coaching for parents

One thing I notice about parents is that when kids struggle – they’re suffering, acting out, hostile, or unmotivated, I often see parents react in two ways:

— They get weighed down under the burden of solving the situation

— They get into a state of upset themselves, like panic, blame, shame, insecurity, regret, fear, or intensity.

It’s 100% understandable and something I’ve done myself as a parent.

But these reactions can build momentum and silently become chronic, creating parents that are destabilized, worn out, and pressured to fix a problem they can’t necessarily solve or control right away, if at all.

That means that every time the kid struggles, the parent reacts by going into their own struggles. It can be exhausting for parents and it puts them in a perpetual state of duress.

Sometimes there are no easy or immediate answers. As parents we have to play the long game, and we need to be able to evolve and adapt.

And in order to evolve parents need to step back from the upset and urgency and look at things with a different lens and a new perspective. That’s a big part of what I do.

But I also teach them what it takes to stay out of the upset, pressure, and urgency more consistently. That allows them to find their common sense, clarity, faith, and most important of all, the pioneering spirit that parenting requires.

While we can’t control or fix our kids, we can control how often and how much we land in reactive states ourselves. The better the parent’s own state of mind, the more creative, persistent, assertive, strong, and confident he/she will become. And that’s where all the power lives.