Real Happy Mom

Practical tips and encouragement for moms

Frustrated with Your Kids? 3 Communication Hacks for Peaceful Parenting

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“Why won’t my kids listen to me.”
“I wish my kids would listen and do what I ask for once!”
“Why I am constantly repeating myself to my kids to clean up. It’s like I’m talking to myself”

If every catch yourself saying these things or have these thoughts you have to listen to this episode.

My guest is Katherine Sellery, a three-time TEDx speaker, who has taught thousands of parents in a Conscious Parenting Revolution for resilient, considerate, centered, and empowered kids who know their inner voice and honor it. Katherine has been coaching parents, children, and executives on conscious communication for over 16 years.

In this episode she shares:

  • How to use a petri dish approach to our family when it comes to trying new things.
  • What is an authoritative parenting style and why is not as effective as you think.
  • How authoritative parenting leads to the 3 R’s that are secondary problems that you don’t want to deal with.
  • How to use a collaborative approach with your children.
  • What is means to actively listen.
  • How to teach our kids to be considerate.

After listening to this episode you will be clear on how to better parent and make your child feel heard. And ultimately improve your relationship with your kids so that they feel comfortable talking to you about their problems and fears.

Connect with Katherine

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Transcript of this episode

Real Happy Mom 0:00
Hey there. I’m Tony and I am a wife and a mom of two little boys. And I’m a general dentist and reservists in the Navy. And I get it when it comes to be a busy working mom, I struggled with the thoughts of feeling like I wasn’t good enough, and losing my identity and motherhood. So I get it. And this is why I created the Real Happy Mom. To be a Real Happy Mom, you have to remain authentic and true to yourself, and you don’t need to be a so called perfect mom. On the Real Happy Mom podcast, we’ll interview real moms to chat about real life experiences. These guests and experts will help you to navigate the motherhood journey by providing answers to your questions and concerns surrounding raising children, cell care competence, and so much more. We’ll have discussions that provide practical tips and resources that you can easily implement into your busy mom life. So if you’re ready to get rid of the overwhelm and start being a Real Happy Mom, join me in the Real Happy Mom podcast. One thing that I found that has been tremendously helpful in making sure that I have the best week possible and eliminate the overwhelming chaos that tends to happen in our busy household is by doing the Sunday prep routine. Now my Sunday prep routine consists of about eight to 11 things depending on what is going on for the week, that are essential things that are going to help get me ready for the week and make sure that my week goes by smoothly. Now you want to get a hold of this and figure out what is she talking about with the Sunday prep routine. You want to go over to Real Happy Mom comm slash Sunday. And there you’ll find a way for you to enter your email so that I can send you my Sunday prep checklist. And in this checklist, outline each thing that you should do on Sunday to make sure that you have the best week ever. These things include getting your week prepared by planning things out, planning out your meals, getting your clothes ready, and so much more. I promise you it sounds like a lot but it only takes about 30 minutes if you really do it right. So go over to Real Happy Mom comm slash Sunday to get your Sunday prep checklist Again, that’s Real Happy Mom comm slash Sunday. And we are back for another episode of the real happy ROM podcast and I am so happy that you are here. Thank you so much for joining me for another episode. And let me tell you what this episode is pretty awesome. And I’m not just saying that because

Real Happy Mom 2:22
I say that about all of my podcast episodes. But

Real Happy Mom 2:24
truly This one is really, really amazing. Today I have Katherine on she is a three time TEDx speaker who has taught thousands of parents in a conscience parenting revolution for resilient, considered centered and empower kids who know their inner voice in honor. Catherine has been coaching parents, children and executives on conscious communication for over 16 years. And let me tell you what she brought it in this episode. In this episode, Kevin is going to be sharing some ways on how we can change our parenting style so that we can communicate with our child better, and not just try to control and use the authoritative type of parenting style, but use more of a cooperative parenting style that will allow our kids to be able to make better decisions, and it will help us out so that we don’t have to constantly nag our kids to get things done. I love the way that Catherine talks in she teaches and explains things. And in this episode, she does actually have a part where she is showing me some different ears. And I will make sure to make this podcast episode available on YouTube because it was really awesome to just see how she shows changing the way that you listen can really impact how the conversations go with our kids, and ultimately how it affects our kids. gatherings. Amazing. And I love talking to her. And you’ll see why I love talking to her in just a moment. So make sure you stay tuned, check out this week’s episode. And let me know what you think this one was one of my favorites. So let’s go ahead and jump on in. All right, so today I have Miss Katherine on and she is going to be sharing some really good stuff. So welcome to the podcast.

Katherine 4:12
Thank you so much. I’m so excited to be here.

Real Happy Mom 4:15
Yes, I am. So happy to get to talk to you. I know every time I see we just talk and talk and talk and have such a great time. And before I even hit record, we were talking for a good little while. I was fine. Now I know exactly such beautiful rapport and it’s so good on your show. Yes, thank you for being here. And I want everyone to know a little bit more about you and what you do before we get started with our topic for today.

Katherine 4:40
Awesome. So I started the conscious parenting revolution about Yeah, about 20 years ago. I have a 25 year old son now and when I was on, you know just beginning my parenting journey. He was like two years old and my husband and I were both At that stage living and working in Hong Kong, and I was at that point A metals trader, I was trading non ferrous metals. And, you know, I was a commodities trader, and my husband’s an architect, and we both had, you know, full swing professional careers that we were both thriving in and, and we were really stumbling with the parenting thing. It was like, wow, this is harder than anything I do. Um, and for people who, you know, have that experience as well, you know, I can remember thinking, Oh my gosh, for parents who don’t get to wake up and go to their job, and they stay home and parent, holy cow, man, holy cow, that is the most stressful job on the planet, and the one that we are least trained for. No resources, no manual, no real training. And somehow, we’re supposed to know how to manage these incredibly complex interpersonal dynamics, problem solving conflict resolution. So I had gone to law school, I was trained as a mediator, and I was in a, you know, dynamic at home where I was really, frankly, under resourced. And that began my journey, personally, to be able to show up as the parent that I wanted to be. And it became my passion. And the thing that I’ve developed over the last 20, something years has been through my own, I call it my own Ph. D. program. You know, I started with one child, and then the second one came along, and the first one was a bit longer, so super concerned about pleasing. And even with the pleaser, I was not sure how to respond in certain circumstances. And then down the road, about four and a half years later, my daughter came and she was so different. She was a completely different personality that I’ve learned to now know what to call and it’s called an autonomous child, who’s extremely self directed and less concerned with how other people feel. Not that. And this is where it’s, again, part of my own education along the path was to learn that doesn’t mean inconsiderate. It means that when there is a really strong, self driven, motivated personality type, that that person and their needs around choice, and they’re also around mastery, makes it feel as though there’s a lack of consideration, when actually, it really isn’t that it’s that if I’m using a certain type of obedience compliance, like Do as you’re told, discipline style and raising my children, then it will absolutely not work with that type of personality, it will just not work. And so the more power you use to get them to do what you want to be considerate of you, ultimately, I think is what’s behind it. But it feels like to be obedient of you. And the more it’s an obedient compliant, as opposed to, Hey, I know you’re really busy, and you’ve got your thing going on here, and that you’re totally engaged with it. And it might be hard for you to find a break point. And at the same time, we need to find a break point for you to break out of what you’re doing and for us to transition to something else. But knowing how to set that conversation up took me years.

Real Happy Mom 8:24
Now, this is something that’s really interesting how you brought up your own child and learning how to communicate with them, because I feel like that is one thing as parents is being able to communicate with our children. Because a lot of times it is a lot of that, you know, do as I say kind of attitude. But I’ve learned now, even with my own two kids that, you know, their personalities are so different, and how they respond, just like you said, is completely different. So I was just wondering, for the moms that are listening, who are experiencing some difficulties, especially when it comes to communication, how can we deal with some of those roadblocks when it comes to communicating with our kids so that we can actually, you know, work together? And it’s not like, yeah, banging our heads on the wall when it comes to talking to our kids.

Katherine 9:10
Totally, I love the way you frame that. Because there’s, you know, there’s a bunch of different ways to approach, you know, harmony in families. And I like to talk about creating an ecosystem. You know, my new favorite analogy that I’ve been using with some of the parents that are in my course right now is to really look, you know, step back and to look at your family nuclear family that you’re working with as your petri dish. And I know you’re kind of a scientist, right is and so you’re going to really resonate with this, I think. So you know, if it’s a petri dish, we know that we can culture that dish with certain ingredients and certain things grow. And we can take another dish, because we’re experimenting and culture it with something else and something else is going to grow. So if we look at our family system, like a petri dish, we know whatever we’ve been doing up until now is essentially culturing, what was what’s being created, and the dynamics that are being created. So we’ve got that down, we know what that dish creates. So now, what we’re going to do is we’re going to take another petri dish out, and we’re going to start seeing, okay, let’s start using some different types of approaches to things and see what it creates. And it starts with this idea that, you know, if I’ve been using a, because I said, so that’s why you’re going to do it. approach to, you know, creating behavioral change, what it does, and this is well researched, you know, I refer to Dr. Thomas Gordon’s research all the time on using a controlling form of discipline, which is based on Because I said so or, you know, look, if you do it, you’re going to get this. And so there’s that carrot that you’re dangling over here, or you could do this approach, if you don’t do it, this is what’s going to happen to you. Right, so it’s stick. So it’s the carrot or the stick, which is what we call a controlling or behavior list approach to conflict resolution. When you use that approach, you may get some changes in results, you might get people to do it, because you do have power over them to limit their ability to access the things that satisfy them. And so because they don’t want to lose that, that satisfaction, they’ll do it. Because you have the power to take it away from them and limit their access. So they’ll do it. But they’re not doing it for the reasons that you want. They’re not doing it out of the consideration for you or out of the acknowledgement or recognition that it’s time to end this and start something else. They’re not doing it because they’ve learned to develop the skills to be able to transition from one activity to the other. And a lot of it is around transitioning. And the other thing we know is that if it were so effective, why do I have to do it each and every day over and over and over again. So it’s a momentary like I can get it to happen in this instant, but then I’m going to have to do it again. And again, and again. And again. And again, what you haven’t taught them is the skill to transition, what you haven’t really taught them because it’s a combination of two things that we want to like look at the brand new world over here is we want to create within them the ability to stop what they’re doing, and start something else. And to learn how to do that. So that once they learn it, it’s it’s a learned skill. Now, you don’t have to keep doing your thing over and over again, because they’ve, they’ve internalized how to do it. But the other thing we learned from Thomas Gordon was that if you use power over you generate retaliation, rebellion and resistance, and he called it the three R’s. And all of his research is based on the fact that by using that approach, you actually cultivate what we then are going to call the secondary problems. So not only do you not get them transitioning from one thing to the other one you wanted them to, or shifting, you know, out of watching TV or playing on their electronics, and going to dinner or going to brush their teeth or going you know, whatever the thing is that you want to get them to do, because I think that’s a lot of our problems is getting them to stop and start what we want them to do when we want them to do it. And that’s a huge thing. So, if you use that older approach, and you cultivate the three R’s, then we know from Dr. Louise Porter’s research that 75% of the problems that we’re dealing with are the other things that we created by using that approach.

Katherine 13:37
So those are the secondary problems are the resentment flows. So that’s where a child will, like, you know, either do it and be mad that they’re having to stop what they’re doing, because they don’t feel understood and acknowledged from their perspective. And so they’ll do it, but they’ll be mad at you for having to have to do what you wanted to do. And not feeling like the way they were feeling about it was even acknowledged or heard I hear parents saying to me, yeah, my kids are always saying you don’t get me. And it’s because you don’t. And it really is a gift when they say that to you to recognize, gosh, I guess inside of them from their perspective, they don’t feel like I got them. And if you pause to take a minute to reflect back what was going on for them when you made that request, ah, they’ll feel a lot better. They’ll do it more willingly. So the work that I do is around giving parents the tools to be able to not have any resentment floats, to be able to not have 75% of those disruptions that they started. Because in their petri dish, they didn’t realize when they used this ingredient, it grew all of this resentment. And so you don’t put that in the petri dish anymore. You don’t have all of this stuff being created.

Real Happy Mom 14:53
Nice. I love everything that you’re talking about there because I was just sitting there thinking I’m like, oh god and my girl.

Unknown Speaker 15:01
Oh my god, what’s my petri dish? I

Real Happy Mom 15:05
need to check my PJs. I don’t know what’s in there right now.

Real Happy Mom 15:11
Something really good that I, once you said it, it’s like a light bulb went off. And it was about the three R’s how we can get them to do it. But what you get are those three R’s and I see it, I see it dello vividly. Like, it’s kind of crazy. So I’m thinking I’m like, okay, so I see what I’m doing now. And I see what it’s creating, what are some of the alternatives? So we don’t create that?

Katherine 15:35
Absolutely. So you know, you can see that if you’re doing what I like to call a solo, problem solving. Solo problem solving is, it’s time to do it. I told you, it was time to do it. Now do it. Right, that’s just you, in a solo, trying to get a change, happening. evoking a different behavior from a person. Collaborative is where there’s a conversation. So, you know, I, I teach a course it’s a 90 day parenting reset. And, you know, the reason I bring it up is that I can, I’m going to start listing some skills for you. Right things that that are going to be the answer to your question. But I can tell you from having run a course now for 20 years that no one person goes, Okay, I got an active Listen, I’m going to actively listen, got it, check the box. Nobody knows how to do that. So the first thing I want to say is yes, you’re going to learn something called active listening. And it is a skill it is it is a magic wand. And when you can actively listen resistance, and know how to reflect back when someone is feeling what they were needing by by not doing what you wanted them to do. Why are they not doing what you want? I like to say the no to you know, I won’t do it is the yes to me. There’s something in me that I’m saying yes to when I say no to your directive? Now, what is it that you’re saying yes to inside of yourself? I’m wondering about that. not putting it into my mind of you are being disobedient. And a little, you know, a little I wanted to say a little ship, you’re being you know, because that is often what, you know, pops up into our head is like, oh, for the love of God, don’t you see, I’m the orchestra conductor in this family, I just need a little cooperation, I just need a little support, I just need you to do what I need you to do what I need you to do it right. Because as parents, we have so many things going on. And we’re not just doing one thing, which is the parenting of our child, we’re parenting our child, we’re paying our bills, we’re keeping the electricity on we’re answering the phone we’re managing with our parents, I mean, we’ve so many other things going on in our world. And our little one doesn’t realize all the stuff we’re doing. So we just want them to be cooperative and do what we want when we want them to do it. And guess what, you know, I like to talk about we use rewards and punishments like a remote control, we want to just say do this, and have them do it. And I you know, you know, I’ve done a few TED Talks, one of my TED Talks, I really just developed that entire idea. And the idea is that, you know, rewards and punishments, we want to use it like a remote control, like I just push this button, I say these words, and you do what I want, but our kids are not TV sets. And so the problem is because they’re not appliances, or television sets, we can’t get them to do what we want them to do. Or they’ll do it because we add enough of a threat to it, that they’ll do it. And they’ll do it because they’re afraid of us. So you can get them to do what you want without taking them into consideration and just have a solo problem solving modality in your petri dish. And then you will maybe get the change but not for the reasons you wanted, you’re going to get to pay for it with the resentment flows, maybe they’re going to retaliate, or maybe they’re gonna rebel, but they’re just going to resist

Katherine 19:16
and for sure, they’re going to resent you. And then they might slam the door or they might start to just be like rolling their eyes at you. Or they may just be afraid of you, but they’ll hurt inside because of you. And none of us want that to happen. But I can tell you, a lot of my clients have kids that are in their teens or young adults. And they’re very upset with their dynamic and relationship. They feel they got fired somewhere along the way. And they no longer became the person that their child came to for support or ideas or, you know, like a sounding board. And they really want that relationship with their child and they don’t understand how they lost it. And so they come into my world to find out how to get it back again. Again, because they’re missing the closeness, the very reason that they had the children in the first place to create that idea of, you know, these are my little people, these are the people that are going to be my sweet little family, that I get to, you know, treasure through my lifetime. And that beautiful close connected relationship was eroded on the basis of not understanding how to create the changes we want for the reasons that we want out of consideration for what’s going on for me, with me also being considered of what’s going on for you. So to a certain extent, I like to say these are simple skills, and they are, and yet you do have to learn them.

Real Happy Mom 20:38
Yeah, and you brought up a couple of things. The the first one that I heard was active listening, that is a huge skill, that I think a lot of people if not even just for parenting, I think it will translate into other parts of your life, if you can really master that skill. But when we’re thinking about active listening, what would you say is some of the key things that we need to do to really make sure that we’re doing it correctly? Because I know a lot of times people will think like, yeah, I’m listening. I heard you. Yeah. weren’t really listening. So break it down for us, so that we can really understand if you’re truly are doing active listening.

Katherine 21:15
Yeah, for sure. So you know, there’s passive listening, which is what you just modeled right there, where you’re sitting there going, Yeah, yeah, I hear you, I hear you. But I, as the speaker don’t actually know what you heard me say, if you don’t actively listen. The passive listening is where you tell me that you’re getting me. And I don’t really know for sure if you’re getting me in what I meant for you to get from me, unless I hear you reflected back to me. In fact, this is so fun.

Unknown Speaker 21:46
I got

Katherine 21:48
I got a couple of my, my you know what I’m going to call like my, my supports here when I teach. And one of them is you know, I put this on and, and these are giraffe ears. And you know, I was trained in nonviolent communication by Dr. Marshall Rosenberg, who was the founder of nonviolent communication. And I loved it because he, he would talk about jackals and giraffes. And how we can speak from our giraffe part of ourselves or we can speak from our jackal part of ourselves. And we can hear with our giraffe ears, for we can hear with our jackal ears. Just give me a second here, I just got these yesterday. I have another set, but they’re in a different house. So you know, we can take off our giraffe ears and put our jackal ears on. And when we do that we hear with a different mindset. Mm hmm. So you know, earlier, I think before we went live, we were talking about there’s mindset things that we can do to change the way we look at things. And then there are actual skills that we learn to land those new mindsets. And it’s a combination in life of strategies, and mindset. and beginning to wonder even about the way we think about things, right. So. So when you talk about listening, we generally have a choice. And these are, you know, these are my ears, right? I can choose to listen to you, with my jackal ears on. So as I’m listening to you tell me the story. I’m thinking, Well, that was stupid. And if I hear you that way, chances are something that I’m going to say that comes out of my mouth is going to reflect how I heard it, where I’m going to say something like, well, you’re not. You’re not very nice. That wasn’t a very nice thing to say to me. You know, you never think about me, You’re so selfish. And you know, that’s a particular mindset of how I heard you speak. And so like, in my course, I do a lot of sort of like stepping back when we listen to people. And you know, and the way that in nonviolent communication we talk about it is now I’m listening to you with a whole different set of ears. You know, these are my giant giraffe ears. And Rosenberg use giraffe in order to signify that a giraffe has a 75 pound heart. It’s the largest hearted mammal. It’s a massive heart. So no matter how you speak to me, no matter the awful words that you use the things that you call me, I have a translator because I put on my giraffe ears. And because I believe that when people can’t meet their needs, they have feelings that arise. And then they start to drown in those feelings. And I call it the tragic expression of their unmet needs. So when I hear no matter what they say, even awful words through my translator, then I’m able to put my giraffe heart in to this conversation. And then when I speak, I say things like, you’re really hurting. That was so disappointing. I can see how hard this was for you. Right? So even when they’re drowning, and they’re, they’re exhibiting through their behavior, what we call these tragic expressions of their unmet needs. We don’t have to judge it. And then speak about it like, how dare you, you speak to me that way. In our family, we don’t speak to people that way. Now you go to your room. Right? So then that person on the other side feels completely misunderstood. Because, yes, the words that they were using and the way that they were behaving, were not okay with you. But they also weren’t about you. They were about what was happening inside of them. And it was the tragic expression of their unmet needs. So when we start to change our conversations, and not just passively Listen, but actively listen, the dynamic is that we were listening, I always listen for what is ours is this person in retaliation, rebellion or resistance. And if they are, I know that I contributed to the experience that’s going on inside of the other person, because life is a dance. And something about the way that I was being connected with something inside of them that put them into some level of discomfort or pain or or quandary my daughter at five years old would say to me, Mom, I don’t want to do what you tell me to do, as if I don’t matter. But I don’t want you to feel like you don’t matter either. But right now, I don’t know what to do. And it five she could say that. Because she could recognize that, you know, without knowing it we’d created in our petri dish, a paradigm of it was either me or her.

Katherine 26:33
So this is what happens when we create family systems, which use either an authoritarian approach, which is a do as you’re told approach, because I said, so because I’m the parent. And I see myself as this is my right to make you do stuff because I’ve my role as a parent, and I perceive and define that role as the boss. If I set up that as my paradigm, in my family system, the other person feels marginalized all the time. Like they don’t matter, their needs shouldn’t matter, because I told you what matters now is what I say matters. But the reality is that children are people too, and they are going to have something inside of themselves that is coming up for them. We can continue to marginalize it, ignore it, and pretend it’s not there, which is what an authoritarian does. But if we want to teach children to be considerate of us, we have to be considerate of their underlying unmet needs as well, if they just do as we’re telling them to do, because they’re people, even children or people, children are people too. We cannot ignore that. And yet, the dominant style of parenting pretends that they just are supposed to do as they’re told. And if they don’t, they’re disobedient, disrespectful. And we then start telling ourselves stories which create our own emotional storm. We call this demand thinking. And when we have this, they should have thinking in our head, it’s a type of demand thinking, and nothing that comes out of our mouths actually is coming from the heart. It’s coming from judgment. And when we create that judgment based, right, wrong, good, bad, then we begin to have feelings about our children that we activated because of the way we thought. And I mean, I’m saying a lot that is actually very deep. And it goes right back to the core of how we even think about ourselves. And what we think about communication and my experiences that I never thought about any of this very deeply, until I was a deer in headlights, when my son was two years old, about 23 years ago. And then for the next 23 years, it’s all I’ve been thinking about, it became my passion to understand what does this mean, how I’m speaking to you is implying a lot of embedded assumptions I have not only about you, but about dynamics, and you know, relationships. And all of it is something I’m so thrilled that I’ve gotten to spend a good portion of my life thinking about. And there have been some great people who came before me who were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, like Gordon, around this discovery of the three R’s. Because the implications are not just within our family system in the nuclear family, they also play out on the world stage, when I believe you should do as I say, because I have power over you. Not only within a family, but within a community, within a society, between countries. You can see we justify our next steps based on an original assumption that because I have the power and I’m the dominant culture, in my family, I have the power and I obviously in the dominant culture, because I have the power. I can make you do things on the basis of the fact that I’m your parent. And when we begin to realize that it’s not that we then become the doormat and when Let everything just happen. It’s not that we’re okay with everything, I still get to tune into, you know, I’m not okay with that. I do need support, I do need transitions. It’s just that now, how I go about creating those transitions is based on a whole different school of thought. It’s that when I experienced your resistance, I know that there’s something going on inside of you. And my best chance of getting you to change your behavior is to understand what that is. And I will model what it is to be considered of someone else by listening to what I’m guessing you might be feeling and needing. That’s getting in the way of you being able to do what I’ve requested.

Real Happy Mom 30:40
Yes, you know, I feel like I just went to your TED Talk. That was really good. Yeah. Yeah, I’m gonna do better. Yes, No, I wouldn’t. Did you touch on just one more thing? Because you brought up some things that I think were just absolutely beautiful, like when the way that you described it in the way you explained it? What about active listening? So now we were clear on what that actually looks like. And then you talk about collaboration too, as well, how it’s not just do as I say, but we’re working together. And we’re doing this together. So how can or share with us what it looks like to actually, you know, be collaborative with our kids, because I think we’ve been so into this whole authoritative type of state that I don’t even think parents even know what it looks like to be collaborative with a child.

Katherine 31:34
Totally. So um, let’s just take a situation as scenario, right. So let’s say that you’re, you know, child, and I’m sure that this is going on right now, given that everybody’s you know, in the situation they’re in right now, you’ve got a child who’s got everything spread out on the kitchen table.

Katherine 31:54
And you just need to get it cleaned up. So you can serve dinner.

Katherine 31:58
And maybe it has to do with school, or maybe it has to do with a project. Or maybe they’re just setting up their Legos or whatever it may be. And, and so you say, you know, time to clean up time for dinner, and your child doesn’t do anything, they continue to play or put together their dolls, or their Lego or whatever they’re working on. And it’s as though you’ve never even had said words. They’ve completely ignored it. Because I’ve heard people say to me, my kids, don’t listen to me. And I’m like, God, I hear you. And so it’s that they aren’t listening. I don’t think that if we did a hearing test, it wasn’t that they didn’t hear you. Right? I’m pretty sure their hearing is fine. They heard you but they didn’t take on board the transition, or the the behavioral change that you wanted when you spoke. So you end up saying it again. And you’re probably you’ve got a lot of bandwidth, maybe, or maybe you don’t have much bandwidth. It could be that you’re already like, Oh, my God, this has just been one heck of a day. And you feel within yourself, oh, my God, I just need cooperation, right? So you, you issue this, you know, it’s time for dinner, I really need you to clean up your stuff. And they don’t do it. Now you have a choice, you can start going into a script in your head way where you’re looking at the the lack of like response that you were hoping for not happening. And you’re telling yourself that they’re so self centered. They never think about anybody else. But themselves. It’s all about them. They just do what they want to do. They never think about us, the family, other people, you can go into that. Right. And I call that the demand thinking they should just think of me. And when I go into the demand thinking I’m going to set myself up for an emotional overreaction, I’m going to explode in a minute, I’m going to start yelling at them, I’m going to go crazy. Or I can back up and I can go Oh yeah, actively listen to their resistance. So instead of going into that script, it’s it’s tried and true. We know it, it’s going to end up with an explosion, and then they’re going to explode back at me. And then we’re going to do this dance, which we just don’t want to get into anymore. I’m going to wonder about why they’re not doing what I was hoping that they would do. So then I switch into, Hey, honey, I can see you’re having a really hard time picking up everything for me. You know, I’m just wondering, is it seeming overwhelming? Is it hard for you to figure out how to do it because you’re really into what you’re doing? And you’ve set this whole thing up? And you can’t even figure out how to do what I’ve asked you to do? And at the same time keep it the way it is? Is that what’s going on for you? Because they may not know how to speak it out and say what’s happening that’s getting in the way. And if you have a sense that that might be what’s happening, or you could maybe wonder, you know, seems like I don’t know, you know, something’s getting in the way of helping me out right now. Are you hungry? Now Mom, I’m not even hungry. So they don’t even want to eat dinner right now. You know, maybe that’s the reason but my active listen is About wondering what the resistance is and making a few guesses, and maybe they’re right, or maybe they’re wrong, but they’ll tell you right away if you guess wrong. No, that’s not it. Can’t you see? I’m in the middle of creating my Mona Lisa, you know, I’m in the middle of creating my whatever. Ah, I see. So you can’t figure out what to do how to do it. And at the same time, help me out? No. Okay, well, let’s see what we could do. And now it’s a week, what we could do. And now it’s no longer me just saying my thing, it’s taking them into consideration. So the more we begin to work like that, in this way, the bigger difference is going to happen in them, where they learn the skill of consideration. It got to the point where I could be a little bit short tempered, and my son would be able to say to me, Oh, Mom, seems like you had a really rough day. And I was like, Oh, my God, he’s active listening me. And you know, and you, you teach the skills by living the skills you doing and living these skills models for your children, what consideration really looks like, and it’s not about obedience and compliance. The problem with obedience and compliance is it focuses the mind of the child on what you’re going to do to them, or what’s going to happen to them. And so they’re not thinking about you and what you’re needing to have done. They’re not being considered or even imagining what’s going on for you. They’re just terrified. And we want them not to be feeling such terror. If they’re not obedient and compliant, we want them to be in wonder, because in this family, everybody’s needs matter. And the minute that you set up a framework, in your petri dish in your family ecosystem, that everybody’s needs matter, everything changes.

Real Happy Mom 36:52
Yes, yes. Once you said I was like, Oh,

Real Happy Mom 37:04
that’s what you do. Okay. So yeah, definitely got to give that one a try. Because it’s, like I said, it’s hard, because you know, especially if you grew up doing it, and you know, your spouse does it, then that’s, like,

Katherine 37:16
everyone does it. It’s everybody does it. And very few people have spent the time to learn a whole new set of skills. So you know, in my 90 day parenting reset, I teach people a whole bunch of stuff. And one of them is how to prevent the problem in the first place. So I talked about all the upstream initiatives, because boy, howdy, I’ll tell you what, if you do those, it’s so much easier to solve your problems in advance of the problem happening than to try to solve it when the problem is happening. So if we can begin to be a little bit more upstream in our you know, how we culture, our petri dish, if we get some of the upstream stuff sorted out, then it just never happens. We don’t end up in so many problems, because we prevented the problem from happening in the first place.

Real Happy Mom 38:03
Yes, definitely. And I know you’ve mentioned the 90 day reset here. And I want to make sure that anyone listening know that I got you, we’ll put the links in the show notes. Because I know that this is something that will help out a ton of moms. So Jeff, I definitely need to jump into the 90 Day Review.

Katherine 38:22
Yeah, you know, in order to set yourself up, you have to realize that, you know, these are skills that a lot of people go through four year degree programs to learn to become social workers, or mediators or, you know, to really do the work in the world that is based in a culture of peace and creating a culture of peace in your homes. You you need to learn skills, and and it does take some time and some dedication. And we can give, you know, some good clues. I’ve created a webinar. That’s a free webinar on three common mistakes parents make. And yes, you can listen to that and go oh my gosh, that is so common. I mean, it’s so common, everybody makes these mistakes. And so just recognizing those, you can shift and change your system. And you know, really learning the skills, you can change it forever. Because if you’ve ever tried to learn anything from tennis to you pick a skill, you’ll know that you can hear about it. But unless you have something regular happening, where you’re going back to your next tennis lesson and the reinforcement in the coaching to actually land it so that it makes a difference over time. You know, we talked about 10,000 you know, repetitions, we talked about this, we talk about that we know enough about what it takes to create a new habit, so that the old robot brain that’s been doing the same thing over and over again, isn’t always running the show. For us to take over from it running the show.

Katherine 39:50
requires some effort.

Real Happy Mom 39:52
Yes, definitely. And again, I will for sure make sure to include those links in the show notes because this is some really Awesome stuff that I want to make sure everyone gets their hands on. So thank you so much for sharing all of that you’re you know, welcome much. And I just want to be here with you.

Real Happy Mom 40:09
Yeah. And

Real Happy Mom 40:10
I just wanted you to give us one last thing I know you’ve given us a lot of things. Yeah, it’s one less thing. He’s given us either a motivational quote, or some words of encouragement for us moms, because you know, it’s tough. So, we want to hear from you. Just some encouragement before we go.

Katherine 40:24
Yeah, no, I love that. And I like to say, you know, and I, I usually just send people to Marshall Rosenberg on see me beautiful. And so there’s a beautiful song that he sings, that is see me beautiful, even if it’s hard at times, even though it may not be obvious on the surface, see me beautiful. So if we have that mindset of seeing our children, when they’re falling apart, see me beautiful, recognizing that it’s not the judgments that we have inside of us that we’re talking about, but that there’s something in them that’s needing support, then it also applies to us too. Because when we fail, and we have, you know, things where we really just handled something spectacularly badly.

Katherine 41:12
You know, look in the mirror and see yourself beautiful.

Real Happy Mom 41:16
Love that love that love that. That was definitely what I needed. So thank you. That was so good. Yes. Now, if we want to hear more about you connect with you, where can we find you online?

Katherine 41:29
Yeah. So it’s the conscious parenting revolution calm. That’s my website. And if you go there, and you want to just find all my links to Facebook, and instant all the rest of it, you just go to the bottom of the page, and you’ll see all the icons there. But I have my goodness, I usually put a blog out every week. So I’ve got a ton of blogs on like mon shaming and all this kind of stuff that we’ve all experienced when somebody else has a lot of judgments about us, and how to get through that. And I’ve been newsletter people can sign up for and they can also find the link to my free webinar.

Real Happy Mom 42:01
Awesome. Awesome. And again, I’ll include that in the show notes. Thank you so much. This Yeah.

Katherine 42:06
Thank you. So great to be on with you today.

Real Happy Mom 42:11
Now that does it for this week’s episode of the Real Happy Mom podcast. To find the links in the show notes make sure you head over to Real Happy Mom comm slash 103. There you’ll find all the links that were mentioned, as well as a kind of a recap of this episode in a blog post Ford. I love having Caborn on if you love listening to her on this week’s episode, make sure you do me a favor and rate and review. This lets me know that this podcast was helpful and it also lets podcast platforms like Apple podcasts and Spotify. Know that this is a great podcast to listen to. Now that’s it for this week. Make sure you tune into next week for another full episode. Take care and with lots of love

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