Eps 308: Finding Our Optimism With Summers McKay

I once heard somebody describe courage as a very tender practice instead of a strong practice. Courage is very tender. It’s being tender with yourself to know that sometimes you’re not strong. It’s courage to admit sometimes you need extra help, and it’s courage to admit that there will be times that are challenging and you have to find your tribe. For me, joyful courage is about taking joy and knowing it’s okay to be tender and gentle. Really taking joy in this process of being human.

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Transcription

Casey O'Roarty 0:03
Music. Hello friends. Welcome to the joyful courage podcast 2022 a show that has been downloaded over 1 million times. That's right, I'm going to continue to celebrate that a place where we tease apart what it means to be a conscious parent and a conscious human on the wild ride of parenting teenagers. I'm your host. Casey o'rourdy, positive discipline trainer, coach and Mama walking the path right next to you as I am perfectly raise my own two kids. Joyful courage is all about grit, growing on the parenting journey, developing and nurturing relationships that provide a sense of connection and meaning and using influential tools that support everyone in being their best selves. Today's show is an interview, and I encourage you to listen for how grit shows up as my guest and I tease things apart before we go there, I have a few announcements to make. First, I am super excited to let you know about a new limited podcast series that I am co hosting with my sister from another mister, Julietta Skoog, beginning Thursday, January, 20. We're going to be showing up here on the joyful courage podcast feed deep diving into the biggest principles of parenting with positive discipline. The show is called becoming sproutable, and we are so excited to share it with you again, you don't have to do anything but pay attention to your podcast feed. The shows will start showing up the 20th and every Thursday, a new show will be posted for seven weeks straight. Super excited about that. The other announcement I have is to remind you that there are only a couple days left to enroll in the living joyful courage membership program. Doors close Wednesday the 12th. That's just a couple days from when this podcast is going to go live, which is also our kickoff call night. So quit putting this off. This membership is where it's at for mamas of tweens and teens, the community and the content supports everyone in writing the ebbs and flows of adolescents for more information and to see if there's still space for you to get in. Go to joyful courage.com/ljc. Yeah, super excited about that. Okay. Thank you so much for listening. I continue to be so deeply grateful for each and every one of you honored to serve you and be walking beside you. Thank you for who you are and for being in the community. Enjoy the show.

Hey listeners, I am super excited for today's guest summers McKay. She is the CEO of the optimist daily, a news publisher that uses a multimedia approach to offer formulas for success to its audiences, which spans over 250,000 active engage optimists every week. The optimist daily aims to create an optimistic, mobilized and solution focused global society, making the world a healthier place for all summers. Is a business powerhouse. She has run successful crowdfunding campaigns, launched global brands, and continues to lead personal development groups and create strategic plans for nonprofit and for profit organizations. She is determined to apply lucrative and scalable business rigor to the world of doing good summer's business motherhood and life mantra is simple, help good things grow. Yay, her. IG, bio claims, mommy, CEO, gardener, Explorer and pet parent. And today, we're going to talk about how we can spark and encourage optimism into our family life when so much around us seems to be contrary to that vibe. Hi summers. Welcome to the podcast.

Summers McKay 4:09
Hi Casey. Thank you so much for having me on. It is delightful to be here. Yay.

Casey O'Roarty 4:15
Well, and I mentioned this before I hit record, but I want everyone to know I had to cut down summer's bio, because, like, the list of accomplishments and things that you've done and the leadership journey that you've been on is just huge. It's huge. You're such a force. Can you tell me a little bit about your journey of world domination and what business? Let's call

Summers McKay 4:39
it world elevation instead of world domination. Okay, right? So,

Casey O'Roarty 4:43
yeah, let's,

Summers McKay 4:45
let's reframe the world elevation. And I am very, very fortunate that I have from a super young age and just presented with opportunities to learn from really amazing people when I. Is about 13 years old, 12, I guess, 12 years old. I got my babysitter's license, and I knocked on the door class. I did. I did. I took the American Red Cross babysitters class, which was such, you know, as a young person, right, like you're getting certified in something. And I knocked on the door of the family who lived next door to my grandmother, and it was a young mom and dad, and they had two little ones at the time. And I said, You guys need a babysitter. You need a babysitter every Saturday night. And you know mom, who is successful in her own career, and dad was a physician, and she kind of looked at me, and she's like we do. And I said, Yep, and I'm it. And I just wanted to work. I wanted to go care for and learn and expand. And so that was my first job. Was just being a babysitter, and I worked with that family, and ended up kind of running like a little Babysitter's Club, and had some other great families that I worked with, and some of the families would all drop their kids off together, and I would hang out with all of them, and I got to travel. And so I started my career caring for kids, but really it was also just like caring for families and knowing that parents need just as much support. So I knew even half the time there, when I was there babysitting, the parents were there. They just needed an extra set of hands, right? They needed to make sure the toddler wasn't like, jumping off a counter. So from there, fortunately, the folks that he babysat for were all really encouraging. I got my first internships from their families, and moved through a career in the entertainment industry in California, and I got to a point as a producer of reality television that I looked around and the work that I was doing, I didn't feel like was good for the world. I felt like I was being asked and encouraged by the networks and the executives who were green lighting our shows to dig into some of the more negative experiences of humanity and really like push people and performers and folks on the shows to say and do things that I knew wasn't in their core matrix of what would inspire them or empower them, and so I threw the E break on my career, and I went to business school because I said there has to be a different way to tell stories, and I want to inspire and empower people through media, not just serve their most base, negative needs, of like, what's gonna you know, just that popcorn eating drama. Sure, it's like junk food for your body and your brain, but what can we do to actually make our brains and bodies and minds healthier with media and content and so that's why I would say, instead of world domination, world elevation is the intention.

Casey O'Roarty 8:04
Yeah, well, it's funny. Side note, I'm taking social psychology right now at the local community college, and just read a whole chapter about cognitive thinking and how, really how we consume, and what's being offered to consume and how, like, it's a it's a financial decision to say, how can we get more dramatic and like, more gross? And because it lures right in the viewers, right? Right? So,

Summers McKay 8:36
addiction? Exactly. Yeah. Uh,

right? Like we get addicted. We get addicted to the endorphins and the cortisol and the stress, actually itself is addiction, right? We have an addiction to stress, and our media can provide kind of a you know, you've got your sugar addiction. You people have addictions to alcohol and sex and all sorts of things, right? There's lots of addictions in this world, but most people unknowingly have a stress addiction, and our media can feed into that stress addiction, and then what we're offering is this just highly addictive content, and people don't even realize that they're getting sort of sucked into that machine. Teenagers don't even realize they're getting sucked in. So you you get the negative content, and then you get the FOMO and the comparison sense and all of that that makes the scroll habits addictive,

Casey O'Roarty 9:37
right? And why they can't just watch one show on Netflix

Summers McKay 9:41
Exactly, exactly. But the good thing is, there are great shows on Netflix you can watch, like the entire episode, the entire season, right? So we can, we can consciously choose to get addicted to good we just have to be aware. And it's, it's sort of that you can't manage, what you can't measure. And. It's time we all talked about our negativity addiction, our stress addiction, and we talked about it with our kids, and we said, All right, let's let's manage this. Let's measure it. Let's see how much negativity we're allowing into our ethos, and then let's change it. Let's get addicted to something yummy and good, yes. So

Casey O'Roarty 10:17
tell us about Optimus daily. Like, how did that come about? Well,

Summers McKay 10:23
long story short, in my entrepreneurial journey, I actually started an organic, intimate care product company

for women. In your bio, keeping it in, yep, Nope, we're gonna just put it out there. So

I suffered from extreme personal, intimate pain due to allergies and a lot of different things. And so I went to sort of try to solve that, and created an organic, intimate Caroline product based in coconut oil. That product ended up being like so much loved that it's just used head to toe by moms, and not just people for intimacy, but as an entrepreneur, I was underfunded. I didn't have the capital to sort of capture in the market, and I really got to a point where I was like in business to serve the business, and I wasn't actually making money, right? And I I needed to change my perception, and I thought it was a great learning journey as an entrepreneur being underfunded, but I didn't have the ability to go seek other funding, so I stepped back, and I said, All right, what have I learned? And I'm gonna go into consulting and help other entrepreneurs make their choices, and perhaps, like, help them determine whether there's scalability to their business, right? Is there a there, there, or do we just have something that we really like, and should we make it in our kitchen and give it to our friends, right? And through that expertise, I was actually brought in to a company that was at its very burgeoning stages. It was the optimist daily, and they asked me to come help them find out if there was a there, there, like, could there be a business in the world of optimistic news, or was it just a hobby, right? Was it just a hobby for writers who are passionate about sharing positive stories? And so what the optimist daily is is it's a positive news media company. We deliver more than 70 positive news stories that are solution based, focused stories every week, plus a thought leader essay every Sunday, and we have a daily podcast that is about those positive news stories. And what we do is we take a look at the worlds of news, and we say, Where are the stories like? We all know the problems, right? We all know climate problems and social justice problems, and, you know, personal wellness problems, medtech problems, poverty problems. We all know the problems, but who are the solutionaries? Who are the solution makers? And what are they doing? Right? And that's what we want to elevate in the news. So that hypothesis was that there could be a community of support, there would be enough of a media appetite for positive news, and could we prove it? And so I came as a consultant, and about six months later, I did put together a model showing that, yes, in fact, it would be slow growth, and we would have to be strategic, but we could get to a business model for it, and the investors asked me to come on as the CEO of the company and lead that, you know, lead that sort of march toward toward business efficiency. So,

Casey O'Roarty 13:32
world elevation, right? Yeah. World World

Summers McKay 13:35
elevation. It was adorably timed in the sense that I was named CEO 10 days before I gave birth to my two, my now two year old daughter. And there was a, there was a lot of generosity and support and encouragement from our investment team and all the the team that I worked with that that they were willing to say to, you know, a soon to be new mom, hey, do you want to be CEO of this of this opportunity? But I'm very grateful, and I love my team, and I work with amazing people, and it's, you know, it's really all about helping us think through the traumas of the past with solutions for the future, so that we're not having ongoing generational trauma and ongoing sort of world challenges, instead that we're educating our new generation, so we're educating ourselves as parents and as grandparents on how we communicate solutions, so we don't just keep communicating and perpetuating problems

Casey O'Roarty 14:36
that is so aligned with how I think about parenting. You know, I'm a positive discipline trainer, and, you know, just this morning on my drive home from the grocery store, I had somebody call me and just do a little quick like, ah, SOS we're having a moment. And she shared the story, and. And she, you know, she wanted support and but she immediately was like, here's what I'm thinking, and immediately went into, here's what I'm going to do to him so that he really gets this lesson right. And I supported her around like, well, that is that's one direction. But if ultimately the goal is to change behavior, elevate behavior, then let's look at this a little bit differently. Let's get a little bit more curious about what's actually going on for your kiddo, what's getting in his way, and how to solve, like actually, first figure out what the problem is that you ultimately want to solve. So I love, I love the solution. Focus of Optimus daily. And I said, before we recording, I've listened to a couple of the podcasts, and now I'm subscribed, and I love that they're nice and short, yeah,

Summers McKay 15:48
we figure you can have your cup of coffee with us in the morning, and like the ads are, at the end of 10 to 10 to 20 minutes, you're gonna feel lifted, inspired, and, you know, just kind of juiced up for your day. Yeah,

Casey O'Roarty 15:58
I love that. I love that. So right now, you know, and my people are parents of adolescents, mostly. And, man, it can feel like we're really swimming upstream, yeah, you know, and trying to stay optimistic with the current state of the world. I mean, global pandemic, like all the things you just mentioned, we all know are exists. So what are you know at the very base level summers, what are your tips for not allowing because unless we live in a cave, even when the conversation is focused on solutions, it still contains like, oh, there's shit going down right now. Yeah, right, yeah. And so what are some, like, really basic tips that you have for people to at least, kind of like, I think about, oh, we're in the hole, but if we can lift up a little bit and seek out from the hole, there is a horizon. What are some tips you have to support people in finding that optimism

Summers McKay 16:58
well, and you're the parenting expert. I'm just like the parent, right? And so I need your expertise too. But there are a couple things that we recommend at the optimist daily, like, first and foremost, there's sort of, it's a negativity bias, right? So if you hear one negative thing, it takes four positive things to offset, right? And that number's sort of loose, and the research is fleshy, you know, but, but really, the negativity bias does exist. And so if somebody says, like, oh my gosh, you look beautiful today. You're so smart. I'm so grateful for your friendship, and what a wonderful person you are. And like, did you really want to wear that? All you hear exactly, right? I just You didn't. I

Casey O'Roarty 17:40
just flipped the middle finger. Listeners exactly like,

Summers McKay 17:43
all you hear is that last thing. And so, um, I think it's important. And the The truth is that, like, we're not going to get rid of that last thing. As parents, as kids, like, we're never going to get rid of that last thing, but what we need to do is like face and acknowledge that that last thing landed, yeah, and we put it in its place, right? And so we so first step is awareness, awareness that we as human beings, and certainly awareness as parents, that our children have this negativity bias, we simply have it. And so instead of trying to, sort of like yell at your team to stop, acknowledge it, acknowledge it and welcome it to the conversation and say so we've got this negativity bias, what do we do about it? We understand that it's going to take so much we have to increase our appetite for positive solution based thinking, so that we can offset that negativity bias. And that can be really hard, right? When you have an adolescent, when you have a teenager, they're gonna they're gonna want to stay anchored in that negativity bias, but over time, you can teach them that they choose what they're consuming. They choose what they're prioritizing, and those little bits of encouragement and reminder do have a downstream effect, right? And you know this, right? Like you might say something into a kid and you don't think it landed, and four months later, they say it back to you, and you're like, holy shit, she heard me. So, okay, so acknowledging the negativity bias is the first step.

Casey O'Roarty 19:24
Okay? And I want to pause you right there for a second, because I love that, and I just want to bring it into some context for listeners, because what I heard you say at the start is you were using the example of like, grown ass adults who can get caught up in that. And so one our own awareness, but I, and I this is like such a great thing to bring to a family meeting. So I talk a lot about family meetings with the clients and classes that I do, and when we have that regular time sitting down, or if you don't do family meetings, you might be sitting around the table. All which, btw, everyone, we only do this like twice a week anymore. So if you're feeling like, oh, we hardly ever sit down as a family don't like, get rid of that negativity bias and come on back to the conversation. Yeah. But anytime you find yourself, like in communion with your family, to say, oh, you know what I heard on this podcast, I heard about this thing called negativity bias, and this is what I'm going to practice. This is where, how I'm going to use it. And I think it's a really awesome place to model as you know, to use the model of yourself as the teacher to your kids as well, and to not because I know teenagers do like to anchor in to that negative, and it can be really triggering,

Summers McKay 20:44
right for us. Like,

Casey O'Roarty 20:45
why do you gotta be so negative? Like, let them, it's okay. Everything is temporary. They're gonna be fine. You know, just keep modeling, keep noticing, keep validating. You know, all the good things. Well,

Summers McKay 20:57
exactly what you were saying is that, like, and this is just what I've tried to as a parent. Is, you know, this is about healing generational trauma and not passing our trauma on to our children, right? And this is how the world's going to be better. Is if our generation, those of us who are parents right now, are sufficiently self aware, acknowledging and managing what we measure, we are going to protect ourselves from doing what perhaps previous generations didn't have the tools or the awareness of the conversation, of the vocabulary to do so that our children can be solutionaries, right? So that we can, we can heal generational trauma by acknowledging like. And you don't have to communicate this to your team, your teenager, right? You don't have to be like, Oh, teenager. It makes me really sad when you get on your phone and give me dirty looks, it makes me feel like I'm being rejected by my own mother, right? Like you don't have to communicate that to your kid, but you can acknowledge it for yourself, yeah, and you can take it and put it in its sort of caring and nurturing place that then you don't have to to pass it on, and instead, you choose what you do. Pass on, right? And

Casey O'Roarty 22:03
I told my kid recently, one of my teenagers, I was like, Listen, I'm working really hard to pass you a carry on bag and not a Foot Locker exactly like I have no there's gonna be plenty to talk about in therapy later on, but hopefully it won't be this, like lifelong slog. Yeah,

Summers McKay 22:20
exactly, exactly. So I think the set the first thing is acknowledging negativity bias. Second thing is, like, really encouraging positive positive options, positive alternatives, right? So when you are sitting around the dinner table and somebody has said, like, oh, did you hear about the guy who, you know, we just had an incident the other night, right? Like a guy where we live in an area had basically barricaded himself, himself into his home and, like, blew out a bomb. And, I mean, it was, like, super terrible, but it was, like, it was this very intense, very negative experience that shook our community for for a time being. So our teenager needed to talk about that. Needed to share that experience and like, honestly, I wasn't even aware of it, because I live in my optimist daily bubble, right? I let, I let them curate the news for me and tell me what I need to know. But I heard, acknowledged, participated, and then offered positive alternatives, right? Not, not. What

Casey O'Roarty 23:25
about so

Summers McKay 23:27
it was, you know, all of these terrible things happen in our community. And then, how did that make you feel? How did you get you know, how do your friends feel? Do you guys feel safe now? What are you thinking? And then, well, I also heard something on the news day. I heard that there's a new device. It's a prosthetic hand that someone can learn to use within five minutes, alternate ability. You know, this is so shifting the conversation, not ignoring or invalidating the fact that real and this is, this is back to negative revised, like owning the fact the bad stuff's there, but then also being willing to present the good stuff and not presented as a defense to the bad stuff, but that it's concurrent, right? So I know there's a family that I good friend of mine, and her daughter, is focusing on becoming vegetarian, but became really concerned. Part of part of her intention for vegetarianism is that she wants to reduce her footprint, her her green footprint on this world, reduce her carbon imprint. And she came to this realization that her alternative for meat was tofu, and tofu itself had its own really challenging green footprint, right? So she didn't feel like she was like, here I am trying to be a vegetarian so I can make this world a better place. But now I've learned that being vegetarian means that I'm not actually doing it better because I'm eating the tofu blah, blah, blah, and so what I encouraged her, her family, to talk about was like that, while vegetarianism is like. Definitely a way to reduce our footprint. Actually, eating is a locavore, right? Eating locally, sourcing locally, if your intention is to do that, so supporting her intention, and then giving her tools. So it didn't feel like this, like falling into the abyss, like no matter what I do, the earth is going to fall apart, right? Which

Casey O'Roarty 25:19
is really easy, I think, to slide into. And now let's talk about how that's been. And, yeah, right, like being a vegetarians,

Summers McKay 25:27
no good, and social justice falling apart, and I can't fix this, and I can't fix that, and I can't but instead having on hand a tool or conversations or media sources that elevate solution mindsets or other ideas, right? And so instead of invalidating the concern, it's acknowledging and then offering new solutions. Love it, right? Well, and

Casey O'Roarty 25:50
I love what's available there too. Is like, hey, let's get online and let's find out what it could look like to be a local voir. And like, where are the resources for people that are making this, this kind of decision and so much skill development? Yeah, love it, yeah.

Summers McKay 26:08
Well, and there's no question that teenagers are, I think, also like honoring the fact that teenagers are brilliant at identifying everything that's wrong. Yeah, right. And so being like, thank you so much for acknowledging that. How can we solve it? And instead of just being like, why are you negative all the time, be like, Oh my gosh, right. That is totally terrible. Is there anybody doing anything about it? And so it is. The third step I would be is like, help them find their mission or their purpose to become solutionaries, right? So, like, here's all these things that they're super negative about. Here's all the things that they don't, don't think they can solve. Here's some people who are offering solutions. And then how can you offer solutions? Is it that you can now go back to your environmental science class and say to your teacher, actually, I learned last night about being a local board. Is it that you can go to your friends and say, here are all the social justice concerns that have alarmed us or concerned us, and I learned last night about this organization in our community that's taking steps forward, and I'm gonna so giving them the opportunity, the tools, the vocabulary to then become activists in their own optimism.

Casey O'Roarty 27:25
I love that, and again, an opportunity to model like, really be, you know, so many parents of teens that I work with are feeling that tension of disconnection and like, well, we don't have anything in common, and I can't, you know, but I think once we step into this work and show up as a model, it opens up a space for them to walk into as well. And then we're doing something together, which I think is really powerful, really powerful, you

and our kids. I mean, you have teenagers, so you know, they have their fingers on the pulse of, like, way too much information. Thank you Snapchat and Tiktok as their news sources, and often are hearing things. You know, my kids come to the table and they're like, oh my gosh, guess what I heard? And, you know, part of me is like, well, and the other part of me is like, Oh God, you know, so, right? And there's a, you know, there's a lot to be discouraged about, and I really appreciate what you shared and and really, I'm hearing you too, like we're not doing an infomercial about Optimus daily, but you know, the other piece is like, okay, so finding those funnels of information and making it a practice. That's why I love that your podcast is daily, making it a practice to tune in, right? So that when the opportunity presents itself. You have something in your back pocket, around, like, well, guess what I heard? Yeah,

Summers McKay 29:06
well, and exactly, exactly as a parent, making sure you have alternatives available. And I think something you touched on right now, like, I heard it on Snapchat, or I saw it on Tiktok. One thing that's this is like this, like the Longest Yard here, but it is teaching media literacy, but teaching it with a way that's not like I told you so and everything on Snapchats bullshit, because it's funny, true, because that's because it's not right. So we can't just automatically discount any information that they might have coming in, but instead, we can work with them if they perhaps share information with you that you're like, Hmm, I don't know if that's 100% true. Yourself being media literate, yourself being aware that if you go on to Google, and you Google a phrase that has any sort of word that is a value proposition, negative or positive word. 10,000 things that support that negativity or positivity bias, right? So if you go in and you Google eating potatoes good for eyes, you're gonna get 10,000 articles on why potatoes are good for your eyes. If you go on eating potatoes bad for eyes, you're gonna get 10,000 articles on why potatoes are bad for your eyes. So instead you Google potatoes eye health, right? So you just choose, as a new parents, yeah, to create a neutrality in your inquiry, and then model that for your children, model that for your colleagues and your friends, right? Because we get in what's so we have negativity bias, and then we have confirmation bias. And so with any sort of debate on health, you know, healthcare issues or personal wellness, or is certainly around the pandemic, we all know that we can get very deep into confirmation bias, right? And that allows So as parents, we have to say the reason, if we don't want our kids going down the rabbit hole, if we don't want our kids getting through 20 minutes of dinner so that they can get back to their phones, but instead we want them to engage in conversation, we ourselves have to be responsible for also being neutral learners of information. We shouldn't come to dinner wanting to lecture. We should come to dinner wanting to share and family meetings or the car ride, right? Like, if you, if you take your kid to and from school, right? Like, all of those are like, about sharing and sharing is not about communicating out. It's about receiving and returning. Yeah, and that that's how we model for our kids that like you can't believe everything you read on Tiktok, or you read on I don't even know, do you read things on Tiktok? No, you watch people dance on Tiktok. My daughter, my two year old daughter, calls Tiktok kitty cat because all I do on Tiktok with her is watch kitty cat videos,

Casey O'Roarty 32:05
baby Tiktok, baby channel. And now I'm like, Oh God, I cannot spend 20 minutes looking at babies, but, oh my god, it's Yeah,

Summers McKay 32:12
but I could spend two hours looking at kitty cats, not gonna lie,

Casey O'Roarty 32:18
to decide, like two hours I can never get back. I

Summers McKay 32:21
know, I know, but everyone bloops, that's the other thing. Like, self care of parenting is acknowledging that, like, sometimes you do just have to watch, like, cat videos from the Smithsonian. Like, sometimes you just have to, it's the only thing that's gonna make it better is watching, like, the mama Snow Leopard nurse her baby snow leopard. That's it. That's all you have. That's what you're gonna do. So

Casey O'Roarty 32:40
can we, I want to talk to you a little bit about, like, the term toxic positivity as well. So I authenticity and transparency are super core values of mine. And when I teach parents too and positive discipline, we talk about kindness and firmness. And sometimes people feel a little like so I need a whole different personality, and I try to remind them that kindness is really about connection, and you still get to be you, right? You still get to be you inside of that. So, authenticity, transparency, super core values of mine, sometimes it can feel, depending on the day, really challenging to move towards positivity and optimism and remain true to myself. And so I've seen this whole phrase, toxic positivity. I'm not 100% sure I understand what it means. Do you? Can

Summers McKay 33:34
you well? So I think you I'm not, I'm not an expert in this, but I have been a student of it. And I would say that I think you kind of described it right there perfectly. It's it's an absence of authenticity around it, right? So toxic positivity is when you throw your head in the sand and just say, No, it's good. No, it's good. Come on, be positive. Keep smiling, and instead, perhaps actual, authentic optimism is about not wearing rose colored glasses, not pretending or ignoring the tremendous challenges that we face every day, right? Okay, it's really hard to be human. It's really hard to feel our feelings. Parents disappoint each other. Husbands and wives disappoint each other. Children disappoint parents. Parents disappoint children. We're all deeply like emotional and sad and happy people, and so I would say that toxic positivity comes from not being willing to acknowledge that both you and your child, you and your spouse, can go deep into valleys of sadness, and a lot of people talk about feeling guilty, right? So I have a two year old daughter, and I. I can't tell you the number of times that I have cried while holding her, nursing her, my breasts, her like, she can't learn to potty train. I'm running around to, like, try to move her to get to the potty, and she's pooped, and I sprayed my back and and I'm just like, but just pretending that like, that's super fun, that would be toxic positivity, right? Like, poop is not super fun. I had this experience, and my I don't talk too much about the big kids on pods, but the little one I'll still share in about. But had a really, really rough week last week, right? Like, I was exhausted, and I, one night, was getting her ready for bed, and she was a bit challenging, right? She's two, she wants to try boundaries and learn things, and her father's not here most of the time. And I was crying, and I was trying to, like, hide my crying and get her wrestled into bed, and I sat down, and she sat down next to me, and her like little she's very verbal. She rubbed my arm and she said, deep breaths, mommy, it's okay. And I looked at my two year old, and I was just like shattered, right? Here's a two year old telling me exactly what I tell her when she melts down. And it was this moment that I realized that my own vulnerability, my own honesty as a parent, my own just straight up, and I'm getting teary even thinking about it, she knew how to tell me to use the tools that I've already taught her to get through it. And so authentic optimism, authentic positivity, is about knowing that we hit lows, and those lows also mean there are highs. And on social media, I think you've looked at my Instagram right like I have. You're very authentic. I am

super I'm so funny, because everyone

Casey O'Roarty 36:56
liked it. I was like, Oh. I said to my husband, I'm gonna like this gal make

Summers McKay 37:01
up free selfies. I was like, what the hell I was supposed to wear makeup

Casey O'Roarty 37:06
your hair, like the one picture of your awesome morning hair at school drop off? I was like, Yes, I want a biggest lady's friend. What?

Summers McKay 37:12
What? Like you're supposed to wear makeup and hair, have your hair done in selfies, like I usually have, like, Baby vomit on me. So, but you know, so I think that's the other thing, right? Like, as moms, you can we look at our own social media and dads too, right? We look at our own social media and we look at our feeds, and we see these people who are like, look at us on this great family vacation. And like, remember, that's just like a snapshot of the moment that felt good. What

Casey O'Roarty 37:40
does it do to get those for five seconds exactly? And guess what? Like,

Summers McKay 37:46
the whole process of, like, the kids having angst about sitting there for five seconds all the way through the moment of the good picture, and like, three ice cream bars later that you had to bribe them with. That's the whole story. And it's all good, right? It's highs and lows are good. And I think I would say that like valuing the highs more than the lows is probably where we get ourselves into trouble with toxic positivity. And I think you honor the highs and you honor the lows, they're all like, Don't Pass value judgment against them. Instead, just acknowledge that they're all part of being human, like and also like hours and hours of cocoa melon or badanamu is what I let my daughter watch when I just can't parent. Well,

Casey O'Roarty 38:33
that's solution focused there. Solution

Summers McKay 38:34
focused is acknowledging, and we actually just wrote a story on the optimist daily about how children's television, in particular, Disney movies actually can give a vocabulary to children to talk about grief and loss, so you're not a bad parent, if sometimes you just have to sit down and let them watch cars for hours. Yeah, I

Casey O'Roarty 38:55
remember being pregnant with my second and I did not feel good those first few months, and my daughter was really into the sound of music. She was two and a half, and that movie is so long, and I was like, what you want to watch sound of music again today? Betcha, let's put it on. All right, all right. So we're moving into a new year, and I am just really excited to encourage everybody that's listening right now to take what summers has offered us in this conversation and really fold it into your life. Find those opportunities to consume positive, optimistic, solution focused news stories. Optimus daily is a great place for that. I'm sure there's other places as well. Look for opportunities to model that, being with your teens in their kind of in their discouragement, while also having some like, yeah, and here's some of the great things that are happening in the world right now. And do. Doing your own like you're the one that's feeling really discouraged. I think there were so many nuggets in this conversation summers that that are going to help us all. So thank you so much for everything that you brought today. I really appreciate it. Well,

Summers McKay 40:13
I It's my pleasure, and yeah, whether it's a New Year's resolution or, you know, a sort of recalibrating as a parent. I think the most, the most important thing for all of us to remember about optimism is that, like being humans really hard, and you have to dig deep for optimism, and it's okay that that process is challenging, yeah, because guess what? The world's a beautiful place, and it can be okay,

Casey O'Roarty 40:40
yep, yep. What does joyful courage mean to you? Summers,

Summers McKay 40:43
well, I was thinking about this this morning, actually, um, I once heard somebody describe courage as a very tender practice, instead of a strong practice courage, courage is very, very tender. It's being tender with yourself to know that sometimes you're not strong, and it's courage to admit that sometimes you need extra help, and it's courage to admit that there will be times that are challenging and you have to find your tribe, find your well. And so for me, joyful courage is about taking joy in knowing that it's okay to be tender, it's okay to be gentle, and really taking joy in this process of being human.

Casey O'Roarty 41:35
That is very sweet. Thank you for that. Thank you for that. Where can people find you and follow Okay. Well,

Summers McKay 41:43
so every world elevation, yeah, into world elevation, everywhere onto the internet, except for Tiktok. We haven't really figured Tiktok out yet. I'm still trying.

Casey O'Roarty 41:51
Are we doing?

Summers McKay 41:52
I don't know. I just don't dance. I'm not that interesting time, yeah, but no, the optimist daily. You can find on optimistaily.com we are on Twitter as Ode to optimism, but we're also on all the other socials, LinkedIn, Instagram, we have the optimist daily update, which is available wherever you listen to podcasts. Join me and Christy Jansen, my chief content officer, for a daily dose of optimism. And you're also welcome to hook up with me. I am at summers McKay on all the socials as well. If you'd like to see some super bad hair selfies, that's where you'll find me.

Casey O'Roarty 42:27
I saw them. They're satisfying. Thank you for offering that to the world and listeners. You know that all those links will be in the show notes, so yay. Well, thank you so much for spending time with me. This was

Summers McKay 42:39
so great. This has been wonderful. Thank you for all you do, and thank you for your podcast. It makes the world a better place.

Casey O'Roarty 42:51
All right. Thank you again for listening. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And like I mentioned last week, let 2022 be the year you head over to Apple podcast and leave a review, it's really, really important that you do that there's this whole algorithm behind how they do things and what things are suggested to people over an apple podcast. And we want to make sure that when parents are searching for podcasts, they are shown joyful courage, so head over there, leave a review. Give me five stars so that the show can be shown to even more parents. I really just want to continue to make an impact and double that 1 million download to 2 million downloads by the end of the year. Help me do that. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Also be sure to follow me over at joyful underscore courage on Instagram and joyful courage on Facebook. If you're looking for community, we also have a free Facebook group called joyful courage for parents of teens. So ask to join that. We'll let you in. Good to go. I love connecting with you on social media and out in the world. Have a beautiful day, my friend, remember to stay optimistic. Stay optimistic. Love You.

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