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This week, I want to talk about something that I see quite a bit in my clients—apathy. I often notice my clients slipping into this state of indifference without even noticing that they are doing it.

They start with big ideas, great goals, and things they want in their lives. They get really excited about them and work their butts off, and next thing you know, they start thinking, “Screw this… I don’t want to deal with it.” They get apathetic about their vision for a period of time, and when they come out, they are full of regret about stopping the creative process and feel like they are always behind.

This vicious cycle is one of the biggest “dream stealers” on the way to self improvement.

The constant mental state of apathy has become “normal” for so many people around the world. They feel “safe” not having to risk anything or experience failure on the way to their dreams. It’s as if those people have already given up on life…

Join me as we pull back the curtain on this epidemic of apathy that is leading so many people nowhere in their lives. Discover the best course of action to reignite your drive and embark on the most rewarding journey of your life!

What you will discover

  • Why so many people in the world live in the constant state of apathy.
  • Symptoms of apathy.
  • The harmful effects of this state of indifference.
  • Why learning and consuming information is not a way out of apathy.
  • How indifference leads to depression.
  • How to defeat apathy and live a meaningful life.

Featured on the show

Episode Transcript

Welcome to The Life Coach School Podcast, where it's all about real clients, real problems, and real coaching. Now your host, master coach instructor, Brooke Castillo.

What's happening, my friends? Yes. Good day. Here's what happened. I recorded this entire podcast already, no mic on, but you know what? It's always better the second time. I just finished doing a behind-the-scenes video with my son. As part of Self Coaching Scholars, each month I send out a behind-the-scenes video, and I had been getting a lot of requests to share exactly what I eat, and how I prepare my food, and how I grocery shop, and all of that. I don't know if you know this about me, but I do not like grocery shopping, and I do not like spending a lot of time cooking food, preparing food, recipes, that sort of thing. Instead of having a chef or something really fancy like that, I prefer to just eat really simple, boring food and make my life super exciting. When I go out to eat, I have less boring food, but food is no longer the highlight of my life. I spent many years where food was the highlight of my life. It's no longer the case.

Anyway, so my son went with me and videoed me grocery shopping, videoed me preparing some food, unpacking groceries, talking about food, and then he edited the whole thing, so it's amazing. He put music to it and everything. I also, in that behind-the-scenes video, I took the phone and turned it on while I was on my hike with the dogs, which I do every day, and shared a little bit about my process and what I do on that hiking. If you're in Self Coaching Scholars you will enjoy that, and if you're not, what are you waiting for? Let's go! It's amazing!

The other thing that's going in Self Coaching Scholars in March is the money bonus. A lot of people like to ask me about money, and making money, and creating money, and spending money, and earning money, and I don't talk about it too much in the podcast, and I don't coach on it in the way that I do on most other topics, so I decided to do a whole training. What I did is…I was just going to do one bonus video and then I decided to do four, so I will be releasing those throughout the months as I continue to create them. Amazing stuff.

Money is one of those amazing things. If you really work with your mind on money, you will really be able to change your life. Having money in your life solves a lot of problems that other things can't solve. It's interesting to think about how we live in a culture where money creates things and we have the ability to create money. Make sure you check out that series. Amazing! And that's within Self Coaching Scholars, so if you want to join, go to thelifecoachschool.com. Make sure you join Self Coaching Scholars. Come on, already!

All right. Today we're going to talk about apathy. Woo-hoo! Sounds like fun. The reason I wanted to talk about apathy is because I see it in my clients. I see you. I see you guys slip into apathy and I don't even think you notice that you do it. The way that we define apathy is lack of concern, like “screw it.” You start basically with these great hopes, and these great ideas, and these big goals, and these things that you want in your life and you get really excited about it and you start working, working, working, working. The next thing you're like, "Screw it. I don't want to deal with this." Then you go into some level of lack of concern and indifference for a temporary period of time. Then you come back out of that place and you're like, "Oh, why did I do that? I wish I would've just kept working. I wish I would've just kept creating," and you end up feeling like you can't get ahead because you're always slipping into apathy.

I want to bring it to your attention and I want you to bring it to your own attention when you do this, because this is I think one of the biggest dream stealers. A lot of people don't pay attention to their own apathy and they find themselves just slipping into default mode. See, here's the thing. You've set yourself up, most of you, in your life where you can just default, right? You know who you are. You can just keep riding the momentum of the first 25 years of your life. You don't have to do much just to survive. Because you're programmed to survive, you're programmed actually once you're in safety, is to go into apathy. What I'm suggesting is that you consciously pay attention to this programming and you choose the opposite.

One layer of this is buffering. This is where you're actually overeating, and you're overdrinking, and you're over-ing whatever it is you over, and you continue to do it because you go into a place of apathy. Some of you what it looks like is “oh, well I've already done it now, so I'm just going to turn off my consciousness. I'm just going to go indifferent and just eat whatever I want for the rest of the week.” I often say to my clients, "It's not like when you show up late for work on Monday you decide, well, I already blew it. I'll take the rest of the week off," but that's how most of us do when we have optional goals in our life.

This is where the problem lies. The whole time we've evolved as humans, our survival wasn't optional, right? It was literally live or die. I mean, dying was optional, but not for a human being. That's not a viable option, but now we're in the situation where our dreams are optional. We don't actually have to create a great life for ourselves. We don't have to actually evolve to the next version of humanness in order to survive. We can just be apathetic. We can be born into this world and be apathetic our entire lives and still survive. Didn't used to be that way, but it's that way now, and that's why it's such a problem. We go into this state of just simply avoiding pain and being indifferent to the potential of our life, being indifferent to our dreams, being indifferent to our biggest desires.

We do this because we think somehow that it's keeping us safe, and it is in the sense that we're never having to risk any kind of failure. If you just go into default mode and putter around with your life, you never have to risk anything. You never have to put yourself in the way of the most intense emotions that may occur to you if you put yourself out there in the world. If you never write that book that you're dreaming about writing, you never have to worry about getting the rejection letter. If you never stand up in front of a group and try and teach them something that you know would help them, you never have to risk their rejection. You make it optional to not do those things and slip into apathy, and then apathy, which is indifference to yourself, really becomes familiar, and it actually becomes comfortable, and it feels like normal.

Now, if you're wondering if you're a person who's in apathy, where you've just basically given up on yourself and given up on your life, the way that you know is look at the last five years of your life. What have you contributed to yourself for yourself? What have you given yourself in terms of an incredible life? What options have you taken? What have you risked for yourself? See, when you love yourself you take a lot of risk for yourself. When you're indifferent to yourself, you're in apathy. You don't do anything for yourself. You don't take action in the world.

Now listen, some of you, I want to be really clear about this…the way that you measure your level of apathy is not the new things that you've learned, the new things that you've consumed, the ideas or the insights you've had. You can be very apathetic and keep consuming information. A lot of you consume information as a way to buffer, as a way not to take action. The way that you understand if you're apathetic in your life is what have you done in the A-line? What have you created in the world that wasn't there? When you think about your life of possibility and creating experiences for you in your life, what have you created, and how much did you have to risk in order to create it? I'm not talking about planning an experience like a vacation or going out to dinner. You don't have to risk to do anything like that. I'm talking about putting yourself on the line to accomplish something for yourself so you can feel proud of yourself, so you can feel like you have more in your life, more experience, more exposure in your life.

If you look back on the last five years and you don't see anything there, if you don't see anything tangible that you can grab ahold of that you've created, then you know that you're indulging in apathy, you know that you're in a place where you are being indifferent to yourself and to your life. Now, nobody else may notice this, because you have a pretty good life. You're pretty accomplished. You get up. You go to work every day. You take care of your kids, but you know. You do know when you're being apathetic. Here's another way that you can look at it. Think about your potential. Think about the possibility for your life. How much energy, how much thought, how much creation do you devote towards that? If the answer is zero, or less than five out of ten, you're being apathetic about you, your potential, your possibility. You're being indifferent to what could be your life.

How many of you are indifferent, apathetic towards your future? You just want to stay on this train wherever it happens to go. How many of you are just the passenger on the bus? You're not really caring where you're going or who's driving. Just easier to sit and look out the window than go take ahold of the wheel and decide where to go and drive and take responsibility. So, so many of us. How many of you are just exhausted and therefore uninterested? You spend so much time worrying, and stressing, and buffering, and hating yourself that you don't have any energy left to be interested or concerned in what is possible for you in your life.

I deal with this a lot with my clients. They go from a place of complete motivation to a place of complete apathy. “I don't really care right now. Screw it. Oh well.” Commitment to apathy is actually a dance. I have a client who eats clean and focuses, and then completely indulges and doesn't care, seeking pleasure at her own cost, back and forth. I'm interested. I'm not interested. I'm committed. I'm not committed. I give in to indifference because it feels familiar. It feels safe. I don't have to risk anything. It's an actual lack of concern for yourself, for your goals, for your life. It's neglect.

There's a great quote that says, "The opposite of love is not hate. The opposite of love is indifference." I often think that I'd rather be hated than ignored. Neglect is the worst type of abuse. We tell ourselves we don't have the time or energy to care for our own feelings, for our own lives. We are often desperately trying to get our own attention to no avail. Our attempts go unanswered. We can't even muster enough energy to care that we are upset. We just avoid, and ignore, and run away, and escape, and hide. Apathy is the suppression of all of those emotions. Complete discipline is the answer, commitment.

Now, with some of you, when I say discipline, you think that what I mean by that is you have to be mean to yourself, and stringent, and be a drill sergeant. That's not what I mean. I mean that you hold yourself in the highest regard with no exception. You do not give in to apathy. You wouldn't do that with a small child, or an infant, or a baby under any circumstance. You would never neglect them. You would never neglect what's important to them, and what they want, and what their needs are, and yet we so easily neglect ourselves. We say things like, "I don't care about my weight. I don't care about my relationships right now. I just don't have time to think about my job or money. I'm just trying to get through the day. I don't care about making a contribution. I don't care about growth."
Think about this. How much energy, how much concern, how much time do you put into your emotional health? Most of you put more energy into cleaning your car and your house than your mind. We are not taught to make our emotional health a priority, and yet our emotional health is what drives every single other thing in our life.

Often, apathy is disguised as self-care, and I just want you to know that the way that you can tell the difference is by how you feel. One feels like love, and one feels like avoidance. It feels dull. It feels empty. Think about, in a perfect world, how you would care for your life, for the potential of your life, for the possibility of your life? Most of us can hold the possibility of our children's life more than we can hold the possibility of our own life. We're so focused on our past we're apathetic about our futures.

What I'm asking you to do is to care about your future, to not avoid it, to not neglect it, to not be indifferent about it. That means the thoughts you have about your future, that means the feelings that you have all of the time, that means the actions that you're taking. When you feel apathetic you don't take any actions. You don't create anything in the world. You don't move towards your possibility. You just stagnate. Extreme self-care and discipline is what allows for growth. It's not confining or controlling, and it's not punishing. It's the difference between a control freak trying to control the world, and someone with complete self-discipline caring for themselves. This distinction is important or you may not commit to extreme self-care and discipline.

Giving in to apathy often feels like relief initially, because it doesn't require anything of you, but the cost is so high. When you give in to apathy, you're not exercising self-responsibility, which is the most empowering thing you can do. Self-care, self-discipline, structure, organization, and love, these are all the things that make us stronger, be able to live into our own potential. When you're unhappy and you turn to apathy as a way of dealing with it, this is what can lead to depression. Instead of embracing unhappiness as part of the human experience, and moving within it, and feeling it all the way through without resisting it and understanding it, when you avoid it and slip into apathy, you miss the opportunity to literally have a life where you are connected and alive.
We often have apathy for things we believe we cannot change, but the truth is we can change our lives when we take responsibility. We can always change how we are experiencing something by how we think about it. Now listen, so many of you hear me talk about this, but when it comes to actually applying it, doing the work, filling out the workbook, to doing the daily exercises that I give you, many of you neglect yourselves when it comes to doing the work. You make excuses for not doing it, for not paying attention to what you're eating or how you are in your relationships. I just want to offer that you are the one that will benefit from being diligent and vigilant.

I want to remind you that it is your opportunity to live your life however you would like. You can live in default and you can be apathetic about the possibilities, or you can be willing to be concerned and care for what really matters for you and make sure that you deliver to yourself. Do not accept apathy as an option. Remove it as an option. If you indulge in too much apathy, you could end up in depression, indifference. Indifference. Indifference leads to depression, and it's exhausting. I want to suggest that you notice your desire to go into default, you notice your desire to say, "Screw it," and go into apathy and you take a stand to move in a different direction. It's a shift in your mind to commit to something different.

Okay, my friends. That's all I have for you today. If you're in Scholars, make sure you do the exercise. Do not just think about this cerebrally. Don't just think about this in your brain. Don't just think about this in your brain. I want you to think about this, and apply it, and do it, and live it. You have no space for being apathetic. That's what happens when you die, right? That's where indifference may have a place, but not in your life. Have an amazing, gorgeous, beautiful week everybody. I want to encourage you all to stay on after the outro and experience the amazing, wonderful Jody Moore. Most of you know her. All of you will love her. Please enjoy.

Hey, if you enjoy listening to this podcast, you have to come check out Self Coaching Scholars. It's my monthly coaching program where we take all this material and we apply it, we take it to the next level, and we study it. Join me over at TheLifeCoachSchool.com/join. Make sure you type in the "the" TheLifeCoachSchool.com/join. I'd love to have you join me in Self Coaching Scholars. See you there.
Podcast Feature: Jody Moore

Hey, everybody! Welcome. My name is Jody Moore. I am a certified coach, certified through The Life Coach School, and I own a business called Bold New Mom. I work with stay-at-home moms who want to find peace, and fulfillment, and joy in the midst of raising kids. Many of my clients are members of the Mormon church. That is the space I know best, and I'm super excited to be here talking to you today. I want to teach you a concept that I call clean parenting. This can apply, of course, not just to moms, also to dads, and in many aspects of life, so even if you're not a parent, you will find some useful tips here, I believe…but my expertise, like I said, is in working with moms.

What is clean parenting? Well, we hear a lot about clean eating, right, nowadays, getting rid of the preservatives, or the harmful chemicals that are in our foods. We know that this is important because those things can have long-term effects on our overall health, so we want to do our best to eat clean so that our food will do the job it's supposed to do of nourishing our bodies, and keeping us healthy, and fueling us. Now, when it comes to our health, there are other factors that are outside of our control. There are no guarantees that clean eating and even if you add exercise, and drinking plenty of water, and all the other things that we know to do, there are no guarantees that you won't get sick or injured. There are things that can happen that are outside of our control, but certainly we want to do our best to be responsible, and take care of our bodies, and take care of our health.

This is the same way I want you to think about clean parenting. Clean parenting means that you, just like it says, clean up your thinking. If you are a fan of The Life Coach School Podcast, then you're familiar with Brooke Castillo's model, which helps you to clean up your thinking, and that is exactly the work that I do with clients and what I want to talk to you about here today, because cleaning up your thinking will help you to do the best possible job that you can to raise your children the way you want to, to really be there for them, and to know how to hold them accountable, and teach them, and nurture them without enabling them.

Of course, your kids get to make their own choices, even down to deciding whether or not they're going to be happy. They will make mistakes, and they will make bad choices, and they will screw it all up at times, right? That's outside of our control and in fact, it's supposed to happen, but clean parenting means that you have peace of mind over doing the best possible job that you could as a parent. The aspect of clean parenting that I want to teach you today has to do with our two core fears. I teach my clients that every one of us has two core fears and I want to begin by explaining that to you.

The first core fear that we all have is the fear over whether or not we're good enough. You might call it shame, right? This voice in our head that questions whether or not we're enough is actually normal and healthy for humans to have. In fact, you may know Brené Brown teaches that only sociopaths don't have shame, so that voice speaks up to varying degrees and at varying times for all of us, but every one of us has that, and certain events can happen in our lives that trigger thoughts for us that light up that fear.

The second core fear that we all have is the fear that we might be missing out on something. This one is a little bit more vague, but it's where thoughts like, "This isn't fair. It's not right." It's where resentment lives, resentment over things that we feel we've been made to do, or things that we've missed out on that we should get to do. The fear of missing out has to do with your overall life experience, and this fear that maybe it's not what it should be or what it's supposed to be.

Here we are, human beings with these two core fears, navigating the world, and now enter a baby, or several babies, right? When you have children, I don't have to explain to you, that your heart is attached to theirs. I love the way Shonda Rhimes in her book Year of Yes describes that you have these little kids and then suddenly now your heart is walking around outside of you and it's held hostage by these little people. These little people, our children, have those same two core fears, of course, that we all have, and you still bring those fears with you into your role as a parent, but now you also take on those fears for your child to a certain extent. This is the natural course of things anyway, right?

First of all, you don't question, in most cases, we don't question our child's worthiness. We already know that they are amazing. We think that they are perfect and everyone should see what we see, right? What we worry about is that they are going to have to feel that fear of unworthiness. We don't want anyone else to make them feel bad, or hurt their feelings, or question that they are fantastic exactly as they are, so that's where that fear plays in for us, the fear that we know our child has the fear of unworthiness, and a part of us really doesn't want to see that triggered for them.

With regards to the fear of missing out, we do tend to bring this fear on. We don't want our kids to have to experience anything painful. I wish I could just lock my kids in a room and make them happy, and fulfilled, and to know that they're amazing all day long, but it just doesn't work that way. We hate to see them get a bad teacher at school, or to be treated unfairly by others, or to miss out on something that we think they should have. All of this will trigger our child's fear, we realize, and then it also triggers that fear within us. If my child isn't going to get into the college that we think they should go to, it can trigger this fear.

This double fear trigger at times, my fear and the fear that I'm taking on for my child, can make having kids be a really emotionally exhausting experience. Then we complicate it all even more, are you ready for the next layer, because our kids trigger our own fears within us at times, especially as they get older. The worthiness fear comes up because we wonder “am I a good enough mom? Am I really doing the right thing? Am I going to be able to parent them the way I should?” We have all kinds of fear around “I don't want them to think about me the way that I thought about my parents at times.” We all have those experiences that we carry with us, and we say, "I'll never do that," right? So this worthiness fear gets triggered easily by our children. We worry about other people judging us as parents. That all falls under the worthiness fear.
What's interesting is that usually our fear over our worthiness as a parent, “am I a good enough mom?” triggers also that fear of missing out for my child, because if I'm not a good enough mom, now maybe my child whom I love is not going to get the experience I want him to have in this life. In addition, our own fear of missing out for ourselves gets triggered. Every time I clean the house, I spend a long time getting everything put away, and then I dust, and vacuum, and mop, and get everything clean and shiny, and then my kids come along behind me and destroy it, my fear of missing out is triggered big time, right? Because it's not fair. I just did that. Now I'm going to have to do it again. Somebody came along and messed it up. It's not right. I'm not getting the life experience I should have to have.

Every time I feel that I have to make dinner, or I have to do the laundry, or I have to take care of all these people who need me, that's again, building resentment and it falls under the bucket of fear of missing out. You see how complicated this whole parenting thing is and why it feels like you're on an emotional rollercoaster all the time? It's totally normal. I'm right there with you, don't worry. I want you to just have awareness of that and now I want to give you a few things that you can do to help.

Step number one, like I said, is to clean up your thinking. Of course we use Brooke Castillo's model to do this, but what I want you to keep in mind is that what is not going to serve you or your child is for you to project your fears onto your child. The only way you know if you're doing that is by noticing and paying attention to your beliefs and what meaning you're adding to things happening around you. I can usually tell when I need to do that by how I'm feeling and how I'm behaving. Let me give you some examples here, okay?

First, before I do, I want to give you the analogy that I really like. You've heard the airplane analogy before probably where we say the reason that on an airplane the flight attendant says that if we lose pressure in the cabin oxygen masks will fall from the ceiling. Please secure your own mask before helping your child. That's a great analogy to illustrate how we need to take care of ourselves so that then we can take care of our children, but I want to switch up the airplane analogy on you a little bit.
I want you to imagine that in the airplane analogy you are the flight attendant, okay? On the flight there is going to be turbulence, because on most flights there's at least a little bit of turbulence. Turbulence equals your child making mistakes, your child disobeying, your child being unhappy, or scared, or worried, or any number of things that your child will go through. When there's turbulence and the captain says everything's fine, it's just turbulence, if you're not sure, you're a nervous flier, or it's really severe turbulence, who do you look to? You look to the flight attendant, right? If she's sitting there calmly reading a book, then you feel reassured that this is just a little turbulence and nothing to worry about. If she's panicked, which thank goodness I've never seen that happen on a flight I've been on, but if she was, we might be nervous. So you are the flight attendant and your child is the passenger going through life with turbulence and wondering if this is okay or if something's terribly wrong.

His or her fears of unworthiness or of missing out are triggered already by what he's experiencing, by what he's thinking of course about what he's experiencing, and he's looking to you. If you can calmly read your book and just be there for your child, you will serve them so much better. Okay? The way you do that is you remember that both of those core fears, while again, it's human nature to have them, but really they both are irrational and unnecessary in the end, because none of us has to worry about our worthiness, ever. We are all amazing. I like to think of a newborn baby, how you look at that newborn and you just know that he's perfect or she's perfect, and you just can't get over, in fact, how perfect they are. Yet, they haven't done anything brilliant. They haven't accomplished anything significant. They haven't developed. We don't know yet I should say what their personality will be like. We just know they're perfect, and that level of perfection, in terms of what an amazing creation you are, doesn't change throughout your life.

Of course, that's an irrational fear. Nothing that you do or don't do or that happens to you can touch your worthiness or your child's. The second fear of course is also irrational, the fear of missing out, but for this one you have to remember things and decide what you believe. For some people, it's a belief like the universe is always conspiring in my favor. Everything that happens, all of my experiences, good and bad, easy and painful, are all happening for me. The same is true for your child. The experiences that we have in this life help us to reach our potential, to become who we're meant to become. As a parent, I want you to remember that you can run around and protect your child from a lot of hard things in this world that we live in, but I try to remember that if I protect my child from a lesson that he or she needs to learn, then that lesson will show up again and again until they learn it, and that the older they get, the more severe the lessons become, and the harder they are to learn.

I want them to learn them while they're young, and while I'm right there, and while they're open to hearing what I have to say. My kids are going to gain a lot of confidence by doing hard things. They're going to grow by doing hard things. For example, when my child…a couple of years ago my daughter was assigned to be in a classroom. She was in first grade, and it was going to be a kindergarten/first grade combo class. It was a new teacher to the school, and a lot of parents were really upset about it because it was a scheduling nightmare. The kindergartners were only there a half a day. The first graders were there all day. There's a big change academically from kindergarten to first grade, and again, the teacher was new. People weren't sure about her. There was just all kinds of reasons why many, many parents said, "I want my child taken out of that class. That is going to be very hard."

Again, that fear got triggered within me too, like “this isn't fair.” Why does my daughter have to go through this? But when I clean up my thinking and I remember that there's a lesson she's going to learn here, and that in fact I want her to experience some hard things right now while she's young, I said, "Oh good. This will be hard for her. This will be really good for her. I can be here to make sure she still learns to read and still gets the things that she needs in first grade and help her navigate this hard situation," but I really want more hard for my kids, because we live in suburbia America. It is very easy, and the people I see that evolve, and grow, and become confident, and contribute the most to the world don't have it so easy. I think being in a K1 combo class, if it's a little bit hard, might be great. I want to keep her there.

All right. You can run around protecting them from all kinds of hard things, but they're going to miss out on the opportunity to build confidence, and to grow, and to learn, and to evolve, and to become more compassionate, et cetera. When my three-year-old is having a tantrum, I have expectations around how he's allowed to behave in our house, but I don't try to talk him out of how he's feeling, because my fear is already triggered, and so what I naturally want to do is yell at him and tell him to stop yelling. Isn't that great how we do that? But that is not me parenting from a clean space.

Clean parenting means I stay calm and peaceful, and I say, "I know you're mad, and frustrated, and upset, and you can be. It's fine. What you're not allowed to do is kick and scream in the living room. You'll have to go in your bedroom if you're going to do that," and then I take him into his bedroom if necessary, "but you can be mad." Just allow him to feel that way, and I know that I'm in charge of how I feel. He's not. He's not in charge of making me feel better. He doesn't need to stop screaming so that I can feel better. He needs to stop screaming because we don't scream in our home, and then he can feel however he wants, right?

If your 18-year-old son comes home and says, "I decided not to go to college anymore. I changed my mind," then all the fear and worry that will come up within you, you can just allow it to come and notice it, and process it a little bit, and then I want you to clean up your thinking. He is on his own journey, and I want to give him space to be on that journey, and so my only job is number one to love him, which I can always do, and number two, to be really clear with him about what I'm willing to do to help him, and what he needs to figure out and do on his own.

Are you willing to let him stay at home and live with you? Do you want him to get a job? What are you willing to offer him in terms of I would say especially financial support, and then you love him, and then you allow him to make choices. These are your options and I love you no matter what. You may want to teach things as well, right? Of course we want to teach our kids this is what I believe. These are the values that I live by that serve me really well, and here's why, and here's some options I can see for you, but your child has to go on their own journey sometimes. Sometimes it's not the journey we would pick for them, unfortunately.
My kids are probably really sick of hearing me say this, but when they get upset, I say, "You can feel that way." They'll tell me, like my daughter when she was five years old, I remember her saying, "Mom, I hate you," because of something I wouldn't let her do. I said, "You can hate me, and I still love you. Now, in our house, we don't tell each other that we hate one another, so you're not allowed to say that anymore. If you do, you'll need to go to your room, but you can in your head hate me all you want, and I still love you." Clean parenting means that you do not need your kids to provide you with the emotions that you want to feel. You keep the credit for your emotions. You manage your mind. You have some core beliefs that counteract your core fears, and then you parent from that place of peace.

Thanks so much for joining me today, you guys. I hope that you found some useful tips here that are going to help you as you do this important work of raising children. I want to mention to you that I have put together a clean parenting toolkit, because if you're like me, you're listening to this podcast while you're driving, or walking around Target, and when you need it in the moment, it's not going to be easy to go back and find and review, so I already put down everything I talked about and much more in what I call a clean parenting toolkit. It's absolutely free for you.

It has links to a couple of other podcasts I've done on this topic, but also some quick one-page cheat sheets about what to do when your child is struggling and not feeling good, how to help them process emotion, how to coach yourself ahead of time so that you're showing up in the way you want to, and some additional, what I call leadership parenting skills, because good leaders and good parents are the same. All you have to do is go to boldnewmom.com/clean and you will get immediate access to that entire toolkit. Thanks again for joining me, and thank you so much to Brooke for allowing me to be on her podcast, which I love, so I appreciate this time and your ear. Talk to you soon. Bye.

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