Do you ever feel as if everyone else is getting life right but you are failing at it? Have you had the feeling that you are not enough just as you are? Do you find yourself putting off doing things until the conditions are right or you feel more qualified or resourced? Are you afraid that someday you'll be found out as the imposter you are? Do you suffer from parental guilt? Are you exhausted? You may be a perfectionist.

This week's episode is with Zoe Blaskey. Zoe is the founder of Motherkind, a self-empowerment platform for modern mums. Through Motherkind Zoe coaches mothers of all backgrounds from Global CEO's to stay at home mums on how to navigate the huge challenges of modern motherhood. Zoe also hosts The Motherkind Podcast and speaks every week to leading experts on a range of topics from self-care, mental health, to career, nutrition and parenting.

Zoe shares with us how she got into the work she does now, having had a breakdown at the age of 23 and then found healing. She describes how the birth of her daughter was a catalyst for her to make changes in her life. She had been a people-pleaser and a perfectionist and was living to satisfy other people's goals for her and feeling like she was never quite getting there despite achieving so many outward measures of success. She developed several addictive behaviours to help her numb and distract herself from her inner pain. But her healing process has enabled her to help many others.

Listen to this episode with Zoe if you want to learn:

• About the difference between nurturing the inner self vs looking good on the outside
• How important it is for parents to develop their own emotional intelligence so that their children can do the same and how important it is for us to 're-parent' ourselves
• The signs of perfectionism –the seeking of qualifications and prestige jobs, trying to get everyone to love you, or maybe striving to look immaculate, saying 'yes, but….' about your achievements and procrastinating or not finishing projects because they'll never be good enough
• How perfectionism is different from doing your best
• How perfectionism can suck the joy out of parenting and lead to criticising your own child and passing on the perfectionism burden to that child
• When trusting your instincts as a parent what the difference is between defaulting to learned parenting behaviours and parenting from a place of awareness
• How having a strong inner critic gets in the way of building our children's sense of self-worth, resilience and joy
• How parental guilt is unreasonable as it focuses on the wrong things, the small things, the things we feel we 'should' be doing, not on the things that are out of step with our values
• How to handle things when we (inevitably) get things wrong, including asking our children if there's anything we can do to make amends, so that we can model our humanness and our imperfection, because if we beat ourselves up we are saying I only love myself when I get things right and they can accept their own imperfection
• How to avoid putting on the mask of perfectionism to hide not being good enough
• To be willing to show our messiness so that our children can accept their own feelings and the complexity of the world
• How to hold your own feelings and accept your child's feelings rather than distract your child from them
• How to build your self-awareness, which plays such an important role in understanding yourself and in quietening your inner critic
• What role meditation plays in understanding that we are not our thoughts

In our celebration of vulnerability and perfect imperfection Zoe shares with us a Low Parenting Moment of her own. Some of you will recognise this moment and may feel that Zoe handled it perfectly well actually.

And she also shares her top tip for raising children to be confident, happy and successful. It's a really lovely one.

Links

To get in touch with Zoe:

Website:https://www.motherkind.co/

Podcast: https://www.motherkind.co/podcast-1

Blog: https://www.motherkind.co/blog

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/motherkind_zoe/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Motherkind.co/

Twitter: @motherkind