Build Your New Parenting Approach like a Muscle

For the past two weeks, we’ve been loosening the grip of an outdated conditional belief that incites your anger or fear and has you doing that auto-pilot thing that always makes it worse with your teenager or young adult child and causes more distance between you.

Week 1, you identified one conditional belief that seems to be driving your behavior.

Week 2, you tapped into a vision of how you could experience that situation differently. It

likely feels like a far-off vision to you right now. And you’re wondering: How do I bring it closer into my real life and transform it from concept to concrete?

Onward to Step 3…

It’s too bad you can’t just choose a new belief and believe it.

You can hope and wish but you can’t will it to happen. You can visualize it, name it and get excited about it, but that’s not enough. Remember, your new vision now has to compete against thousands of previous experiences that substantiated your old conditional belief and ingrained it more and more into your thought patterns and your body. So, what’s needed are new experiences that substantiate your new vision.

Before we go any farther, let’s be clear that this isn’t about taking a big jump into a new belief and acting like it’s true. If you want to be able to swim long distances and you start with crossing a 10-mile lake, then your belief that you’re not a strong swimmer will just be corroborated. Jumping into the deep end doesn’t work.    If you want to real, sustainable change, what works is daily repetition of actions that substantiate your new way. Then you’re shifting your trajectory one degree at a time, like doing more arm days at the gym or jogging farther to increase your endurance.  

If you’ve been following my work, you know that, when I’m coaching parents, I design practices for them to do in between our coaching sessions. These are actions tailored precisely for that person and their situation. And they’re essential because a new way of parenting is only image and theory until your body registers it, feels it and starts doing it naturally.

Consider the mother who had the conditional belief, “As long as I look ahead and anticipate what my son will need, then I’ll prevent big family dramas.” Let’s say she’s done some exploration and discovered a new perspective that feels like exactly what she’s longing to be able to do: “As long as I feel my balance, then I can open my heart to what he’s trying to express, knowing that I will be safe.”

A first practice for her might be a daily 3-minute silence for grounding and recalibration. Or literally finding her balance by walking on a narrow curb on her street. Or stretching her arms out wide to open her chest.

These might sound so simple but, for this mom whose living on eggshells 24/7, it would be a challenge to do this every day. She hasn’t been able to stop her habit of constantly scanning for warning signs. She isn’t capable right now of giving herself a moment when his outbursts begin. She doesn’t yet know how to find her balance when he’s loud and demanding. And so, she has to start exactly where she is and gradually build these capabilities in herself, i.e., go to the gym and strengthen her ‘pause and rebalance’ muscle.

Now it’s your turn.

Considering the new perspective or vision you discovered last week and the ‘muscle’ you can see needs to be strengthened, what might be a first practice for you?

Think small.

Be creative but keep it simple.

It doesn’t have to be something you do in your interactions with your big kid, just like you don’t have to be in water to strengthen you swimming endurance.

Make it both challenging and doable.

Then do a 14-day experiment. Some days will be stellar and others will be a bust. That’s the reality when you’re building something in yourself that’s deeply important to you, a new parenting approach that’s going to shift the trajectory of your relationship with your teenager.

So, do it again tomorrow.

And tomorrow.

You know, most of us have gone to a parenting workshop or read a popular parenting book and got some great insights, but then nothing changed in our interactions with our kids. That’s because insight and self-awareness only take you part of the way: personalized incremental practices take you the rest of the way. They make new experiences land in your being. Vision to reality, one day at a time.

When you experience yourself repeatedly in a new way, you come to believe something new about yourself and you notice that you’re parenting in a slightly different way. You stop scanning for danger. You can find your balance, even amid the dramas.

Gradually, like a changing season, you will embody this new way of parenting, the way your heart was always longing for. It seemed so far off, just a glimpse in a meditation or an idea in a sketchbook. And now you are a grounded, present parent, lovingly and effectively navigating situations that used to go off the rails.

I’ve witnessed such transformation again and again.

It’s always unique to the individual, and always breathtaking.

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