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In crafting our True North 🌟, our big picture, our target 🎯 , for parenting – which anchors âš“ us – especially in the Teen years – one thing to consider is Self Talk 🗣 and how it factors into overall success.
In today’s Monday Morning Reflection, I share a little about my journey and struggles as a parent, as it relates to success and self-talk
Parenting – The Big Picture – Self Talk! [Transcript]
Good morning. It’s time for Monday Morning Reflections. We’re inside today because the mosquitoes want to carry us away. There’s been so much rain.
Anyway, today’s topic is a continuation actually from last week. And I hadn’t intended that. But that’s kind of what happens. I don’t choose the topic until the night before, or the day of. I have this long list. And I just kind of pray over it and think about what needs to be talked about based on the conversations I’m having that week.
So this week, we’re gonna go back to the big picture, because that’s actually like, we only covered last week, like the tomorrow and the quotes from L.M. Montgomery and Kelly Lovejoy. And there’s just a whole lot more that we can do with the big picture.
Because the big picture is our true north. It’s our target. It’s, it’s what anchors us when well meaning friends, and — my phone’s going off — well meaning friends and the culture around us are trying to direct us in different directions. Our true north helps us decide and go back to: What were our values for parenting? What are our values in those hard times? And what are our values in the day-to-day?
There’s so many things that can pull our attention. There are so many methodologies out there. For example, you know, one of my big picture things is that One Size Doesn’t Fit All.
I really, truly believe that we are perfectly created as individuals. And someday I’ll share you the story with you from A Wrinkle in Time that really struck me as a child. And I have a prop for that.
But anyway, so that in mind, I’d like you to remind you to use the shopping cart. I’m inside, so I get to have my shopping carts today. Take what works for you and leave the rest behind.
And let’s just kind of talk about this and, and you really just kind of think about this from your perspective, and what’s true for your family, and for your situation.
And I’ll just share ,a little bit about my own journey with it.
So big picture, parenting, shopping cart, moving on.
So today’s topic related to big picture that really has been something that that has been really important. I didn’t realize how important it was going to be until I really got into parenting. But it was something that what drove home to me.
And so I grew up in a business, and a small community that was fairly isolated. You had to drive five hours in any direction, over mountains in order to get to a city. So there’s a bunch of small communities on the — and this is on the North Coast of California, Redwood Forest.
And so in the southern part of the county, everybody knew my grandfather, who was a business owner. And then the other side, everybody knew my father, who was a business owner. And as a teenager, you know, that that was something that I had to balk against a little bit, because I just wanted to be, I didn’t want to be their grand-daughter or their child, I wanted to be me.
And so, when I left and I moved on, to other things, I decided I wanted to know what success look like outside of the modeling that had been in my family. And, so I started doing a deep dive into the studies on success and the factors of success.
And you know, because I was raised to be successful. That was, that’s a goal that was held up there. I wasn’t raised to go to college. I was raised to be successful as an adult.
And so I wanted to know what that look like outside the pictures that had been modeled for me at the time. And as I got into reading and studying the thought leaders on this particular thing, and those who have done research on, on people who are deemed “successful,” one of the things that comes up repeatedly and repeatedly as a major factor in success is our self talk, and our ability to reframe our thinking.
Our brains are wired to protect our survival. So they’re going to feed us things that helps protect us. Well, to take risks, to run businesses, to go on adventures, you know, there’s an element there that we have to overcome.
We can be safe in our little shells, you know, in the world that we know, that’s safe to us. And so to move out of that, our brains are wired to, to initially, our amygdala’s are wired to initially protect us from that. And it’s what repeats the self talk that we have in our head. But we can reframe that. And we can wire it to, to reframe, to to dwell in the self talk that matters to us.
And so I went into this parenting adventure, this journey of parenting, thinking about self talk a lot, and the type of self talk that I wanted to feed into my kids. And, and so that is something that really has helped frame my bigger picture.
And you’ve heard me say this phrase – Let’s see if I can show it: Will this matter in two to five years? Will this matter of the course of a lifetime?
So, I care about self talk. I care about my relationship with my kids, because when I hear people who are much older than I am, who have lived their lives, and they go through when they think about things that they would have changed later on, or redone. It was about, “I wish I spent more time with…”, “I wish I had a better relationship with…”
I’ve yet to hear, or read of, somebody saying, “I spent too much time.”
Now, I’ve heard, “I did too much for them.” But the spending too much time, no.
So when you’ve heard me use this, and I have a whole other video on this: Will this matter in two to five years? Will this matter over the course of a lifetime? So I’m thinking about that. I’m thinking about the whole thing we talked about last week on tomorrow. But then I’m also talking about the self talk.
You know, what kind of messages are they going to be replaying in their head? What type of messages am I replaying in my head and spouting out? And I have to be careful about that.
And being, because from a brain standpoint, the memories that we repeat, and we revisit, get stronger. Those connections get stronger, the more we use them.
And so, if we’re going to be revisiting self talk, and it’s a bad self-talk, negative self talk, that’s not going to help us. It’s going to be much harder to clip that, and and go into the positive land, to move towards success in that thing. It’s hard to overcome some really negative self talk. And and I’m, you know, maybe you know that, from your own personal experience.
You know, I have a story and I was very protected self talk wise. Like I said, success was really a big deal. And a definition of success, that is a little off the beaten path already. But I remember as a, I think I was 10-11 years old, I told my dad, I was like, “Hey, you know, I, I want to either be a writer or a teacher.”
And he was a young, young parent at the time. And he would respond completely differently now. Or, even a few years later, and he doesn’t even remember this conversation. But this conversation is played over and over in my head.
And his words back to me were — and it was just off handed, in the moment, you know, how that happens as a parent? And his words back to me were, “No, you don’t. There’s no money in it.” And that self talk, that got revisited in my head – for years. Even when I was earning really good money as a writer, and a trainer.
So, and and I consistently always look… that’s a core to me, writing and teaching, writing and teaching. And it doesn’t look like what it normally would look like or what he was probably thinking that it was going to look like. And in that moment, but it was just something that that continued to replay in my head and something that I I continually have to work through. Even now it’s like, I have to set that aside and reframe it.
Um, you know, it was… What’s even more important is, that I remember that. And so that helped frame my my conversations with the kids. I had to be very careful about making sure I wasn’t projecting my biases, and my unknowing, or fears onto them.
Because we want our kids to succeed, right? We want them to flourish, and grow, and be healthy adults.
And, and so, for me, one of the things I had to make sure is that my vision of that box that I want to put them in, you know, realize that that may not be the box that they’re meant for. And then I need to make sure that their self talk is in a way that allows them to grow within who they are.
So, as you probably already know, you know, three of my kids are dyslexic. we have some Autism in our family, and ADHD, and we have a few things that would be considered, you know, “learning differences.” You know, Josh has a written expression disorder. Yet, he’s a writer.
Okay, so one of the reasons that is, is that we worked really hard on reframing, that everybody has their strengths and weaknesses, and we fill in the gaps for each other.
Yesterday, Zach came and asked me to help him with something. And he apologized for asking. And I’m like, “you don’t have to apologize, you help me with stuff all the time.” We fill in the gaps for each other.
You know, corporations and companies are not built on one person. They’re built on a team of people, because everybody brings their unique perspective and talents, and makes a common mission happen. And we do that with life.
So one of the phrases you’ve heard me say before is, “Your ability to read does not impact your ability to learn.” And that phrase was developed specifically to put that self talk in. Because, as the kids get older, and they’re dyslexic, and they are challenged with reading, there’s a lot of voices in the culture that can beat our kids down.
And the problem is, is there are so many other ways in, especially in our time, there’s so many other ways to learn. There’s so many other ways to tap in to how we learn best, and it’s not the same for everybody.
So, we repeated this statement, “your ability to read does not impact your ability to learn.” We’re not going to get hung up on that your brain isn’t ready to read yet. We’re going to get up, we’re move forward and think about, “how do we learn?” And, “what are we interested in?” And dive into that. And enjoy the learning process. And the reading will come. And we, and we work on that.
Anyway, the other thing that we often use, is that the Power of Yet
Have you seen that one?
So, that’s a really powerful reframing tool. It’s like “I can’t read YET” is completely different than “I can’t read.”
“I can’t -whatever- Yet”.
You know, That’s a powerful reframing tool. And so, when I’d start to hear the kids say, “Well, I can’t..” then we would add yet.
Or, when I was talking, I would make sure that I was using the word Yet.
Because yet implies, eventually you will, or you’ll find a way. Right?
So, on my journey with this, I’ve come across a couple resources that I really have enjoyed. And one of these that I ran across, my mother sent this to me when Kate and Josh were little. Before Esther and Zach were born. And it’s Raising Your spirited Child: A Guide for Parents Whose children are more intense, more sensitive, more perceptive, more persistent, and more energetic, by Mary Sheedy Kurcinka — I can’t pronounce that correctly.
That book was really instrumental for me in my parenting education when the kids were young, on how to think about reframing. Like, these qualities that can be considered negative, how to reframe them into the positive.
And that’s even just one section of the book, but, but it was really, really powerful for me for learning that. And I posted something on reframing a few weeks ago. And you it’s just really good to be able to look at those and like, change our wording and practice changing our wording, and create our own memories, and change our own self talk and changing you know, how our languages how we’re using this and just kind of build that strength of memories on what wording to use – to build people up, to build our kids up, to build ourselves up.
You know, that’s just – because the voices in our heads, as parents, as people, the voices that our kids heads, you know, they come from not just our parents, or our family members and our loved ones.
They’re coming from the people that are around us. You know, the people we’re hearing, the people we’re reading. And you know, we don’t get to completely impact how a person’s self talk is. I mean, every once in a while, Josh will come in with something and he’ll… Like yesterday, he came in and he says, “Hey, Mom, can you stop sending me this? Because even though I know, this isn’t how you intend it, this is how my self talk is interpreting it. And I have to combat that.”
And it’s, like, “where would you get that? That’s not…”
but you… our brain, again, is designed to protect us and sometimes it takes a wrong turn. So, we just kind of have to keep, like, helping each other, build each other up, and work through it.
So, anyway, those are kind of the, you know, thought patterns that I’ve had about self talk and keeping that as a bigger picture, is that it’s gonna matter. The self talk matters.
And if we go back to this question that I asked myself, “Will this matter in two to five years? Will this matter over the course of a lifetime?
The self talk, it matters. It matters for our entire lives.
You know, so that’s something individually…. So, I’m going to leave you with this quote by Theodore Roosevelt:
“Believe you can, and you’re halfway there.”
So, I love that quote, I think it’s very powerful. Because what we believe that we can do, is huge.
If you can’t believe in yourself, if you can’t believe you can do it, then it’s not going to happen. You know.
But if you can believe it, and you can imagine it, and you can revisit that in your memories, then you make it happen. That’s, that’s magic. That’s, that’s, that’s, that’s, the battle right there. It’s won. You just have to Do. And you keep revisiting that belief factor, and that self talk to make it happen.
Anyway, so, that’s my Monday Morning Reflection for you. If you have any thoughts that you would help me clarify my thinking on this or you any takeaways that completely has resounded — that didn’t come out right there did it? — didn’t. If there’s anything that you that, you know, resonated with you, put in the comments below (on Facebook), and I would love to hear it and help me kind of continue to to reframe my thinking.
Anyway, have a good week. I’ll see you next week.
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Shannon Stoltz is a writer, trainer, and entrepreneur. But her favorite role has been that of work-at-home mom to four fabulous, homeschooled, and now grown, kiddos. Shannon is fascinated with how humans learn, grow, and communicate, and passionate about the importance of embracing our unique gifts, talents, and individuality. She lives in the countryside outside Houston, Texas, with her family, and their menagerie of rescue animals.