Tapping Into Your Kid's Hidden Potential

Foreign. And this is good inside.

When I think about potential, what I'm interested in is your capacity to grow.

Yes.

And that depends much more on your motivation and the opportunities you have to learn than it does on your raw talent. Whether you think about that as intelligence or athletic ability or being a musical prodigy, like those starting points do not determine the distance you can travel. And I think that parents think about this often backward, unfortunately.

Today I have Adam Grant on the podcast. Adam is an organizational psychologist. He's a best selling author. And on a personal note, he's a friend and my TED Talk mentor. We talk all about the topic of potential. What is potential? Is potential someone's ability? Do you notice potential when you see your kid do something amazing? Or have we been thinking about potential in totally the wrong way? I promise you, my discussion with Adam will leave you with a new perspective about what potential really is and how to bring it out in your kid. More after this. So you just wrote another book. Congratulations.

Thank you.

And this one feels different from your others. I mean, even just the title, hidden Potential. And you tell me, you correct me, but I feel like your belief is that everyone has hidden potential. And your latest book is just kind of about how to help unlock it. And so I'm curious, what made this topic come to mind for you? Why write this? Why now? What was going on in your life?

Yeah, I do believe everyone has hidden potential. And I think it's a travesty that many people never discover it or develop it. And I think sometimes that happens because we doubt ourselves. So that would be imposter syndrome. Other times it happens because other people doubt us. And that's when you end up feeling like an underdog. And the way that we respond to feeling under, qualified or underestimated often limits our growth. And that, I mean, that just that hurts to watch that happen as a psychologist. It hurts to watch that happen as a parent and as a teacher, as a colleague, as a friend. And I feel like I've watched potential squandered all around me. I've also, Becky, been incredibly fortunate to benefit from having coaches and mentors who saw more potential in me than I saw in myself. And I wanted to write this book to pay forward the lessons I learned from them. So I've been thinking a lot over the past few years about what, what do we know in psychology that would be helpful for everyone to understand? And the more I thought about this question, the more I realized this is actually, in some ways, the story of hidden potential is the arc of my Life. I mean, honestly, I wrote this book because I was told I couldn't write, and I figured it was time to change that narrative.

When were you told that, like, your early years?

Later on, when I arrived in college, the first thing I did as a. A new freshman at Harvard was take the required writing test, and I failed. I was told that I would be best off in a remedial writing course, which was. It was known as writing for people who spoke English as a sixth language and for jocks. And that was kind of devastating. Here I am already feeling like an imposter. I don't belong at Harvard. What if I'm the one mistake? And then they tell me I can't write? And I think this is my sixth book. I am certainly not as good of a writer as I aspire to be, but I feel like I've gotten pretty good. I've gotten a hell of a lot better than I was then. And I guess I had hidden potential that got unlocked through the last couple decades. And I feel like most of the things I'm proud of went that way.

Well, there's so many things there. First of all, I think there's a message even in college, right? You're. I don't know, you're 18. I'm sure the same thing is true for us now, those of us who are older than 18, there still could be hidden potential. But I also want to end up talking to you about our kids because when I was reading your book, I feel like that came up over and over and over. This kind of, I think sometimes pressure we feel almost as a parent, when you see potential in your kid. And sometimes our efforts to bring it out can almost know, stifle it, at least temporarily. Like you said, it's never too late. Kids can keep doing things and, you know, changing course. But I want to go back to your story before we do that. So you're getting this message of you're a bad writer. You should be in a remedial course. Here you are, you know, a handful of years after Your age of 18, a prolific writer, and I think most people who know you would say an amazingly clear, powerful writer. What helped you get from point A to point B? How did this hidden potential become more and more known?

Well, thank you. I will. I'll try to live up to that. I think the big lesson for me that I guess didn't crystallize until I sat down to write this book was that I thought I was being evaluated on my cognitive skills. How well do I structure an argument. How convincing is the point that I'm making? But actually, what drove my growth ended up being a set of character skills that I developed. And I know we're going to talk a lot about this with kids, but for me, what that meant was basically, so I had this choice. They said, look, we're not going to force you to take the remedial writing class. But just so you know, no one who's ever gone straight into the regular writing after doing this poorly has ever gotten an A. And you're probably going to get a C. And I'm like, no, I don't want that on my transcript. So I had to make this tough choice of, like, what will I do? And I decided that I would rather be somebody who takes on challenges than somebody who shies away from them. And I said, I'm going to skip the remedial class. I'm going to embrace the discomfort of potentially doing poorly in the class. I'm going to become a human sponge and learn everything I can about how to write. And I'm going to reject the pressure to be perfect and say, you know what? If I get a B in writing, at least I took on the challenge and I'm gonna grow a lot through that. And that was. That was pretty pivotal.

You ended up weaving in so many different things from your book into your response, which is so valuable for people to know because you really do explain that process and you really break it down. So you, You. You dropped this, but I wanna come back. Skills of character. I think most people are listening, say, like, I know what those words means, but I've never actually heard those things together. So can you explain?

Yeah, yeah. I've actually completely changed my view of character in the last few years. So I used to think about it as virtue. I guess I was an Aristotelian in saying that character is a habit. It's a set of principles that you live by. And one of the things that psychologists and economists have learned over the past decade is that character is not just a matter of will, it's a question of skill. So the real challenges around character are can you put your principles into practice? If you're a procrastinator by personality, can you override that tendency when you need to deliver on a deadline for somebody you care about? If you're a shy introvert like me, can you put your character skills into action to stand up on stage and educate and entertain a group of students? Those are actually skill questions. More than will questions. Will will maybe get you to your computer or get you to show up on stage, but to deliver on those goals, that's actually, you know, it's a can do question, not a will do question so much. It's a know how challenge. And so I think what we're really missing is, is a. Yeah. A set of skills that allow us to say, okay, these are. These are the. The principles I stand for. How do I. How do I make sure I stand by those on a difficult day?

And what's the skill of character that you feel like most people are probably, like, working to build or, you know, would benefit from developing?

So I actually just collected some data on this. I didn't have the data when the book had to go to press, but now I do. So we launched a hidden potential quiz that I wrote, trying to use a combination of psychometrics and also a little bit of fun. And we've had over 30, 38,000 people take it in the past month. And I've found that the character skill that most people are struggling with of the ones that I've studied is being an imperfectionist, which. Which I would define as having the discipline to know when it's important to aim for the best and when it's okay to accept flaws and mistakes. Easier said than done.

Seriously, just to break that down, because there, there is, like, a multiplicity you're holding at once. I think people hear, wait, so, like, the character skill, the skill of character I might need to build is a tolerance for my own imperfection, and that is going to help protect, bring out my potential and achieve more. Like, just. Just connect those dots because I see you nodding. I think you're like, yeah, that's exactly it. But it sounds on the surface, counterintuitive.

Yeah, I think you just captured it really well. So when psychologists study perfectionism, they find that it can stunt our growth. And in fact, like, I think if perfectionism were a medication, it would come with a huge warning label. It would say, warning may cause stunted growth. Because what happens to kids, and this is true for adults, too, when they start striving for perfection, is they think any flaw is unacceptable. And so then they only try things that they know they're going to ace. And that means their comfort zone gets narrower and narrower. They stop taking risks, they stop seeking out challenges. They don't put themselves in new and uncomfortable situations, and that limits their learning quite a bit. And so the idea here is to say you have to be comfortable enough with making mistakes and with failing to put yourself in those new situations. To treat an obstacle in front of you not as a barrier, but as a crucible moment that's going to test and develop your capabilities, and that's part of how you reach your potential.

Yes. I want to give a concrete example of this with my daughter. So during COVID times, she was home doing school, right? On zoom. She was, like, kindergarten Zoom. It was, like, the worst. The worst thing, right? So stressful. And she was working on writing. Okay. And she, at the time, definitely had some perfectionistic, you know, kind of tendencies. And she. She was reading already. And so the struggle was when she wrote something, she knew she spelled it wrong because she could read it and say, that's not right, but she didn't know how to do it correctly. And so I watched her write a word, and she was supposed to write a sentence and erase it and try to write the word again and erase it, and it was so painful, right? And here's where I think that duality of imperfection and perfection can kind of come together. I was like, okay, so she likes to be, quote, good at things. Let me use that to her benefit. So I said to her, I said, look, I just want to tell you something. You're in kindergarten, and this is serious. You're really not supposed to know how to spell. I'm just telling you, like, you're really not. And if you spell too many words right, I just want to be honest, like, I'm going to tell your teacher, and, like, your teacher's probably gonna talk to you, and, like, you're not really doing your job as a kindergartener. And so I'm gonna walk out of the room and, like, I know you like to do a good job at things. I know that's the type of person you are. So when I come back, like, I just hope you've done a good job. And, like, there's really not too many words that are spelled correctly, because if not, me and Ms. Gopal are definitely gonna have a discussion. And I. I watched Adam, her, like, eyes light up in this way, and it really was. I could cry, like, the first time after days of struggle and stress where she actually completed a sentence. Right? And of course, the irony is now she's doing more. She's learning more. She's also learning. Her struggle is actually, like, a beautiful part of her process to be able to bring out her potential of writing. And I think that, like, turning that narrative was so key for her.

That's such a great Dr. Becky wisdom drop, because it's. It's the exact opposite of what every parent's impulse is. My instinct in that situation is to say, don't worry about making mistakes. You'll get it right eventually. But that only, like, if. I mean, it's so. It's so hard to deliver that message without your kid feeling like, but I need to get it right. And that's, that's the message I forget that I'm conveying is, all right, these mistakes are, they're problematic. And so you have to make them go away as opposed to, I just want you to keep getting better. And, you know, I guess this is, this is what I've. I guess what I've learned from the research on perfectionism. So Thomas Kern and his colleagues find that perfectionism has increased over time across the us, Canada, the uk. And it seems to be in part not just due to social media, but you could track it even a generation before there was social media. The spike and two of the strong predictors of the rise in perfectionism are escalating parental expectations and an increase in harsh criticism from parents. So, like, parents are expecting kids to be flawless and then really reaming them when they don't live up to those standards. And that can create a very vicious cycle where kids feel like, you know, in addition to the kind of the narrowing of competence that we talked about, kids end up just feeling inadequate constantly. And that leads to depression, anxiety, burnout. This is all well documented, of course. And so I love your model as an alternative to say, hey, actually, you're, you're already ahead. You're not even supposed to know how to do this right.

I always say to. About my kids, I don't know, I said this to you is like, the thing I hope they're really good at is I hope they're really good at struggling. Like, that's the thing. I hope they're excellent at it. And they're like, you know, to the point where, like, when they're young, I always think, like, we do to some degree, like, brainwash our kids so we can actually use that for their benefit. So I remember when my kids were young doing a puzzle and having a hard time, and I was like, ooh, this is so tricky. Good thing you're a kid who loves tricky things. And they were kind of like, oh, I am a kid who loves tricky things. And like, they would say at times like, this is really hard. I love hard things. Right? And I feel like we think about potential as pure genius ability, but that's not the potential you're talking about. So can you explain that difference.

Yeah. When I think about potential, what I'm interested in is your capacity to grow.

Yes.

And that depends much more on your motivation and the opportunities you have to learn than it does on your raw talent. Whether you think about that as intelligence or athletic ability or being a musical prodigy. Like, those starting points do not determine the distance you can travel. And I think that the parents think about this often backward, unfortunately.

Well, I think sometimes those kids, and I've said this about the kids in my family and kids, you know, families, I've consulted with the kid who has all this, quote, raw iq, such a high iq, where they really are playing the drums at age three in a way that we look and we're like, wow, that's really crazy. Amazing. Those are the kids I worry about. I worry about those kids. Right. Because they get told so early, this is who you are. You are perfect. You are, quote, exceptional. Right. That is so limiting for growth because it's so much pressure.

It is. And it also. It really stifles their creativity. So there's. There's some evidence to suggest that child prodigies rarely grow up to become adult geniuses when it comes to creative breakthroughs. And I think it's a cruel thing to do to a kid to say, okay, you have this impressive aptitude, and so we're going to teach you to memorize a Mozart sonata or to know all the digits of PI. But they don't ever learn to think for themselves, and. And so they've mastered the rote ability to produce somebody else's work, but not to imagine and dream up something of their own. And I don't want to put all the blame on parents. This is a challenge for teachers, too. There's some evidence that the most creative kid in a classroom is the least likely to be the teacher's pet.

Yes.

Because they're constantly going off script and not following directions.

They're not. So people pleasing those creatives.

No. Like. And so, you know, I think sometimes teachers inadvertently wanting to get the whole classroom on the same page, you know, end up standing in the way of, you know, kids flourishing and tinkering and experimenting. But I think to. I guess to go back to the point about potential, I think one of the things we want to do is we want to invest in teaching kids character skills early. And that's exactly what you're doing when you normalize, struggle. Like, if you teach your kids, hey, like, you're somebody who loves a challenge, that's allowing them to approach the next impediment. In their path with, you know, with enthusiasm, with gusto, with curiosity, as opposed to seeing that as a threat to their ego or their competence.

Talk to me about motivation, about kind of, you know, you have skills for character. And then you talk a lot in your book about structures for motivation. And I think that's probably on parents mind too. So, okay, potential isn't just inability, it's my kid's capacity to grow. How do I help my kid become more motivated to grow?

Well, I think my, my favorite way to think about this is to say like, the person most capable of motivating your kid is definitely not you as a parent. I mean, there's a wall there where, I mean, how many times I've seen this with our kids. I know you've seen this many times as well. How many times do you just get a psychological reactance response where they just do the opposite of what you wanted just because they don't want to be told what to do by their parent? When if it was a teacher they admired or a mentor or a coach that they looked up to, the same message would have landed very differently. So I think, I guess I would say a little bit of humility is required at the start to say that your very status as their parent sometimes disqualifies you from motivating them.

I think that's right. That motivation, I mean, it feels like pressure to kids. Right. Because kids know what we're invested in. Right. They know what we ask questions about. That shows them our values. Right. And so it's hard to ask too many questions to your kid without them thinking, oh, this really matters to my dad. And so basically they're saying, I need to be this way. And then they are overloaded with pressure, which can get in the way of motivation.

Exactly.

So then what, what does help a kid feel motivated?

Well, so you want to help them uncover their own motivation. So I've become a big fan of what I've come to think of as the coach effect, which is basically the core finding is that if you want your kid to do something, instead of giving them advice and encouragement, you should actually ask them to advise and encourage someone else. And that can build their own motivation and confidence because they realize I already have the knowledge I need and I'm excited to put that into practice. So a moment where I did this by accident was when I was getting ready to give my first TED Talk. I was terrified. And Becky, it was kind of the opposite of how you seemed in a few days before Ted. You were so calm and Collected. You knew you were going to crush it.

Fake news. Fake news.

No, I, I mean, I was there. I can, I can vouch for this. Personal, personally, I watched you. I'm like, okay, that, that is masterful emotion regulation and true professionalism. Um, so, yeah, I was. Not that I was freaking out and I thought I'd been on a lot of stages by that point and I'd gotten over my stage fright. But the, the TED stage was a whole nother level. So a few weeks beforehand, I was, I think I was pacing around, like, practicing my talk, wanting to make sure I had every word memorized. You know the drill. So our oldest daughter, Joanna, was, was watching me, and I think she was 8 at the time. And she started making fun of me because she said I moved. I move like a Muppet sometimes. And like, I just looked like a goofball. And I told her I was really nervous and I asked her for advice. I said, what should I do? And she said, well, you should find a smiling face in the audience and that will calm you down. Great advice from any age, but especially for an 8 year old. So I asked a couple people I knew to sit in the front rows and I locked eyes with one of them early in the talk. And I still think I sounded a little bit like Darth Vader when I was breathing partway through the talk when I rewatch it now, which is excruciating, but it went fine, all things considered. I think it was about as good as I could have done at the time. So a few weeks later, Joanna's super shy at the time, and I was wanting to motivate her to come out of her shell. And she's got a school play coming up and I can tell she's really nervous. So instead of trying to motivate her, I asked her what advice she gave to me. And she remembered that she knew the answer. She had already an insight about what to do. And I saw her get on that stage and lock eyes with Alison and me and just she came to life. She was beaming. She seemed comfortable. And it was so powerful to watch her motivate herself through giving advice to me. And I guess what I learned from that experience is we know, of course, that we want to support our kids and we want to show them unconditional love. We forget that they also need to feel relied on, not just that they can rely on us. And I think one of the best ways to motivate a kid is to show them that you rely on them and you trust them to Motivate somebody else.

Right.

Or to advise somebody else. And that's where they often discover their own confidence and competence. Sorry, that was a really long answer.

No, there's so many things it makes me think about. I mean, this is just a new thought that I'm having right now is the whole idea of potential. Right. I mean, you're now the expert on it, not me, but is that it's, like, in someone. Right. And so we don't bring out potential as a parent by putting it into our kid and then taking that back out. That was just ours. It's just like a transfer. Right. And so if you think about potential, it comes from the baseline idea. And then you and I are actually very similar in this, that it's inside, right? I talk about there's, like, goodness inside, there's potential inside, and we have to help a kid access it. But that is actually a very different framework than having the thing and needing to give it to them.

Light bulb. You just captured something that, frankly, it's implicit in the book. And it did not hit me until you just said it. Like, potential is not something that you create. It's something you unleash.

Yes. Oh, I have the chills. It is.

I cannot believe. Where were you when I was writing this book, Becky?

Adam, that's a good line. You got to get it back into the book.

I know I'll have to get it in for the paperback, but it's so interesting because throughout the book, I talk about unlocking and unleashing potential, but I never made that explicit that it's not something that you can induce in somebody else. It's something that you have to unearth in them.

Yes. And, you know, something I think about a lot is in any system or relationship. So certainly me and my kid, right? Any two people, there's only a hundred percent of a quality to go around. Stay with me. Okay, so let's say the quality is motivation. The more I own it, the more my kid will have less of it. Because if I'm owning their motivation, inherently, there's only 100%. And so the more I say things like, did you do your homework? Did you do your homework? You need to do your homework by tomorrow, you need to do. Okay, I now have 100% of the motivation for my kid to do their homework. It is no Wonder they have 0%. Like, you can't get to more than 100. And I've learned this with my kids where even forget homework. Like, I remember when my son's room just like, always had his towel on the floor. And it just bugged me. I was like, do you not see this? Like, what? Right? And I remember seeing him for a while, like, pick up your towel. Pick up your towel. And like, right now, I have the idea to pick it up. I have the words to pick it up. It's no wonder my son isn't learning, because he has zero percent of that, that I've taken a hundred. Right. I remember thinking, number one, to some degree, we're always trying to work ourselves out of a job, so what I'm doing is not helping me do that. Number two, I remembered this a hundred percent thing, and I just said to him, hey, what would you need to do to remember to pick up your towel? Like, what? Literally? Like, let's just make it like it's a concrete thing. Like, because you're a responsible kid, and I don't know, maybe you don't see it. You're not thinking of it. Like, what would you need to do to jog your memory? And right away he's like, I don't know, like, see a note? And I was like, oh, where would you put that note? And he was like, I don't know, like, right. Like, you know, right near where he always drops his towel. And I was like, oh, I wonder if that's the best place or if there's a more visible place. He goes, oh, I don't know, maybe, like, by my door. And I was like, oh, that's a great idea. And then he ended up writing in his own handwriting again. I didn't want to take that percent away, pick up my towel, putting it at his door. And nine times out of 10, he started picking up his towel. Like you said, like, there was a skill missing. Right. And the more I own that skill, why would he tap into his potential if I was taking 100% of that for him?

This framing is so powerful of saying, okay, like, I want my kid to own a larger percentage of the knowledge and the motivation.

Yes.

Never thought about it that way. Okay, you've just given me. You know, it's funny, I've sometimes complained about, like, what we do after we write books. Actually, Glennon Doyle put it best when she said, like, why do I have to say words about the words I've already written? And that that resonated. But I have a response now, because you get to learn new things from the people who read and interview you. And this is a great mom moment of that. Yeah. I think you're onto something really powerful and I guess maybe the takeaway for me is that if you're going to unlock potential rather than trying to instill it, then the place to start is to say, I want my kids to be responsible for what their goals are and how they learn.

Yes. And I think that framework, I'm even like, I'm closing my eyes. You see, like, the visual of there are things blocking their potential and I'm like an excavator with them, trying to figure out what those things are. So maybe I remove some, they remove some. But what you were saying with your daughter, to me, is the most beautiful part of parenting. It's like you watch your kid have the aha moment. Like, you can't manufacture that when you give it to them. When you say to your daughter, hey, you could find someone in the front row and lock eyes with them, and that would make you less nervous. Like, I guess she'll be like, all right, thanks, dad. Like, and she probably won't even do it because it feels annoying because it's her dad's idea. But either way, what doesn't happen? Like, my guess is you remember the way she looked when she came up with an idea for you. And I wonder in terms of when you're saying potential is like, your capacity to grow. Like, I have to believe every time your body manufactures the aha, I just discovered a new idea within me moment that that is our capacity to grow the more of those moments you have.

Yes. Yes. I love that. I think it's interesting because at some level, I'm trying to think of how to best capture this. I guess what I would say is it seems to me that where we screw this up the most is we think we already know the answer. And this is why it so often backfires when parents coach their kid in the sport they played. Yes.

Where do you. What do you see there? Because I actually get so many questions about parents and intensive sports. It's a whole scene, right?

Yeah. I mean, I think if you're gonna coach your kid's sports team, the best thing you can do is coach them in a sport you know nothing about. Because then you're learning it together and your kid can teach you about it.

Well, do you think it's funny? I have often said, like, on the soccer field, you watch parents, like, you know, unfulfilled dreams, you know, just act themselves out on their children, you know, but maybe what it is, is it's their sense. Now I feel sad of their still hidden potential that they regret or feel bad about and that's kind of acted out.

Yeah.

On their kids.

I think that's really poignant. I think, yes, the research on this talks about parental over identification and over involvement. And the thesis is, and there's good evidence for it, that parents are defining themselves in terms of their kids success. And I always want to sit those parents down and say, your kid is not a reflection of your success. You should not define your worth as a parent by what your kids achieve. You should define it by who they become and the character they demonstrate. And by the way, if you help them build those character skills, they're going to achieve more anyway. But I don't want to have to trojan horse this. I want you to, to care about the values they live by and the skills they learn independent of the results they produce or the status they attain. But I think you've highlighted another factor here which is probably motivating a lot of the same parents but also fueling another group of parents which is, yeah, they have potential that never got realized. I mean, it's amazing how many people have these regrets from high school.

Right.

I should have stuck with that sport. I shouldn't have quit the piano. I should have tried debate. Like I should have studied abroad. Then I would have actually learned the foreign language that I stumbled my way through. And yeah, I think a lot of parents are maybe living those shattered dreams vicariously through their kids.

And I think one of the things your book also gives like a roadmap for is it's, it's actually so empowering as a parent to say, okay, like that potential that I feel like hasn't been fully realized, that's real for me. I feel that, that, that seems to be in me. And actually like, maybe my best chance of working that through isn't putting on my kid. Like I'm, I'm still alive and kicking. Like, okay, maybe I'm not living abroad for six months, but I don't know, maybe, maybe I am with my family or maybe I am taking a language class or maybe I am finding an adult basketball league or. Right. And realizing again that, that that potential is still in them. Right. It's still there. It's not dead just because they're however years old.

Yeah. I think the hard part about that is like with sports in particular, there's a, like there's a ceiling or there's a, there's a critical window where like you feel like you're past your prime and you can't do it. But you could switch to another sport, you could choose another activity I'm like, okay, anybody who feels like they missed their window in basketball, like, there's tennis and there's ping pong, and now there's pickleball for you.

Exactly, Exactly. Well, okay, one last question. Because I imagine people listening to this thinking like, oh, oh, no. Oh, no. With my kids, like, I feel like maybe I've, you know, unintendedly, you know, kind of, quote, squashed their potential, or I've put on a lot of pressure, or I've. Maybe I've taken motivation away from them because I do kind of so powerfully own it for them. What are your thoughts about that? What next for those of us listening.

Thinking that you're the parenting expert?

Well, is the potential still in there? Is that what you would say?

Yeah, of course it's there. I mean, that's why, though, like, it often starts to emerge when kids go off to college and they have independence for the first time or when they, you know, they. They change to a new teacher or a new coach who sees something in them or has a. A slightly less authoritative style.

Yeah. And I would add, just bringing it full circle to Ted and, you know, my love of repair that. What an amazing moment to say to your kid. Like, I listened to something, it really made me think. And I think you can say a bunch of things and say, I don't think I always give you credit for, like, all the things you really can do on your own. Or I think sometimes I put on a lot of pressure from you, and that's something I'm going to do less of. Right. Just something really simple like that can, can be so relieving for a kid.

Yeah. And I, I think I would go even a step further, which is something I know you're a fan of and I am, too, which is like, this is a moment to ask kids for advice and say, like, I did this recently with our kids and said, like, I know I've been repeating this behavior over and over again, and I'm doing it because I'm not aware of it in the moment. Like, can you, can you let me know when it's happening?

I love that. And in a way, they're helping us build skills, the skills we need. Right. Because we have the potential to be less authoritarian or less controlling or to step away a little bit more. And it's true. Sometimes, sometimes we need our kids help to, like, point those moments out.

Are you saying that even bad parents have hidden potential?

I am saying all parents are good inside and that, you know, opening ourselves up to the idea that we, we all have the capacity to learn. There's no parent I know who wouldn't say parenting is one of the hardest thing I've ever done. And so yeah, there are a lot of opportunities to learn and grow. Adam, this was so amazing to talk with you. I feel like I always think new thoughts and that's like the most fun part of talking to someone.

Same. I learned so many things from hearing your questions and your reactions and I really feel like I would be a better parent if I talked to you more.

Well, let's, let's get on calendar.

I think that needs to happen.

All right. Thank you, Adam.

Thank you for having me.

Thanks for listening. To share a story or ask me a question, go to goodinside.com podcast. You could also write me@podcastoodinside.com parenting is the hardest and most important job in the world and parents deserve resources and support so they feel empowered, confident and connected. I'm so excited to share Good Inside Membership, the first platform that brings together content and experts you trust with a global community of like valued parents. It's totally game changing. Good inside with Dr. Becky is produced by Jesse Baker and Eric Newsome at Magnificent Noise. Our production staff includes Sabrina Farhi, Julia Natt and Kristen Muller. I would also like to thank Erica Belsky, Mary Panico and the rest of the Good Inside team. And one last thing before I let you go, let's end by placing our hands on our hearts and reminding ourselves. Even as I struggle and even as I have a hard time on the outside, I remain Good Inside.