S2 EP5: The Art of Deception: The Solution – Part 3

Hey everybody, it's Richard Ramos and welcome to the Parent Whisperer podcast. Today will be our last session on the art of deception and how to win and maintain our influence with our children. I hope you've enjoyed this series. But most of all, that you've learned something, that you've been inspired, and that you've been instructed in a way that you can be more aware and paying more attention to the influence that social media and commercials, movies, magazines, music are having on your children. But I've said enough about those things. Now it's time for what is the solution? Well, the solution, if you haven't guessed already, it's Parents on a Mission. It's becoming a parent on a mission, or maybe you're already what I call a parent on a mission. And that really is the solution. So if you were to say to me, okay, Richard, you convinced me, how do I become a parent on a mission? Well, there are some several steps that we teach in it, but I just want to talk about the first 4 most important steps that lay the groundwork and the foundation of what Parents on a Mission is all about. And the first step in this growth process to utilizing what I call our parental weapons of influence is to know yourself. Grow yourself to know yourself, to grow yourself. A constant attitude or mindset of a lifelong journey of growth in your emotional maturity as a parent. Positive influential parenting is a lifelong journey of constant growth. That is the key. Our growth in our personal maturity, emotional maturity as a parent—that is the key to so many things in our relationship with our children. We don't. What we don't want to do is we don't want what I call flatlining, and what I mean by flatlining is in in in this journey, this lifelong journey. of growing in our emotional maturity. If we're not constantly working on it, then we're going to flatline. And we don't want to do that. What we want is to just constantly be climbing in our emotional mature growth. But the thing about it is, as we all know, growing old is automatic. I mean, you don't have to try to grow old. It just happens automatically. Growing up is not automatic. And the mistake a lot of parents make that I've learned is that we equate getting older with getting wiser and getting more mature. And that's just not true. Getting wiser and much more mature takes work. It takes discipline. It's a mindset of always wanting to learn and grow. And the main thing that I'm saying right now is to learn to know yourself. And this mindset is important because we don't want to take our relationship and our influence with our children for granted. But if you flatline and you're not growing, then you're not learning from your mistakes, because we're all going to make mistakes. I make mistakes. We all make mistakes. This is not about perfect parenting. It's about growing as a parent, and if we're growing, we're going to have a great connection and maintain our influence over our children. But if we're not growing, then and sometimes kids outgrow their parents, and then they're no longer relevant in the life of their children. And then, as I was saying throughout the other two series or two podcasts that I did, then those other influential media people. Are having more of an impact on the heart and on the mind of your children than you are, and we don't want that. This is the key. Growth in our emotional maturity is the key to defeating your competition from the masters of deception. You don't need to be more controlling. You need to be more intentional and more relational, and that's what Parents on a Mission is all about. That's what it's built for. And in in this process, the first one is I need to know me, and that's a whole lesson in itself. I'm not going to get into all the details right now, but that is the foundational. A step is to know myself. Number 2 is to understand the power of your thoughts. Very important. I don't think we really take the time to understand how important our thought life is, how important our mind is, how important our thinking is. You know, there's a study that was done by psychologists And it says that on average, people talk to themselves, they have an internal conversation 50,000 times a day. Man, that's a lot of self-talk. You know, the thoughts that go in our minds about so many things all day long, every day. But the key to that study said 80% of those thoughts or that self-talk is negative. Imagine that 80% of as we talking to ourselves is negative. Well, that's important to understand that because if I have a negative self-talk or thought life about me, because that's the main thing is how is my thinking about my thinking about myself? Well, if it's negative most of the time, I'm going to have a negative relationship with myself and ultimately a negative relationship with my children. alone other people. But here's the truth. All of my relationships flow from my relationship with myself. And so that's why my thought life is so important that I take control of that. And in Parents on a Mission, we teach parents how to take control of their thought life and not to underestimate it. You know, and one of the ways you know what What kind of thought life you have about yourself is to pay attention to your self-talk. If you're putting yourself down, if you don't know how to receive compliments, if you're always, you know, saying negative things about yourself, that's telling you we need to work on our thought life. And then third, the third principle that we teach in this emotional growth is the power of our choices. Now, have you ever thought about where your choices come from? You ever thought about how is it that I come to a choice? Why do I choose to do that or choose not to do that? Why do I choose to say those things? Or why did I choose to go there, buy that? All of those things. Well. In general, again, just keeping this very simple, our choices are the result of our thoughts. And that's why the thought life is so important, so that we are making mature choices, right choices, especially when it comes into the relationship with our kids. So there's a saying that we teach And I forget exactly where it comes from, but it's a powerful little saying. It goes like this: sow a thought, reap an action; sow an action, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap your destiny. But the point of it is, it all starts with our thought life, then making decisions, actions that ended up, uh, end up developing our character and our habits. And then our habits develop our character, and our character is always going to lead us to our destiny. I like another thing about the power of choice that I learned from Stephen Covey, and he said that we are not the victims of our circumstances. We are the victims of our choices in our circumstances. Now, that, that's taking 100% responsibility for our life. When you realize that I'm in the circumstances I'm in today because of the choices that I made, see, that's taking responsibility as opposed to blaming other people, playing the blame game as it's called. Blaming them, blaming her, blaming the government, blaming you, blaming you know everybody else. I'm in this situation and there's nothing I can do about it because of him, her, them, you. Rather than no, I am taking full responsibility for the choices that I've made. I made those choices and they're connected to the way I think. So again, these these these are the steps that we teach so that parents you are. Learning how to function in your maximum potential, and a lot of it has to do with our emotional maturity. So you want to avoid in this choices; you want to avoid being emotionally hijacked, and that happens to a lot of people. But right now, I'm talking about overcoming and defeating. The art of deception by our competition. I could say enemies, but our competition for the heart of our kids, for the mind of our kids, for ultimately the loyalty of our kids. And why would they choose to be more loyal to somebody else or something else other than their parents and the family and our values and things like that? Well, that this is how it happens if we lose that connection simply because we are reacting in an immature way and we're not maintaining that connection and the relationship that we we want with with our children. And emotionally hijacked a story that I heard that this happens a lot of times. You know, we react. There's a story about a very, very influential town, and the in that town, one of the things they did when their kids would graduate from high school, they would buy their child the new car. Imagine that! But that's the way it was. True story. And so this young man and his father, they went out to look for the car that he really wanted, and they found it. And so when the day of graduation. came, his father handed him a gift-wrapped Bible. Well, the young man, young boy, he became so angry and so mad and so disappointed that he took that and he just threw it on the ground. And he was so upset with his father, he didn't talk to him. He went off to college and he never talked to him again. He didn't want anything to do with me. Well, it was the death of his father that brought him home, and so when he went home, he was going through his his dad's things, and he came across that Bible, and he opened it up, and inside the Bible was a check for the exact amount of the car that he picked out that he wanted. See. He got emotionally hijacked. He made an assumption. He made a choice, and by the thinking that he had, "Where's my car? Oh my God! I can't believe you did." You know, whatever went on in his mind. But look what it cost him. Imagine the grief, the heartache, and the grief of his father, and the choice that he made. I don't want to talk to you anymore. I can't believe you did that to me. You know, a victim mentality. And so that's what I call being emotionally hijacked. And we don't want that. We can— we want to know ourselves to grow ourselves. We want to understand the power of our thoughts and our thinking about our thinking about ourselves that leads to the power of our choices. And the final step in this 4-step process is the power of forgiveness. Now, you know, this is a big topic and a big subject, and so I'm not gonna go too much into depth, but just simply say a couple of things. I understand, you know, things happen in life, and we can hang on to those things and our resentment and our bitterness. But I ask you a couple of questions about that. Number one is why? Would you want to give your power away to somebody else? Because that's exactly what we're doing when we hang on to what he did, what they did, what happened in the past, and we hang on to it and we say to ourselves, well, I can't forgive them. First of all, they were in the wrong, not me. And if I forgive them, then I'm kind of letting them get away with it. No, they're already getting away with it because you're hanging on to it. You're empowering them. They're controlling you. They're controlling your emotions. They're controlling your thoughts. And so we need to give that to some consideration. The other thing I share with people, and this is a little hard to hear, but it's true. Why would you deceive yourself by choosing to live in an emotional wheelchair? Because that's what you do when you choose not to forgive. See, we all know somebody that's in a wheelchair, and they're in that wheelchair either because they were born with some defection, or maybe they, in their life, they got in an accident or something happened. And so now they find themselves physically confined to a wheelchair. And so that person knows they can never live in their full physical potential because they are in that Something happened. They're in that wheelchair. Well, see, when you choose, when you make the choice not to forgive somebody, you're choosing to live in an emotional wheelchair, and you will never live in your full human potential. Now, as a parent, that's something that we don't want, you know. And as we grow in our life, you know, things happen to us when we were children. Things happen to us when we were young men and young women before we ever. Became a parent. And we're hanging on to those things, hanging on to those things and justifying it. And then we have kids. Well, see, that suppressed bitterness and anger and resentment, it's going to come out somewhere. I know it did in my life, and it started coming out in my children, or towards my children and my wife at the time, until I was able to just let those things in the past Go. And in Parents on a Mission, we help walk parents through this process of breaking with the past so we can break through to the future. Now, you may say, Richard, yeah, but you know, you don't understand. You don't know what happened. And I would say you're right. I don't know what happened. And maybe I don't understand the full picture. But here's what I do know, and here's what I do understand: Who's hurting? Who's hurting themselves? That person is probably not even thinking about you. They're out there having a great time, but yet they have control over you, and we don't want that, especially when we want to be free to be all and give all. the love that we have in the relationship with our children. So these are the things that we teach in Parents on a Mission. And you, if you learn these principles, you will reclaim your relational influence with your children. I have seen it happen over and over again. You're going to lead your home with a mission and not in chaos. And you're going to compete with social media by out-connecting it. You're going to out-connect it because your kids are so connected to— we're going to out-connect that. How? By learning through these principles of personal, uh, growing in our personal maturity and other things that we teach in Parents on a Mission. And what you're learning in Parents on a Mission, this is a strategy that you can apply anywhere at any time. To give you back, if you've lost it, that connection and influence with your kids. You'll be more emotionally present, more relationally relevant, more emotionally consistent. Now, Parents on a Mission is not necessarily— what I'm talking to you about is not necessarily parenting advice as much as it is leadership training. That's really what Parents on a Mission is. It's a parent leadership program for parents who want a healthy and a happy relationship with your kids. Now, how do you learn all this stuff? And remember, I've just given you one, one part of it. There's so much more to learn. Well, there's 2 ways you can go about this. Number one is you can buy my book. Yeah, I think you could see it behind me there where it says Parents on a Mission. That's one book. The other book, The Art of Step Parenting. If you're a stepparent, you can buy the book. The book's available on Amazon. Those books are available on my website, richardrramos.com. If you like to read, that's why I wrote the book, because maybe the Parents on a Mission classes that we do Around the country in different cities and different states. Well, there may not be a class in your city, so I wrote the book so that people could have access to the information and you could read it on your own. The other way that you can get the full instruction from the Parents on a Mission classes that I teach is by enrolling in the POM online course. Now that, that course is 15 different videos, short videos. You'll have lifetime access. You can watch them with other people, and it will give you a framework of clarity and confidence and connection. And the course is only $97. You go to my website, go to the tab that says course. Click on it and you, you can join and watch those videos at your leisure anytime you want. I don't think any of them are longer than 15 minutes or 15 different videos. They're anywhere from 12 to 15, maybe a little more than 15 minutes, but they're not really long. And I'll walk you through everything about the proper use of authority, the proper use of discipline, how to reconcile broken relationships, how to raise citizens that are positive contributors to the community. And one of the most important lessons in there is how to win the loyalty of your children. And here's the thing, if you are not fully satisfied with the course, with those videos, I offer you a 100% money-back guarantee, no questions asked. So if you're tired of competing with your child's phone, For influence, and you're ready to lead your family with clarity instead of chaos, I invite you to go to my website, richardrramos.com, and either buy the book or click on the courses tab at the top of the website and join that online course and be on your way in in in growing in this overcoming and competing, growing your emotional maturity so that you can compete. With and defeat and overcome, uh, the masters of the art of deception that I talked about. Thank you for listening to the Parent Whisperer podcast. I would ask you, please, uh, if you'd be willing to like this, uh, video, like this, uh, this, this podcast, subscribe to this podcast. And write a review. That's those three things: liking, subscribing, and reviewing. Those are the things that grow the podcast and help me to reach more parents. That's my goal. So listen, always remember, parents on a mission is not for bad parents; it's for good parents who want to get better. See you next time.