Episode 236: Parenting and Partnering with ADHD, Anxiety, & More with Elaine & Diane Dempster

Hello everyone, this is Rebecca Green for the first Winey Palooza Parenting and Marriage Summit. We are starting with day 2 with 2 fabulous women. Um, I feel so privileged to have you 2 here and for you 2 to start the day. We have Elaine Taylor-Klaus and Diane Dempster, and they are— we're going to start with Elaine. I'm going to introduce both of them. Elaine Taylor-Klaus, MCC, CPCC. You ladies are going to have to tell us what these initials mean. Um, a master certified coach, Elaine helps parents stay sane while raising complex kids. She is also a certified co-active coach, public speaker, author, educator, and co-founder of impactparents.com. And she's the co-creator of Sanity School for Parents and Sanity School for Teachers. Online behavior management training programs. Moving on to Diane Dempster, MHSA, CPC, PCC, is a certified professional coach, author, speaker, educator, and co-founder of Impact ADHD, now called Impact Parents. She works with parents of children with ADHD and other complex issues to radically improve their personal and family lives by gaining new skills, increasing their confidence, and learning to use coaching techniques in their parenting. Thank you, wonderful ladies, for being here and starting us out today.

I'm so honored to be here and to, and to be the kickoff. Like, how fun is that to get to start your day with you? Thank you for having us.

Yeah, Rebecca, it's just great to be here and to be part of your community, and I'm excited for today.

Thank you, ladies.

You know, we met because I just love the name Winey Palooza. Do you remember that? I just thought it was so good. So when we talked about what we wanted to share with your community today, we thought— so we've mentioned, and some people were saying in the chat they've been members of Sanity School. Sanity School is our training program because we think every parent needs sanity.

Some sanity.

Um, and so we wanted to share with you a little taste of sanity that, that some key tools that we think will support you both in parenting and partnering. So let me just see if I can get the screen moving. And just for the disclaimer, all of the material you found— you will hear about here is found in Sanity School and in The Essential Guide to Raising Complex Kids with ADHD, Anxiety, and More. And we do receive financial benefit from these programs, from these books.

Well, and just Elaine, to just say it, I know a lot of you have complex kids, a lot of you are part of our community, and some of you don't. And, and the cool news is that the tools that we teach and the strategies and the, the approach we take is great if you have complex kids or a complex partner, and it's great if you don't have complex kids or a complex partner. So all the above. Um, and as we jump in, what we'd love to hear in the chat, and we're gonna chime in on a little bit of this, but what are some of the common challenges you're facing right now? What are the things that are hard for you as you're parenting, as you're co-parenting, living your lives?

Yeah, capturing the chat. What's, you know, what's the first thing that jumped into your head? Is it meltdowns? Is it sibling fights? Is it parenting with ADHD and myself, right? What's going on for you? Well, and some of the things that we're hearing, the things that, that you're likely to hear in your house is one version or another, either Stop being so hard on him. Can't you see he's struggling?

Or stop babying him. He needs to learn to do things for himself.

We tend to kind of go one way or the other, and there's usually one parent who does one and one parent who does the other. And then sometimes we're feeling like, oh my God, am I helping them more than I want to be? Am I setting them up for success? And everything in between. Yeah.

And as parents, we can see how our kids stand in their own way. We can see the outlying behavior. We can see avoidance, isolating, maybe risky behaviors. Maybe you're dealing with intensities in your house, whether it's your kids or you or your co-parent. And we can see that part of it. But the question is, can you see how you as a parent might contribute to that dynamic?

And this is really what we wanted to turn your focus to today is I know there's a lot of talk about our partners and our kids, and we really wanna bring your focus to yourself, right? What's the role that you're playing? We'd like to introduce you to our avatars. This is Denying Dan and Bootstraps Bill and Anxious Ava and Fix-It Fran and Lost Lois.

All of us do the super mom.

There's Sue the Super Mom, Nagging Nan, Andy Angry, right? All of us show up in different ways in our households, in our families, in our relationships, and that's normal. Right? We're not always gonna be at our highest best self.

Well, and you might be all of these or you might be one of these, you know, sometimes.

And the goal is not to, to be this all the time, but to become aware of how we're reacting so that we can become more intentional about how we respond.

Well, and underneath all of this, what we want you guys to leave today feeling is that the change you want for your kids Actually starts with you, and just the brief story of Elaine and I, and Elaine, you alluded to this earlier, but you know, we are the parents of 2 complex families. We have very different backgrounds and very similar backgrounds. I'm the one on the lower left. You can see my tribe, bunch of young adults and adults, but I was one of those parents that was yelling a lot more than I wanted to. I was frustrated because I, my brain, and fairly neurotypical, although when anybody's stressed, we're all, I believe we're, we're all neurodiverse. And I found myself frustrated and, and, and angry and, um, not knowing what to do to really support my quirky family. And when I started coaching, um, back in, uh, 2008, 2010, I found that I, I developed skills and my communication style really shifted. And helped me to be more of the kind of parent that my kids needed to be, to be successful. And Elaine, your story was similar, but a little bit different.

Similar, but different, right? So I'm what I call, I'm the mom of what I like to call an ADHD plus plus family of 5, now 6, because I have a daughter-in-law. And, um, and we are all, we all have a number of diagnoses. We all have ADHD. We all have anxiety. There's learning disabilities. There's a lot of neurodiversity in our family. And when my kids were little, I was totally overwhelmed by it. And the truth is, I didn't even know that I had it. I, and at some point I had some, a doctor who had almost patted me on the head and said, no, honey, you're just a mom. And then at some point in my forties, I went and got myself evaluated because I looked at my kids. I'm like, there's no way that my husband could be responsible for all of this neurology. I mean, we were just, you know, bouncing off the walls. And it turns out that in 40-something, I was diagnosed with, with learning disabilities and attention issues, which I had never understood, but it kind of made my whole life make sense. And the long story short was that as I got a handle on myself, and as I— somebody introduced me to coaching, and I was on my way to graduate school because I wanted to support other parents, and I couldn't find a program that met my schedule with young kids. And so I thought, okay, well, I'll just try this coaching thing for a little bit as a stopgap. I'll do that first and then I'll find a graduate program. And that was over— that was almost 15 years ago. And I fell in love the first afternoon. I called my husband in tears like, I found it. This is what I've been looking for. And I never looked back. And within a couple of months even, it became clear that with the skills I was learning as a coach, I was becoming a much better parent. And over time, and I'm telling the story a little long because we're talking about partnering today too. And over time, my husband actually started noticing, and then he went and started getting coach training and he became a coach. And a few years later, I asked him what was different. He said, I couldn't deny anymore that what you were doing was working. And so, you know, Diane states it very calmly, but I think the truth is when we became coaches, we became significantly better parents. To our complex kids. And I don't want to understate it. I mean, it's a huge shift. And so what we're going to talk about today are tools from what we call the Coach Approach, because it's both a philosophical framework and a toolbox. It's both. And it really guides us to parent better, to partner better, to, to transfer ownership to our kids, to motivate their independence, and And I think the most interesting part is that we're teaching them a process for problem solving so that they grow up to become their own problem solvers instead of doing it for them and fixing it for them. So that's what we're talking about today.

Yeah, and I know that it's a, it's a yes and here, and there's a lot of underlying stuff, and I think we lose track of the fact that we're trying to grow independent kids and problem solvers underneath the fact that we're trying to get them to do their homework and hang up their towels and stop talking back and being disrespectful and, and all that other stuff. So just know that the framework and the toolbox is designed to help what's going on today, but ultimately what's really going on is we're trying to develop strong independent kids.

So, so if I leave you with nothing else today, it's to understand that really effective parenting is to walk our kids through the process of problem solving again and again and again and again instead of solving problems for them. Bottom line. Okay, so there is a methodology here. There is a model, and you can see it's pretty simple. And the goal here is to keep it simple enough to, to be able to use it. And a lot of times in our community, parents will say, oh yeah, I just got to go back to the model. So we're not going to go through the model today, but we do want you to know that there's a framework for what we're teaching. And what we're going to talk about today, you can see these 4 boxes. These are the 4 cornerstones, and we're going to— we've pulled a few key tools from each of the cornerstones. That we're going to teach you today.

Well, we call these core competencies, fancy word, right? But the reality is we're trying to build a toolbox. And we're trying to have, you know, if you're in a family, the challenges you have today are not the challenges you have this afternoon, and they're not the challenges you have next week. And so what you want is not a set of solutions. When this happens, do this. When this happens, do that. You really want a toolbox because it's gonna help you regardless of what the challenge du jour is. And so we're talking about 8 specific things here. This is a classic coaching wheel. It's a tool for really looking at how things are and how you feel about your competency in these areas. So as we're going right now today— Right now, just to really specify.

So it's a tool for like, what's your level of satisfaction with how you're doing with these things right now? And if you answered this or looked at this wheel next week or last week, you'd probably answer it differently, and that's okay. It's just about, you've heard the term metacognition when we're talking about kids. It's about raising your awareness to how are you with the, in relation to these, these 8 areas that we're gonna talk about today. Ready?

Yep.

Okay. So on a scale, you were starting to say, and I interrupted. Oh, I was starting to say, so I'm the ADD one, if you haven't noticed.

As you, as you go, as we go through these, evaluate, kind of take a snapshot and say, how am I feeling about how I'm doing with each one of these? Am I at a 0 or at a 10 in terms of my satisfaction? No judgment, but just an acknowledgement as a way to really look at where, where might you want to focus your efforts from here?

Well, and the beauty when you're done is you can kind of— if I'm at a 3 here and a 5 there and a 7 there, you begin to see where the rocky stops are on the road, and it helps you begin to level it out. Okay, so let's talk about taking aim, transferring ownership and control one step at a time.

As we said earlier, we've all got a million challenges every day, and what ends up happening for us as parents is that we're trying to tackle all these things at once, and often we don't do such a great job at any one of them. And so what we want to challenge you to do is you're looking at the challenges and the behavior changes you're looking for, the situations you want to improve is to start by taking aim. And taking aim is about looking at what's really going on and narrowing in so that you can avoid the distraction of the million things going on, to really just give yourself permission to go, okay, wait, I'm just focused on this right now.

Well, and I'm noticing the chat, Jamie, saying delegate, delegate, delegate. And, and there's definitely part of this that's about delegation, and more, more what we're talking about is, is that you know, there are a million things that you've gotta handle and that you're responsible for. And there are a million things you wanna teach your kids. I know that when my kids were little, at one point I put a, you know, one of those reward charts together with like 30 things I wanted them to accomplish in a day. It was just absurd. It was way too much. There's a picture of that original chart in the book. And so what we are talking about is really simplifying and focusing on one thing to take aim on at a time, one thing to foster ownership at a time, one place for them to become more independent while we kind of let go or scaffold the rest while we support the other things so that they're really gaining independence and can focus on one thing at a time. And a lot of times clients will say to us or parents will say to us, how do I focus on one thing when there's so many things going on, where there's so many needs? And the truth is that when you give yourself permission to really focus on one area of fostering independence, it lightens the load. You stop feeling like, well, but they should be able to do this and this and this and this. And you start feeling like, okay, right now they're only working on this one thing. And it takes the pressure off of everybody and really allows you to get some success going. And the success breeds more success. What else would you add?

No, I think that that's right. And it's the key of where to start, because so many times we don't even have any idea. What do I do first?

Right.

Pick something.

No, take aim. And if you're not sure where to take aim, take aim on something that takes the stress off you. Back to that, somebody was talking in the chat about, you know, our model is circled in self-care. Take the stress off you. Yeah.

The second concept is something we call, and we did, we didn't coin this, we got to give somebody else credit for, is it naughty or neurological? And this is a perspective shift. This isn't about knowing or understanding, okay, is my child's behavior naughty or is it neurological or is it a little of both? It's really about the fact that if I look at this situation, if I have a kid who's being disrespectful and yelling at me and calling me names or whatever is going on in my household today, and I'm going, wait a second, you can't talk to me that way. This is terrible. And, and I get all riled up and triggered and upset, I'm gonna handle the situation very differently than if I go, wait a second, this kid must be struggling. You know, kids do, kids do well if they can. Isn't that the quote from Ross Greene? We love that. If they're not doing well, if they're not behaving in a way that feels good, chances are there's something going on for them. And if I look at it from that framework, I'm gonna support them in a very different way. Elaine, what would you chime in with?

Well, so, so we did get this, we got this from my kids' psychologist when they were 8 and they're now 28. So it tells you how long I've been playing with this concept because it works, right? The notion that they can't versus they won't. And sometimes I'd like to say it's that they can't yet, right? It's that developmentally they may not be ready yet, but that doesn't mean that they won't ever. It just means that they're not ready to yet. And so when we look at a kid's behavior, I was just talking to a couple yesterday who was saying, Well, you know, he can't get his work done. No, he won't get his work done. He won't, he won't do whatever it was that was expected. It's like, well, is he able to? Is he— have you— do you have all the pieces in place to set him up for success? Does he know what it takes to be successful? So when we can assume best intention and look at terms of, of that, it's not that they won't, but it's that they can't yet. It changes our ability to to support them and, and problem solve with them.

The next one is called raise the bar from where they are, and this happens all the time. Parents are looking at their kid and they're like, but they're in 6th grade, they should be able to do this, or they're going off to college next year, they're going to have to be able to do this on their own. And we end up trying to drag our kids to where we think they should be instead of figuring out, well, where are they? What can they do independently? And, and gradually, consistently helping them to become more independent instead of just trying to get them up to a certain spot or a certain place where we think they're supposed to be.

Yeah, I, again, this conversation has come up a bunch this week as well, this notion of, but if I lower the bar, but if I'm lowering the bar, so I feel like I've lowered the bar so much. And it's not about lowering the bar. It's about meeting them where they are and setting the next bar reasonably. Because if we set the bar too high for too long, at some point they're just going to give up and say, why should I bother? Why should I even try if no matter what I do, it's never going to be good enough? And so we want to, you know, I alluded to this earlier, we want to give them some wins, right? We want to set them up for success so that they feel success. And it's like, oh, I like how that felt. I want to try something else. I like how that felt. I want to try something else. And the solutions are in those successes. And so we really, really, really want to meet them wherever they are developmentally. And if you've got complex kids, they tend to be 3 to 5 years behind their same-age peers in some parts of their development. So we want to meet them where they are developmentally, not in terms of their age, but in terms of their development, and then invite them to take the next step and the next step and the next step from there.

And I'm watching the chat. I mean, this is about This is about setting realistic expectations. And the thing I always say about realistic expectations, because parents will say, but that one time he did it, or he can do it when he's gaming, or he can do it when he's really interested. If, if your child's not doing something independently 80% of the time, that's not the bar, right? That's not realistic. You want to find the thing that they can do 80% of the time independently and set the bar there and raise it from there.

I want to say one more thing, because Sanjay was saying that raise the bar because the bar was high when we were kids and times are different now. I would argue that the bar is higher for them now than it ever was when we were kids. There's so much more expected of them. There's so much more information coming at them for them to process. Their exposure to the world is so much more sophisticated. They've got a lot more to process than we did when we were kids. So, so we need to kind of slow it down a little bit and give them a chance to process and be with where they are before we move them to the next stage. All right, I'm going to watch our time because this is a good one. All right.

Yeah, so this one is understanding and using motivation. And, you know, parents come to us all the time and say, my kid's just not motivated. And part of that comes from the thing we were just talking about, because if the bar was too high, they're going to get demotivated because it's going to be really hard to do the thing that we're expecting them to do if they can't. And motivation is key to the complex brain. You know, it's this sort of— if the complex brain is not genuinely interested in something, it's going to be really hard for that brain to get anything done. And we— go ahead.

So could I just give an example? I was talking to a client yesterday whose son was doing great first semester for the first time ever, and they were so excited. And now they're into the second semester, and, um, and the kid's kind of lagging and getting some zeros. And he was doing so great last fall, but he's kind of lagging and kind of slowing down and not as engaged this semester. And so we started talking about these 5 motivators, and we realized, oops, that, that this is a kid who's motivated by novelty. And so the beginning of the school year, there were new teachers, new classes, new, you know, new materials, and he was, he was really engaged. And now he comes back second semester after break, it's the same teachers, the same materials, the same classes. It's lost the shine, it's lost the novelty.

So there's a couple of things in here. One is the just get it done button on the right, which is that the, the ADHD or complex brain doesn't have a just get it done button like most neurotypical people do. And that there are 5 things that actually motivate the brain: play, interest, novelty, competition, and hurry up. And I don't know, Elaine, we don't wanna go through all these, but I do wanna talk about hurry up.

Well, I wanna go through all of them quickly. Can I, can I do it super quick? Yeah, sure. Okay. So play in that realm is also creativity and humor. So that whole realm of the creative world. Interest could be interest in teachers or interest in a subject, something that gets their attention. Novelty, I just talked about. Competition, I also think sometimes it's connection. So it has to do with being in what their relation is to others, whether it's connection or competition. And then hurry up is, we also call it urgency, and you can explain what's going on there.

Well, and so hurry up is about actually using a different part of our brain to motivate. It's either, oh my gosh, it's going to be late. I create, you know, I go back into my amygdala, or oh Oh my gosh, I'm gonna get in trouble is also a, an urgency sort of thing. And the challenge with that is, is number one, it is effective. And, and I don't want to kind of shame us by, by using that as a, as a tool because urgency does motivate the brain, but it's exhausting. It creates cortisol and it wears our bodies out. So if the only tool in our kids' toolbox or our toolbox is urgency, it's gonna become exhausting over time.

So you don't want it to be their only tool in the toolbox, but understand that it's a legitimate tool. To use, and that sometimes waiting to the last minute to get something done is a great way for them to get activated to get something done. So try not to demonize it and invite them to learn to use some of these other motivators as well.

Wendy's saying that neither of her kids wanted to go back after break. It's like, it's boring. It's like the same thing. If you give me a new teacher, you give me a new class, I'm all excited to go back. But if it's the same thing as it was last semester, nope, not interested.

All right, so I'm watching our time. The next one is called Create the Tone. We call it the tone of the home, and this is one of those concepts. It's more of a concept than a tool, um, that, that some people in our community, it's like the thing that gets them, helps them really begin to integrate the coach approach. Because the notion here is that you create the tone of the home. And you want— most of us, a lot of us feel like, well, my kid's having tantrums, my kid's bouncing off the walls, and we feel like our kids are setting the tone. But the truth is, it's up to us, and we have the capacity to set the tone of our homes, to decide what kind of home we want. Do we want it to be playful? Do we want it to be a home where people have dinner together and play together? Do we want it to be a home where people are yelling? We set that. We start that. We have the capacity to create that.

What do you want to add? No, I think you did it great. Awesome. Shedding the shoulds. So this is— somebody was talking about this earlier in the chat, but So often the world or the voice in our head or, you know, the teacher or whoever is like, but your kids should be able to do this, or you should be a better parent, or, you know, there's all this sort of judgment that floats around in our world externally, internally, the whole nine yards. If we can shed them, I mean, we can't, we can't often get rid of them entirely, but if we can challenge ourselves to let them lose their influence in our world and let go of the what should be going on and look at what is going on, And again, raising the bar from there, it lightens the load for us. It makes it less pressure. It makes less pressure for our kids, which enables us to really focus on the tasks at hand and the problem solving and the skill building and all those things that we're doing underneath things. Elaine, what would you add?

The other thing I would add is that this is about shedding the shoulds for us too. Yeah. Right. It's letting go of what my sister-in-law thinks I should do, or what the teacher thinks I should do, or what the neighbor down the street thinks. Like, We oftentimes, we live our life according to other people's shoulds because we're living other people's expectations. And so what I love about coaching is that it brings us into a conversation with ourselves where we get to start saying, what do I want? What's important to me? What are my values that I'm bringing to raising these kids? What are the shoulds I wanna put in place? And for me, when I let go of my family's shoulds, and I love my family, no judgment, But their kids weren't my kids. And when I let go of trying to live my life according to their expectations and started meeting my kids where they were, that's when everything shifted. And that's actually what allowed my kids to excel, is when I was focusing on their gifts and strengths instead of trying to have them kind of keep up with the— in my case, keep up with the Taylors.

Well, and the other flavor of this— go back for just a second, Elaine— is is we get into this place where we, we have to try to find the right answer, right? It's this sort of, there's this other, like, even if we're able to shut out the other voices, there's this, I gotta get it right, I've gotta fix it, I've gotta make it happen. And the phrase experimenter mind is what I wanna bring into this. Somebody was made a comment about growth mindset, and that's so important for us as well. Parenting is an experiment. It's not trying to figure out how to get it right. It's about figuring out what you wanna try next. And seeing what you can learn from it. And if we can approach it from an experimentation perspective instead of a, oh my gosh, I've got to get this right as a parent, or they've got to get X, Y, and Z done so that they can get into Harvard— forgive me if any of you want your kids to go to Harvard, I'm not judging that— but if you're in that tense mindset, you're going to handle it completely differently.

Well, and Magda said in the chat, ugh, this is hard, this hits hard, I need to learn to let go. And, and I like to say that parenting is a daily exercise in letting go. So, so it's not an on or off. It's like every day we're learning to let go a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more. And the same is true with shedding the shoulds. Every day you can do a little bit more. So, so allow yourself one thing at a time, step by step. You've got it.

Well, and Elaine, commercial note, because we said at the beginning we were going to talk about partnering and parenting, and we've been really focusing on the parenting piece of this, but all of this applies when we're talking— somebody made a comment about their husband in chat, which is why I remembered. But it's this sort of— all of this stuff applies in our co-parenting as well. We need to let go of our shoulds about, you know, I was talking to a client the other day and it's like, my husband and I should be on the same page with regard to the way we're handling our kids. And I'm like, well, what if that's not quite true? I mean, what if you just need to be in the same book? Yeah, right, exactly.

Same page, just the same book.

Solutions are in the successes. We talked about this earlier, but just this reminder that success breeds success. And if we're spending all our energy focusing on all the stuff that's not working, we're gonna see more stuff that's not working. That's what the brain science says. What you focus on grows.

Yeah. What you pay attention to grows. Exactly. Right.

And so if you're focused on everything that's broken, you're gonna approach life completely differently than if you can go, okay, wait, so what's good about this?

Well, and the, and this is true for us too. Like we start when we have group coaching sessions and, and, and training groups, almost everything we do, we start with celebrations. Yeah. Because, and sometimes it's really hard for parents to find the celebrations, and sometimes the celebrations are in the painful moments. Sometimes it's my kid didn't make it to school today and I stayed calm, right? That's a celebration. And so we really want to invite you, encourage you. The very first coaching tip we wrote, like in 2011, I think, when we started working together, was celebration. Because it's huge. And we don't slow down and stop. And oftentimes parents will say, yeah, well, that was great, but— right, stop. Don't go on to the next thing yet. Slow down, celebrate the success, help your kids see their successes. I promise you, this is a true story. One time my success to my kid was, you came to school with both shoes today. Well done. You know, like, That was a kid who had a hard time remembering their shoes. So look for what's working instead of what's not working.

The eighth one is commit to calm. And sometimes this is really hard, whether it's us calm or them calm or everybody calm. And I wanna say a couple things. So one thing is that calm's not always yelling. For me, I'm a recovering yelling mom. And so when I wasn't calm, it definitely looked more like, you know, frustration, irritation. But calm for you might be fear and Overwhelm. Dysregulation and overwhelm. And I mean, calm is about, I can handle this. I'm okay. I'm grounded. I'm problem solving. It's not that this stuff isn't happening. It's that I feel comfortable being able to tackle it. And that's what's really important here because we do have challenges. We do have problems. Our kids do have challenges and problems, and we need to be able to problem solve with them collaboratively. And we can't do that when we're dysregulated, they're dysregulated, And so committing to calm means there's 2 steps to any challenge. One is checking to make sure where are we on the calm phase? Where are we on the calm scale? Are we all calm enough to really tackle and address this problem? What would you add, Elaine?

Well, so I was just thinking about like what I want for, for all of my clients, for every member of our community, is to have what I call to learn enough of the coach approach to have what I call a bring it on attitude. And I talk about this in the book as well, right? Bring it on. I want you to be able to say whatever's coming at me, because life kind of comes at us, I got this, I can handle it, I can swing here, I can swing here, I can do whatever needs to happen. I know how to figure out how to respond to what's coming at me in life. And I think that's really what we mean in some ways by what you were saying about calm isn't just not yelling. Calm is about knowing I've got this. I can do this, and every one of you can do this. You are amazing, capable, strong, powerful.

You wouldn't be here if you weren't.

You wouldn't be here, right? And it starts with knowing that, that it starts with you and that your response sets the tone for everything else. So that Commit to Calm has a lot of cascading.

Yeah, well, and we do an entire class around emotional regulation. Somebody said, how do you stay calm in the, in the midst of the, the emotional upheaval, you may not be able to, but committing to calm might be recovering well when you do lose your cool and apologizing and apologizing well.

So quickly capture for yourself on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 is the center, 10 is the outside, how you doing with all of these? Give yourself a little assessment of what's working for me, what's not. Maybe capture this on a piece of paper, maybe take a screenshot if you're on a, on a Zoom. Yeah, on a Zoom you can do a screenshot of Maybe save it for later, but really look for yourself on how you're doing with these 8 core competencies of the coach approach.

Well, and Elaine, I want to add a 9th. Dance with me for a second. The 9th one is somebody was talking about listening to podcasts and great articles, and there's so many great resources out there in the world for parenting. And this, I don't want to, you know, what we're doing is a great amount of information and resources. I wanna challenge you not to stay in information land, right? It's just sort of, it's so easy to get stuck in, oh, there's another great idea and another great idea. And if, and if the idea we try doesn't work, we go back and we listen to another podcast and we try another great idea. And I wanna challenge you all to avoid that trap and begin to focus on how do I begin to try some of this? How do I begin to put some of this into practice? How do I move towards transformation and outta information? But that's my night.

That journey we talk about is there's information, then there's implementation, then there's integration, and then there's transformation. So you wanna— what I think Diane's challenging you to do is to move from information. Keep yourself moving forward, slow down, give yourself permission to use what you're learning here today. And you're going to learn a lot of information here today. So we always in our sessions, I'm going to do it here to say, what's one gem you're taking away from this today? What's one insight? And with each presentation you hear today, I would invite you to slow down at the end. And maybe Rebecca, you can remind people to ask themselves, what's, what's my insight? What am I taking away from today? Because I know there's a lot we talked about, but what's the one thing you're taking away from this 30 minutes that you want to bring forward into your life. And as a reminder, all of our material is— all of this material and more comes from Sanity School and The Essential Guide. And we have a parent guide for you if you're interested and you like this coach approach. You can go to impactparents.com/whiny. That's W-H-I-N-Y, whiny, and get some more information.

Thank you for tuning in to the Whiny Palooza podcast. If you like what you heard, Please be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. While you are there, leave a review. I love to hear your feedback. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time.

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