What can I offer you as your guide on this sacred quest as a parent?
Byron Katie says that everyone deserves a personal experience of someone whose life has been transformed. Until I started to do The Work of Byron Katie, I was not able to implement the powerful parenting information that I was helping to spread throughout the world via the Great Parenting Show that I founded in 2009. I’ve interviewed over 150 of the world’s top experts, and I know firsthand, how erosive more parenting information can be. I felt more and more like a fraud with every expert interview I did, while struggling with my own family, marriage, work issues, etc.
I was passive, always trying to be agreeable and liked, but that only led to me either blowing up, or become so lethargic and unmotivated by life that I struggled to get anything done.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (cbt) was helpful for taking me from clinically depressed to functional and good it many ways. It took The Work for me to become the parent I so deeply wanted to be. Literally every aspect of my life has been transformed by doing The Work in community. That’s why I’m so excited to offer this course for the first time.
The one thing I'd do differently for my kids:
I would start doing The Work, and doing it intensely, much sooner. That one change could have shifted things so powerfully. We talk in GPS about how a 1 degree shift at the start of an ocean journey can result in us landing on a different continent. I see the perfection of how things have evolved for my family and I, and I also see how many of our subsequent challenges would have been affected. If I been truly calm and confident, not trying hard on the surface to present that image while paddling furiously under the surface of the water, like a duck on a pond, my kids would have had so much less intensity to wade through in their lives. I don't regret the past, and I am doing today what I wish I'd done then.
I'd heard about the importance of my emotional regulation for years (and ironically was teaching parents about it) before I found a tool that showed me how to keep my cool in tense moments. Like you, I was busy, stressed, and thought I could figure it out on my own.
In 2014, after leaving my husband for the second and last time, I started to teach The Work to parents in my first Inner Circle small group coaching program. I knew that without a growth mindset they’d have the wrong energy in the heat of the moment, even if they remembered to say the “right” words. Other ways I’d tried to teach a growth mindset to parents didn’t work very well, as parents balked at doing the cbt-based exercises in my 1-1 work with them. On the Great Parenting Show, I’d interviewed Grace Bell, a certified facilitator of The Work of Byron Katie. So I decided to see if that modality, similar in many ways to cbt, would be more effective at shifting parents' mindset.
At first, I prefered my cbt tools, so I did the Work only enough so that I could answer my client's questions. After I got over my own barriers to it, such as getting confused about turnarounds, I started to see how much more helpful it was to me. I felt more relief, and a greater ability to solve my serious problems. I began to turn to it more and more whenever I felt stressed.
One gift of my separation and divorce, was that intensity and pain drove me to seek help. The Work helped me dive more fully into my emotions and see the hell my mind was creating for me. Then it would lead me to see things from a higher vantage point.
A virtuous cycle began. Each time I did The Work I got relief from my suffering and clearer thinking, which led to being better at solving my problems. That led to me turning up the volume on the quantity of The Work I did. I learned that if I made the Work a priority, especially when things were extra stressful and my time was very tight, I’d benefit exponentially. I saw again and again how I was able to find creative, elegant and/or life-saving solutions to my serious problems when I questioned the walls that my ego was adding bricks to.
I look forward to taking a small group of parents through the inaugural version of what I expect will become a regular course that I teach. It will be an adventure full of joy, surprises and relief. If you have any questions, reach out to me at JacquelineG[at]Great ParentingSimplified.com.