting, um, you know, if we're just gonna break down mindfulness like we did Zen, it's just about being here. It's just about paying attention to this thing, to doing this thing Now, rather than having all these long-term goals and plans, we can have goals, but we also have to be able to realize that they may not, things may shift as we go along because.
We're again, getting to know this human in front of us and we're changing as
[00:38:20] Todd Adams: parents too. Well, and I'll add to that, um, I, when I get reactive, I'm usually worrying about what this kid's gonna turn into in 10 years, or it's reminding me of some unresolved issue that I have with my dad or something like that.
So like, to Kathy's point, if we could just focus on the now moment, what's in front of us. Um, it's a lot, I don't wanna say easier, but it's the, it's just a little bit, I don't know, I guess it's easier. Um, and the other thing I was gonna bring up is I also think that I, and my guess is other parents, uh, forget what it's like to be a kid.
Like I haven't been a kid in a long time. As much as I would love to say I continue to be childlike. Um, one is, it's, it's hard to remember what it's like to be in seventh grade. Like, I don't know who told us
[00:39:04] Hunter: this, Kathy, but I think I wanna block out seventh grade particularly actually. Yeah, right.
[00:39:08] Todd Adams: But just the idea of being in class, go, you know, school is like seven meetings in a row that you don't want to be in for the most part.
And I hate, I can't say I'm being in one meeting in a row that I don't like being in. And the other thing is we don't know what it's like to be a kid. Cuz being a kid in 2023 is so much different than it was when we were growing up in the seventies and the
[00:39:28] Hunter: eighties. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's true. And so like, so to that difference, like you're, you know, you've practiced Zen Parenting, you know, for a long time.
Is it, is it really different from the way you started out or even from the way you were raised? Like have you, did you have to like shift old patterns from your own childhood? Yes.
[00:39:50] Cathy Todd: Um, we're like, uh, yeah. Um, and, and not necessarily because there's some big grand story about it. It's just, I think the thing that I had to understand about my childhood is that my parents were doing what they knew how to do, and in many ways they did things wonderfully.
There was, you know, I, I took so many beautiful things from my childhood and I liked my childhood, but I also was very misunderstood in my childhood. I was very sensitive. I was very emotional. My parents didn't know what that was all about. And my mom, uh, unfortunately my, my parents have both passed away, but they, you know, both said, you know, as I was getting into this work, like we didn't really get you when you were little, you know?
So I had to resolve a lot of that in myself to recognize that the things that I was experiencing as a kid as being sensitive, it was okay because as a kid, of course, I thought it wasn't, and I thought that I was too different or that I needed to be like everybody else. And so I obviously had to work through that.
And then, um, You know, well, Todd, you go ahead and then I can, well, and
[00:40:48] Todd Adams: I guess I'll speak to how I think our Parenting has evolved, like, and bless everybody out there that does all these different Parenting techniques. But, you know, I, I think we did timeouts early on and then we realized timeouts or not something that we were a big fan of.
Instead, let's have a discussion whether. The kid is two year olds, two years old, or seven years old. So we, and you know, I remember being super reactionary and I just shared on our podcast like the last few weeks, my, one of my least proud Parenting moments was I was really reactive and agitated at my, like, three-year-old daughter.
And she wasn't cooperating, getting her in a car seat. And I like, kinda like put her in, in a really aggressive manner and it just, it woke me up like, oh my God, who am I? If I am, you know, this kid is doing the best that she can and yet I am putting her in the car seat in an aggressive manner. So I think, and the only way I learned that is by making mistakes and doing it.
So I hope Kathy and I, the way we parented is we made plenty mistakes. We're gonna make plenty more, but the whole idea is, can we learn from it and grow from it and evolve through it?
[00:41:56] Hunter: Stay tuned for more Mindful Mama podcast right after this break.
My next conversation is with the raising good humans every day. Board writer, Dr. Shali. And of course, Dr. Shali is the author of her own amazing books, New York Times Bestsellers, conscious Parenting, the Awakened Family, and More. Dr. Shali received her doctorate in clinical psychology from Columbia University, and she specializes in the integration of western psychology and eastern philosophy.
She is an expert in family dynamics and personal development and teaches courses around the globe. In this conversation, we talk about our, the wounds that we bring to Parenting that we may have from our own childhood, and how sometimes we can collide with our children and they trigger us. We're gonna talk about what we can do as parents when our children want to be seen and heard, when their needs bump up against our own insecurities.
[00:43:10] Dr. Shefali: Just because our children come from us biologically doesn't mean we are psychologically ready able, or capable to handle them, especially in today's modern world where we don't live in tribes. You know, at least back then, I, I like to nostalgically, imagine that if I'm a crazy mom, at least my sister may be a good step in.
Or my aunt. Right? But now we have nobody. It's just one crazy or two crazy people dealing with these children. So that's the tragedy. And because our bodies knew what to do doesn't mean we know what to do. Big difference. Right? So, to answer your question, children do not evoke wounds in us. We have wounds in us that we allow to remain unhealed, which then naturally collide with our children in their raising, and then we blame them for doing something to us, for triggering
[00:44:07] Hunter: us.
And so these are like the generational patterns, right? That are coming through. Like we may have a wound from our C child, that hood, that then this, we're in this relationship again, and therefore it's like coming out. Correct.
[00:44:20] Dr. Shefali: So we, we come with the, we, we are, uh, we've grown up with these insecurities, not feeling seen, not feeling hard, not feeling good enough.
We entered the Parenting journey with those quote unquote wounds with those holes, H O L E Ss. And because we have these holes, our children, by just being children, by being needy, by wanting us to see them, by wanting us to consider them significant collide against our wounds. Because we as children, were not seen as good enough or felt significant.
So now we have like children who genuinely need to be seen colliding with our quote unquote inner children who were never seen. And then we are competing with each other. You don't respect me. You don't, you know, give me, you're not listening to me. We act like toddlers. I dunno whether you remember. Oh, I remember boiling.
You remember doing tantrums? Exactly. Like if our toddler said, Manni, I hate you. We fell apart and it was a three-year-old talking nonsense. Right. But we took it so literally, Because we were so primed for rejection that our children can reject us. That's really sad that a two-year-old can reject us, that we feel disrespected by a two-year-old.
How can that be? Right? If you really, now our children are grown up and we look back and we go, my goodness, did I really think my two-year-old was actually disrespecting me? Obviously, now we realize that the two year old simply didn't know any better. I see in my book the Parenting Map, this is my new book, the Parenting Map, that children misbehave for only three reasons.
Only three reasons. Number one is lack of skill because they don't yet have a brain brain developed yet, and neither do we, frankly. But they definitely have major gaps. And the second reason is lack of practice because they haven't lived long enough. And number three is lack of worth. So pick one of these reasons and each one of these reasons should, if you are in a state of adulthood, Evoke compassion, not punishment, not screaming and yelling.
The reason we scream and yell is because our wounds collide with the genuine needs of our children. Our children are not wounded. They're genuinely needy because they can't sustain themselves, but their neediness collides against our unmet needs, and that's where there's a huge clash. And because we've been told that children should not make us feel anything but good, right?
We think that they should just make us feel good about ourselves when we end up feeling bad, instead of going within to examine our wounds, which is what my work teaches. Like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You are angry with your child. Not because your child did something so criminal and heinous. You are angry with your child because you have issues.
We need to look at them. But we don't do that work because we've been told it's not us. We're amazing. We're perfect. It must be the child. So we rage, scream, slap, yell at our children. It's from this perverted way of looking at this dynamic that it all begins.
[00:47:33] Hunter: Yeah. Yeah. We have to, we have to fix them. I was with, um, my cousin and, and her two-year-old and her, uh, grown adult, um, stepdaughter, and the two year old just wanted to like, just was done with dinner, had too much beans in the brands.
They wanted to get out and move and they wouldn't, so they were whining, fussing. They wanted to stay in the high chair, and they wearing, he was whining and fussing and it got to the point where they felt like he had to be put in a timeout, you know? And I watched, I could see his dysregulation happen, you know, I could see him, you know, he's two, he can't, he's just feeling so upset and, you know, and.
And I, I was observing and just thinking about this idea of like, you know, this is a pattern, right? This is a, these are just a, this is like a thought process of like, we have to, we have to do this so that he can, that it's really the, i, it's really doing like kind the exact thing that your child doesn't need because you want your child to be able to regulate themselves and you feel like you have that, that that has to happen and that that's a hard process for everybody to.
Wrap their heads around, I think, to understand like the thing that I thought was doing what I wanted that it to do is doing exactly the opposite. And that can be like, and what you say in a lot in your book and in a lot of what you teach is very eye-opening this way. And it can be very hard for parents to accept.
And this idea that this idea that we're, we're focusing on the wrong things. And do you find that it's, do you find that parents have a lot of, um, difficulty accepting some of these ideas that you're, you're opening our eyes to, oh my
[00:49:17] Dr. Shefali: goodness, I get so much, you know, blatant resistance and shut down, uh, to my ideas.
Because parents, again, because of their narcissism and their self-absorption in a way, because they've been told that once you're a parent, you are in charge of your children, you are in control. You get to decide that your children, it's inconceivable to us. That our children are sovereign beings, and it's inconceivable to us that we could be doing the exact wrong things that actually work against our goals.
So here we are. Most parents will say that our goal in life for our children, for our children is to raise children who are self-empowered and are leaders just not at home. Right? Just not at home. So whenever we shut down our children in this blatant disregard, yes, we may get immediate compliance in the moment, but what we don't see is that we're also going to get a huge problem later on.
Because when you suppress another human being over and over and over again, there's a chance they will end up doing one of two things, either turning toward themselves in violent ways, attacking themselves because they'd been so attacked. Or attacking others. So they may become the compliant, timid, you know, tiger in the cage who just never leaves their corner.
And you may think you've won, but you haven't because you've killed their spirit. Or you may get the tiger who wants to eat you one day and leave your house and never come home, and in which case you've lost again. But parents don't see that untold damage and that hidden damage that is being caused because again, we've not been trained to look beneath the surface.
We've been just trained to look at the form of, am I being listened to? Am I being heard? Is the A grade on the report card? Is my child making a lot of money? Is my child fitting in? That's all we've been trained to see and we've, you know, we've not understood the emotional repercussions that are underfoot, which will show up later on in life.
[00:51:40] Hunter: And my final conversation in this sort of sampler pack of the Raising Good Humans Summit is with another person. I feel happy to call a friend. Now. This is Alyssa Blas Campbell. She's the founder and c e O of Seed. And so an organization committed to giving parents, teachers and caregivers the tools to raise emotionally intelligent humans.
An emotional development expert with a master's degree in early education. Alyssa co-created the collaborative Emotion Processing Method with Lawrence Stale and researched it across the United States, and she hosts the Voices of Your Village podcast. In this club, you'll hear about the collaborative emotion processing method and how we can do it in stressful times.
[00:52:39] Alyssa Blask-Campbell: We're social beings, right? And so much of what we do is social and commun, uh, and based in community. And we know that that's how we thrive, um, as humans. And yet with emotions. So many of us learned the like, oh, but this should be done by yourself cuz it's shameful. Um, it should be hidden, it should be tucked away.
Don't talk about it, don't express it out loud. Um, pretend you don't feel that way. And so we were naming it very appropriately. We said, no, is this collaborative emotion processing and that my body's gonna respond to what your body's doing and vice versa. And so when we outlined the SEP method, c e p, SEP, uh, we, it's five components.
Four of them are about us as the adult and one is adult child interactions. This is what I felt like I was missing of my master's in early adds. Surrounded by social emotional curriculums and all these like workshops and social emotional learning. And so much of it was about the adult child interaction.
What do you say to the kid inside the moment or outside? And it sounded great when I was sitting in a workshop and in a regulated state and like, yep, this makes total sense. And then in the moment I couldn't apply it in the moment I was triggered. In the moment I felt out of control in the moment I wasn't able to access regulation.
And then I would go through feeling guilty or ashamed of like, I know that I'm supposed to be doing this differently and I'm not actually doing it differently in practice. And so when we were creating the set method, that was really intentional there. The four parts that are about us are self-awareness, building our own awareness of what am I feeling, where do I feel it, what's going on for me today?
How did I sleep last time I ate? Am I in an argument with my partner? What's going on for me and how is it, how am I feeling uncovering implicit biases? This is where we're diving into what's coming up from my childhood, my social programming, what did I hear about these feelings or this situation or defiant or respect?
Um, and then what might be triggered in this moment based off of that. And as we get to know those parts of ourselves that are coming up in the moment, it becomes so much easier to have compassion for those parts and rewrite
[00:54:58] Hunter: this script. And I wanna just jump in here because what you're describing is so much like what I teach in Mindful Parenting and about recognizing, allowing, accepting these feelings and, and investigating them and things like that.
And this, um, this piece about, you know, our implicit bias and things like that. And it sounds like, I can imagine the, you know, the person watching this and saying, parent watching this and saying, wow, that sounds like a lot of stuff to do in a moment where I'm feeling, you know, whatever with my kid. But I'm, I'm gonna just jump in here because I know that as you start to kind of go through this process in a slow way, in a different moment, and then you start to do it and then it be starts to become this like sort of habit.
And then you can be in the moment and you can be like, oh, hello. That old issue with not being listened to and Hello. I see you there. I see you there. Okay, that's what's happening. I'm breathing, I'm gonna colonize stress response. So it's not, it can be something that can happen at first in, you know, like 15 minutes and then later in like 30 seconds.
And I imagine that you've had that exact experience, Alyssa.
[00:56:15] Alyssa Blask-Campbell: That's exactly, and I think of it kind of like when I was first landing to drive, and I remember going out with my dad and being in the car and being like, oh my God, there's so many things to pay attention to. Like there's so much going on. Like there were so many different things and do I need the lights on yet?
And like when do I move things? When do I put this turn signal on? How close until I'm at, like when I'm gonna turn and like, how do I cut this turn? Like there were so many decisions to make. There was so much and it all felt really new. And then as I drove more and more, it just kind of became second nature, where now I'm not thinking like, I'm gonna turn up here.
When do I put the turn signal on? It just happens as a part of me driving consistently. And that's the same with this work that as we're doing it more and more and we start to get to know these different parts of us and like, oh yeah, there's the part of me that, uh, is really afraid that if my child is defiant, they won't be lovable because that's what I learned in childhood for myself was that defiance was not lovable.
It makes total sense that it's showing up right now as my kid is being defiant, like makes total sense. And that whole thought process, you're right, happens in 30 seconds and you don't go into the whole like, oh yeah, makes sense. It's showing up here isn't as long as it is at the beginning. And the really hard part about this is that we can't pull from a toolbox we don't have, and we build those toolboxes, not in these moments, but outside of them.
When you're in a hard moment, when your survival brain is on, when that kid is melting an aisle four of the grocery store, like inside, you are also melting. This is another part of the set method is the scientific knowledge of mirror neurons. When they're melting, you're melting in the same way that when a baby has a delicious laugh, like you also feel with that oxytocin, that's like the best sound when that toddler is melting on i L four.
You're not building new skills right now. Right now is where we're going to pull from the toolbox of the skills we've built outside of these moments. Yes. And so a lot of our work in, in the set method is helping you learn how to build these tools outside of the moment without dedicating your whole life like we all are Also living.
Mom over here again. I'm like, yeah, okay. And that's spare five minutes. I never have, like how do I do that? And so part of the set method is looking at like, how do we build these skills outside of those big moments so that when you're in the moment, you have a tool to pull from. So often we're like in the tantrum or we're in the meltdown, and now we're trying to build a new skill.
And your survival brain's on and you're, uh, uh, prefrontal cortex. You're like rational thinking, problem solving. Brain is shut down intentionally.
[00:58:51] Hunter: Yep. You're lid. Yep.
[00:58:52] Alyssa Blask-Campbell: Yeah, exactly. And so like now is not the time to build a new skill. Now is the time to call on the skills you have already built. And we dive in into that in our work.
Um, it's like how do you build those skills
[00:59:04] Hunter: outside the moment? And what Alyssa's describing is like, these are all, all steps that we, the parent does, right? Like this, you know, collaborative, emotional processing. We're trying to like have something for our kids, right? We want them to be able to develop emotional intelligence.
And the first four steps are about you. And that makes so much sense. That's why, you know, I talk about this and raising good humans and raising good humans every day. And this is that, you know, we, we enter our, we enter our, with our kids, we have those mirror neurons. We are the, the most social species to ever become this earth, right?
So we feel each other's feelings. And that really plays into like how your child is developing those feelings, right? Is through this process of being with you, watching you, experiencing you feeling. You go through this process. Am I right? Yeah,
[00:59:58] Alyssa Blask-Campbell: absolutely. And our fourth part of the set method is self-care, which has also gotten so buzz pretty.
[01:00:03] Hunter: And, um, for us it's not like a night
[01:00:06] Alyssa Blask-Campbell: away or a weekend away, like maybe that also fills your cup. But for us, we're looking at. How do you support your nervous system all day? Yeah. Um, what does sensory overload look like for you? How does your unique sensory systems, how do those work? Like what are things that help your unique sensory systems calm?
What are things that you are sensitive to? Because we're gonna have different sensitivities, you and I, and we're gonna have different things that help us regulate. And so when we figure those things out, what we look at it as is like a battery where, um, if I unplug my phone, for instance, the minute I unplug it, the battery starts to drain whether I'm using it or not.
It starts to drain. There are certain apps that I'll drain it faster, uh, and we are looking at like, okay, what drains our battery faster and then what recharges us and how do we recharge throughout the day so that we're not getting to like a blinking red 10% left battery life and instead are staying ahead of it in the same way that we don't wait for a child to be hangry and then we feed them, or we don't wait for them to be overtired and then we try to put them to sleep.
We try to stay ahead of it and what would it look like to do this for ourselves and to prioritize that self-care? And then what are we modeling for kids? What are they learning about taking care of their nervous system and their regulation?
[01:01:31] Hunter: Thank you so much for listening to this episode. I mean, this was awesome for me. I loved having these conversations with. Carla Berg, Chris Willard, Mr. Chaz, Kathy and Todd Adams, Dr. Shefali and Alyssa Blas Campbell, I mean what amazing experts. And this is just the tip of the iceberg, my friend. There are more in the Raising Good Humans Summit, and you can sign up for free for the summit right now at Mindful Mama mentor.com/summit.
The summit will be running from July 11th through 14th, 2023. So, you know, join now and, uh, if this is in the future for you, you can get your two copies of raising good humans every day and listen to this summit in the future too. So, uh, go to Mindful Mama mentor.com/summit and pre-order now, if you're, if you're listening to this right when it comes out, pre-order raising good humans every day.
Pre-ordering is so important because it, it really helps the book's chances of success enormously because it encourages the larger retailers to increase their orders. So it'll actually be there in bookstores when they wanna get it. And then post-release, those pre-order sales count as part of the first week sales.
And this allows the book to, you know, launch and climb into the rankings of the bestseller lists, which guarantee continued sales because it's one of the best things that can happen to a book cuz people who have never heard of it, might have never considered buying it will go out and buy it because it's on this list.
So if you wanna support the Mindful Mama podcast, if you wanna support this book, get your two copies now. And to thank you, we're gonna give you all of these awesome 16 conversations for the Raising Good Human Summit. That you can keep and return to again and again. And these conversations include all the guests we have here.
Plus, I'll be talking to Shauna Shapiro, I'll be about compassion talking to Dr. Diana Hill, about a c t I'll be talking to Gabo Mate and more. So there's such an awesome lineup and um, I hope you will get your copy of raising Good Humans every day. I'm so proud of this book. I love it. I think it's so readable and accessible.
I'm so excited to be able to share more than I was able to share in raising good humans and expand into so many different areas. So I think you'll love it just for the book itself. But then you'll get the Awesome Summit too. So win, win, win, you might as well. And if you'd love this episode, please do me a favor, share it on your Instagram stories.
Tag me in it at Mindful Mama mentor, and uh, you might as well file Follow me there and you'll get some. Mindful Parenting inspiration. And, and that's it. I'm wishing you a really great week. Um, next week we have some of the awesome guests from the summit, um, who I'm doing a full podcast with next week, and then you'll hear me talk about raising good humans every day pretty soon as well on the podcast too.
So there's lots of awesome stuff coming up. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I hope that it's helping ground you, get your feet on the ground and give you some perspective, um, on this journey, this challenge, this incredibly hard and bumpy road that is Parenting. And, uh, as you go into this, as you take this all in, please remember, you don't have to do it perfectly.
You know, we're going for good enough and that's, that's where we are. So, I mean, looking back on my own experience, truly good enough is all the best we can do. So, I hope you have a great week. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for listening and being part of this community, and I wish you ease. I wish you rest.
I wish you peace and hugs and all those good things and I'll talk to you again soon, next week. Thank you so much for listening. Stay.
[01:05:36] Cathy Todd: I'd say definitely do it. It's really helpful. It
will
[01:05:38] Hunter: change your relationship with
[01:05:39] Alyssa Blask-Campbell: your kids for the
[01:05:40] Hunter: better. It will help you communicate better and just I'd say communicate better as a person, as a wife, as a spouse, it's
[01:05:47] Cathy Todd: been really a positive influence in our lives, so definitely do it.
[01:05:52] Hunter: I'd say definitely do it.
It's so worth it. The money really is inconsequential when you get so much benefit from being a better parent to your children and feeling
[01:06:03] Alyssa Blask-Campbell: like you're
[01:06:03] Hunter: connecting more with them and not feeling like you are yelling all the time, or you are like, why isn't things working? I would say definitely do it.
It's so, so worth it. It'll change you no matter what age
[01:06:15] Cathy Todd: someone's child is. It's a great
[01:06:18] Hunter: opportunity for personal growth and it's great investment in someone's family. I'm very thankful I have this. You can continue in your old habits that aren't working, or you can learn some new tools and gain some perspective to shift.
Everything
[01:06:34] Carla Naumburg: in your Parenting,
[01:06:39] Hunter: are you frustrated by Parenting? Do you listen to the experts and try all the tips and strategies, but you're just not seeing the results that you want? Or are you lost as to where to start? Does it all seem so overwhelming with too much to learn? Are you yearning for community people who get it, who also don't want to threaten and punish to create cooperation?
Hi, I'm Hunter Clarkfield, and if you answered yes to any of these questions, I want you to seriously consider the Mindful Parenting membership. You'll be joining hundreds of members who have discovered the path of Mindful Parenting and now have confidence and clarity in their Parenting. This isn't just another Parenting class.
This is an opportunity to really discover your unique lasting relationship, not only with your children, but with yourself. It will translate into lasting connected relationships, not only with your children, but your partner too. Let me change your life. Go to. Mindful Parenting course.com to add your name to the wait list, so you will be the first to be notified when I open the membership for enrollment.
I look forward to seeing you on the inside, Mindful Parenting course.com.
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