In this solo Philosopher’s Notes TV episode, Brian Johnson distills Dan Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson’s book The Power of Showing Up into five actionable ideas for parents. He begins by rejecting the myth of perfect parenting, urging a shift from perfection to predictable presence. Johnson then introduces the authors’ core 4 S’s framework—Safe, Seen, Soothed, Secure—as the essential ingredients of secure attachment, using the metaphor of a parent as a safe harbor and launching pad. He stresses the importance of parents crafting a coherent life narrative that integrates past, present, and future experiences, arguing that this personal coherence is the strongest predictor of a child’s secure attachment. The episode presents the concept of a “relational trust fund,” where each responsive interaction (a “deposit”) builds a child’s confidence and trust. Johnson also emphasizes that one’s upbringing does not dictate one’s parenting destiny, encouraging listeners to rewrite their scripts. Practical tips—most notably putting the phone away to truly see and respond to children—are woven throughout. The talk is peppered with personal anecdotes, references to other thinkers (Maslow, Ryan Holiday, William Damon), and a call to action for listeners to apply at least one idea today.
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We've got, uh, 5 of my favorite big ideas here. My hope is that you will find at least one idea that you can apply to your life today. That's our plus one. Let's go! First thing you need to know as a parent is there are no perfect human beings, period. What is the single most important thing you can do to help your kids flourish, show up as their best, however you want to frame it up? The answer is very, very simple. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another Philosopher's Notes TV episode. Today we've got another great book, The Power of Showing Up by Dan Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson. Subtitle: How Parental Presence Shapes Who Our Kids Become and How Their Brains Get Wired. Dan Siegel is one of my favorite human beings on the planet. He is a Harvard-trained He's a psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and mindfulness expert, and he's just a good, good human being. He and Tina have written a number of books on parenting. I got to know Dan 20 years ago before Alexandra and I met, and as we were getting ready to have Emerson, our first child, almost 14 years ago, which is hard to believe. We were blessed to spend time with him and gave us great wisdom that has deeply inspired me and impacted me on my parenting journey. Parenting from the Inside Out was actually the first parenting book I read well before we had a kid. So great book. We've got the Philosopher's Note on that great book in which I pull out some of my favorite big ideas to help you apply them to your life. Check out the show notes, get the PDF of the Philosopher's Note and the MP3 for free in that link. Of course, we have 750 moving toward 800 of these notes, fate permitting. God willing, Dale Valente will get to 1,000 notes in the not too distant future. So with that, we also just did The Daily Dad and Raise the Player, Not the Pressure. Our last 2 episodes were on parenting, so we're going to continue that today. We've got 5 of my favorite big ideas here. My hope is that you will find at least one idea that you can apply to your life today. That's our plus one. Let's go! What's the idea that you can apply to your life today? Have that in mind right now. We want to move from theory to Practice to mastery together today. So let's get to work. First thing you need to know as a parent is there are no perfect human beings, period. Dan and Tina talk about this throughout the book. We do not need you to be perfect. You will not be perfect. You want to move from trying to think you need to be perfect— Shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh. 2, you want to be predictably showing up versus perfectly. There's a big, big, big difference between perfectly showing up and predictably showing up. Can you more consistently— never perfectly— but can you more consistently show up for your kids? We'll talk about how to do that. And I should say, if you want to know— and I plan to read this, so I will go back and read this— Dan and Tina ask, what's the single most, the single most important thing I can do for my kids to help them succeed and feel at home in the world? What would you guess it is? What is the single most important thing you can do to help your kids flourish, show up as their best, however you want to frame it up? The answer is very, very simple. It is show up. Just show up. We'll talk about how to do that. Again, you don't need to do it perfectly. Common humanity. Right? You are not alone. Dan shares some stories of him flipping his lid where his prefrontal cortex— he's a neuroscientist, right? His prefrontal cortex goes offline. His limbic system goes crazy. He yells at his kids. Wow. When I read that, I felt permission to be human. Wow. Okay, I'm not alone. You are not alone. You are not perfect. We want to be more predictable as we march forward. Abraham Maslow, the great humanistic psychologist who studied the greatest of his generation and those of prior generations. He said, look, there are great people, there are movers and shakers, he says, but there has never been one single perfect person. And you and I, as I like to joke, will not be the first. So tragically, we will not be the first perfect people. But as Ryan Holiday talks about in The Daily Dad, now that you've realized you don't need to be perfect, you can be good. You can do your best to become the best version of yourself. More predictably, Without having to worry about being perfect. Now, Dan, in this book and in other parenting books of his, he's a big secure attachment parenting style, brings in wisdom from the attachment parenting research in which we learn that 4 things are really, really important. He talks about the 4 S's. I will write them down for us here. The 4 S's. Are these. One, your kids need to feel safe. They need to feel seen. When they need to be soothed, you can soothe them, and all of that leads to them feeling secure. So the book is basically about helping us show up such that we can bring these 4 S's to life. Our kids feel safe, they feel seen, they feel soothed, and they feel secure to to go out and live their lives. When we do that, we talked about this in the last episode, um, there's a great metaphor Dan uses where we provide our kids with a sense of safety. We're a safe harbor. They can come when they need to be soothed, right? And they know that we have, uh, them and their best interests in mind. We can take care of them, and they feel this sense of freedom. We're a launching pad for them to go out and explore the world with that secure attachment, etc. Now, one of the main things we want to think about with safety is you to be the one who keeps your kid from harm, both physical and psychological. Of course they'll face challenges, etc., but you do not want to be the one who is creating an unsafe environment for them, either physically or psychologically. That's obvious, but keep that in mind. And again, as a, as a guy who grew up with a father who struggled with alcohol, that was a big issue for me, where a safety figure provided psychological Harm and lack of safety for me, which leads us to the last point we'll talk about. And this one we'll talk about creating a coherent narrative in our lives where we integrate some of the challenges we faced as young kids growing up who may not have had secure attachment with their parents, where they didn't feel safe, seen, soothed, or secure. How do we create that in our own lives? And we'll talk about the importance of doing that, as that's the number one predictor— your own coherent narrative. Is the number one predictor of your kids' secure attachment. Kids need to feel seen. You know what the number one pro tip is here? Put your phone away. When your kids say, hey, Daddy, respond to that bid. And the most powerful thing you can do, the most simple, powerful thing you can do, is put your phone away. Show your kids and your spouse, if you have one, and other loved ones and colleagues that you care about them, that you see them, by not staring at your phone. Literally, you cannot see your kids if you're staring at your phone. That is incredibly Psychologically destructive for them. Put your phone away. Put it away. Spend time with them. Make sure they feel seen. And of course, you can soothe them when they feel the inevitable challenges of life. Now again, we're not going out solving our kids' problems. We want to create antifragile kids, but we need to have them feel a sense of safety, that safe harbor we talked about. When we do that, our kids are secure. They can go off and launch into life. With more of the courage that we hope that they cultivate, the resilience as Dan talks about throughout the book. Those are our 4 S's. Well, how do we show up? This leads us to the importance of creating a coherent narrative. Now, again, remember, we don't need you to show up perfectly. We need you to show up predictably. So if there's one thing to remember from our time together today, it's show up, show up, show up, show up, show up. You fall short of your standards? Perfect. Show up in this moment. Next play is what the sports mental toughness, uh, coaches would tell us, right? Just next play. Let the past go. Repair, as Dan and Tina would say, if you need to. Say sorry. Repair. Close the gap. Be your best self. Show up for that next moment. Now, we're going to show up more predictably if we have done the work in our own lives to create a coherent narrative. So Dan talks about this a lot, and again, I learned about this 20 years ago before we had Well before I had— maybe it was 15, 16, 17 years ago— read Dan's first book called Parenting from the Inside Out, in which he talks about the importance of parents creating a coherent narrative in their lives, and that that is the number one predictor of their child's secure or insecure attachment to their parental figure. The way we create a coherent narrative, of course, he talks about in the book. We talk about in the note. We talk about in another note by William Damon. One of the world's leading moral psychologists, another wonderful human being. He wrote a book called A Round of Golf with My Father, in which he tells his story of how he created a life review and a coherent narrative in his own life. To put it in perspective, William Damon, the great psychologist and professor at Stanford, his father essentially abandoned his mom and him during World War II. He was raised to believe that his father died, but his father did not die. His father just decided not to come home and created a new family in Europe. Goosebumps saying that. So William needed to do the work to create a coherent narrative to integrate that experience. We all have our own experiences we need to integrate. I don't care who you are, we all have the work to do. We need to get clarity on our past, our present, who we are today, and where we're headed in the future. And the coherence of that narrative, where we've integrated all the challenges and how they've shaped us into who we are today, with a clear arc toward the future, we're moving with hope, with all the lessons learned, that coherence of that narrative that you and I have will be one of the greatest gifts we can give to our kids so we can show up more and more powerfully. Which leads us to the next idea: relational trust funds. Again, show up, show up, show up. Make deposits in your relational trust funds with your kids. Every single time you respond to their bid, you show up when they need you or they ask for you, you're creating more and more trust. And in this, in the Philosopher's Note for this big idea, anytime I think of the word trust, I think of a book called The Confident Mind. The word confidence means intense trust. Confidere, Latin words, with intense trust. If we want to create confidence in our own lives, if we want to create a trusting relationship between our kids and us, and they trust that we will show up, they are confident that we will show up and help them become all they're capable of being, we need to— Nate Zinsser, I'm looking at the copy of the book I have, I'm going to do an episode on this soon— Nate Zinsser tells us We need to make deposits in the past, the present, and the future. Again, mirroring that coherence we need to have in our lives where we understand where we were, where we are, and where we're headed. So show up, show up, show up. Put the phone away. Make a relational trust fund deposit today. Which leads us to our 5th big idea: history is not destiny. Dan and Tina make great points throughout the book that however you were raised, Is not the destiny of how you will parent. I touched on this, but I'll hit it again. We have all had our own challenges and our own upbringings, and we have the opportunity to create more coherence in our lives now. We can create a secure attachment to ourselves and to other individuals in our lives today. Our spouses can play that role. Other people who have a significant role in our lives can do that. And again, we need to do the work to integrate the past, the present, the future, such that we can show up, help our kids, Feel safe, feel seen, feel soothed, feel secure so you can go out into life. It isn't about being perfect, it is about being predictably awesome. Once we stop worrying about being perfect, we can strive to be good human beings. We're not alone. Next time you fall short of your standards, remember that. Do your best to step back up. Self: safe, seen, soothed, secure. Remember how you show up as you create coherence in your own life. Check out the notes, check out the notes on a round of golf with my father, PNTV coming soon. Make those deposits and create the new destiny for yourself and for your kids. Show up as your best to shape your kids and how their brains are wired. It is day 1. We are all in. Let's go! What's your plus 1? Anything jump out and land for you today? Think about that. Think about how you can integrate this wisdom into your life today. Today is the day to move from theory to practice to mastery. As always, a joy to spend time with you. I hope you enjoyed. Look forward to sharing I'll be talking more with you soon. See ya. Hey, this is Brian. Thanks for spending a few minutes with me today. If you enjoyed it, please hit subscribe so that the best of the show keeps landing in your feed. Then head over to heroic.us. That's heroic.us, where you'll find the full library of wisdom I've created over the last 20 years. As well as the app, advanced training programs, coaching, and everything else we've built to help you optimize your life, actualize your potential, and live heroically. It is day 1. We are all in. Let's go.
