How can I relax and enjoy parenting?
How can I relax and enjoy parenting?
Can you imagine what kind of world we could live in if every single time we were an observer of our thoughts and instead of choosing negative things we chose to think about joy, about acceptance, about love? Let's talk about procrastination, hands up who loves to procrastinate like me, like to the point I will do so many other things and I will literally start scheduling things into my diary when I have a really important deadline coming up? Do you do that...if so, why? Because we have a thought or belief system running in the background, “You’re not good enough, because that's not gonna be any good, you’re not gonna make it”, or when people laugh at us.
All of these stories, these thoughts that we are choosing to think, Now I know that we did not learn the gift of flight by thinking about sinking, you don't learn how to swim by thinking about drowning, am I right? Our brain has this real negative bias, and is constantly looking for the negative experience, particularly based on the belief systems we have formed from our early programming in the first seven years of life. Everybody is dealing with trauma or negative thoughts, or unhealed beliefs, or unexpressed emotions in some way, and yet it is our responsibility to live and choose every single present moment what we think about. But the first step is in noticing, because if you don’t notice that that is what is actually going on, in the ticker tape of doom, how are you going to begin to change it?
Manifesting positive change in your life
I want you to think about what you could choose to think instead. What could you choose to express, choose to do instead? What if the outcome is going to be great? What if something wonderful is about to happen right now? Because I am telling you now there is not one thing in this world that did not at some point just start as a thought. Even if you wanted to change a habit; perhaps it’s eating sugar, perhaps it’s smoking, perhaps it’s shouting, or watching box sets every night when you could be doing something productive. Our ability to be able to change thoughts is a process, you know. Nobody is able to go, "Okay, that's it, I'm gonna become CEO of Virgin tomorrow! That's not how it works. But when we notice what is going on in our inner dialogue we are able to change things.
How parents cope with stress
The way it tends to work for me is I find that I notice it first and then what happens is I start trying to change and form a different concept, because it's the self-concept of ourselves that is the biggest problem. It's just a concept. Our beliefs about ourselves are just thoughts! That is all they are. And thoughts can be changed. And our children are our biggest teachers, because our children are reflecting at us all the time all of the things that we need to change the most about ourselves. They’re our biggest teacher if we choose them to be. So when we start to change a thought we notice the thought, and then try to form a different concept about the thought that I’m feeling.
Prime example; I was speaking at the Early Childcare and Education Expo on Saturday, it was glorious and went beautifully and was probably the best live 45 minute talk that I've done, interspersed with music. I got to share my teachings on emotional frequency and energetics and how we teach this to children. It was so well received, but a couple of days before I was thinking “What if nobody gets it? What if I fall over. I’m just gonna look stupid. I can't remember the beginning that I’ve worked out. What if nobody’s there? What if it’s just a bunch of teenagers and they’re not interested in what I do? Is it going to be received?” So a practice that I use all the time before I do any sort of speech, but I think you will find incredibly helpful, is I will often spend several minutes just sending love to the people I'm going to be talking to, connecting with them and seeing them listening to what I'm saying, seeing penny drops on people’s faces, seeing people dancing.
Because I know the only way I can make this work is how I am feeling. Because I’m gonna go in and start projecting my thoughts onto the situation. I'm going to go in and I'm gonna start thinking people don't like me, I'm not gonna feel confident, I’m gonna start shrinking…and the more I feel like that, guess what? The more I feel like that the more the people watching are going to feel like that. We’ve all seen it on X-Factor, haven’t we? Someone comes on who’s painfully frightened and awkward, and we feel it. So we have this choice at any given moment to decide that it is going to go well. I would love to know how often do you actually go into something thinking “This is going to go really well!” This is a practice, this is something we have to cultivate as an experience with our children, especially in early childhood.
Why is parenting so stressful?
How often are you going “Oh this is gonna be a nightmare” as you're approaching a meal time or a bedtime? They can already feel it, because you're already nervous, you're already stressed, your tension is already mounting. We are creating a situation with what's going on in our heads, and that’s not even reality. We have the ability to change our thought processes, change the way that we feel, which affects everybody around us; our children, our friends, our families. We can choose to go into something assuming that we have common ground, assuming that people are going to understand and receive us, and that even if they don’t at the beginning then they will do by the end.
That is why spending five minutes before any anything like that (this is something you can bring into your day, it's really useful)... just a few minutes visualising it being incredibly well received, visualising your children from this place of trust, that is where your power lies. Visualising from a place of trust and feeling in your heart and your bones that everything is going to work out exactly as it should. What that helps other people do, including your children, is to receive it, people feel your trust. People feel your comfort. I have very strong intentions for my children and my positive parenting and when I operate from that place (not a place of fear like they're gonna meltdown), when I show trust in an outcome, when I show trust in my children, things always go well.
Even if things go wrong, because you feel okay it can actually be one of the highlights or the funniest part of it! So the invitation for you today is for you to think about what are you projecting onto a given situation, how are your thoughts affecting how you're feeling and how you’re showing up. And how can you change them into ways of loving, ways of trust, ways of knowing that it is going to work out exactly as it should. You can step out of parenting stress and focus on your sensitivity to your children. The early years do not last forever, enjoy them while you can!
I’d like to leave you with this thought; given the pressures and the lack of freedom or choice, or freedom of expression for women in so many parts of the world, realise how many choices you have, and that we owe it to them and ourselves to make every single choice for the best outcome for all. When I notice how many things are going well, that’s when I make the best choices. Sending you so much love today and I will see you for more thought-provoking stuff and manifesting change in your life, for a happy family, soon.
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