You know what you need to do to be a better parent, it’s written all over the web and you’ve heard it from at least five different parenting coaches on Instagram.
You know it, and yet you are struggling to make that change and become the parent you wish you were for your children.
Maybe you want to be a more present parent.
Calmer, funnier, and more accountable.
A safe place for your kids to explore the whole range of emotions, authoritative but not authoritarian, never a yeller, always a curious listener.
I get you, I want to be that parent too.
The thing is — we all have our baggage of trauma and past programming, and we don’t always get to choose how we respond to a triggering situation.
When you are faced with the inevitable difficulties of everyday life, you can choose to see each challenge as an opportunity to grow.
Parenting is a bumpy journey that sees us on the edge of a breakdown more often than we’d like to admit.
It’s stressful, for the body and the mind. It drags us out of our comfort zone, over and over again.
When you are faced with the inevitable difficulties of everyday life as a mother/father/caretaker, you have two choices:
keep on going your own way, hoping that things will eventually get better with age, or see each challenge as an opportunity to grow and become a better version of yourself.
Here I tell you exactly what I (successfully) do to get closer to becoming the parent I want to be for my children, every day.
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# 1 — Be clear about what you want to be — or what you don’t want to be
Being clear about what your idea of a good parent is, is the key to succeeding in this self-improvement journey. Without a clear endpoint, it’ll be difficult to focus your energy in the right direction.
You won’t be able to pull it off by just saying that you want to stop yelling or you want to spend more quality time with your kids.
You have to be specific, think about any difficulty you are facing and where you are falling short, and define the qualities you wish you had to respond at best to these challenges.
If you are struggling with gaining clarity on this, it might be easier to reverse-engineer from the kind of parent you don’t want to be.
I know I don’t want to be an absent parent, too absorbed in my own business to really pay attention to my child and spend quality time with them, and I know I don’t want to scare them.
This makes it easy for me to know where to put my focus:
I want to be present, dedicate plenty of time to making wonderful memories with my kids, and be able to respond in a gentle and calm way to their challenging behaviors.
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# 2 — Embody your desired core qualities
We tend to think that the person we are today is the person we will always be, but studies show that that’s not true. We go through massive changes during our lifetime.
Growth is a lifelong inevitable process. It can be for the better or for the worse, you decide.
If you think about who you were ten or twenty years ago, chances are you will find that you’ve changed a lot.
That’s called growth, and it’s a lifelong inevitable process. It can be for the better or for the worse, you decide.
There’s great creative power in imagining the person you want to be and seeing yourself being that person.
It gives you a direction in which to focus your efforts, and it makes it seem possible for change to happen.
This technique is called future self embodiment and, although it can seem like a woo-woo practice, science is proving its effectiveness in rewiring your neurons and putting you in the right mindset to bring in the change you desire.
Here’s Dr. Joe Dispenza on this topic:
“According to research on mental rehearsal, once we immerse ourselves in that scene, changes begin to take place in our brain. Therefore, each time we do this, we’re laying down new neurological tracks (in the present moment) that literally change our brain to look like the brain of our future. In other words, the brain starts to look like the future we want to create has already happened.”
The more you immerse yourself in your desired outcome by imagining it, the more you start acting as if that was your reality, allowing for the pieces to come together and create that life for yourself, for real.
The process is easy and pleasant:
Sit down, close your eyes, and imagine yourself embodying all the qualities that you want to have. See yourself living that life, and be specific with the details.
During your day-to-day, think and act as if you were that person.
Give your future self a name, so you can refer to them in challenging times and summon their wisdom.
When I am about to lose my cool, I ask myself what would Calm Nadia do? That immediately shifts my focus from problem-oriented to solution-oriented and puts me in the right mindset to find creative solutions to respond to the situation from a place of calm and empathy.
Imagining that version of yourself makes it real, but that won’t work alone. You also need to be serious about becoming that person and start making changes in your life to reflect your future self. And this brings us to the next two points.
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# 3 — Define your umbrella statement
What’s a sentence that could summarize the values you want to live by? Think about it for a moment, and put it pen on paper as if it was a sort of mantra. Everything you do must fit under this metaphorical umbrella.
In your day-to-day, you will try to align all of your actions to this statement. When you notice you are drifting away from it, asses your reaction against your umbrella statement and adjust your course.
My umbrella statement:
I live a life of love, beauty, and kindness.
Whenever I feel like yelling, I remind myself that yelling has no place in a life of love, beauty, and kindness. And when I fail to notice I’m being triggered and yell before I even realize it, I still remind myself about my statement and do what needs to be done to put my actions back in line with it — which is, I apologize.
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# 4 — Use pattern interrupts
The difficulty of changing our reactions lies in the fact that they often seem out of our control, as if we are acting on auto-pilot.
This is actually true: we do act on auto-pilot when we get triggered. It’s called a limbic hijack, a survival mechanism that fires when we perceive danger.
Stress and lack of sleep can make us hyper-sensitive to loud noises or defiant behaviors. This, combined with unconscious reminiscence of our own upbringing can cause our body to go on fire or flight mode and snap for things that normally wouldn’t represent much of a trigger. That’s when the limbic hijack kicks in, inhibiting the analytical part of our brain in favor of our instinctual one, and causing us to react emotionally instead of logically.
It’s the “I know I shouldn’t do that, but I just can’t help it” feeling.
The intentions behind this mechanism are noble, but we need to limit its occurrence to when there’s real danger around us.
The first step to control this is to notice when it’s about to happen, in order to put some space between the trigger and our reaction to it.
In that space, we have the wiggle room to interrupt the emotional escalation and choose a better alternative, by using what’s called a “pattern interrupt”.
Pattern interrupts are NLP strategies that allow you to step out of a bad habit by distracting you and changing the course of action that you would normally follow. It’s an auto-pilot disruptor.
When you notice you are being triggered or are falling into a bad habit you wish to unlearn, you do something to interrupt that stream of action.
It can be anything, from splashing cold water on your face to doing breathing exercises, calling a trusted friend to rant, or going for a jog. Some people also use spiritual pattern interrupts and say a prayer or imagine a shimmering colorful light shining down on them and giving them the strength to do the right thing.
Try different ones and use the ones that work best for you.
Personally, any time I feel like I am about to lose my cool I start singing. I say what I was about to yell but in a singing funny voice.
It works every time — it allows me to let out all the energy that I feel it’s about to explode in my chest, and gives the situation a funny note, making it much more likely for it to end up in laughter.
Noticing you are about to end up in your usual auto-pilot response isn’t easy. It takes time and practice to strengthen your awareness muscle, but it’s doable and 100% worth the effort.
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#5 — Don’t identify with the problem. Focus on your progress instead
We tend to speak in very definitive terms about ourselves and label ourselves as if our behavior was a representation of who we are. But when we place a label on ourselves we drastically reduce our chances to change and grow.
Instead of focusing on the things that you don’t like about yourself, focus on the process of getting better.
“Measure the gain, not the gap”
Dan Sullivan
For example, instead of thinking that you always yell at your child, start getting intentional about yelling less and focus on the progress you are making.
This is what I’ve personally done:
I’ve started marking each yell-free day with a heart on my calendar. Every day I have a beautiful reminder of my progress to motivate me to keep going and to lift me up when I feel less than worthy. When I am about to yell, I just think about all those hearths and how much I’d love to add a new one on today’s date.
It works.
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If you got to this point, you are smart enough to know you can improve, and that alone is the stepping stone to your success in this journey.
The parent you want to be exists, just for the fact that you have imagined them. Your brain has already started creating the neural pathways that will make it possible for that change to happen in your life.
All you need to do is follow along and do what you can, step by step, to align your actions and thoughts with that better version of yourself.
Just keep in mind: you will f*ck up.
You will hurt the people you love the most and you will feel bad about yourself. That’s just part of the journey.
Forgive yourself and move on.
Don’t let guilt consume you and get in the way of your healing.
Without those moments, you wouldn’t have the drive to grow into a better version of yourself.
Besides, our f*ckups give us a precious chance: the chance to apologize and repair, and that’s a behavior we definitely want to model for our children.
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The short version:
Becoming a better version of yourself, when it comes to parenting as well as any other aspect of your life, it’s possible and can be achieved in 5 steps:
- Be clear about what you want to be
- Embody your desired core qualities
- Define your umbrella statement
- Use pattern interrupts
- Don’t identify with the problem. Focus on your progress instead
Forgive yourself when you fail. It’s only on failure that we can build our true success.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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 The Lack of Gentle Platonic Touch in Men’s Lives is a Killer |
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Photo credit: Sai De Silva on Unsplash
