I have been coaching women who shy away from empathy in their motherhood and relationships. 

Sometimes this is because they can't see it as a part of a solution, maybe it doesn't come naturally to them. Most often we don't bring empathy into parenting because we don't want to enable our kids or express any permissiveness of their poor behaviour. 

I want to unpack what empathy is, the two types of it, and how to bring it into your parenting without using it as a way to enable poor behaviour. Empathy can increase our connection and relationship - which helps us work on conflict resolution together. 

Find the full transcript at the end of this post

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This is part one.

In this episode we cover:

The two types of empathy

How empathy helps make our lives better

The phenomenon of having empathy for 'the bad guy' 

Empathy is not enabling

Empathy is not the silver bullet solution to conflict with our kids

How empathy teaches our kids emotional intelligence 

How expressing empathy to our children helps them offer it to others

Empathy helps us both deal with the discomfort of their negative emotions

The book I mention in this episode is Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child by John Gottman I have a thorough book summary on that book right here

I also mentioned SISU, which is a Finnish concept of grit and resilience. It is from a great book I read a couple of years ago called The Finnish Way. 

 

Sign up for information about one-on-one life coaching with Shawna Scafe - Certified Coach Practitioner & Certified in Transformational Life Coaching. 

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

If you're new here a little bit about me, I am a mom of three kids in small-town, Canada. I am a life coach, a minimalist mom. And I started out my career as a health inspector, very underwhelming job. And I gave that up once my second child was born, to stay at home with them, which evolved into me being here, somehow just taking step after step, idea after idea down the road, to where now I am life coaching women and helping them show up for their lives.

That's my whole goal for you, is to give you some freedom and power to show up for your life to enjoy your life. No matter where you are, even if you're knee-deep with toddlers, or you're balancing work life and mom life. I want to help you show up well for your life.

As I mentioned, I am in small town Canada and our province is going into another wave of COVID restrictions, we're entering into another time of somewhat isolation, but not as extreme as last March. So we're really relying again on what we can do outside even though it's cold, and there's snow around. Getting outside for walks is a huge thing.

Last week, I took my daughter for a walk and we walked an hour right across town, the sun was shining, it was beautiful. And I don't know about you, but I feel like with my kids, if I pour into them one on one, just being with them just I had to just walk with her and listen to her, it was easy, that she is so much more receptive to me so much more warm with me that it just, it makes us such a stronger connection.

And I think that's so important when your kid is maybe pulling away like she'll sometimes do that pulling them a bit closer, is going to keep them closer, and I'm going to talk about something today that's really going to help with this.

I'm going to talk about empathy.

And it's something that I've been coaching on and I'm hearing more and more moms and women are shying away from using empathy in their relationships. And maybe because it doesn't seem like a possible step towards a solution. Maybe it feels like empathy would make things permissible, and it's almost accepting of people's poor behaviour. Maybe empathy doesn't come natural,