Eps 450: “Warming up” for the twists and turns of parenting teens

Ahhhh coming into 2024 with LOADS of Joyful Courage! What that means to me is to L-I-V-E in a way that sets me up for the best possible outcome, and to hold that I may not always know what the best possible outcome is. I get to TRUST that my practice is moving me in the direction I am meant to go in. ❤️

Transcription

Casey O'Roarty 00:05
Hello, Welcome back. Welcome to the joyful courage podcast, a place for inspiration and transformation as we work to keep it together. While parenting our tweens and teens. This is real work people. And when we can focus on our own growth and nurturing the connection with our kids, we can move through the turbulence in a way that allows for relationships to remain intact. My name is Casey already I am your fearless host. I'm a positive discipline trainer, space holder coach and the adolescent lead. It's browseable. Also mama to a 20 year old daughter and a 17 year old son I am walking right beside you on the path of raising our kids with positive discipline and conscious parenting. This show is meant to be a resource to you and I work really hard to keep it really real, transparent and authentic so that you feel seen and supported. Today is a solo show and I'm confident that what I share will be useful to you. Please don't forget sharing truly is caring. If you love today's show, please please pass the link around snap a screenshot posted on your socials or texted to your friends. Together we can make an even bigger impact on families around the globe. If you're feeling extra special, you can rate and review us over in Apple podcasts. I'm so glad that you're here. Welcome. Welcome. Welcome. Enjoy the show. Hey, everybody. Hi. Hi. Welcome to the first episode, the first solo episode of 2024. I'm so glad that you're here. I'm so honored that you're listening. Happy New Year. Happy New Year. We are a few days in Did you listen to my New Year's Day show with Natalie Cogan Ah, what a powerhouse she is, oh my gosh, I love getting to know the guests who are on my show and hearing their stories. And it's always just so interesting to me to hear the twists and the turns and the pivots that you know people move through over the course of you know, their current lifetime. I love hearing stories about recognizing what matters most. And then people who are like, Okay, I know what matters most. And now I'm going to move in that direction, I'm going to dedicate my life to moving towards what matters most to me, Natalie's story was so inspiring like that. Her immigrant background story. I mean, I can't even imagine being a 13 year old and moving to the United States and not knowing the language not knowing the culture and being thrust in I mean, I can't wrap my head around it. And you know, all the success that she was able to accomplish everything she was able to do, from that foundational experience, her grit, right, and then her breakdown her dark night of the soul and using it to create work that is literally changing the lives of others. It's just so cool. So beyond and I love in our conversation when she said Hey, you don't have to have a breakdown, you don't have to have a dark night of the soul to move towards a more balanced and thoughtful life. Right. I love that. And I think that's true. Right? I love that she talked about that daily commitment to ourselves. And I especially loved and aligned with her saying and acknowledging that the most powerful thing we can do for our kids is to be a model of what showing up each day with self compassion looks like, right? It feels like and I know I see you I get it. We want really concrete answers to how do we bring this to our kids? How do we shift their behavior? How do we, you know, do the things and the power of the modeling? It's everything right without it, you know it, everything else falls flat. So, yes, so good. And I have her awesome human journal. That's what she was on promoting on Monday. If you haven't listened to that show, maybe pause the show, listen and come back because it was really good. But the awesome human journal is what she was promoting. I love it. And I have made a commitment to myself to move through it each night at bedtime to use it each night at bedtime. That's what works for me. And as I mentioned on Monday, I love Have that this particular journal, it's super prompted. So, you know, in the mornings, I like to long form journal, and I like to decide what I'm writing about. But in the evenings as I come to bed, you know, there's shorter prompts. There's smaller spaces, I'm led through a process. And I really, I really appreciate that. I really appreciate that. So, yeah, awesome human journal. Throughout the book, she has these notes to self quotes, which I also love. Like she's just so wise. And the first one says, Don't do this day like a chore, do it like it's a gift you're excited to open. I love that invitation. Don't do this day like a chore. Do it like it's a gift you're excited to open as we roll into a new year. What if we held that as the mantra don't do this year, as if it's a chore, do it like it's a gift you're excited to open that might be a little too big, right? So we can also hold it in the day, don't do this task. Like it's a chore, do it like it's a gift you're excited to open, we're going to come back to this quote. Imagine what our experience would be. If we took those words and that invitation to heart. Imagine I meant to it, right? It is inspiring me. Even as I sit down and create this episode for you, how exciting to be in creation, right? Have something that I think will be meaningful for all of us. That's always my goal. When I create podcasts for you, and I'm a human being so some days, it does feel like oh, God, I gotta get it. Podcast written, I gotta record it, I got to deal with things when it becomes a chore. Right. And when I listened back to my shows, I can hear when it's more of a chore, and when it's more of an exciting unfolding. And I want your experience to be one of Ooh, a new podcast with Casey, how exciting gift that you get to open. Right. So good. So here we are at the start of a new calendar year. Right? I don't you know, I know. It's just a date, whatever, right? It's just another month. But I, I always get swept up in the New Year energy. Right. And I definitely am someone who feels like it's the start, it could potentially be the start of something new, right? I potentially could be that anything truly is possible or at the start of a new year. And I love that I want to live inside of that. So yes, to January, yes to the energy of the new year. And for those of you that have been keeping up, I spent December really urging you to take stock and how things had been going with your team's throughout the last year and doing a little work around. Where do you want to head? How do you want it to feel? Right? What do you want to practice? And I'm curious about where you landed? And I'm wondering if you are in that also in the wondering of okay, so how do I align my head with my heart? How do I align my practices with what I want? You know, and I want you to think about, if you haven't already like that, come back to those two questions of how do you want to feel? And what do you want to create, in your life in your relationships with your teens with your partner? How do you want to feel inside of that bubble? Right? How do you want to be influencing and dealing with people and the relating in the reacting, right? Because that's the thing when we're talking about people, right is that you can't control their response to you. You can't, which is super annoying, but you can decide how you're going to experience them. You also get to decide how you're going to experience you know, your own disappointment, your fear and worry, your anger when that comes up. Right

Casey O'Roarty 09:24
because again, we are relating to other people. And last week, back in the old year. Last week, I spent time talking about calibrating how we calibrate ourselves, to be in intersection with the world versus calibrating to the world. Right. How can we show up already calibrated right because, you know if we're not being intentional about this and we're just kind of moving through our life and it's okay, it's okay, well, it's okay until the other person or the world starts throwing shit at you Right, literally visualizing chimps throwing shit, which by the way, they typically only do chimps throw shit their poop, they only do that in captivity and there is a rabbit hole that is beckoning me to dive in and connect the dots between chimps in captivity, and teens, autonomy being stifled, and their response to that threat of their spaciousness of their autonomy, but I'm gonna let that go. But there are dots to be connected there, not by me, not today. So the life and relationships in the world throws shit at you, that you might not be prepared for. Right? Especially if you're kind of an automatic pilot, right, and that automatic pilot of just assuming that everything's gonna be fine, you know, and that, you know, the expectation that everybody's just going to do what you want. So there's a personal calibration that we get to do each and every day. And I think about it, like, you know, my husband's truck, we're, which I like to call the other woman. My husband has this big drug that he's obsessed with. He loves it, he's had it for 20 years, it's never going away, I've pretty much rebuilt the whole engine Anyway, before he goes anywhere in it, he has to turn it on to warm up, right? It needs to calibrate needs to prepare, it needs to get ready for driving down the road. Right. So my husband asked to warm up his truck, Natalie used the metaphor during our podcast of fuel like our we need fuel in the context of kind of that self care practice, we need to continue to attend to self and fuel up, we wouldn't not put fuel in our car, right? She was talking about it as how self care gets squeezed out of our schedule, like it's not important enough to be at the top of the list. So he put it at the bottom of the list. And then some days were like, wow, no time not doing it. And she was talking about, you know, when there's when we're on empty in our car, there's no room to say, No, I don't have time to get gas, just going to drive on empty, you know, if we do that our car stalls out. Same is true for us. Right. And I think there's something there. So there's that piece of fueling up. But there's also something around this, like warming up, you know, like an athlete, right? For those of you I know some of you are runners, God bless you, I am not a runner. But I sometimes go to yoga, I do other things. And there's always a warm up warming up our bodies to prepare for what we're going to ask them to do. Right? The warm up the preparation. Right? So how are we warming ourselves up for the emotional roller coaster of adolescence? Right, that some of you are in that daily or even hourly? rollercoaster, some of us, you know, we're in that we're in the flow, but no, it's, you know, probably going to add some time soon. How are we warming ourselves up for the unexpected things that can show up in our day? Right. And obviously, this is the work that I am so passionate about. This is what I talked about all the time, here on the pod. And we'll continue to talk about as we move into this new year, right? Because it's everything. It's foundational. And when we have a daily practice of warming up, right, and coming back to Okay, right, what do I want to feel? Where can I feel it in my body? Right? This is the warm up like a little bit of stillness or some writing or some movement, but intentionally tuning into what do I want to feel? How do I want to feel, bringing that to life animating that, as I like to say, in the body? What do I want to create today? In my experiences for me, right, what do I want to create? And so that warm up is really finding like searching for it until Oh, yeah, there it is. And everybody has different ways of accessing, right? Different ways of accessing, like, if I want to create connection in my day, I'm going to start with like really connecting with myself. And what does that feel like for me, I get to explore that. I want to bring more focus to my day, right? That's always something less distraction, more focus. So what does that mean? How is that going to feel? What is the warm up to bringing more focus less distraction to my day? And I'm asking these questions, not because there's a right answer. There's going to be an answer for me, right to access focus at the start of my day so that I have a place to come back to when I noticed Oh, distracted, I'm gonna come back to focus. Right? So it's personal. And it's an exploration, right. And when we have this daily practice, we're also keeping our compass pointed in the direction we want to go in, right, we're better equipped to consider the struggles we're having with our teens from a solution focused place. And we are more likely to remember to go under the surface of the iceberg. And, you know, remember, like, this is important, right? And sometimes, you know, there's the stress of the struggle, or there's that moment of realizing there is a struggle, and we get, you know, this activation and ah, we got to fix this. We got to shut it down. We forget sometimes in that reactivity, that, okay, wait, we're looking for solutions, not blame, right? What's going on under the surface, it's easy to forget that because we're so geared up to fix things, right that we forget to take the time to do the work to dig in. So again, when we're warmed up, right, when we have that daily warm up, and those things show up, we're going to be more likely, okay, wait, hold up, man activated, to take a pause, go into the surface, and just have more of a consideration when situations pop up, right, hopefully lending itself to needing to do less repair. Right. And you know, what I also think the daily warmup helps us with seeing our whole teen seeing all the parts of them, not just what isn't working right now, or where they're getting into mischief. And I've talked a lot about this with clients lately. You know, they're so worried about certain behaviors, that they forget that there's this whole other part of their team that they're not connecting with, because they're hyper focused on, you know, where they're coming up short. Right. So I've said this before, and I'm going to come back to it because it's powerful, the most useful tool, the most powerful tool we have for influencing the behavior of our teens, is the relationship that we nurture with them. Added to that the most powerful tool we have for influencing our teens perception of themselves, is what we're spending time focused on with them. Right, the most powerful tool we have for influencing whether or not our teens will grow into young adults who want to pick up the phone, when we call and spend time with us, is how we're making them feel right now. How are you making your team feel? Right? How are your interactions with your teens influencing the relationship that you have with them? And if you're like Manono, ask them, hey, you know, when we connect or when we talk, how do I make you feel? How do I make you feel about yourself? And then be prepared to hear? Right? And you've heard me invite you into this work on the pod before, be prepared to hear what they have to say, and hold it as their equally valid separate reality, right? Sometimes when you hear well, you make me kind of feel like shit, or you make me feel like I'm not capable. Or you make me feel like a big disappointment, right? It's often in our nature to want to say, whoa, whoa, that's not true. Right? That's not what I meant to do. Just receive the feedback. Okay. Wow, that must be really hard to hold. I'm sorry that I make you feel that way. Really working on showing up differently and listening to this fabulous podcast. Right. But keep in mind bringing it back to the warmup when we are warmed up. And in our grounded, authentic, transparent, centered way of being right, we can receive that feedback.

Casey O'Roarty 19:11
Also, we can see beyond going back to seeing the whole kid, we can see beyond what we're worried about and delight in the person our teen is becoming I have a beloved client who has just, I imagine a very cool child. I would love to meet them one day. And you know, we were talking recently on a call and she's really concerned with some of his choices. So concerned that it's getting in the way of her daily existence. Just She's just worried which is okay, like no shame in that. She's really worried and it's really hard to not feel like every interaction is a harp on the things that he's not doing or the things that he's doing that are not okay. And I asked her what do you love about your kid said, what are their strengths? And she listed off all these amazing things determination, funny, cares about people. He's a helper. Right? And I reminded her that this is a place where she can come back to when she's really feeling that spin out around some of his not so great choices. Right? This is a kid that has so much to delight in, right, who he is and what he does in the world, how he shows up. There's so much to delight in. Right? And the mischief making and our attachment to the worry. And fear is actually robbing, robbing the relationship from that delight, right? Let's delight in our kids. What happens if we can delight in our kids? And make it a part of our warm up? Like, what do I delight in? I love the word delight. And I'm thinking about that, you know, note to self from Natalie to in this context around communicating and because we can delight in them, right. And we still have to have hard conversations, it's still a thing. Or we still have to, you know, talk about things like chores and, you know, homework and shit like that. So thinking about the note to sell from Natalie, don't do this day, like a chore, do it like it's a gift you're excited to open? How can we put that into play when it comes to our interactions with our teens? Don't have a conversation, like it's a chore? Have it like it's a gift, you're excited to open? What might happen. If we shift the energy we bring to our interactions with our teens in this direction. One, they might think we're not okay, to they might catch the energy, they might be swept up in the energy, they might be more easygoing, they might be more agreeable, or they might double down and their resistance to you in which case, because you've done the warm up, that daily warm up, you'll have that energetic capacity to respond with Whoa, that was a intense response, what's going on for you? And literally just practice this with my son. She has so many clothes, he loves the goodwill, and he doesn't purge he just consumes. So it's a crazy town in his room with his clothes. So I said to him Hey, babe, which day? I've already kind of brought this up. But this so now I'm like, narrowing it down. So which day do you want help with purchasing your clothes tomorrow or Friday? Now he can't see me, because I'm calling out from my office. But as I said it, my eyes were wide. And literally my hands were I was rubbing my hands together in this practice in anticipation and excitement. Like this is a gift. Okay? Which day do you want help with purging your clothes? Right? It's gonna be so fun. I didn't say that. But that's kind of the energy I was bringing right my energies up up. I'm also holding that this is something that's going to happen. But he gets to be in charge of the when I could hear him from downstairs say Friday was kind of low effect. And I said, Great. I can do that Friday morning is perfect. Since I have an appointment in town to we could drop the bags off at the Goodwill, great done interaction done. It was smooth. with seemingly no resistance. Right. The next test will be Friday morning when I remind him Okay, sweet. It's Friday morning. I'm going to help you purging your clothes. What can this look like? What do you want to start with? I'm going to keep that excited to unwrap the gift that is the purge and keep that energy going. And to do a warm up that morning. Personal warm up with shimmy is my soul care time? Like what do I need to access? What I want to bring to this interaction? Right? I'll be keeping that in mind. Again, there's going to be a real difference in the experience if I show up to it as a chore. Like okay, here we go. We got to do it. Sorry, buddy. But this is what's going to happen and or All right, it's time. Let's go. Should we pick some music? That'll be hard for me because I'm not a big fan of his music choice. But I know there are places where we can find alignment and I can deal. How will this experience play out? If I hold an energy of lightness and show up expecting Hey, we're gonna get it done. And I get to bring the expectation that we can work together. Right? I get to influence the experience even if he's like, Oh, I don't want to. I know. I know. But we get to and it's gonna be amazing. When all of this is cleared out. You're gonna feel so good. Doing it together. What do you want to start with pants sweatshirts. He's got like 500 sweatshirts. We could literally open a hoodie shop So yeah, I'm into this. I'm into this and I'm in the practice to, alongside all of you do it like it's a gift you're excited to open. Yes. Okay. So this week's homework for all you listeners, this week's homework, get a piece of paper, if you need to open your notes app on your phone, warm up for your day. Right? That's the first bit of homework, whatever that looks like for you. You've heard me talk about so many different ways to start your day from a more grounded place. build in time for yourself every morning, even if it's only five minutes a day to access, how do you want to feel? What do you want to create, before the day starts, something that I do that helps me remember that I did this practice is I'll put it on a sticky note. And I'll put it somewhere close by where I spend most of my day. So I can be like, Alright, cool, my shoulders back, come back to that quality that I want to bring more of. And it's okay, if it's the same thing every day, you don't need to, like you know, reinvent the wheel every day. So that's first bit of homework, creating the warmup, right? And then the second piece of homework is having at least one interaction with your team, where you do it like it's a gift, you're excited to open and see what plays out. Right? And then try it again, using what you learned from the first go around. Right? So have that first interaction. And then what do you learn in what do you notice? How can you put it into play for a second interaction and see what happens? Right? I love this. So I'm going to bring you homework each week on the solo shows. And I'm going to invite you to take what you hear and integrate it into your life. Right, let's see how that feels. You can share your homework with our community at the joyful courage for parents of teens Facebook group, I'm going to post weekly about the homework from the podcast and I'm going to encourage discussion, I'm really going to hold that you all are going to show up to this discussion. So the post is going to be there, jump in there, set your notification so that you can see when I post in the group, be in the group, right? If you're not already joyful courage for parents of teens on Facebook, it's free. I'm going to do this post every Thursday when the solo show comes out where I'm going to remind you what the homework invitation is. And invite discussion. Let's hear how it's going. Let's connect around the work that we're doing. As parents of teens, all right. Yes, here's to a connected New Year, my friends. So excited. I'm so grateful for you. And I hope that you have a great day, drink lots of water, take some breaths. Get out in nature. You're awesome. Bye.

Casey O'Roarty 27:48
Thank you so much for listening in today. Thank you so much to my spreadable partners, Julieta and Alana as well as Danielle and Chris Mann and the team at pod shaper for all the support with getting this show out there and helping it to sound so good. Check out our offers for parents with kids of all ages and sign up for our newsletter to stay better connected at B sprout double.com. Tune back in on Monday for a brand new interview and I will be back solo with you next Thursday. Have a great day.