Episode 341 Transcript
**As referenced in the episode: Join the “Daily Lift” for $1!**
Hello, it is Rachel and welcome to episode 341 of Your Parenting Long Game.
As you can tell by the number of this podcast episode, I do have hundreds of episodes and many strategies that I teach parents who are raising kids with big emotions. And in some ways, it’s a good thing that there are so many strategies because honestly, there are very few things that kids with big emotions will do that I can’t help parents with because I do have so many strategies.
But on the other hand, the fact that there are so many strategies can be overwhelming and often parents will feel stuck in knowing what to do next, especially when you’ve tried all the things and nothing seems to be working consistently.
So I have advice for parents who are thinking, “What is something I can do right now that will help bring more peace to my home and hopefully in the long run, foster more resilience in my children?”
And it’s a great question because most parents when they come to me or when they’re listening to my podcast, are on this journey to support their kids with big emotions. They may want to become parents who can bring more peace to their home so emotions are no longer in charge and who can teach children to handle the fact that life isn’t always going to go their way? This comes from leadership parenting. Again, a lot of parents are in this place where they’re not making progress toward becoming a leader parent because they are in a place that I call being “buckled in.”
So let me tell you what I mean by being “buckled in.”
As a parent of a child or children with big emotions, you’re probably navigating a lot of issues. Maybe getting them out of the house in the morning can be really dramatic because your kids are arguing, or maybe one of them is really cranky and irritable.
Maybe in your home, you’re dealing with a lot of anxiety where you have a child who’s refusing to do something that’s uncomfortable or they’re really inflexible and need things to go a certain way.
Maybe you’re dealing with resistance when you ask your child to do simple things like doing their homework or putting their dishes away.
Maybe your child is disrespectful to you or to their peers, or even to themselves saying, “I never do anything right,” or “Why am I so stupid?”
Chances are, you’re dealing with a lot of these dramatic situations.
I often equate parenting kids with big emotions to going through a jungle where stressful things can happen at any time and you don’t always know what’s going to happen or what’s going to pop up or what’s going to go wrong or when.
But if you were facing this jungle and someone told you that they had a map that could get you through that jungle more easily with less pain and less misery, and if they promise that same map could also get you to the other side of the jungle…You’d probably want that map, wouldn’t you?
Well, I can tell you that I have created these maps to get you through pretty much anything you and your family are facing as you’re raising a child with big emotions — a child who’s anxious or sensitive or strong-willed or inflexible. But even though these maps exist, it can be hard to use them.
Why? Because you’re stuck. You’re experiencing the stress of the jungle, but you’re not able to move through the jungle effectively. You’re not able to move through the stressful situations that you experience, and you’re definitely not able. And you’re definitely not able to get to the other side of the jungle.
Instead, you may not be really moving at all. You may feel stuck, almost like there’s a van inside this jungle, and you’re not able to even use the map because you’re stuck inside of the van. You’re in your seat with the seatbelt on. That’s how stuck you feel.
And this is what I refer to and this feeling of stuckness of not being able to move forward is what I refer to when I say that you are “buckled in,” you’re buckled in with that seatbelt and cannot move forward.
The scary animals and the stinging insects of the jungle are still there, but you can’t get out of the van to take those first steps and use the map that will guide you through the jungle and get you to the other.
What that means in real life is that you may still be experiencing the stress of raising kids with big emotions.You’re feeling trapped and stuck. You don’t see progress in being able to diffuse situations, and you certainly don’t see progress in making the drama less likely to happen. You feel powerless because you are still “buckled in.”
So you may know if you are in this place of being buckled in, if you’re still stuck in that seatbelt, if you feel like you’ve all these stressors as you’re raising your children. Nothing seems to be working to get you through them effectively. At least nothing seems to be working consistently.
You don’t know how to navigate these situations where there’s drama in the morning or your child is anxious or they’re being disrespectful to themselves or others.
You’re also buckled in when you’ve read all the things, listened to all the podcasts, tried all the strategies, but you don’t see long-term progress. And it’s not only not getting better, but it’s possibly starting to get worse. It’s affecting you day to day, and maybe even it’s affecting the relationships in your family and what you’re able to do.
Maybe you can’t even go to the events that you’re invited to, or you can’t go on vacations that you want to because you’ve tried so many things, but there’s still so much stress and drama. If this is the case for you, that means you are still “buckled in.”
So how do you get unbuckled? I can tell you, it’s a lot easier than you think.
I know this because I’ve been helping families for 13 years, thousands of families, get to the other side of the jungle, to the place where their homes are more peaceful and more connected, and kids can be more flexible and resilient. So I’m going to tell you how to get unbuckled and why it’s much easier than you think.
But I actually want to start with the first step on that map that will get you through the jungle more easily and out to the other side.
That first step you need to take if you want more peace in your home is to start to see situations differently. If you’ve done any “self help” work, you’ve learned this before because it is a fact that the way you handle situations and the amount of stress you experience is based so much on the way you see the situation.
So for example, let’s say you have a child and they’re at soccer practice and there’s a little bit of drama at the soccer practice. Let’s say your child wasn’t playing well and they melted down in front of everybody.
How you see their meltdown is going to determine your reaction and how effectively you work through that stressor.
So let me explain that. Let’s say you see your child melting down and what you’re telling yourself, the way you see that situation is something like, “Oh my gosh, this is so embarrassing. I can’t believe my child is melting down! Everyone is staring at us!”
What happens when you think about the situation that way is you’re going to have a lot of negative energy as you approach your child. You’re probably going to try to control your child’s behavior to get it to stop. You’re going to try to get them to stop melting down or to be more mature, and the more you try to control them –because this is something bad that needs to end – the more they’re going to resist you and the worse things are going to get.
But there is another way to see or interpret the situation, and a lot of parents will say, “Well, isn’t it obvious that this is embarrassing and it needs to stop? Isn’t that objectively true?”
The reality is it’s not objectively true. You can see it and think about it differently. You could, instead of thinking, “This is so embarrassing, it needs to stop!” think something like this: “Oh, I know why my child is melting down and I know exactly how to handle it. People may be looking at me, but their judgment is only going to last maybe five minutes and my relationship with my child will last a lifetime.”
Now, when you approach a situation by seeing it this way, thinking about it as something you can handle and focusing on what your child needs and your relationship with your child, you are going to approach them with a much different energy.
And your child with big emotions is going to sense that better energy. You’re going to help them calm down more quickly and easily and move through the situation more effectively. How you see a situation is going to determine how you feel and how the situation goes. So again, the first step on the map that helps you navigate stressors more effectively and helps you get to the other side so you’re not dealing with them all the time, is to be aware of how you are seeing situations.
That is really the first step if you’re feeling overwhelmed or stuck to help you feel less stuck.
But what I find is that when I start to give parents this first step on the map, so many, most, I would say, still struggle. And that’s because you are still “buckled in.” And you are buckled in because of your own yuck.
Because when you do have a lot of yuck, when life and all these things are happening, you are tired and you’re overwhelmed. And when you are depleted, you are not going to be able to take this first step on the map. You are not going to be able to see situations differently. And of course, parenting kids with big emotions does take a lot out of us.
It affects our day-to-day living. It affects our relationships. It takes a lot of energy, and this doesn’t even begin to talk about all the other things we have going on in our lives besides parenting. We are often in a place of yuck where we’re depleted, we’re overwhelmed, and we can’t take that first step on the map.
So the bad news is that our yuck does prevent us from seeing situations differently. Our yuck does keep us buckled into the van so that we can’t even get out of the van to use the map and get through that jungle. But the good news is that getting unbuckled does not require very much energy, all it requires for you to be open to new messages.
All it takes is for you to take in messages that give you a little bit more hope and that feel a little less draining.
Because here’s the thing, we are telling ourselves thousands of thoughts every day. And thoughts are either keeping us stuck in our yuck, keeping us buckled in, or thoughts are getting us unstuck and “unbuckled.”
It is our thoughts that lead to yuck. It is our thoughts that buckle us in. And I learned this and saw this all the time during COVID.
Obviously there was a lot of struggle for a lot of people at that time, and I was struggling myself in the beginning as well, just like everybody else. I was watching the news.
I was feeling more and more hopeless and scared. But very early on during COVID, I happened to see this program that was put on by John Krasinski. I don’t know if you know who he is, but he’s an actor. He played Jim in “The Office,” and in real life, he seems to be a very funny guy, and he created this very amusing, engaging, positive news show.
And he started to talk about what people were doing to support each other during COVID. And what I found was that if I just watched a very few minutes of the show, if I was open to what he was saying, I felt a little bit later during the day.
I did this for two or three days, and I started to feel slightly less bad. And because I noticed that it only took a few minutes of the day to feel lighter, I started sharing different lighter messages with my clients every day, and my clients started telling me that for them too, just hearing one or two different messages started to make them feel lighter too.
They weren’t doing anything different yet, or taking any different action. They were just listening to different messages. It was so powerful.
So I want to give you one more example of this with a specific client, and I want to tell you what this has to do with you. I want to tell you about something very simple that you can do that doesn’t take a lot of energy if you feel stuck and overwhelmed and want to take that first step in getting unbuckled and feeling a little bit more lightness.
So this story is about a mom who came to me exhausted, depleted, and overwhelmed. She has a son with ADHD, and her son had big reactions whenever things didn’t go his way. Her son also had anxiety and his anxiety came out as anger.
Now, this mom had another child as well, but that child, she told me quite frankly, was much easier to raise. And unfortunately, her son with ADHD was being very mean to that child, and she was very protective.
She knew she wanted things to be better in her home, but she said to me, “Rachel, I have no energy left to do anything with my son who’s so difficult. I don’t have the energy to make the big changes that I know I have to make.”
This mom was buckled in. She was stuck in that seatbelt by the stressors. She couldn’t move through her jungle, and she could barely see the other side of the jungle, let alone believe that she could get there.
She just didn’t have the energy to make changes, so I asked her to just passively listen to what I called a “Daily Lift.” These were short messages that served as a reminder to her of what was really going on for her child, so she could see the world through his eyes and feel more connected.
All I asked her to do was to be open.
Importantly, the Daily Lifts also included reminders that she as a mom, as a person mattered too. A couple of the messages that she told me stood out because she was constantly doing things for other people. One of the Daily Lift messages was, “You are not required to set yourself on fire to keep others warm.” That message really resonated with her and reminded her that she didn’t have to sacrifice herself to make sure everyone else was okay.
Another one of the Daily Lifts that she really liked was, “Ask yourself what you are really responsible for.” And when she was open to this message, eventually she started remembering it and she started to let go of some of the burdens that she was holding onto.
So she had these daily messages coming in, and these messages literally took less than 30 seconds a day to read. She told me that when she first started reading these Daily Lift messages, nothing really happened. Day 1, day 2, day 3, she still felt really depleted, but she said by about day 5, she started to feel that lift.
By day 8, she felt different. She started approaching her son with a little bit of a different energy. She kept listening to the messages and she noticed that her energy slowly changed more and more, and because she was changing, her son’s resistance to her also decreased.
She told me that as she was listening to these Daily Lifts, some of the negative voices in her head started to decrease. Sure, she still had a lot of negative messages – the ones telling her it was so hard, things would never change. But she also heard the positive ones, the more hopeful ones come through, more and more. She had this new little voice mixed in that helped her feel lighter. It gave her the energy and the hope to get unstuck to unbuckle her seatbelt.
And this change happened with very little energy on her part because she wasn’t doing anything except reading messages. All she was doing was letting it in.
Truth be told, if she hadn’t done this, things would’ve just gotten worse. She would’ve lost more influence with her son. Her son would’ve felt worse about himself, and his behavior would’ve gotten worse. She would’ve felt more depleted, and a vicious downward spiral would’ve happened.
So I want you to think about this as well. I want you to think about the voices in your head and what they are telling you and what energy they lead you to. I want you to think about what you are telling yourself right now about your situation, because the bad news is that your brain believes what you tell it.
Your thoughts will keep you stuck, will tighten that seatbelt if you let it. But the good news is that your brain believes what you tell it, and you can loosen that seatbelt and get unstuck with a lot less energy than you think.
Now, I will tell you that because I know the impact that this has and because I know a lot of parents are struggling right now, I am bringing back the Daily Lifts and I am offering them to you.
I want to help you bring more lightness to your day to help you get unstuck. I’m going to offer this Daily Lift, which is going to be one message sent to you every day that helps you think about and see things differently.
And then once a week with all of the other parents who are getting these Daily Lifts. We’re going to have what I call a get unstuck or get unbuckled discussion. It’ll be a live 30 minute discussion where we talk about, first, what it’s really like to parent kids with big emotions, what our struggles are, what our stresses are, and you’re going to hear from a lot of parents who are going through very similar things to what you’re going through.
And then in the same 30 minute discussion, I’m going to help you get unstuck, or “unbuckled.” I’m going to ask you one question that will give you a little aha moment that you can take with you for the rest of the week as you continue to read your Daily Lifts. Now because this does take some time and resources to coordinate this Daily Lift and the weekly Get Unstuck live session will be $9 a month.
However, I’m going to give you a coupon code where you can try it for just $1 for the first month. I really want you to experience what this is like and the impact that this has in your life when all you do is read a Daily Lift.
And if you choose, come to the discussion, which will help you get unstuck.
So in the show notes for this episode, you will get the details for the Daily Lift and the weekly discussion as well as the coupon code that will help you try it for a dollar for the first month.
And if it isn’t helpful after the first month, you can cancel any time before it goes to $9 a month. I want you to think about this. If you don’t make a change, are things really going to get better? Probably not. You’re going to reinforce the thoughts that you already have in your head right now. They’re keeping you stuck.
You are going to tighten your seatbelt. On the other hand, when you take very little energy and you’re just open to hearing things, you will start to feel a change. You’ll start to feel lighter. You’ll start to be able to treat your children differently, which means that they are going to feel and act differently.
Things can be later and easier in the morning, in the afternoon, when your child is anxious, when your child is disrespectful. And it all starts with just a few sentences a day, a Daily Lift that can help give you the energy you need to eventually use that map that will get you through your metaphorical jungle with all of the stressors, get you through it more easily, and get you to the other side where there’s more peace, more connection, more laughter, and more positive memories than negative ones because you have become that leader parent who guides you and your children to this place.
This is how you get unstuck with less energy, and this is how you turn in the direction of becoming a Leader Parent. This is Long Gam Parenting
Again, all of the details for The Daily Lift and the Weekly Get Unstuck discussions are on the show notes for this episode at Rachel-bailey.com/341. Thanks for listening and I’ll see you again soon.
JOIN THE “DAILY LIFT” + WEEKLY “GET UNSTUCK” CONVERSATION FOR $1
