TRANSCRIPT OF TORIE HENDERSON | HOW TO AVOID FALLING DOWN THE PARENTING WELL

  

(MUSIC INTRO) Are you facing a crisis in your life or business? It's time to steer yourself in the right direction through the real experiences, passion and courage of our guests. We're Taking the Helm, with your host, Lynn McLaughlin. Hi there and thanks for joining us as we take the helm once again.

As you know, if you post a review of Taking the Helm, we're going to give you a shout out in a future episode. And it's time to give one to Sonya YD, who posted this on Apple podcasts. Love hearing all the personal stories and journeys of each guest on his podcast. The conversations are insightful and uplifting and I come away after each episode inspired. Thanks, Lynn. No, thank you very much for that review.

Now, our guest today is Tori Henderson. She's a breast cancer survivor. She's the host of the podcast called Super Mom is Getting Tired. She's a life coach, a teacher, a parent educator, and we're going to talk all things parenting today. Super mom, super dad, super parent. How many of you have children that just don't listen? You're feeling burnt out? Tory and I are going to talk about ways that we can get ourselves out of those situations, how we can empower our children to make better choices for themselves, and how we can be healthier and happier ourselves. Torie, I can't wait to jump into this conversation with you.

Thanks for having me. I'm really happy to be here. Well, I'm just going to do a little bit of I went on your website and I spent so much time because there's just so much to offer and I love this thing that just jumped out to me at me right away. You said you love your kids, you love being a mom. Why aren't you happier now? My kids are in their twenties. I know you've got teenagers, you support people all the way back from having toddlers. And I mean, I'm a mother of adult children and I learned so much from you and I think, okay, now I have better tools from when I'm a grandma.

Yeah. No, I think becoming a parent for the first time is life changing and it's a huge transition and there's a lot of people that work in that space and helping support new moms. So I really like to work with moms who have school aged kids where it kind of feels like I said, the way the mind goes is it should be easier by now. Right. I've gotten out of the intense survival mode of the baby and toddler years and they're in school now. There's a kind of a routine to their days or schedule and yet it's still difficult. So that's kind of where I like to work is with preteens teenagers, young adults or parents who are just like, I've got the life I wanted. Why am I not enjoying it as much as I should be?

I guess the context I'm using is I listened to your podcast, super mom is Getting Tired, and specifically the webinar. Stop nagging and repeating yourself. And I mean, what you taught us, it was just so fascinating to listen to all the context that you shared. Speak a little bit more about this. But at the end, what I love, Tory, is concrete. There's a lot of philosophical stuff out there. There's a lot of try this, try this, but you were step by step by step in terms of how many times do I have to ask my children to hang up their coats when they come home? And there's a process that you used. I thought, Oh my gosh, that's just so helpful. And I was thinking, that could take us all the way back down to little people. But I love your questions.

Okay, for sure it works. But I was teaching on that webinar is what I call the energy of leadership. How do you know? But there's certain qualities that kids are wired to respond to. And I kind of talked about how I wanted to become a teacher. And I worked with kids my whole life, but I'd never been in the leadership role with them. I'd always been like a teacher's aide. And so when I was younger, growing up, and then I went to college, I had to manage a classroom. I had to get them all to listen to me and obey me all at the same time. And I did not have the skill set. I love listening to it as an educator. Still teaching at post secondary, you took me back to my beginning teaching days, too. Yeah, yeah, we've all been there. What's so great about teaching? I started a substitute teaching. And substitute teaching is a very fast way to learn what doesn't work when it comes to kids and getting them to listen to you because you get immediate feedback. So what I've learned after twelve years of coaching Moms, particularly, is that nagging and repeating yourself is one of the biggest energy drains. I call it a kryptonite. What robs them of their ability to enjoy raising their kids is to be constantly feeling like they have to nag them. They're not being heard. Kids aren't respecting me. They're not doing what I asked them to do. And it gets you stuck in this very disempowered state where you just don't feel energized and you're not able to kind of enjoy it because you can't master this one skill called getting the kids to listen to me, to do what I'm saying right. Because we have their best interests at heart. We're trying to get them to brush their teeth and go to bed and get off to school in the morning and all of these things. And that just affect our daily life and the quality of our daily life. And so I really wanted to teach people there is a skill set that is not taught this is the thing, Lynn, like, why isn't this taught to us while you're teaching us now? There you go. There is a certain thing and I had to learn it the hard way of how to get kids to listen to me. And it's all this nonverbal language, right? So much of the largest portion of communication happens non verbally. And so as soon as kids start talking, we forget that. We think, oh, they've got words now. They can hear me and listen to me. And we rely solely on the words. And we forget about posture, eye contact, voice tone, the balance. It's so weird that these things but the closest I've ever seen somebody to teaching the energy of leadership is Caesar Milan, the dog whisperer. He focuses on that. He says, you've got to have your posture, right? And you've got to imagine the dog doing what you want them to do. And that's what helps parents too, as you can imagine the kids going to turn off the video game and go and empty the dishwasher. If you can picture that happening, then you're getting yourself into this energy that makes them respond without having to nag them.

It's great for them and I have talked about those pros and on both sides, because when we can empower our children, when they have that positive reinforcement and they know that they can do it, it just sets them up for future success. Let's just talk more about your podcast. Super mom is getting tired. You're in your third year. If I tuned in today and I have followed you and I have written a review of the webinar that I listen to yes, absolutely. What kinds of things can I learn from you? And a myriad. You're going to have to pick and choose here. Yeah. So I've been doing well before I was a life coach for parents, which I've been doing for the last twelve years. I worked in the classroom as a classroom teacher, always kept 1ft in the schools. I just love hanging out with the kids and in some smaller capacities, I've been raising my kids. I was a parent educator before I became a life coach and I've been writing a blog since like, 2011, I think. But when I decided to record the podcast, it was actually my motivation for this was because I got breast cancer and I thought, okay, my days here might be shorter than I anticipated and how do I want to let this diagnosis affect my future? Right? I'm a life coach. We are the most optimistic bunch on the planet. I've had life coaching friends who said, oh, breast cancer was the best thing that ever happened to me because I turned my life on a different trajectory. I'm thinking, okay, I kind of want that. I want it to be significant and impactful. But I already liked my life and I'd already done my life coaching and so everything was how I wanted it. So I thought, okay, what am I going to do? And I thought, I'm going to record a podcast because if I'm not around when my kids are raising kids, I want them to hear my voice giving all the parenting advice that I have to offer because they certainly do not want to listen to it at whatever, they were 16 and 20 years old or something when I got sick. So that there's no way they want to hear all my parenting wisdom now. And so I thought, I will record it for posterity and then some day in the future they'll have that wisdom. Even if I'm still around to watch the parent, they don't have to tell me that they're listening to my podcast. I've spoken to many people in my years of podcasting as well, in collaboration. I don't think I've ever heard that specific reason for someone starting a podcast. I think it's brilliant and it's beautiful and what a gift to the future, hopefully. Because as teenagers, they don't really see that. They don't even know I did that. They don't know what my reason for doing that. So in the meantime, what I've turned it into is just a Q and a podcast. So people write in their questions and I answer it with kind of the traditional wisdom of what I call parent educator answer of like, here's the information that you need. Because there's information as a diamond dozen, you Google your problems. The problem with that is that people can't implement it. And that was certainly where I was as a parent. I read parenting books like crazy, devoured them, and I would be good for a couple of days, maybe five days, and then I would slip back old patterns, right? So that's where the life coaching answer is. What gets in our way from implementing it, from taking this advice? Why can't we make that change? And that's where the life coaching is super powerful. I love it. Okay, so I'm going to jump over because when you and I were speaking just a short time ago, we talked about the challenges of teenagers and mental health and anxiety and all of the things that are facing so many of our kids these days.

And you asked me a question which I've been kind of grappling with, and I think, let's talk about this because there's a lot of people going through this. The question is let me give you context first, right? So I have a child who had debilitating anxiety. We've gone through that. She's doing brilliantly. I was in a position where I was a controlling mother because I wanted my child to do exactly the way I thought it should be done. Big, big mistakes. In the end, I was enabling. I wasn't helping her to become well. So the question you asked me was, do we rescue or do we accommodate our children? And we went back and forth on this. Where's the line? What do you think? Where is the line? So my son may be similar to yours. He always kind of had sensitivities, probably predisposition for anxiety, but he didn't know it when he was younger. He had, like, sensory motor integration issues. And so we basically just adopted our lifestyle was our first born, so we adopted our lifestyle to accommodate his sensitivities. We didn't go to noisy restaurants. We didn't go to festivals with lots of people. And that was fine, right? It wasn't a huge accommodation. We avoided basketball games with that super loud buzzer. Like, my brother-in-law was a basketball coach, and we would go watch his games. But then when we had a baby, it was like one of us had to stay home. So we accommodated his sensitivities and stuff. But then when he hit middle school, he really struggled. And it's kind of like this, the way I think of it, is like, your child falls down a well. So whether they're struggling we're just going to use this metaphor. If he's fallen down a well, he is not good. For me, this works because we didn't know what was going on. We didn't know why he was struggling. He just was. And so I just like, Okay, he's falling down a well. The way in which most parents try to help is they either, as you're describing, tell them what to do. I see you're down a well. Here's what you need to do. Step A, step B. Like, you need to call you. I'll help you here. We're going to make this happen. And we really got to move into their life and tell them exactly what they need to do to get out of the well. And we can get very intensely focused on this. It makes us feel better because we feel like, I have the answers. I can help. This is not a powerless situation, right? But it doesn't make us feel better because it doesn't work very well, and it makes the kids feel worse because they feel like they can't solve their own problems, right? When they're young, it's okay, but when they get older, they want to be able to solve their problems. And so the other way in which we try to help that doesn't help very well is we fall down the well with them, and we're sitting at the bottom of the well going, it's dark and cold down here, and it's miserable, and I don't like it. But it doesn't make them feel better in the long run, because now they have the responsibility of their mom's happiness on their shoulders. And it doesn't make us better because we're sitting at the bottom of a well feeling powerless and helpless. So these are the kind of two ways in which we try to help our struggling teens, tweens, young adults, kids, whatever. So they had changed for me was my son was really I remember he said this was kind of cataclysmic for me. He says, it's not that I want to kill myself. I just see no point in me living like twelve stop. Everything stops. Everything stops in those moments. So I had been doing this. I call put on my super mom cape. I had gone all in. I mean, I was helping him, doing everything I could possibly think of to help this child. My marriage was not doing well because my husband and I were on different pages with this. And I was making as many appointments as I could and just reading as much as I could and just doing all the things I was like. So in that moment, I was like, okay, super on cape is still on, right? We're going to fix this. We're going to make it happen. Like, I said the right things. I did the right thing. But then I heard Dr. Phil say on TV, I don't know, it was like in passing, he says, you are only as happy as your least happy child. I thought, what a horrible message to send to a mom. That's a lot of weight on our site. That is not okay with me because I've been working with moms at this point for a long time, many years. And I thought, you want to send that message to moms who are living with struggling teens and tweens like, that is not going to happen.

That's where I shifted focus. I still did what I could to help my son. Turned out, by the way, he had a brain injury and we didn't know it. That's what caused him to fall down the well, because he'd always have these sensitivities. I kind of thought like, is this just adolescence? Is this the normal trajectory? But we ended up one of the things I tried with him was neuro therapy, and they did a q EEG of his brain and they said, this shows signs of trauma. Takes us back to the day all started, and that's how we found out. So he ended up treating it as a concussion. We didn't know that that's what he was dealing with. So anyways, I kind of switched my focus from managing him to managing myself. How can I be happy even when my child isn't? How can he be at the bottom of the well and I can sit above the well on the ground enjoying the fact that I'm healthy through the blue sky. It's a beautiful day of like, I have a good life. Everything's going well for me, but I could still be there and be like, yeah, that looks terrible and dark, and I can see how gloomy it is down there, and that must be terrible. And if you want help, I am so here for you. You just ask and I will throw you a rope and just learning what that looks like in real life. How do I do that, how do I focus on myself and my own happiness while still being there for my son? And what I came up with was the mantra, love more, care less. Wow, I've had to think about that one quite a bit myself. Because when you have a child, love and care are very intertwined, right? I'm getting up in the middle of the night to feed you because I love you. I'm caring for you because I love you. I'm changing your poopy diapers because I love you. So they're very much the same, but when they get to adolescence, you don't want to be caring for them in the same capacity. Right. We want them to start caring for themselves, and we learn to love more. So increase the amount of love while we decrease the amount of care. And this works with healthy teenagers. This is not just for teenagers who have fallen down a well. This is for when tweens start pushing back and saying, mom, leave me alone. I got this. You're hovering. Stop micromanaging. They don't want to hug you anymore, and they don't want to sit next to you like all that, that's the love more careless, hot mess that your kid is today. Rather than saying, I can't love you, I can't access love until you are physically, mentally healthy, until you're doing the way I want you to do it. Like we withhold the love, because love unchecked turns into need, dependency, and control. But I do love him, and I need him to get good grades so that I can continue to love him. I do love him, and I need him to take his medication or go to therapy or just turn off the Xbox and then I can love him. Right? That need, dependency, and control. That's not love. That's not love. And so many of us have been there. Absolutely. And why do we feel the need to control, right? Because we think we know how to do it. Right. We're talking about someone totally different, a totally different person. When we do that, we're basically taking away their power. We're taking away their ability to solve their own problems. And then what happens is they become dependent on us to solve their challenges in everyday situations, as opposed to saying, like you said, hey, he's got this, she's got this. Go great. He doesn't have this, and that's okay. And if they're stuck in the well for a little longer, they're stuck in the well for a little longer. But when they get out, wow, imagine how that makes them feel, as well as you for allowing that to happen. As opposed to saying, I'm going to save them. And there's something really beautiful that happens with the struggle and the kind to get the well. That's where they build well. First of all, recognizing nobody's going to rescue me and I have to solve my own problems, that's a beautiful place for our kids to be sure is of like, okay, this is on me to figure out if it wasn't your kid's problem to solve, then it would have worked. All the stuff that we're doing, all the advice people are giving, whatever, like, if it wasn't your child's problem to solve, then all that stuff would have been helpful, but it wasn't. So here we are, kids problem to solve as they learn the steps required to climb out of the well and push and struggle and pressure climb and building the muscles it requires, right? Asking for help, saying, I can't do this on my own, those are the life skills that they need in order to survive as an adult in this world. And so for us to rescue them from that, it robs them of their ability to build those muscles. But you asked a really good question of like, why do we control?

Why do we try to tell them what to do? It's all fear every time you see someone trying to control it because we're scared. And so it's scary to watch your child struggling and not feel like there's anything you can do about it. And so if we can calm down our own fears and make peace with that was a really hard thing to do. I had to make peace with the question I asked myself was, if the worst thing that happens, if my sentiment, which to me was like the worst case scenario, how can I still believe I was a good mother? Right? Because that's where the fear was. I have to prevent this so I can continue to believe I did everything possible. I was a good mom, you know? And so what would it take for me to believe I was still a good mother even if I didn't get the result that I wanted? Because with that that mom guilt, that parent guilt, it's always there, isn't it?

Tory, I think you're telling us that there is a way that we can move past that. And I've had a lot of trouble with that in my own life. And I know there are many people listening right now. They're saying, okay, how could we possibly do that? Well, if you think about the guilt is just coming from a thought in our head, it's just something that we're thinking, and usually that goes on subconsciously. We're not aware of what we're thinking about, but if you can find it and go, what is it I'm really believing about myself that's making me feel so good or so guilty or whatever. And it's probably something like, I haven't done everything I could do or whatever, or if I was a good mom, my child wouldn't have these problems. Or it's something that's probably not even true, right? So once we can find the belief that you're thinking, like, a good mom wouldn't have a child who's struggling, whatever, something like that, then we can question that and be like, well, is that true? And the work that I did was trying to figure out, like, okay, is it possible that there's another mom out there whose kid commits suicide? And I look at her and I'm like, wow, she was a really good mom. Like, I totally admire the way she handled that. And it was like, absolutely, that's possible. And what were the qualities I would be seeing and admiring in that mom? And it was pretty much the love, more careless. That's what I would admire. Like, someone who's just very loving and compassionate and present and resourceful and helpful, but not pushy or control. There would be an element of kind of live and let live, and just not every problem is my problem to solve.

Yes. That's a tricky one to figure out. I had to have some help with that, too. What's the line? What's the line that says, no, that's not going there. Not going there. And when do you, you know, and I had to go for counseling for that. That was a really tricky one to figure out. And we got to dig deep because a lot of our own beliefs and what we feel is intrinsic coming back from previous experiences, which were probably very often, I would say, not even aware of. So sometimes it is about going back and digging, why am I control freak? Okay? And then how can I let go of that? So I'm so happy that I'm thrilled, actually, Tory, that there are people like you out there who've had the personal experience, who have the qualifications, who is also an educator, who can help us figure these things out, because there's lots of different possibilities out there. A lot of people oh, I won't a lot of people, whatever age, don't want therapy, don't want counseling. They want to make changes, but they don't want to do the traditional approach. So having someone like you to guide us along the way, even by listening to your podcast, is incredible, and I thank you very much for doing that.

And I think the difference is, like, therapy is more kind of past focused and, like, why you are the way you are and kind of like, healing old traumas. And I get a lot of people come to life coaching who've been through therapy, and they feel like it's just not doing much. It's not giving me the real world practical skill sets I need, you know, and so that's where life coaching is really helpful because it's more present and future focused. It doesn't really matter why you guys came. This like, how is it preventing you from getting what you want today and how to do it? And I like to think of it as a simple way to think about it is most of us have sort of a default emotion that's very easy for us to go to. I have no problem feeling frustrated and angry, and I'm a yeller. Anger is not a hard one for me. But we also all have sort of like a hidden emotion that we really avoid. And for a lot of people, that shame, embarrassment, stuff like that. So when that emotion gets triggered, we often resort to our default. So for me, every time I yell at my kids, it's pretty much because I was embarrassed or ashamed of something. Like, I don't know, just even something silly like being late. You're like, Oh, my God, I can't believe it. You guys took so long and now we're in the car, we're going to be late. Whatever. Like, so what? Why am I freaking out about this? So what? Yeah, it's because I'm embarrassed of what other people are going to think. I'm disrespecting their time or whatever. Right? And so you can kind of look at it as that, well, I've got some emotions I try not I try really hard not to feel. And then when they get triggered, that's when I go to controlling or I get mad or I get scared or something like that. But you're aware of it, and when you're aware of it, then you can flip to something else more positive. The very first thing that happens is that awareness, and it's definitely the first step in a very helpful one. Yeah. Okay, so I want to talk about connectivity. Our kids will go back to our kids who are having challenges, our teens or young adults, and that connectivity. And the line about you have on your website supportive text to send your teen. It goes back to what we said before, where's the line, what to do, what not to do. And that is so powerful to me. Just explain. Maybe take one of those and give us context. You can go to my website and find 15 texts to send your team to reduce their stress and make them nicer, because we can get so caught up in our kids ‘behavior. They're rude, they're snarky, they won't be nice to me. They just spend all day in their room. They won't talk to me. Open that. We're very focused on their behavior, and we forget that there might be a reason why people act the way they act. Right. We get controlling because we're scared. They act dismissive or whatever just because they might be stressed or they feel like they have to push us away because we won't go away naturally on our own. So these are texts to kind of, like, tune into. Just say something supportive like, hey, thanks for putting up with me. I've never raised a teenager before. Your tolerance is appreciated, or, I really admire the way you handle this. I could never do what you did. I was such a hot mess at your age. It's so impressive how you got your act together. Just stepping outside of that normal daily, like, Oh, my God, why won't they do this? And giving them some words through text that are just acknowledging the stage of life that they're in and how challenging it could be. Almost confirmations, almost like, whether it's like, from someone else. And I also like what you said about taking the pressure off. Yeah. And helping them see us as humans, too. We're not the whoa. The mother who knows it all and does it all. In humans, we make mistakes. I have a leading your teen class, it's called. And it's a lot about, like, kind of shifting the authority, right, from, like, I'm the parent, you're the kid, I know what's best, to kind of shifting this to becoming more of, like, a coach to your kids and saying, like, hey, how can I support you and your goals? That's what the coach is there for with the players, right? Like, what do you want? I'm going to help you make that happen. And that's why I think the parents can kind of shift into that role instead of, I am steering this ship. And how do you do that? Right? Certainly if your kid teenager is starting to resist you, then you know it's time. But there are signs before that we can start making those steps of asking them, what do you need? How can I support you? What role would you like me to play in your life? And just kind of starting to renegotiate that and saying, I don't know what's right and wrong. Do you want us to be really close? Do you want us to be dominant, to back off?

I mean, I remember my husband, my son was, like, 14, and it was right. I swear he changed on a dime. Best buds. And like I said, he was really unwell during middle school, and so I was super mom, and he and I got really tight and I feeling all the feels together. And then all of a sudden, he started high school and he's like, you're fired. Your job is done, and you've been made redundant. Like, I no longer need you. And I was left just floundering, like, okay, but you aren't totally fixed yet. You've still got a problem. Like, you are a hot mess. Like, how am I supposed to let go and trust you're going to be fine when and you're fine? So I remember going out to dinner with my husband, and he was trying to explain it to me. It's my energy. He's like, Your energy is off-putting. Your energy is making him not want to be around you. And I'm like, I don't understand what you mean by this. This is before I figured out how to teach the leadership energy stuff, too. I was like, what? Do you get it? And he's trying to find all these words, and finally he's like, Tory, it's like you're his stalker. No, there's a line there's. Be the nicest mom in the world, but nobody wants to be nice to their stalker. Got it? Yeah. And I was like, that's a great analogy. I see the problem that could really help me get it. I was like, because it doesn't matter what I say, what I do, if my energy is in, I need you. I need you to be happy. I need you to be healthy. I need you to be nice to me. I need you. That was just so off-putting that I had to learn how to pull back my energy, let them be love more, care less, all that jazz. And it was not a smooth transition, but I was determined as I was going through it, I'm like, I am going to teach other moms how to do this. Because that was like my motivation through all of middle school. And when he was struggling and I went all in in super mom mode, I was like, I'm going to help other moms. No other mom's going to have to go through this alone because this totally sucks. And I felt very alone. It was very hard. Oh, I remember creeping. I remember creeping. I remember there was a period of time where I was so concerned and I was looking on the phone and actually, I will admit this and all my kids know this now, I would send a stupid question, oh, I'm not really figuring out how do you do this on? IG I knew the answer, but I wanted to see the response. Oh, she's okay right now. Seriously. So you can pay attention to your own those things. When you're doing that kind of thing, you're not well. You're not well yourself. And that's another thing. Alignment wasn't stalking. Yeah, different way of stalking. And they didn't know it at the time, but certainly stalking.

I so appreciate what you're doing, Tory, and I encourage everyone who's listening or viewing to go and listen to your podcast. Go and check out your website, lifecoachingforparents.com. What closing comments do you have for us today? And I understand you have something to offer to people. Oh, yes. So I guess closing comments, I realized I never really answered your question, so let's tie that one up. Is accommodating versus rescuing. Oh, all the way back to the beginning. All the way back. Right? Okay. How do you know where's the line right? And so I would say because when your kid has sensitivities and anxieties or whatever growing up, of course you want to accommodate because you want to make it easier for them to live in this world. If they have panic attacks every time you go to a crowded place and you're like, no, we're going to keep going to crowded places so that you learn how to not have panic attacks. It's like, okay, that's a lot of work. Is that really the most important thing? But then you really have to prioritize. And I think every kid is individual. And so if school is like, for after the pandemic, a lot of kids have been stressed out by school, just going back to school, being around people, sitting in a classroom, it's triggering anxiety. Right. So the question is, do I keep them in school and help have them figure it out and learn or do I bring them home, home school and make it easier? I just think everyone is individual and it's just really helpful to have somebody else's outside perspective to support you as the parent to kind of figure that out. I don't think there's a one size fits all.

I would agree with you. And I'm teaching post secondary right now and I certainly saw that. I mean, those students who were coming into college hadn't been in person really since the end of grade ten on a regular basis. So I saw that as well. And my caution, I guess, for people is if you say it's okay to stay home permanently and it's always going to be home schooling, those things that step by step by step by step, that could set up our children for future success in that setting, they won't have the experiences. So there's lots of other solutions as opposed to is this or that. There are baby steps in the middle. It could be one class in person, three classes online. If you're in secondary, for example, it could be a balance. It could be that I'm going to stay home in the mornings and I'm going to go in in the afternoons, depending upon what the days look like. It could be that there's a safe person at the school that they go to first to say, hey, how are you feeling today? Can I help you get to your classroom? There's lots of different ways and it's not easy to figure that out on our own. So I agree with you. Speaking with people like you or people who don't have that immediate connection can help us to see all of the options out there. It's not black and white. Yes. And I think as long as there's always needs to be an element of growth yes.

Right. So you don't want to remove every trigger, every potential hazard or problem, but you also don't want them to try to overcome every if there's 100 different anxieties, you won't have to deal with them all at once. Right, exactly. So you need to make sure that they're always learning and growing and they're doing just enough of a triggering activity to work on it and understand that managing your brain is something we all need to learn and it's a brilliant life skill and you might as well start at as young as possible. If you know your triggers. Like for example, let's say walking into a crowded room is a trigger, you can set yourself ahead of time. I always go to the corner. I always have my back in the corner. I'm always looking at people. If I have someone beside me. You set yourself up. I know people in my circle of friends that will not sit with their back to the public behind them because of previous experiences or professionals or whatever, but that doesn't stop them from doing it. They just intentionally find a seat with a wall behind it. You got to develop coping skills, and so you need to have enough of triggers around you in order to force the development of coping. Awesome. So that's what I wanted to follow up with, but yes, I would just say that if you are struggling with living with somebody who's not happy and you find yourself falling down the well with them or trying really hard to get them to climb out of the well and it's not working, then I'm happy to offer a free coaching call, just a discovery call, where we can kind of talk about your individual situation, see if life coaching is a fit for you, or just feel like you get some support because it's very isolating and it's very frustrating and confusing because there isn't a one size fits all answer for every situation. So I just really think that for a parent to have support during that time and it really doesn't matter how old your kid is, I mean, gosh, it could be if your husband's falling down a well, you need some heart anyway, your family member. If you're struggling because you can't get them to do what you want them to do, then I think life coaching is a really good fit for that. And it's all about love more, care less. But I want to say it's not just about your loved one. Love them who they are today instead of wishing they'd go back, but love yourself, too. Like making sure that you're putting that love on you and thinking, how can I take excellent care of me while my child or my loved one is falling down a while?

Exceptional closing comments. And I encourage everyone to go to Tory's website. The link is in the podcast notes. Take a look at her free resources. Take a look at those text messages for teenagers. Book a free consultation. Call and read the blog post and listen to your podcast. There are many, many things that you offer us. There is? Yes. Thank you so much for having me, Lyn. It was a nice day. Our pleasure. Thank you.

Our next guest on July 27 will be Karen Dial. She's a holistic nutritionist and the CEO of Key to Health Nutrition Counseling. She helps women and children leverage the power of plant-based nutrition to get to the root of unwanted symptoms so they can truly thrive. And her passion for helping others achieve optimal health comes from her own journey in overcoming her daughter's health challenges as well as her own. We look forward to speaking with Karen in two weeks. Stay healthy and safe, everyone. We'll see you next time.

(MUSIC OUTRO) Thanks for tuning in and posting your review of taking the helm on your favorite platform, we'll give you a shout-out in a future episode. To be inspired by people who are steering us in the right direction. Go to lynmclaughlin.com, where you can search previous guests by the topic of your choice. And while you're there, download Lin's gift. There's more than one way to get through a crisis.

  

 

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