Failing doesn't feel good, so we often avoid it. This podcast is about why it's important to embrace failure and how to approach it. Embracing failure means giving ourselves permission to be human with permission to experience all of the emotions. It's okay to have conflicting feelings, joy in bad times, and sorrow in good times. It's all human. There are things we can do to better approach failure. We can remember that the unpleasant feelings that come with failure are temporary. The podcast suggests other tools like willingness statements, naming the emotion, and other ways to deal with the big emotions that accompany failure. One creative way to handle failure is to create a goal loop. Package the failure into an experience and throw it into your past. Goal loops are 3 simple questions about an experience: 1. What went well and why? 2. What didn't go well? 3. What did you learn? Other tools for handling failure are the better than zero principle, normalizing failure with dinner conversations about the day and talking about it, reminding ourselves that this is one performance, one hour of their lives, one teacher, one moment, or one class. A final tool in this podcast is creating a space for both performance and learning modes.

Often people spend significant energy trying to eliminate their weaknesses or make them strong.  Today's podcast presents a framework for looking at our weaknesses without freaking out or feeling bad about them.  If you line up 1,000 human character traits and score them on a scale of 0 to 10, every person on the planet with have zeros and every person will have tens. We are strong and weak in different things. That creates diversity, not disaster.   Looking inward to fix our weaknesses is like a hypochondriac who constantly takes their own temperature instead of looking outward to show up, come as we are, and lift where we stand.  Think of your weaknesses as a soundboard where we can call forth different character traits as the situation calls for it. Working from a position of strength is more useful than spending lots of time fixing our weaknesses or feeling bad about them.

Permission to be human.  Sounds like a relief, right? Today we dive into Tal Ben-Shahar's work on how giving ourselves permission to be human works to transform perfectionism into healthy striving.   Did you know that researchers have found that perfectionism has basic ingredients?  When you bake a cake, there are basic ingredients. These ingredients determine if the cake will be a chocolate cake, lemon cake, or angelfood cake. By looking at the ingredients of perfectionism you can determine your flavor of perfectionism and what you can do to dial down perfectionism in our lives.  In this podcast LeAnn will unpack perfectionism layer by layer, looking at the 9 ingredients of perfectionism and discussing the antidotes to each ingredient. The ingredients are: • High standards • Order • Expectations of others •Reactivity to mistakes • Perceived pressure from others •        Dissatisfaction • Details & Checking • Ability to be satisfied with an accomplishment • Black and White thinking

Gaps are scary. Whenever we set a goal or see a gap between where we are and where we want to be, we often have an emotional reaction to the gap. And when we encounter a gap we have a avalanche of thoughts about our ability to span that gap. It doesn't matter how big the gap is, our bodies still react with emotions and thoughts.  Why talk about gaps when we are talking about perfectionism? The way we look at the gap will allow us to dial-down our perfectionism. It allows us to be a healthy striver. It allows us to enjoy the journey. It allow the process to change us.  In this podcast LeAnn will discuss ways to look at the gap and the tools to help us manage the gap better, These tools include: Emotional regulation, looking at the end as a way to improve and grow, remember there will always be a gap, and thinking about the purpose for this goal or task.

Unpacking is making a list of what's going on in a situation. Unpacking brings awaresness or self-awareness. Unpacking perfectionism helps us uncover how perfectionism shows up in our lives and how it affects us. Perfectionists don't confront reality and often have secret rules for themselves that aren't realistic. Unpacking helps uncover these hidden rules and face reality. It's not about a standard of excellence, it's about what people think about us.  It's an overconcern with making mistakes and worrying about what people will think rather than giving ourselves permission to be human and make normal mistakes. The podcast includes lots of questions to help you unpack your perfectionism.

Uncomfortable emotions are like waves that come and go. Anger, frustration, or desperation can lead those waves to crest into yelling or other actions. We have all done that before and it never feels good afterwards.  We can learn to ride those emotional waves until they pass and then we can continue parenting without the guilt or the crying children.   We can learn to keep calm with our kids. Keeping calm in the moment is part mindset and part tools! There are mindsets like remembering that nothing's gone wrong here, this is normal. There's also managing the wherewithal that comes in layers and noticing when we are tired, hungry, or maxed out in some other way.  LeAnn also introduces research about how the presence of a calm parent changes the way a child's emotional brain works and lowers their reactivity.  Keeping ourselves calm is the first step, but it leads us to helping our kids keep calm as well, and opens up a lot more opportunities for teaching and parenting. Get ready for tools, principles, and examples about staying calm, something we all need at some point with our families.

We are learning how to get our kids to do what we need . Sometimes it works fine.  Other times it seems really complex.  And what works one time, doesn't work the next. What works for one family doesn't work for another.  Yes, we are talking about realistic parenting.  In this podcast, LeAnn explains some areas of realistic parenting.   How to let go of some of the expectations that make parenting hard.  How to  decide which parenting advice to implement in our parenting.  And she explains that somethings we, the parent, are part of the problem. Even if we have good intentions and work hard, sometimes the way we are handling a situation is part of the problem.  We may need to find new ways to  handle some situations.  However, knowing that we are part of the problem in in a given situation provides us real power and allows us to change and become part of the solution.

When our kids were little we taught them to share. Sharing a cookie meant: dividing it in half. Sharing lots of cookies meant counting them out: 1 2 3 4 5 6 and dividing them up evenly.   But how do you share a toy? We had to develop new language for “sharing” toys, so we taught them to take turns.  We even got them timers so they could take turns for 5 minutes at a time.   As our kids get older, sharing power keeps changing, until they become an adult with 100% power. Sharing power until then is not a tug of war.  It’s a way of looking outward and going in the same direction together.   This podcast is about sharing power with other people, including our kids.   LeAnn will take a look at ways to share power with our kids.

One of the great parts about being a parent is we decide how our home is going to be.  A large part of this is setting personal boundaries between us and our family members.   Creating boundaries takes time and effort. However, it is worth the effort.   We are creating a family culture and a home where everyone is happy. We decide what’s okay and what’s not okay in our house.    Also, while it is our responsibility to care for your children, we need to care for ourself as well.  We need to meet our own needs or else we will be unhappy and may eventually act out on our kids.  To avoid any explosive behavior, we create a boundary. We only have to set them a few times before kids know we mean business.  We can prevent frustration, resentment, and anger through creating boundaries.  Through simple actions and behaviors, we can help kids to see what is okay and what is not okay.  It takes practice but it is a skill worth learning as a parent.   In this podcast, LeAnn will teach you about the principle of setting boundaries.  Come learn how to craft a one-liner to ask for what you need.  One-liners help me be a calmer stronger parent.

As a parent, the environment we create influences our kids’ choices. Sometimes, a change of environment is necessary to help push them to do the things we need them to do.   Changing the environment changes the response we get from our kids.  It gets our kids attention and helps them know that we mean business. Part of your job is to prepare your kids for the future and so it's worth the effort to make these changes and do things that will help them to make good choices.    In this podcast, LeAnn teaches about the power of changing environments.   Doing something really different can really make a difference.  She will teach you to examine your assumptions and break out of them so you can mix it up and try something new.  You can’t control your kids or their choices, but you can control a lot of things.  So when you experiment, make changes, and get something working well, it builds positive momentum to get other things working well.  You will have more confidence as a parent and find better ways to influence your kid to do good without needing to force them in any way.