Parenting for Lifewriters

Hello, this is Steve Barnes here with Life Writing Live. As always. I'm always trying to get here on Sundays, but last Sunday I was in New Mexico, and the Sunday before that I was probably someplace else, and the Sunday before that I was someplace else. So it gets difficult. But I do have a commitment and I may have a mission right now. I've had a really interesting week. This was the first week of school. Jason going back to school after a year and a half of being at home, you know, almost. It's been kind of amazing. And what impressed me was his behavior regarding school. He got himself up in the morning, gets himself to bed at night, did his homework at school, was extremely pleasant and unstressed. And that means that we get to concentrate on what we're doing, which is trying to work, trying to stay healthy and happy and of course, to raise him. But we have to focus primarily on him. Unless things are going well right now. Because things are going well, we can concentrate on career things and other aspects of life. Cautiously, I'm going to say that it feels as if we're sitting, seeing him emerging from one period of his life into another one, that we're actually seeing the young man that we love developing and displaying his real being more frequently, let's say. I don't want to say that he's at another level, but he is displaying next level characteristics more regularly. In writing about this, I keep hearing from people who enjoy my thoughts on parenting. And people have asked me for a couple of years to create a book or a course on this subject. And I'm just beginning to think that if I can anchor this in, if Jason has really grown in that particular way, then I am profoundly grateful and I do want to share these things. So I want to go through the different processes, the different ways that I looked at this. And so I'll be talking about these things a lot over the next weeks, I guess, because my eye is now on the potential of doing a course on parenting. Now, this ties in with life writing because the core thing that a parent can do. Hi, Becky. It's fun to see people there. The core thing that you can do is to be a good example so that your kids would want to be you, would want to grow up to be you. In other words, you can help them to solve any problem that you have solved yourself. They will want to listen to what you have to say to the degree that they believe that you're telling the truth and that you have provided a role model whose footsteps they would like to walk In So your first job is to be a healthy human being. That's very much like the job with finding a partner. You know, the soulmate process. You know, it's. It's. Don't fake being a healthy human being. How about actually becoming one, then loving yourself? And if you do that, you'll find somebody who's just as far from their completion as you are from yours. And if you love yourself, you will accept them. You'll be able to say, hey, you know, we can dance together. We can walk together on this path. With being a parent, I think that it's being happy with your life, healthy, telling the truth and being there. Because if we go through this, the first thing that has to be asked is, what is the job of a parent? And I would think that the job of a parent is to produce a healthy adult human human being. That would seem to be accurate to. Let's back up a little. Maybe to make themselves grandparents, you know, with healthy adult human beings making healthy babies, which implies things about teaching, about relationships, about emotions, about careers, about organizing, about any number of different things. Whatever the primary values are, that is what we have to give our children in order to replicate ourselves. I think that that's reasonable. I'm going to be gaming all this stuff out. I'm going to be talking about it, see if I can't come up with 10 principles, maybe I'll be able to tie it in with one of the models. But meanwhile, it's having one model look at another model and one of the models that has been very important. If I take a look at what it is that I'm teaching Jason, maybe things like the three gates. Is it true? Is it kind? Is it useful? The three centers. Belly, brain, heart center, head center. The magic ritual, which ties in with a childhood ritual that I created for Jason more than 10 years ago, and the High Performance 6, which is a positive set of principles. But the real reason I'm teaching Jason this is to get him into the habit of looking outside dad for his information, because that comes from Brendon Bouchard. I want him doing his research. Then there's the Hero's Journey, which is the overarching way of looking at the process of change. That was my first breakthrough. In order to implement these things, I think that I will need to use the persuasion framework created by Chloe Madonnas and Tony Robbins. Really, really powerful stuff. I'm not necessarily going to give it to Jason yet. And I think that you. That I might not give him that one until I'm pretty sure he's cooked, pretty sure that he's actually implementing these things in self motivating. Then I can sit him aside, I can take him aside and I can sit, say, if you want to know how I got, the effects that I got, how I helped you, these are the things that I did. So for a parent or a teacher, knowing the persuasion framework is very, very valuable. The kid themselves, I'm not entirely certain. And I will have to think about this. Is it necessary for them to understand how you are helping them? It could conceivably be counterproductive. There'll be another point at which it is optimally productive. I honestly don't know right now. But let's take a look at the first piece of the puzzle, that thing about being the person that they would want to grow up to be, and ask yourself if there are a few basic things that are needed here. One of them is that whatever it is that they do, they will have to do for their reasons, not yours. People do things for their reasons. I love Jamba Juice. So the question if you ask a troubled teenager what they want, quite often they will either have unrealistic comments or they will shut down and won't say anything to you. So one of the strengths came from taking a look at what is universally desired in human beings. One thing that's universally desired is to move away from pain toward pleasure. All human beings, all animals would do that. And if you don't understand that, look more deeply. Milton Erickson was one of the world's great hypnotherapists, therapists, maybe the greatest, had a pattern that he used that helped him to move clients forward. And I remember I asked the gentleman who I studied Ericksonian hypnosis with, I have a master hypnotist certificate from Transformational Arts up in Marin. And I asked him, how did Milton Erickson get the fantastic results he got? And what my teacher said was, Milton Erickson had a model about what it is that human beings wanted, that they wanted to mature, to be able to have agency over their own bodies, to satisfy their sexual needs with integrity, to have enough power to create money and, you know, a safe place for themselves and potentially a family to open their hearts, to be able to create a healthy relationship, bring a family into the world, raise their children to develop a map of reality that enables them to understand what life is and how it works, to be able to pass this map on to other members of their community and to their children, to feel that they are constantly growing, changing, advance to AIDS with dignity and diet, peace. That we're genetically programmed with this stuff and also socially programmed with these things. And with a teenager, the thing that you have to remember is even if they don't know what they want, you do. You've been a teenager. They've never been an adult. What they want is to become an adult. They want the preference privileges of being an adult with as few of the responsibilities as possible. And if you know that, you know that they want power, they want sex, they want freedom, they want, you know, so forth and so on. If you know that before they can admit that, then you can design your program to put them on that track, to move them along that path. And you're ahead of them because. Because they don't even know what they want yet, but you do. They want to grow up. They want to be adults. What does nature want with them? It wants them to become parents and become responsible adults, to either generate children or make the world safer for children. Understanding what they want in their heart, in their guts, should tell you what it is that you need to be in order to be someone like who they aspire to be, someone who they admire, someone who becomes a role model. Then all you need to do is supply them with the pieces of the puzzle that they need to do that. So what's best for your kids is also what's best for you to become a happy, healthy, autonomous adult human being. That human being will find it much easier to influence children and easier to understand what the children need to be influenced. So those are just my thoughts today. I love to talk about these things and get comments back and be able to answer the questions that people have. So as time goes on, you may have some questions. In the process of answering those questions, I will learn more about what I need to know in order to create a really terrific class on parenting. But meanwhile, I won't be absolutely certain I can do this for another few months, because I need to be sure that Jason's feet are really firmly on the ground right now. Things are looking fantastic. I just am so proud of him. But I want to be sure, because before I formalize anything and pass it on, it's critically important to me that I be able to believe that what I'm saying is the truth. To pass the three gates, it has to be true, it has to be kind, it has to be useful. All right, this is Steve Barnes. If you've enjoyed this, please share it if you want to know more about being a dynamic parent. The work that I have right now that's probably closest to that is the warrior's journey. Being a warrior for your family, being willing to stand up and be the adult in your household. Because if you're not, your kids will try to be, and they're not. So they will be operating from fear, whereas you get to operate from love. Take care. Bye. Bye.