A parent's worth isn't measured by results. The speaker argues that judging yourself by outcomes creates stress that actually hurts your parenting, and that doing your best is enough. Parenting works like learning to walk: try things, keep what works, ditch what doesn't.
Hello, good afternoon, and welcome. I hope your week is starting well. Today we're going to be talking about doing your best. Now, when we talk to our— when I talk to our kids, we're often keen to reassure them that doing their best is good enough. That's All we can expect them to do, to do their best. We want them to give it their all, but we know that the outcome of whatever— we want to reassure them that the outcome of what they do isn't the important thing. It's the amount of effort that they put in. If they do their best, then that is good enough for us. We're not going to judge them. on what the result of their efforts are. So whether that's at school, whether that's in their hobbies, wherever it is, their best is good enough. So what if we could do the same ourselves? What if, as parents, our best is enough? Why am I talking about this stuff? Why am I talking about this stuff? Well, I'm talking about this stuff because the mums and dads that come to me are often really stressed about how much they're putting in. And they are holding themselves, judging themselves incredibly harshly. They're not judging themselves on what they are doing, that effort that they're putting in, they're judging themselves in their results. And they're looking for that one single way, the way that's going to help them overcome the problem they're facing with the child. And they're putting themselves under incredible pressure. Now, I totally get this, right? I put myself under incredible pressure to change the world and to help parents make their kids happy and resilient. It's like sometimes there just seems to be too much on the line for me, so I relate to this. Um, but it's, it's not the truth, is it? And, and we don't, we don't do our best when we're under that amount of pressure. So I want to encourage you to see, see some difference in, in this, to an insight. I want to, I want to help you, encourage you to, to an insight in this. Um, To mirror something that I found is I'm taking the pressure off myself, or seeing the pressure that I'm putting on myself. I've got a chance of reducing that pressure. Yeah, what drives change in us is when we see things differently. So if I can help you see things differently, then you're going to do stuff differently by— well, you're going to do that stuff differently automatically. So just by seeing the fact that the pressure that we're all putting on ourselves is doing us no good whatsoever, if we could just lighten up a bit, if we could just lighten up a bit, if we could just take a little bit of pressure off ourselves, we can feel the weight come off our shoulders. Look, there's no one way To, um, to get your child through, through whatever they're getting through. You're more likely to see the myriad of different ways to get your child through the challenges that they're facing, whatever those challenges are, if you just take a little bit of pressure off yourself and just relax into it. We're looking— we're all looking for that Holy Grail, aren't we? That one thing that's going to work. And There isn't one. We're learning. All the stuff that you've done as a parent, all the learning that you've had has been learning by learning by learning. You know, with kids, we learn— when we were kids, we learned to walk by falling over, getting up, and going again. So this— you're gonna try, and you're gonna— some things are gonna work, and some things are gonna work less, and you're gonna either— you're gonna You're going to get a breakthrough or you're going to learn something new about something that doesn't work. And you've been doing this all the— since the day your child was born and probably before that. You've been doing this, you've been learning by trial and error, and that's the only way to learn is by trial and error. But we're bombarded by people saying that there's 7 steps to this and 8 steps to that, and there's a magic formula that's going to magically address all our solutions. And they know that we're looking for solutions and they know that we're looking, we're so impatient, and there aren't any. Well, there is. Try something new, see if it works. If it does, if it works, do more of it. And if it doesn't work, do less of it. That is the magic formula to anything in life, whether that's in parenting or whether that's in our careers or with our spouses or whatever. That is what it is. So doing your best Is enough for me, and I'm encouraging you to see it that it's enough for you. So I hope that helps. I hope that lifts a little bit of pressure off you guys because see so much harsh criticism, judgment, self-judgment, and just want to help. Just want to help you whatever best I can. Take care. See you again soon. Bye bye.
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