If your children are happy, you’re happy (and vice-versa)

Hi there, good afternoon, good afternoon. I hope you are well this sizzling day. It's a sizzling day up in North Yorkshire and I hope that you are managing to get a bit of sunshine today. So today we're talking about your happiness, so you as in you the parent, your happiness. So I've heard it said that Parents are as happy as their least happy child, and I think that that is a great a great point and probably and probably true. Think it also works the other way around though. So your child, a child is happy as their least happy parent, and so our attitude. really matters, and kids, our mood matters. I see a lot of parents kind of, well, a lot of parents talk to me about faking it till they make it, so putting a brave face on, and the thing about that is that kids see straight Straight through it, and they won't. They won't tell you it. They won't tell you that, but they'll see straight through it. So your your happiness, your happiness happiness matters, and hopefully I'm doing a little bit to make you happier. That's what the purpose of these the videos that I do are is hopefully to. Lift your spirits a bit. We're going through a tricky— still going through a tricky time. Obviously it's easing with lockdown, but we're over 3 months on now, and yeah, there's lots of rumblings about what's going on. And I used to think— so the last big the last big challenge that I think that we faced as a country was the credit crunch back in 2007, 2008. I can't remember which year it is. And when that happened, well, that happened before I knew a lot of stuff that I know now. So I was worried. I was worried about what was going on in the outside world and how that was affecting me. I was worried about the future, and I wasn't really quite myself. I was off. I was definitely off. I was worried about my business, and my mood definitely dropped. Because I didn't know what I know now. So most of us think that, and I certainly used to do, that we change through developing new skills. And so we're always working on new skills, working on new strategies, we're working on new how-tos. People just say, give me the how-to. But what actually really drives change, as I've seen it and as I've seen it in myself and in the parents that I work with and kids that I work with, that I've worked with in the past, is that change is driven by a new idea, like one of those what people call an epiphany, an insight. So a new idea, an epiphany, an insight, all the same I'm just using different terminologies to sum up the same thing. So it's about what we know. And I used to think that the outside world, i.e., the credit crunch and what was going on in the economy, affected how I felt. So I was at the mercy of the outside world. And most of us think that most of the time we are at the mercy of these circumstances. So our happiness is dependent on what's happening in the world. So let me give you a really trivial example about this. I talked about weather when I came on to do this video today. And so there's this idea that societal idea that we should be happy because the sun's shining and that miserable weather— that there is such a thing as miserable weather— that so when it's raining that we should be low. But let me ask you a question. Have you ever been worried in the rain or happy in the rain? Have you ever been unhappy in sunshine? Have you ever been unhappy in the sunshine? That's— let me crystallize it. And I know— have you ever been unhappy in the sunshine? And I know I have. So I've been on holiday, but my mind's been elsewhere. My mind has been elsewhere. Um, so we say things like, um, it doesn't even bear thinking about, because we know kind of intuitively that the feelings are an inside job and they come from what's going on inside us, and yet most of the time we think that the outside world is determining our mood inside. So pretty much the main focus of my work is helping You see, and your kids see, the truth that feelings come from thoughts, and that's the only place they ever come from. So you are not at the mercy of the outside world, even COVID. See you tomorrow. Bye-bye. Bye.