#867: Dr. Becky Kennedy — Parenting Strategies for Raising Resilient Kids, Plus Word-for-Word Scripts for Repairing Relationships, Setting Boundaries, and More (Repost)

Dr. Becky Kennedy is the founder and CEO of Good Inside https://www.goodinside.com/, a parenting movement that overturns a lot of conventional, modern parenting practices to empower parents to become sturdy, confident leaders and raise sturdy, confident kids. She is the author of the bestselling book Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be https://www.amazon.com/Good-Inside-Guide-Becoming-Parent/dp/0063159481/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, a chart-topping podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/good-inside-with-dr-becky/id1561689671, a TED talk https://www.ted.com/talks/becky_kennedy_the_single_most_important_parenting_strategy?subtitle=en with more than 5 million views on the power of repair. This episode is brought to you by: Monarch https://www.monarchmoney.com/timtrack, budget, plan, and do more with your money: Monarch.com/Tim https://www.monarchmoney.com/tim Shopify https://shopify.com/tim global commerce platform, providing tools to start, grow, market, and manage a retail business: Shopify.com/tim https://shopify.com/tim* This episode was originally published in December 2024. Show notes and links: https://tim.blog/2024/12/27/dr-becky-kennedy-good-inside/ TIMESTAMPS: [00:00:00] Start. [00:01:55] The power of repair. [00:04:50] "It's never your fault when I yell at you." [00:08:55] What does it mean to be a "good" parent? [00:10:32] Activating curiosity over judgment. [00:13:33] Alternatives to saying "Good job" as a confidence builder. [00:20:50] Making kids happy vs. building capability. [00:24:18] A pilot metaphor for sturdy leadership. [00:29:30] Role confusion. [00:32:04] Defining boundaries. [00:35:07] How parenting becomes a two-way mirror for growth. [00:40:09] The MGI (Most Generous Interpretation) approach. [00:42:52] Biggest challenges in parenting. [00:46:52] Recommended reading for someone with kids in their life. [00:52:11] Advisable prerequisites for singles who aim to build a family. [00:56:18] Setting boundaries with grandparents and dealing with different parenting styles. [01:01:42] Handling frustration when a child is pushing your buttons. [01:09:58] Lessons learned from working with eating disorders. [01:13:26] Managing troublemaker behavior. [01:17:38] Bad influence intervention. [01:22:52] Cultivating resilience in "deeply feeling" kids (DFKs). [01:28:58] The trials and errors that birthed Good Inside. [01:32:53] "Our words are not our wishes. Our words are our fears." [01:40:07] Billboard messages and mantras. [01:48:00] Fan-favorite scripts on saying no, boundaries, and repair. [01:51:15] The tennis court metaphor for boundaries. [01:55:45] Resources and parting thoughts. For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show https://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show https://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsors https://tim.blog/podcast-sponsors Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts https://tim.blog/transcripts. Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books https://tim.blog/books. Follow Tim: Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss https://twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferriss https://instagram.com/timferriss/ YouTube: youtube.com/timferriss https://www.youtube.com/timferriss Facebook: facebook.com/timferriss https://www.facebook.com/TimFerriss/ LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferriss http://linkedin.com/in/timferriss See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where for more than a decade, it has been my job to deconstruct world-class performers from different disciplines, all different disciplines, to tease out the frameworks, the favorite books, the routines, and in this case, the word-for-word scripts that you can apply to your own lives. My guest today is Dr. Becky Kennedy. She is the founder and CEO of Good Inside, a parenting movement with members in more than 100 countries that overturns a lot of conventional, modern parenting advice to actually empower parents to become sturdy, confident leaders. We'll explain what that means and raise sturdy, confident kids. Of course, there are a million people out there giving parenting advice, and Dr. Becky

• 0:44Tim Ferriss?

  Kennedy's advice, her thinking on this, has resonated incredibly well with me, and that is why, for years, I've wanted to have her on. She is the author of the number one bestselling book by the same name, Good Inside, a chart-topping podcast, Good Inside with Becky, you can see the theme here, a TED Talk with nearly 4 million views on the power of repair. We'll discuss what that means and what it looks like, and a children's book, That's My Truck, a Good Inside story about hitting. Maybe I could use that, too. You can find her online at goodinside.com and on Instagram at DrBecky@GoodInside. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

• 1:26Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 1:28Tim Ferriss?

  No, I would have seen it broken.

• 1:30Speaker 01

  What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 1:44Tim Ferriss?

  Well, let's start with what popped into my head.

• 1:47Speaker 02

  Great.

• 1:47Tim Ferriss?

  And we'll just keep rolling with that thread.

• 1:50Speaker 02

  Love it.

• 1:50Tim Ferriss?

  And see if it goes where interesting. If it's a dead end, I'll get us out of the dead end. But I want to talk, perhaps, about your TED Talk on the power of repair. Why do you think this struck a chord with people? And what resonated with people from that?

• 2:05Speaker 02

  A classic example is you yell at your kid for something, right? So I'll use this example, which is different than the one in my TED Talk, because it also leads to some, you know, common questions. So my kid's stalling in the morning. Like, I gotta get my kid to school, because also, when I drop my kid at school, I have to get to work, and my kid's late, I'm late, the whole thing, we're also rushed. And my kid is saying, you know, I don't know, whatever they're saying, I'm not going to school today. You can't make me go to school. I'm not putting on my shoes. You put on my shoes. And you're thinking, I have an eight year old, like they have to put on their shoes, right? And then we get to some crescendo moment where as a parent, and I'll say me, myself, because I have this too, I just yell, scream at my kid, what is wrong with you? You don't do anything.

• 2:47Speaker 02

  You're eight years old. You know, they all, you're never going to amount to anything in your life. You can't put on your shoes or, you know, you're so selfish, you're going to make me late. You turned me into a monster. Why can't you listen the first time? We say this thing, depending on our kid's temperament, they react in different ways. If they're kind of in the more people pleasing type, that immediately stops them. They're like, oh no, my parents mad at me. You know, I'm going to be good. Mostly just because I'm, I really need to see that they reflect that I'm a good kid. I like need that. If you have another temperament kid, they use this as a way of like, oh, you want to fight? I'll show you a fight. And they're like, I am not putting on my shoes, you know?

• 3:24Tim Ferriss?

  That was me.

• 3:24Speaker 02

  Right. That is my third kid. Love him. What order are you?

• 3:29Tim Ferriss?

  I'm first.

• 3:30Speaker 02

  You're first?

• 3:30Tim Ferriss?

  Mm hmm.

• 3:31Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 3:32Tim Ferriss?

  But I was a pretty defiant little kid.

• 3:35Speaker 02

  Right.

• 3:35Tim Ferriss?

  At points.

• 3:36Speaker 02

  And so then you get through the moment, you get through it. And then I think after drop off, there's this like immense heaviness as a parent. And you're cycling through different things that again, whatever your voices, might be your own voice, or it's probably the voice you've internalized from your own upbringing, in terms of how people would have responded to you, if you were your kid in that moment. But it's some version of blame. It's either blame in or blame out. It's either I'm an awful parent, why can't I stay calm? And why can't I just get to the morning? And then that usually cycles with, I have an awful kid, and my kid's a sociopath, and they're going to go to jail, and they're never going to amount to anything. And either way, you're blaming. Where repair would be saying to your kid, some point, hey, I screamed at you earlier. That probably felt scary. And this will be

• 4:21Speaker 02

  the kind of maybe, maybe the start of something controversial. It's never your fault when I yell. And I'm working on staying calmer. So even when I'm frustrated, I can use a calmer voice, like I'm sorry. That would be a repair. I'm kind of going back to a moment that felt bad. Kind of like reopening that part of the chapter. I'm taking responsibility for my behavior. I'm giving my kid a story to understand what happened.

• 4:46Speaker 02

  And I'm kind of talking about what I would do differently the next time.

• 4:50Tim Ferriss?

  All right. This is great. Grist for the mill. And part of the reason, and we talked about this a little bit before recording, that I was excited to have you on and have a conversation is that the tools you're talking about really apply everywhere. And they're echoed by a lot of folks people would not necessarily associate with parenting, like Jaco Willink, Navy SEAL commander, extreme ownership. And there are many other examples that I could give where I feel like what we will discuss in our conversation can be applied many different places, many different dojos for very similar tools and toolkits. With that said, I suspect

• 5:33Tim Ferriss?

  one line where people maybe got stuck, and you know exactly what I'm going to say, is it's never your fault when I yell at you.

• 5:40Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 5:41Tim Ferriss?

  All right. Part of me loves that because, just to invoke the great name of Jaco again, who did his first ever podcast, first ever interview on this podcast 100 years ago. When you own things, you give yourself a degree of agency.

• 5:55Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 5:56Tim Ferriss?

  Right. But also overly blaming yourself can be the flip side of maybe taking on excessive responsibility for other people's actions and feelings and so on, meaning sort of codependent or otherwise. So I heard everything you said, but I suppose like some listeners, I was like, always never. These absolutes are very strong words.

• 6:18Tim Ferriss?

  Why say that particular line?

• 6:21Speaker 02

  And when I share a script, to me, it's often words that are representative of kind of principles. I never like to get too stuck on words. I actually gave those words an example, in part because I think it does bring up a lot of questions. But I never want someone to hear this and think, okay, I got to write down that exact word. In general, take responsibility for your actions. Give your kid a story. Say what you do differently the next time. And I actually would hope anyone listening would say, I think I have my own brand of that. Amazing. That's better for you and your kid than my brand. So with that in mind, it's never your fault when I yell. Here's why I think that's powerful, even if you don't say it to discuss and really think about. The way we react to our kid, yes, has to do with the situation in front of us. But we actually react to the set of feelings in our own body,

• 7:05Speaker 02

  combined with the circuitry we have to manage those feelings. And I think the biggest thing to think about is that circuitry, those skills we have to manage emotions, literally predated our kid's existence. That was there so far before them. Now, when my kid doesn't listen and the morning is delayed, I feel frustrated. And that feeling is definitely co-created with my kid. Separating frustration from my ability to manage the frustration are two really different things. And telling a kid, basically, "You make me yell, you turn me into a monster",

• 7:46Speaker 02

  is actually holding your kid responsible for your set of skills to manage your feelings. And the other reason, and then I'll be quiet for right now, that I think it's so powerful, is I think about my son, I don't know, it could be my daughter, whatever, he's married one day, let's say, and he has some partner and he had a really bad day at work. And he comes home and for some reason I'm at his house visiting, and his partner is like, "Oh, man, I forgot to get toilet paper from the store." And then he sits down for dinner and maybe his partner like ordered him the wrong thing. I don't know, he yells at her. And I hear him saying like, "Well, if you just got toilet paper and ordered me the right thing, I wouldn't be yelling at you." And I picture the cringe, "Oh, my God, that's like the creepiest thing, like seriously."

• 8:30Tim Ferriss?

  And you're like, "Did I install that software?"

• 8:31Speaker 02

  And then we hear ourselves say to our kids all the time, "If you just listened the first time, I wouldn't have yelled." Or like, "Okay, well, if you were just calmly playing with your sister, then you wouldn't get this reaction from me." And if that creeps us out down the line, like if we wouldn't say, "I would be so proud to hear my kid say that to a partner", then I don't know why we think that's a good idea to say to our kids when they're young.

• 8:55Tim Ferriss?

  So there are many different branches off of this that we could explore. Let's maybe back up or zoom out, choose your favorite metaphor.

• 9:05Tim Ferriss?

  And perhaps you could just, in your, suppose, framework or worldview, what it means to be a good parent, could you define this or just speak to that?

• 9:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:17Tim Ferriss?

  And then we can use that as a sort of a foundation from which we can launch into a bunch of other stuff.

• 9:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, I should have a really succinct, really solid answer to that question by now, but I-

• 9:27Tim Ferriss?

  Fortunately, we have a lot of time.

• 9:29Speaker 02

  Maybe part of what I struggle with is, I think, we probably think about that word or that term, good parent, is like, what I'm doing on the surface is something observable. Or I think a core principle that I think about is actually separating kind of who you are in terms of your identity, which is not observable, from what you do and your actions, which usually is observable, separating those two. I mean, but I think a good parent probably sees parenting as a journey of self-growth and discovery as much as they see it about anything related to your kid's growth. So I think that's number one. Number two, I think a good parent really activates curiosity over judgment in a situation with their kids.

• 10:12Speaker 02

  And a good parent probably can put into action the idea that really being the sturdiest leader for your kid involves equal parts, very firm boundaries and parental authority as it does kind of warm, validating connection.

• 10:32Tim Ferriss?

  You mentioned curiosity over judgment. Now, when people hear this word judgment, they probably assume that is a negative judgment. But a judgment could also be something like, good job, right? So what would curiosity look like in place of either a negative or a positive judgment?

• 10:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think the words, good job, have gotten a lot of, like, press for parents, like, you also say, good job, say, good job. That's not going to do damage to your kid. I think there's a lot we can unpack there against there's deeper principles, right? They're like, oh, what do kids really need when they have accomplishments?

• 11:03Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I like how you zoom out because it's not the- Whether you're using like crayons or the oil paints or the acrylics or charcoal, you have to learn the fundamentals of like drawing and to do that, you need to learn how to see things. So it's like returning to those first principles.

• 11:18Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 11:18Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 11:19Speaker 02

  That's exactly right. So I think judgment, it can be positive, but I would say in parenting, actually in any relationship, it's just so easy to see someone's behavior that feels bad or feels less than ideal. And we just activate our judgment about the behavior. And usually when you judge behavior, what you're unconsciously doing is you're seeing behavior as a sign of who someone is. That's why you're judging it. This person's such a selfish person. Right? My friend didn't call me back. Oh, they're so selfish. Or my kid keeps hitting on the playground, even though I say no hitting. And then we don't even realize going to like, what's wrong with my kid? Why do I have such a bad kid? You know, my kid is never going to figure things out. I'm a bad parent. You just see something on the surface and you kind of feel like you know

• 12:04Speaker 02

  everything about it. I actually think I never thought about that. That's really what it means to judge something. I see something that's probably part of a larger story. And instead I think it's the whole thing.

• 12:15Speaker 02

  To me, the opposite of judgment in any relationship is curiosity. And I think curiosity is when you see something and you just wonder about it. To me, that's like one of the best words for parents. Wonder. I wonder why my kid is hitting. As soon as you use the word wonder, you're unable to judge because you're thinking and kind of conjuring up this bigger picture. Now, where parents usually go when they hear me say that, it's like, oh, so it's just okay? My kid's hitting? And there's this, again, judgment we even do there where-

• 12:45Tim Ferriss?

  You must deal with so many people with so many strong opinions.

• 12:47Speaker 02

  Well, part of it is I get it. I have so much empathy for parents and even understand their skepticism of our approach because we have had shoved down our throat this very, very behavior first, punishment first. We call it discipline. It's actually a joke to me in any other area of life. If we allowed CEOs and coaches to talk to the people in their organizations, like we think parents do to kids, and then we call it disciplined, it would never fly and those people would be fired. But we've had that shoved down our throats. And so anything new always feels uncomfortable. And these are very new ideas. But I think about with other areas, even with kids. If your kid isn't learning how to swim, you teach them how to swim. And nobody says, oh, you just think it's okay that they're not swimming? It's like, oh, we'd be like, what? I'm just teaching them how to swim.

• 13:32Tim Ferriss?

  So I have a bunch of thoughts on this good job thing. I know that

• 13:36Speaker 02

  Let's do it.

• 13:37Tim Ferriss?

  I like your potential replacements for that. Could you just, just to give people a concrete example, like, what might you say instead of good job?

• 13:45Speaker 02

  A kid comes to us and let's say they, I don't know, a young kid brings us a painting and we could say, oh, good job. It's amazing, right? Or let's say an older kid brings us some paper they wrote and they got a good grade. And we say, good job. Okay, again, good job does not damage kids. But I think in those moments, we want as parents to kind of double down on building our kids' confidence. That's usually the goal we're optimizing for. So then to me, the question is, is that like the best of all options? Or at least we have other tools in our toolbox. And the thing that really builds kids' confidence is learning to gaze in before you gaze out. We're in a world that is priming us to gaze out before we gaze in, kind of like, look what I've done. And can someone in the world tell me it slash I am good enough?

• 14:29Speaker 02

  That's basically the world we live in and it makes you very empty and very fragile, very, very anxious.

• 14:34Tim Ferriss?

  I'm talking about social media?

• 14:35Speaker 02

  It's social media. Yeah, everything. I mean, so many things, right? Definitely social media.

• 14:44Tim Ferriss?

  Most people's finances live in say a dozen places. This includes me. Accounts, cards, investments and more that never talk to one another. It's hard to keep track of. This episode's sponsor and one of my team's absolute favorite tools, Monarch, is the all-in-one personal finance app that uses AI to give you a complete, organized view of your money. Accounts, investments, net worth, savings goal, all in one place, always up to date. A bunch of my friends also love this. Monarch has helped users save more than $200 per month on average. And you can ask it all sorts of things. You can ask Monarch's AI assistant anything about your money. Am I on pace to hit my savings goal by December? Or how has my travel spend trended over the last six months?

• 15:26Tim Ferriss?

  You can ask it anything. Monarch then analyzes months of data so you don't have to. And with AI insights, Monarch flags things you don't think to look for. So it can go beyond your question. And now you can get half off of your first year of Monarch with code TIM at monarch.com. That's just $50 for your first year at monarch.com with code TIM. One more time, monarch.com. That's M-O-N-A-R-C-H, monarch.com, code TIM.

• 15:54Tim Ferriss?

  Not to be a salty old dog, but in the early 2000s, back in the day when I was running my own e-commerce business, the tools were atrocious. They tried hard, but man, was it bad. You had to cobble all sorts of stuff together. I could only dream of a platform like Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world. And now 10% of all e-commerce in the U.S. is on Shopify. Now, back to the early 2000s, then, nobody even thought of AI. Who could have predicted, even in the last 24 months, the magic that is now possible with AI? Shopify has been ahead of the curve, and they are packed with helpful AI tools that will accelerate everything,

• 16:37Tim Ferriss?

  write product descriptions, page headlines, even enhance your product photography. Best of all, Shopify expertly handles everything from managing inventory to international shipping to processing returns and beyond. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at Shopify.com/Tim. One more time, Shopify.com/Tim. In 2026, stop waiting and start selling with Shopify.

• 17:09Speaker 02

  And if I think about this moment, and again, I'm often very long-term thinking, but my kids, over and over, show me things. What's going to help them down the road? Well, I know when you're in your 20s and 30s, what's really helpful down the road is when you produce something. Maybe it's art, maybe it's a project. Being able to give yourself some estimation of that before others do is very helpful to your whole self-concept and protective of anxiety and depression. I think I did a good job in this project. It's true, I didn't hear back from my boss yet, but I'm a little anxious about what my boss is going to say, but the fact that someone didn't tell me something isn't going to spiral me. And I think about the yearning and the searching and the desperation for a good job. Well, if every time my kid produces something,

• 17:51Speaker 02

  again, what they wire next to that is someone telling them, "good job", then they go into the world unable to give themselves that type of validation and searching for someone to say they're good enough. So what do I like better? Anything that helps your kid share more about themselves actually ends up feeling better to your kid also. So I think about, you know, a little while ago, my daughter paints stuff, and she did. She gave me this painting, and I'm a horrible artist, so anything she does is amazing. But what I said to her first, I said, "Oh, like, tell me about the painting. Like, what made you pick red there?" She told me this whole story, this whole story about how she hasn't ever really seen a red police car and whatever it was, just she shared her story with me.

• 18:36Speaker 02

  Same thing, I'm thinking about a kid giving us a paper. Oh, how do you think it'd come up with that topic? Oh, what made you start it that way? Oh, what was it like writing that? Whatever the questions are. And I know it sounds, it sounds like annoying at first. I get it. Like as a parent, you're like, oh, really? Can I just say good job? And of course you can. But then again, I go to an adult example. Like, let's say, Tim, you redid your house. Okay. And I visited and you really worked hard on it. And I came and go, oh, I love your house. Good job. It's actually kind of a conversation ender. I feel like you'd say to me, thank you. But if instead I said, how did you pick that color wall with that couch? You would, oh, okay. Well, let me tell you and let me show you my Pinterest board or whatever it was.

• 19:16Speaker 02

  And even if I never said, good job, I bet you would feel more lit up inside and almost better than if I had just kind of ended the conversation that way.

• 19:26Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, for sure. I have a number of friends. I mean, I have a lot of friends with kids, but one who comes to mind, I'm not going to name him, but he's very good at this and one of the best learners of any skill I've ever met. He's just an incredible human. The other thing that he did, and this was even prior to books like Grit, I think that's Angela Duckworth. But instead of saying, good job, another thing he would do is say something, I'm making this up as an example, but he would be like, I'm so proud of you. You worked so hard on that. To reinforce the effort, the process over the outcome.

• 20:02Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 20:02Tim Ferriss?

  Which seems to make sense, right? And you're not suggesting your path is the one only toolkit of purity and redemption in the sense that it can combine with other things. But the first principles are adaptable as long as you understand what those principles are.

• 20:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that every parent, I feel like some percentage of the time would be like, great job. That's cool. That's awesome. Okay. But those questions, process over product, asking for a kid's story, asking them to tell you, once you get started, it's easier. And yes, it actually focuses on what's more in a kid's control. And then setting up your kids to feel good about themselves, even if they're not always getting 100, is just such a massive privilege. And it actually makes them work harder because they're focused on their effort and process instead of just on a result.

• 20:50Tim Ferriss?

  What is your opinion of parents focusing or viewing their job as making their kids happy, optimizing for happiness, right? Because who's going to poo poo happiness?

• 20:59Speaker 02

  I will.

• 21:01Tim Ferriss?

  All right, so let's wade into the deep waters.

• 21:05Speaker 02

  It's something people say as a throwaway comment. Like, my husband always jokes, like, you're out like a dinner party. He's like, you just want your kids to be happy, right? And I'll look at me and think, Becky, please don't ruin this perfectly nice moment.

• 21:15Tim Ferriss?

  Don't take the bait.

• 21:16Speaker 02

  And I always do. No, I very much would say a parent's job is not to make a kid happy. And again, because we struggle to hold multiplicity, people will say, you want your kids to be unhappy? No, I definitely don't try to make my kids unhappy.

• 21:30Tim Ferriss?

  Can I just stop to say you're not going to like this maybe, like, why are people so stupid and just like want to fight? It's like, obviously, you don't mean that.

• 21:38Speaker 02

  We think in these extremes. We see that in all areas. And holding two things as true or holding nuance is increasingly hard in this world, which is why it's even more important to kind of have some of these ideas in our homes. So you use the word optimizing, and I think about that a lot. So zooming out against, again, about kind of good insight in general, is I would say our parenting approach is just very long-term greedy. Because I just think my kids are going to be out of my house for way longer than they're in my house. They're going to choose whether they want to be in a relationship with me way longer than they're locked into a relationship with me. And however high the stakes feel when they're eight and 10 and 17, we know the stakes in life just get higher. And so

• 22:22Speaker 02

  when we think about making our kids happy, what we're actually saying is I am prioritizing my kids' short-term ease. I am making my kids' life easy and comfortable in the short term. And what ends up happening, not when you do that a couple of times, but as a pattern, is you actually narrow the range of emotions kids believe they can cope with.

• 22:45Tim Ferriss?

  100%, for sure. True in partnerships, too. True in a lot of relationships.

• 22:50Speaker 02

  Yes. Anyway, you end up having adults who are remarkably anxious. So prioritizing happiness for kids leads to adulthood full of a ton of anxiety.

• 23:00Tim Ferriss?

  Because you're protecting them from a broader band of emotional exposure. And so they don't develop the confidence that they can handle those broader ranges.

• 23:10Speaker 02

  I have to sometimes use hyperbolic language with myself to like really get me to do something that's hard, but I think good for my kids. Like I see my kid, you know, who's left out of a social event or who, oh, got the school project in a group where all of his friends are together and my kid is the only one not with his friends. Or my kid is struggling to do a puzzle. And one of the things I say to myself is Becky, do not deprive my child of finding their capability. Do not steal it. Do not steal their capability. A kid doesn't feel capable when they do something easy. A kid doesn't even feel capable when they're doing something hard. Kids develop capability after watching themselves survive something that was really difficult and just get through it. And so if I say to my kid, I'll call the school and I'll switch to the school group for you.

• 23:54Speaker 02

  Oh, I'll do that puzzle for you because I just don't want to deal with you having a meltdown, not once, but over and over. I'm actually stealing their capability. Capability really is the antidote to anxiety. And going forward, when I think about my kids going into the world, what's more important than feeling like I can be capable in a wide range, not very narrow bubbled cushion range of situations?

• 24:18Tim Ferriss?

  What does it mean to be a sturdy leader?

• 24:23Speaker 02

  I love the word sturdy. Like there are certain words I love because even though I'm a psychologist and I have a lot of words to say, I actually think very visually. And to me, the words that make sense evoke an emotion that I can access. The word sturdy just does that for me. And again, I think sturdy leadership is what we want in a CEO. It's what we want in a partner. It's what we want in a coach. It's definitely what we want in a pilot.

• 24:44Tim Ferriss?

  So does that mean reliable, dependable?

• 24:47Speaker 02

  I think there's a couple of ways. I think it's a leader who is equally boundaried as they are connected to you. They're actually equally as connected to themselves. What do I want? What are my values? What are my limitations? As they are able to connect to you. Oh, you might be different, but I'm able to hear and understand your values and wants and feelings. And to me, the way that can get kind of operationalized. As a kind of really set of skills is you know how to set boundaries. And I think most people get boundaries completely wrong. So I know how to set and hold boundaries. And at the same time, I'm able to connect to and validate other people's emotional experiences. Those are the two pillars of sturdy leadership.

• 25:29Tim Ferriss?

  Could you paint a scenario for us? You have great scripts and people come to you for scripts. Doesn't have to be a verbatim script, but could you just walk us through a hypothetical situation that exemplifies someone being sturdy in this way?

• 25:45Speaker 02

  I think sometimes the best way to do it is actually in this pilot metaphor. Can I do that first and then I'll come to us?

• 25:50Tim Ferriss?

  Let's get into the pilots.

• 25:52Speaker 02

  Okay. So are you actually a pilot? Wouldn't surprise me.

• 25:55Tim Ferriss?

  I'm not a pilot. I have landed a plane, but I'm not a pilot.

• 26:00Speaker 02

  Sully, right there. I got Sully. Okay. You're many things.

• 26:04Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Don't. I'm definitely not the sturdy pilot you want.

• 26:08Speaker 02

  So I'm definitely not a pilot. You know, you're a passenger on a flight and there's, let's say, a lot of turbulence and you're very scared. And maybe even you look around and everyone's pretty scared. I think there's three versions of a pilot that you might hear come over the loudspeaker. And I actually think they perfectly exemplify three different versions of parenting. So here's pilot one. Everyone stop screaming. You're making a big deal out of nothing and I can't focus and you ruin everything. And you're just gonna all have your frequent flyer miles taken away if you keep screaming. Something like that.

• 26:38Tim Ferriss?

  Not super reassuring.

• 26:40Speaker 02

  Not reassuring. And the invalidation there as a passenger for me almost makes me worried. Does the pilot not know it's turbulent? And oh my goodness, me screaming and being scared is enough to make the pilot kind of freak out at me. Like that actually doesn't feel good. It feels like I was contagious to the pilot and they couldn't handle the situation. Okay, that's pilot one. That's like when we say to our kids, if you don't listen to me the next time, you're losing dessert. You're so rude. You can't hit your sister and you ruin every family vacation. Whatever we kind of just scream at our kids and we threaten things that, by the way, we never follow up on. And we just dole out punishment because we don't really know what to do. That's pilot one.

• 27:23Speaker 02

  Pilot two is almost the opposite extreme. Oh, like everyone's scared and it is, you're right, it is really turbulent and I don't know, I'm just gonna open up the cockpit door and if any of you know how to pilot the plane, just come on in and take over. And at this point, you're no longer scared of turbulence and you're just terrified that this person is your pilot, right? Because there's this merger. My overwhelm became your overwhelm and you just melted in front of me. That is so scary. The pilot we want to hear is the sturdy leader and they'd probably say something like this. I hear you screaming. That makes sense. It's very turbulent. And I've done this a million

• 28:02Speaker 02

  times. I know what I'm doing. What scares you does not scare me. And so I'm gonna get off the loudspeaker and go back to piloting the plane and I'll see you on the ground in Los Angeles. And what's crazy is I think you think about a passenger in that situation and I'm gonna guess even if the turbulence was the same, they feel calmer because what a sturdy leader really does is they say to you, I see what's happening for you. I see your feelings as real and your feelings don't overwhelm me. There's a boundary. I can see yours as real and connect to them while I can maintain a separate connection for myself. And there's kind of this cockpit

• 28:43Speaker 02

  between us. That's like saying to your kid, oh, you know, they're having a meltdown because you say no to ice cream for breakfast, right? And you say, oh, you really wanted ice cream for breakfast. I get it. It's so yummy. And that's not an option, sweetie. You can have a waffle, you can have cereal. Let me know when you want to make a decision. And when I model that, the parent will say, it's not working. It's not working. I'm like, what do you mean it's not working? Well, my kid still screams. I'm just thinking about my pilot saying, my announcement didn't work. My passengers are still scared of the turbulence. Like, can you imagine? Who cares? Like, in a way that they're still scared. Their reaction is not a barometer for whether you are doing a good job and defining it that way can get into

• 29:27Speaker 02

  real role confusion can get us into a lot of trouble.

• 29:30Tim Ferriss?

  What do you mean by role confusion?

• 29:32Speaker 02

  Well, I think every parent wants to do a good job. But over and over, when I talk to parents and their kids are tantruming all the time, they're rude, whatever it is, I'll say to them, what is your job in this situation? And all of them say, I have no idea. But again, I go to the workplace and I imagine someone at Good Inside, like as a company, showing up and me as CEO saying, I do a good job today. And them saying, but I don't have a job description. And I'd be like, do a good job? And they say, Becky, I cannot do a good job if I don't know what my job is. And I need to know what that person's job is. So I know what they're doing versus what I'm doing. That's totally fair. So I think as a parent, if you don't know what your job is, you can't do a good job. And what role confusion, what I mean by that is number one, you don't have clarity on your job.

• 30:15Speaker 02

  Because I think any parent listening to this, if you think about any tricky situation, my kid's rude, my kid's not sleeping, my kid's lying. What is my job in this situation? If you don't know that with clarity, that's at least your starting point. And often, as parents, we ask our kid to do our job for us.

• 30:34Tim Ferriss?

  What would you offer as a sample job description?

• 30:39Speaker 02

  Almost always, our jobs are those two things. Setting boundaries. Boundaries are limits we set, they're decisions we make. And sometimes, especially when our kids are younger, they're truly, they're physical. They're stopping my kid from running into the street or picking my kid up and leaving the park because they're having a meltdown, even though my kid doesn't want to be doing that. Those are boundaries. The other side is always seeing the good kid under the bad behavior and connecting to my kid in that way. Here's a good example. I hear all the time, my kid doesn't listen to anything. My kid doesn't listen to anything I say. For example, my kid is jumping on the couch right near a class table. Get off the couch. Stop jumping on the couch. And they don't listen. I say, stop jumping on the couch.

• 31:22Speaker 02

  And then I say, if you don't get off the couch by the time I count to three, I'm going to take away your dessert. And then I don't really take away the dessert because I don't want a meltdown later that night. Like, this is so common.

• 31:30Tim Ferriss?

  Sounds like, sounds like a mess.

• 31:32Speaker 02

  Right, it's a mess. So number one, I would say, what is your job? Again, I think they would say, I'm doing my job. I'm trying to get my kid off the couch. But you're asking your kid to do your job for you. You're watching your kid not able to make a good decision. This is your kid who you like. And instead of helping them be safe, you're asking them to do something they're showing you they can't do.

• 31:54Tim Ferriss?

  So what would you potentially do?

• 31:56Speaker 02

  Great. So let's start, I can't even answer that without saying what's a boundary. Because that parent, I would say, is not setting boundaries. And this is true separate from kids.

• 32:04Tim Ferriss?

  Is it fair to think about boundaries as rules you follow consistently? Or is, I guess there's probably more nuance to that.

• 32:09Speaker 02

  Um, I mean, I guess I think it's fair to say, but I would say it's not the most actionable, helpful definition.

• 32:15Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, alright, great.

• 32:16Speaker 02

  To me, my definition of boundaries, boundaries are things you tell people you will do, and they require the other person to do nothing. That's a really important dual kind of definition. It's something I tell, let's say it's my kid, although it could be your colleague or anyone, it's what I tell my kid I will do. That's an assertion of my power. It's what I will do. I'm not letting my day be ruined by my four-year-old not listening. I just like myself and my kid too much to do that. So boundary is something I tell my kid I will do. And it's success requires my kid to do nothing. Get off the couch, get off the couch. I'm not telling my kid what I will do. And it requires them to do something to be successful. It's a complete giving away of your power.

• 33:00Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 33:01Speaker 02

  Versus, and this surprises people, because too often, I think, Good Inside, we get lumped in with like soft, permissive parenting. This is 0% permissive. Setting a boundary and validating my kid's feelings, being sturdy, would sound like this. Once I tell my kid, hey, get off the couch, they don't, I'd say, look, I'm gonna walk over to you. And if by the time I get there, you're not off the couch, I will put my arms around you, I'll pick you up, I'll put you on the floor, because my number one job is to keep you safe, and it's just not safe to, you know, jump near that glass table. Okay. Now, in my own house, when my kids were younger, I'd go over to my kid, and people have this illusion, so you do this, and then your kid just gets off the couch. No, no, they don't. You do this, you get over there, if you have a normal child, they're gonna look you in

• 33:46Speaker 02

  the eye and keep jumping up and down, not because they don't respect you, just because they haven't learned how to control their impulses yet. So then, I would do my job. I would put my arm, okay, I'm gonna pick you up now, I'm gonna put them on the ground. They will not look at you and say, "Thank you for your sturdy leadership. You're so amazing. I really needed that. Thank you for saying..." No, they will scream. But actually, when you understand this kind of parent's job visual, you set a boundary. Every time you set a boundary, your kid's gonna get upset, until they get a little more used to it. But that's because when you set a boundary, you're basically just telling your kid, "You can't do something you want to do." Humans feel upset when they're stopped from doing things they want to do, all the

• 34:27Speaker 02

  time. They get upset, and it actually allows you to do the second part of your job. So I pick my kid up, they scream, "No, put me down. I hate you," whatever they say in the state. And then I can say, "Oh, you really want to jump on the couch. You really don't want to jump on the floor. It's so boring." Again, when I say that, that doesn't mean for one instant that I let my kid back on the couch, what they will try to do, and my hands will be ready to block them. Nope, I'm not gonna let you do that. This is where I think it really is this revolutionary idea in any relationship. I can be equally strong and equally connected to someone else. And that's true sturdiness and really doing our job.

• 35:07Tim Ferriss?

  To ask you about perhaps another facet of doing your job, but you can't trust everything you read on the internet, so I will ask this question in the following way. This is from a participant in one of your workshops, and they described your approach as one of, quote, "Coaching a nervous system to cope with being a human in the world," end quote. Is that a fair description?

• 35:30Speaker 02

  What we do?

• 35:30Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Or would you say, "Mm, not quite. Close but a miss."

• 35:35Speaker 02

  What I love about that is it captures something that's so much more true than why most people initially come to us. They come to us because their kids are having tantrums, their kids aren't sleeping, their kids are being rude, their kids are being defiant. And what they end up getting is they themselves get rewiring to be sturdier in the world while they learn how to give that to their kids from the start. So I think that that's close.

• 36:05Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I mean, that's referring back to what I mentioned earlier in this conversation. It's really simpatico with so many other things that I've been exposed to, but you're, it seems like... With good insight, the child is, yes, you're interacting with the child. Yes, one of the objectives is to become a better parent and be more connected and be a sturdy leader. And your child is also a mirror and a medium through which you get to work on yourself. Because if you're dysregulated, guess what? How can you expect your kid to be regulated? And, I mean, some people are gonna hate this, because I recognize that human children

• 36:46Tim Ferriss?

  are not dogs, but, for instance, there's a great book. There's so many terrible books on dog training, but one, which has a terrible title unfortunately, called "Don't Shoot the Dog," is written by Karen Pryor. She took clicker training from marine mammals and brought it over to shaping behavior with dogs. So clicker training is when you click to reward a certain behavior or getting directionally moving towards the right behavior, and then you're able to sort of time mark that and offer a reward. But the reason I'm bringing this up is not that you should use clicker training with humans. I've tried that as a joke. It generally lands really poorly.

• 37:28Tim Ferriss?

  But rather, she reinforces over and over again why most dog problems are actually owner problems. And you need to be consistent. If you are trying to shape behavior, you also need to be very, very consistent with. And I know this might open up some debate, but rewards generally not punishments in her approach. It's almost all positive reinforcement. And when I see, for instance, I mean, she's not here today, but I have a very well-trained dog, and I have some tolerance for the monotony of dog training, and I find it very soothing, actually. But when I see dogs that are misbehaving because they were never trained early on, and then their owners are freaking out, maybe hitting them, being really abusive, I'm like,

• 38:13Tim Ferriss?

  that is an owner problem. That's not a dog problem. And I have to imagine there are probably similar examples in parenting, and there must be.

• 38:23Speaker 02

  My oldest son said something once that I don't think he meant to be as profound, but it's something that sticks with me a lot. And it goes kind of problem blame where we're in a situation in the car. And essentially, my husband thought my son had closed the door and he didn't. And kind of backed out the car and the car got caught in the garage, the door, anyway. And he kind of said something to my son and my son just said, it's not my fault. And my husband said, so it's my fault? And my son said, I think he was, I don't even know, eight at the time. He goes, you know, sometimes bad things happen and it's nobody's fault. And I think for parents, this is always true. Like when your kid is really struggling, is it a kid's fault? Is it a parent's fault? Like, we're obsessed with fault. Why is it anybody's kind of fault?

• 39:08Speaker 02

  I always say to parents, it's not your fault your kid's struggling in the way they are. Fault's just not a useful framework. You are the leader of your home. And if all the associates in some big company, you know, were struggling, I don't think you would start an intervention at the associate level. Leadership would say, okay, it's not our fault, but like, we're the leaders. So what are we going to do?

• 39:30Tim Ferriss?

  It's not your fault, but it's your responsibility.

• 39:32Speaker 02

  It's your responsibility, exactly. And the other thing is, I think when we become parents, it's not just like our kid's problems are our fault or our problems, but I see a much more hopeful framework where through your kids, if you want to take this on as a journey, you will learn everything you ever needed to know about yourself, your own childhood. By the way, you watch your partner's childhood play out. You're like, oh, that's how you were raised. I see it now. And there's so much learning, right? And that's hard. Learning is hard, growth is hard. And it is kind of this amazing opportunity. Rather than my kid's problem being my fault or my problem, it could be like, there is an opportunity for everyone here.

• 40:09Tim Ferriss?

  What is the MGI?

• 40:10Speaker 02

  Hmm, I love a good acronym. So. When I was in my clinical psychology PhD program, I'd always hear these amazing people speak and I'd go with my classmates and be like, "That was amazing." And I say, "Yes, it's amazing, but what are we gonna do about it?" And they'd be like, "What do you mean? Just think about it." I really don't love thoughts without actions. I just like to know, "Okay, well, what do I do? How do I action on this great idea?" And to me, this idea that your kid, all of us, we are good inside identity, separate from behavior. It's a very powerful idea, but I don't find it as actionable as I would like. So to me, the way to action on that idea is this idea of MGI. And to me, this is something in all of our relationships, even if it's just after the

• 40:54Speaker 02

  fact, at the end of the day, we can ask ourselves. And MGI just stands for most generous interpretation. What is the most generous interpretation I can come up with of my kid's behavior, of my colleague's behavior, my teammate's behavior? Because I think what happens naturally is we default to the LGI, the least generous interpretation. So you see your kid, they lie to your face once. "No, I didn't take Kit Kats from, I didn't eat before dinner," and they have like chocolate all over. And it's just so easy. You just go to like, "My kid is a sociopath. My kid doesn't respect me." You're like, "Well, my kid ate a Kit Kat." And like, all of a sudden, this is a matter of like respecting me, right? Or, you know, "My kid is hitting. They're in a hitting stage."

• 41:36Speaker 02

  And again, we just go to, "My kid is never gonna have any friends. My kid is clingy. They're always gonna be the loser at parties and they're never gonna be able to converse with anyone." And then what happens and why the LGI is so almost dangerous is it makes us do this fast-forward error. We take a situation today, we fast-forward to what that means about our kid, I don't know, 20 years from now, and then we respond in the moment based on all of that fear, rather than what's just going on in the moment. And MGI really shakes us out of that. What is the most generous interpretation of why my kid would lie to my face? Whenever I ask parents that, it's amazing their countenance goes from like so angry at

• 42:17Speaker 02

  their four-year-old to like, oh, they're probably scared of my reaction. Okay. And then eventually it's like, what do I do? But the mindset we're in, in life, determines the interventions we use. And I can promise you, as long as you're in an LGI mindset with your kid, with your partner, with your colleague, zero productive things can happen. And then we say, what do I do? What do I do? The answer is to stop doing from that mindset and ask yourself a different question to get in a more productive mindset and then intervene from there.

• 42:52Tim Ferriss?

  So we're meeting for the first time. We have a lot of mutual friends, it turns out, but I have this suspicion that we have a fair amount of shared DNA, just in terms of how we operate. And as you're mentioning, the thoughts as being interesting, but not that interesting if there's no action to apply these thoughts, I thought that might be a useful place for a segue. So I read that you're a planner and that your husband gave you some advice around planning. Is this enough of a cue to prompt?

• 43:25Speaker 02

  I don't know. It's not.

• 43:26Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, you don't?

• 43:27Speaker 02

  I don't know. I need more.

• 43:28Tim Ferriss?

  All right. So this is from Romper, romper.com.

• 43:31Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 43:32Tim Ferriss?

  And so this is the journalist speaking.

• 43:35Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 43:36Tim Ferriss?

  I tend to catastrophize, jump to the worst-case scenario when we're struggling with a difficult phase or unpleasant pattern, but I tell myself to have faith to believe that we will work ourselves to a better place. And then, this is, I believe quoting you, "I'm guessing you're a planner." She responds, "I'm a planner, too. My husband said to me over the pandemic, 'I never thought of planners as pessimists, but the opposite of planning is not catastrophe, it's being able to say to yourself, 'I'll figure it out no matter what happens.'" The opposite of catastrophizing isn't predicting the good, it's saying to yourself, "I'll find my feet. I'll be able to cope with what comes my way." So this is a roundabout way of asking, what historically or currently have been your biggest challenges in parenting?

• 44:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:18Tim Ferriss?

  That could be with your kids, it could be with your husband, could be other, but what comes to mind?

• 44:25Speaker 02

  It's a great segue, and that is true, where my husband said to me when I, you know, during the pandemic, I kind of started this. Whole part of my career and I kind of burst into these like creative thoughts where I became much less organized and I had all this creativity and at the same time, the pandemic was very hard to me and this relates to one of the things that's hard for me in parenting and one of the things I talk about a lot. So people probably think I'm good at it, but I talk about it all the time. So I'm bad at it. That's why anybody talks about things all the time. Where he's like, wow, I think I made, I didn't marry like a very logical optimist. I think I married like a creative pessimist.

• 44:59Tim Ferriss?

  Creative pessimist.

• 45:02Speaker 02

  You know, I think I'm short term pessimistic. Yes, long term optimistic. And what I mean by that is I love a plan. I love an action. People outside of me will be like Becky is one of the most productive people I know. And I think that's probably true on the surface. But the driver of that is I'm incredibly anxious when I want to do something and haven't yet done it. That the way I relieve my own anxiety is just to do it. So it looks productive, but it's, it's probably just an anxiety coping skill. And what that means is when I want to do something or there's a struggle and I can't get action on it, I have a really hard time.

• 45:43Tim Ferriss?

  What would be an example of that?

• 45:45Speaker 02

  I mean, all during COVID in terms of, I think one of the reasons I probably, in some ways it would say, oh, you were like there for me in COVID and I produced so much content is I just like needed something to do because the pause of that slowness that like, there's not a lot to do to fix this. You just kind of have to be in it. It's really, really hard for me. Another example of that is, you know, I think about my kids and, you know, they're now seven, 10 and 13. So, you know, each of them, they go through these stages and, you know, maybe some social shifts or harder stages. And I think I talk so much about sitting with feelings and not fixing them because my first instinct for sure is to just go in and make it better, make them happy. And that is something, again, the

• 46:30Speaker 02

  parallel process of like learning to just sit with my own feelings. All of us who can be prone to action, there's like morality to it, like a better, you know, thing. And it can be better in some circumstances, but sometimes the best thing to do is just sit with it. And that is something I think I have worked on in myself even, you know, through working on it with my kids.

• 46:52Tim Ferriss?

  In addition to your book, Good Inside, A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be, which has been recommended to me by multiple close friends, even though I don't have kids. In addition to that, what other books or modalities do you think could be helpful for someone in relationship and/or with kids? For instance, a few come to mind, right? There's a book called Conscious Loving. I think it's by Gay and Katie Hendricks. I always mix up the Hendricks because there are two pairs. There's Nonviolent Communication.

• 47:24Speaker 02

  Mm hmm. Great book.

• 47:26Tim Ferriss?

  There is, I think I mentioned, Extreme Ownership, which it does actually overlap in certain ways. You have, I believe, a quote from Dick Schwartz.

• 47:38Speaker 02

  I was gonna say.

• 47:39Tim Ferriss?

  Internal IFS, Internal Family Systems. For people interested, I did a live session with him on this podcast.

• 47:46Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 47:46Tim Ferriss?

  Which got very interesting very, very quickly. Fascinating practitioner, really useful system. Anything else come to mind? Any books, resources, anything at all that you would kind of add to that list?

• 47:58Speaker 02

  The three books, I guess, that are top of mind would be, yes, Dick Schwartz's No Bad Parts or just his Internal Family Systems book. I mean, he knows, I've been very influenced by him and when I work with adults in therapy. And to me, some of the best gifts and privileges kind of we can give our kids is helping them understand the parts of themselves and talk to their parts as kids. Like, when I hear my kids do that, I always think, this is gonna help you more when you go to college than anything you learn at school. It's crazy. So IFS. Eve Rodsky's book, Fair Play.

• 48:30Tim Ferriss?

  I don't know that.

• 48:31Speaker 02

  Is, I think, so powerful, especially for parents who feel like they're the default parent, meaning they're the parent who, maybe their partner takes the kid to soccer, but realizing they have to be signed up for soccer, thinking about what soccer, where to sign up, getting them the shin guards, getting them the new cleats that actually fit and are the ones they want. That idea of mental load, the mental load of parenting is so intense. But she really helps put a word, words and a system to that. But I think it makes a lot of parents say like, oh, my God, I'm not crazy. Like, this is a thing. This is a system.

• 49:06Tim Ferriss?

  Why is it called fair play?

• 49:08Speaker 02

  Because it's the idea that if you have a partnership, that you don't have to distribute tasks 50 50, but that the mental load has like a disproportionate impact on your stress and overwhelm. And there needs to be more fair play amongst teammates in that way.

• 49:23Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 49:23Speaker 02

  And then this might sound, you know, like an odd recommendation, but Cheryl Strayed's Tiny Beautiful Things. Cheryl is someone I also wonder like, do I share DNA with her where I'll read things she writes in there? And I think, oh, my goodness, did I steal her thought? I swear I say this in my book. And she has said to me, no, I've always, I worry I plagiarized you even though my book came out before your book. And it's very interesting. I'm just hearing my own three suggestions and none of them have to do with kids.

• 49:48Tim Ferriss?

  But that's super fascinating.

• 49:49Speaker 02

  Maybe that's my, you know, revealing something. To me, the things we need to learn for our kids when we're parenting. If I think about a strategy or what to do with my kid, it's like something I put on a shelf. That's important. When you open a closet door, you need the things on the shelf to take that are actually useful and feel right and move things forward. But what I hear from parents all the time is I'm learning, I'm learning, I'm memorizing, I'm missing. But in the moment, I just scream at my kid, you know? And then they say, what's wrong with me?

• 50:15Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 50:16Speaker 02

  Right? To me, you need the key to the door. That is the closet that has that shelf, right? Like, if you can't.

• 50:26Tim Ferriss?

  Explain that one more time.

• 50:27Speaker 02

  Like, if all of your parenting strategies are on a shelf in a closet and there's a door to the closet. And in the moment, you're like, I want to get that strategy.

• 50:34Tim Ferriss?

  You need to be able to access it.

• 50:35Speaker 02

  You have to be able to access it. And so for any parent listening, it's like, that is so me. I know the thing I want to say, but then I just scream my head off at my kid. I would actually say, stop learning parenting strategies. You have enough on that shelf for now. What I would focus on are my triggers. What is happening with my kid that I am triggered? And I'm at a 10 out of 10. And when you're at a 10 out of 10, nobody has a key to any lock.

• 51:00Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah. Strategy's not going to be forthcoming.

• 51:03Speaker 02

  No, the strategies you need have a lot more to do with you, not because it's your fault. And the beauty is when you work on those strategies where you're triggered with your kid, guess what? If you're triggered when your kid's whining, it's not the whining. It's probably the fact that whining generally represents helplessness. I would guess if that's a particularly triggering situation, helplessness was very shamed in your own family. It was probably a pull up your bootstraps kind of family. If you're crying, I'll give you something to cry about, family. So you had to shut down your helplessness because it was dangerous. You see it in your kid and you respond to them in the same way people responded to you. Okay, that's like a lot of therapy in 30 seconds. But let's say that's true. Or people are like, wow, that's weird. That's very true. You can memorize everything you want to say to your kid. But if you don't, and IFS is hugely helpful,

• 51:48Speaker 02

  you're hugely helpful in my reparenting approach and trigger approach. If you don't get to know your protector parts, and you don't do that type of work, then every time when that happens, that part is going to scream out. So the answer to showing up as a parent you want to be is this combination of yes, I have to put the things on the shelf, but I have to know how to open the door also.

• 52:10Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, makes a lot of sense. So what advice would you give me, since I'm currently wife slash partner hunting? I would like to have a family, but would like to hit some prereqs. I guess technically, biologically, not that hard to have kids, but I would like to have

• 52:28Speaker 02

  You could do it, Tim.

• 52:29Tim Ferriss?

  Build a family together adventure.

• 52:31Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 52:32Tim Ferriss?

  Like to have that version if possible. For people out there who are single but would love to have a family, what advice might you give them in terms of positive indicators for people who will be leaning towards some of the abilities and self-awareness and skills that make for a sturdy

• 52:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:54Tim Ferriss?

  leader parent?

• 52:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:56Tim Ferriss?

  If I was like, hey, here's my dossier of like 10 prospects. And you're like, well, let's like ask a few questions and

• 53:02Speaker 02

  There's this sturdy leadership on the, on the list.

• 53:07Speaker 02

  One second, I'm assessing you for sturdy leadership.

• 53:11Tim Ferriss?

  They're like, ooh, dirty talk.

• 53:12Speaker 02

  Seriously, seriously. Talk about that one in our next episode. So, a couple of things. To me, again, being a sturdy leader has nothing to do with being a parent. And while I think it's actually through parenting, and this is the beauty, that people have such in their face the work they need to do, that they can access that. You're right in pointing out how amazing you're doing some of this work before. So I think number one, again, curiosity over judgment to me is very, very key for any sturdy leader at any age. So when you're dating people, you know, when you're friends with people, and in general, they hear something that's happening for you, and they're more curious and they are judgmental. Oh, I did this thing. I had this awful interview. Oh, what happened? Tell me about that.

• 53:57Speaker 02

  Or you even hear that they approach their own life that way, where people who have really intense rigid judgments about anyone, they tend to be that way with others because they tend to be that way with themselves. And then that's going to be activated probably with kids. That's number one. To me, I think tolerance for inconvenience, it's like a really important part of sturdy leadership, especially with kids.

• 54:22Tim Ferriss?

  I might suss that out. I mean, you can go on like a traveling trip and see how they handle baggage being delayed or whatever. I mean, you can try to engineer it that way, but any other way.

• 54:31Speaker 02

  I think that probably comes up in our life all the time. Like, I don't know how much we're always optimizing for convenience versus like, yeah, let's take the subway. It'll take us a little longer, but like, it's easy enough. Or, oh, there's a wait at a restaurant. I really want to go there. Okay, can I tolerate that? Or, oh, I really want to go. I was just invited to this party. It's going to be so cool. I already committed to my friends and this kind of not quote cool, but random group dinner. And like, you know what? I'm going to miss that party. This is like my best friend's, you know, birthday party, whatever it is. Because I think that's one of the things with parenting that people don't talk about enough. It's massively inconvenient. That's really the word I think about all the time. I show up, I'm trying to grocery shop, my foregoes having a tantrum, and it's just like, that's inconvenient.

• 55:13Speaker 02

  That I've spent 10 minutes now dealing with that and I won't be able to finish my grocery shopping. I also think in a relationship. The ability to be curious about your experience and not see that as any reflection on their own experience, which is really the ability to hold multiplicity. Like, when you say to a partner, like, "I was really upset you didn't text me back." Probably, whoever the partner is, their first reaction might be like, "I wouldn't have been upset in that situation," or whatever. "Are you saying I'm a bad person?" Or we get very defensive because we find someone's experience of us to be counter of our experience of ourselves. And if we're very secure and sturdy, we'd be able to say to ourselves, "Okay, I can

• 55:55Speaker 02

  know what my intention was, and I'm not threatened by the fact that Tim was upset that I didn't text him back. I can be curious about it, be like, 'Oh, tell me more about that. Oh, I see that.'" And I don't see that as like a threat to myself. That, to me, is probably the ultimate indicator, because that happens all the time with our kids.

• 56:14Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah, I can only imagine. Sure, it happens all the time. I would love to ask you a few questions that one of my employees sent. She is a toddler. In every instance that I've seen, she tries very hard to be, however she defines it, a good parent. And I think maybe this conversation will lead her to think about the definition differently. But she sent a bunch of very good questions, and we probably won't have time for all of them. She really took my question and my producer's question seriously, I should say. So she has eight questions, but I want to hop to number eight. This is about grandparents. "Does Dr. Becky have any good tips on parenting our parents? Our quote-unquote 'boomer' parents often use guilt and shame as teaching methods,

• 56:59Tim Ferriss?

  which we don't love or approve of, but how do we effectively introduce more positive ways they can grandparent our children when they're together or babysitting for us?" This question could also apply to someone's partner, right? If someone reads your book, they think it's fantastic, they want to embrace it, but their partner maybe has a heavy-handed, reactive way of handling things, or...

• 57:21Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 57:21Tim Ferriss?

  Fill in the blank.

• 57:22Speaker 02

  They're skeptical.

• 57:23Tim Ferriss?

  Right. So maybe you could speak to the grandparents, and maybe that will also speak to the partner question, although there are different dynamics.

• 57:29Speaker 02

  They're probably, they're related and different. The grandparent one is a great one, because I think there's a lot to unpack there. So if she was here, I'd first probably ask her questions about what it's like for her to parent in a way that's different from, it seems like, what her parents think is right. I actually think that's at the core.

• 57:46Tim Ferriss?

  What it feels like for her.

• 57:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, what it's like for her. I mean, I think that what happens when you have kids and grandparents are involved is we don't even realize how much unconsciously we're just looking for them to tell us we're doing a good job. And most parents parent differently than their parents did. Most grandparents find that to be almost a criticism of how they parented.

• 58:06Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 58:06Speaker 02

  And so they're interested in criticizing their kids almost as a way of making themselves feel better. And then as the parent, we don't even realize we're back to being five years old and being like, doing a good job. And the whole thing becomes very, very toxic. To me, the most liberating thing when you're an adult, and it's just an idea, obviously it takes a little to get emotionally there, is I don't need my parents' approval. I remember when I realized that, that's actually amazing. That just changed my life in so many ways.

• 58:34Tim Ferriss?

  We won't lose track of the grandparents' question, but was there a catalyzing event, conversation, revelation?

• 58:43Speaker 02

  There actually was. I just remember going through my dating life and dating people that, you know, my parents like would have some things to say about. And I have not to have any like majorly toxic relationships, but they had opinions. And I just remember one day thinking, and the way it came up my head is, they're not dating this person. Like, there was an "I." I think there was a boundary. This like, I'm in the cockpit, they can be chirpy passengers. But that's actually what they are. And by the way, I love my parents. They're incredible. And I think realizing that, and this is the thing, when you're a parent, realizing that about your own parents only serves to make your relationship better. Because when you're unconsciously looking for their approval, you get frustrated, you

• 59:26Speaker 02

  tend to show up in really confusing ways to your kids. You start to do weird things with your kids in front of your parents, almost trying to bridge this gap between how I parent and how my parents want me. And my kids are like, who is my parent? They're doing all this weird stuff that they never do. And then we really lose ourselves. So what I would actually say here, which sounds odd, and it's probably not that dissimilar to what I'd start with, with a partner, although I think the dynamic is different with parents, is The first step is actually trying to figure out what do I believe in, in my parenting? The sturdier you are in your boundaries, the easier it is to deal with pushback. And in fact, the opposite is true with boundaries. The more I seek approval for my boundaries, the weaker my boundaries become.

• 1:00:12Speaker 02

  And so that's where I would actually start. So let's say, oh, I wish my parents understood my kids tantrums, the way I try to understand them. And instead, my parents tend to say, why aren't you sending Bobby to his room? Or, you know, you have a bad kid, or whatever they say.

• 1:00:25Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, or if they're babysitting, they just do that.

• 1:00:27Speaker 02

  That's right. But even those conversations are so much easier to have once you've really grounded yourself in what you believe. Because then the conversation becomes less emotional. And here's then how I would handle it after that. How I'm handling Bobby's meltdowns, I think it's different than what comes natural to you. And we have a couple of options. I'm happy to kind of go through it and why, you know? I'm also happy if you don't really care about the why. Just share how I would like you to respond. That's in line with the way we're doing things. Because given you spend a good amount of time with him, it's just confusing for him to hear things so differently. I know you probably don't approve, or at least it's going to feel weird because it's so new.

• 1:01:12Speaker 02

  And this stuff really matters to me. Right? And then I don't know how egregious it is. Again, is it just different? Is it terrifying? You know, we want to differentiate. But the conversation is kind of, me and my parent even are on the same team. And that conversation, and I have a lot more to say about being on the same team versus oppositional teams. That's a lot easier to have if I'm less caught up in probably what's happening unconsciously, which is trying to get them to kind of tell me that I'm doing a good job on my kid.

• 1:01:41Tim Ferriss?

  Let me bring up one other question of hers, and I may bring up more. But partially because it also bridges to a question that I had. So this is a question about parenting toddlers could apply to all sorts of ages. Is it okay to tell my toddler that I'm upset by her behavior? For example, if she's whining and complaining about getting buckled into the car, and I've tried to stay calm, but it goes on for so long that I get frustrated. Is it okay to say that I am frustrated by her behavior and I need a break? Or what is the best response to avoid guilt and shaming language? Because I was

• 1:02:20Tim Ferriss?

  Thinking, I was reflecting on the example you gave of the kid jumping on the couch. And I could very easily see myself like, okay, I've done the work, done the I F S, got the key to the closet. And I go through the routine, right? I set the boundary. If I walk over there and you're still on the couch, but I'm calm, I'm calm. Then I put them down, they scream their face off. They somehow juke me and get back on the couch. Maybe I do it a second time, but by this point, my blood pressure is a little higher. By like rep number three, like there's a point.

• 1:02:55Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:02:55Tim Ferriss?

  Where if it's like rep number 20, like there's a rep at which anyone will probably kind of break. So I guess my question is, but we can tackle. I want to answer her question because she was generous enough to send the questions. Is it okay to tell my kid that I'm upset? Or let me get her language. Broader.

• 1:03:12Speaker 02

  Frustrated, I think she said.

• 1:03:14Tim Ferriss?

  Right. Is it okay to say that I'm frustrated by her behavior and that I need a break, et cetera, et cetera? What is the best response to avoid guilt and shaming language? My broader question is, what do you do? Let's say in the jumping on the couch example, when you've done the right thing two or three times, and the kid is just hell-bent.

• 1:03:32Speaker 02

  Still being a.

• 1:03:33Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:34Speaker 02

  Difficult.

• 1:03:35Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:35Speaker 02

  So a couple of parts to that question. Number one, there's this thing about, I hear it. I've never said like, you can't tell your kids how you feel. There's all these like random things people ingest. And I don't even know who said that, but I think I'm not supposed to do it to not get, you know? Whenever you're.

• 1:03:49Tim Ferriss?

  The 10 commandments.

• 1:03:50Speaker 02

  But I would say whenever as a parent, you're repeating advice to yourself where you can't even name the person who said that. It's a pretty good, I'm not going to let that take up too much space in my head. You know, if I don't even know the name of the person who I trust enough to let that live.

• 1:04:03Tim Ferriss?

  Oscar Wilde.

• 1:04:03Speaker 02

  In my head.

• 1:04:04Tim Ferriss?

  Abraham Lincoln.

• 1:04:05Speaker 02

  There's a big difference between saying to your kid, hey, I'm really, I'm frustrated. I'm taking a breath, I'm taking a break, I'll be back. And saying, you make me yell at you. Stop doing that. That makes mommy so sad.

• 1:04:23Speaker 02

  The insinuation that we say out loud that your kid, your three-year-old is making you feel something is actually especially toxic for kids, who you said like you were, who are kind of rebellious, who already kind of struggle because they know, like, I'm a little more powerful in my family dynamic than I should be. People are a little scared of me. And now my parent is confirming that as a three-year-old, I have the power to make her feel a certain way. I think we say it because we're so desperate and we're like, nothing's worked. Will this work? But again, we all say all the things and then we repair and try to do a little better the next day, but I'm not such a fan. But what that has got kind of misconstrued as is never tell your kids how you feel. They're totally different.

• 1:05:07Speaker 02

  Saying to your kid, that's a great thing to say, hey, I'm getting heated. I need a break. And then I think it's helpful to say to a kid, I love you. I'll be back. Because kids are so attuned evolutionarily to attachment and therefore to proximity and kind of quote abandonment, that a kid can feel like, oh, did I like make my parent go away? So, hey, I'm feeling frustrated. I need a moment. It's actually such beautiful self-care. I'm gonna go to my room. I'm gonna take some breaths and I'll be back. You know, connect with you again in a few minutes or whatever it is. And that's especially powerful. What I want to tell parents listening, if you know you're someone, you get reactive, you kind of get to the point where you boil over, such a powerful thing to say to your kid, to preview to them before, hey, I'm gonna start doing something different going forward.

• 1:05:51Speaker 02

  Now, how sometimes you get upset, I get upset, and then kind of there's like this big screaming moment. I'm really invested as a parent in trying to have that happen less. Just keep a calmer home. And one of the things I'm gonna do is start to notice when I'm a little upset. Instead of waiting for it to get to a time when I'm very, and you could say to your kid, because that's what happens to feelings, right? If you don't take care of them when they're small, they get bigger and out of control. So I might end up saying to you at some point in the next day, ooh, now is one of those moments. I need a break. I'm gonna take that and I'll be back. And what I'd say to a parent, you can practice this with a kid. They love it. I would actually, okay, let's practice that. Ooh, get off the couch. Oh, you're not listening. Okay. Ooh.

• 1:06:35Speaker 02

  Okay, dad needs a break right now. I'm gonna go to my room. What do you do when I go to my room? Right. You go to the art room and you color. Like you can actually practice this, just the way we practice sports plays. Why do you run a play on a basketball team in practice? Because you know, you're not going to do it in the game. If you haven't run it over and over in practice. I actually think that's so powerful to think about our interactions with our kids in the same way. Then when the moment comes and you say, oh, now's one of those times. Your kid has had a rep already. And the whole moment will probably go a lot more smoothly.

• 1:07:09Tim Ferriss?

  Do you have any other recommendations? So I'm thinking of, for example. I like that and it makes a lot of sense. And I'm wondering. What you do in a circumstance where you can't take a time out for yourself, right? So let's just say she's trying to buckle the kid into the car. Tantrum, tantrum, wine, yell, yell, yell. She tries to do the right thing, tries to do the right thing and.

• 1:07:29Speaker 02

  And her kid's still doing the thing.

• 1:07:31Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, doing, doing like, you know, the crocodile roll in the baby seat or whatever.

• 1:07:36Speaker 02

  So I'll answer that question, but I really do think again, it's a framework. Shift question, because people say them all the time. It's like saying, when I drive my car to the cliff, what can I do so I don't fall off the cliff? Like if that was a friend, like, why are you driving to the cliff all the time? How about we recognize that you're on the road to the cliff? When we get to the point as a parent that we are so. Full of anger, resentment, burnout, that we're about to explode because our kid won't allow us to buckle them into the car seat. The real question, if you want to make a change is how do I start to recognize I'm on that road way before I get to the cliff? What can I do? Why am I getting there so often? How can I get into a different road? To me, this is the whole idea of rage.

• 1:08:21Speaker 02

  This is actually something we talk about at Good Inside all the time. Because when you don't take care of yourself as a parent, when you lose touch with your friends or dance class, or whatever the thing that made you feel like you before you had a kid, you better bet you're going to be screaming at your kids all the time. Because to some degree, you're just saying, I miss all the other parts of me that used to light me up. And so I think that's the better question. Now, still, when you get there, this is where I think it's so important to establish that you said, good inside it, sturdy, not soft. If your kid won't get into the car seat. Okay. Hey, we're gonna play a game. We've already practiced. We've done the things. There is definitely time and place. Sweetie, I'm gonna buckle you into the car seat. You're gonna scream and cry. You're not gonna like it. My number one job is to keep you safe, and so I'm doing that.

• 1:09:04Speaker 02

  Again, my kid's gonna be screaming. I buckle them and then close the door as I'm walking to the front. And I say to myself, oh, my goodness, that was really hard. I'm gonna go to bed early tonight. I'm gonna call a friend. But again, that's an example. It's actually a good example, because I actually heard this exact example from parent recently that used to drive me bananas. The reason that situation feels so exhausting is because on some level, you have job confusion. You think your job is to get your kid happily into their car seat. If you know your job is to keep your kid safe and to do what you can to try to make it smooth, but then if push comes to shove, you're just gonna prioritize safety, and you know that that's you doing your job, you actually don't feel as exhausted by it.

• 1:09:47Speaker 02

  Oddly enough, it is like a pilot getting through really intense turbulence. We're on the ground, the pilots, I kind of earned my wings today. Like, you know, you don't earn your wings by a smooth flight.

• 1:09:58Tim Ferriss?

  This is gonna be a hard left.

• 1:09:59Speaker 02

  Okay, do it.

• 1:10:00Tim Ferriss?

  I'm curious how or if any of it will tie in. So you mentioned being a postdoc at one point, I believe. And my understanding is you worked with a number of people who had eating disorders. What did you learn from that experience? And what were you studying? What were you working on?

• 1:10:19Speaker 02

  So, yeah, I got my PhD from Columbia. Then in my postdoc year, I worked with college students and grad students who were students at Columbia. And I did a specialty in the eating disorder kind of group there. So I saw a good number of eating disorder clients. I had an eating disorder in high school. And so I think through that, you know, and I'd been in recovery for a while. I also just started to put more pieces together. A couple of things I learned. Our body has this remarkable way to act out conflict if we don't kind of understand it and resolve it. And this is like a lot of what anorexia and bulimia are. Things that we don't understand, things that live kind of unformulated, we're conflicted about.

• 1:11:02Speaker 02

  And the body expresses it in these horrible somatic ways through an eating disorder, through so many other things, too. But as an example, and this is not true for everyone, but often, anorexia. Is this kind of conflict around your relationship with anger and taking up space in the world? It's kind of amazing. Like in anorexia, you both take up so much space because you get everyone's attention, right? And you take up no space. You shrink into a prepubescent version of yourself. That conflict is being represented in your body. I think bulimia, how much can I want? Is it okay to want things for myself? Can I want things? What is my relationship with desire? I actually think anorexia and bulimia

• 1:11:47Speaker 02

  have a lot to do with your relationship with wanting and desire, especially as a woman.

• 1:11:51Tim Ferriss?

  Is there anything that you took from that experience, questions, lenses, insight that also transferred over to some of the work that you do now? Or is it sort of looking, I guess, leading the witness of it, but is it like looking at the thing below the thing below the thing? Is that what it has in common with what you do now? Or are there other things?

• 1:12:17Speaker 02

  I think yes. That's the second part of that question. Like, what is really underneath people's behavior? That's always really driven me. It's why I became a psychologist. Why do good people do things that work against them? Why do good kids act out and lie and do these things? Why do good parents scream and get into these kind of quick fix cycles, even though they don't want to do that? I think I have, again, it's like the curiosity over judgment, always been really curious about that. And then I guess through especially my work with people who had intense eating disorders, and this was true when I was in private practice too, and worked with teens who were really struggling, I think I really

• 1:13:01Speaker 02

  understood and saw how desperate they were. Like a very sturdy leader who can make good decisions when they couldn't. And how they'll say all the things on the surface that make it seem like they can be in control, but really they're deeply struggling and they're deeply in pain. And I think that probably helped me see kids struggle and pain underneath their disruptive behaviors.

• 1:13:25Tim Ferriss?

  Reflecting back on my own childhood, I have a younger brother and brothers got up to brother stuff like, you know, so he would try to get me in trouble or I'd like kind of like wrestle him and beat him up. And it was, it wasn't malicious necessarily, but there were definitely times when, you know, he'd be screaming like, mom, Tim is hitting me. And then she'd run into the room and he'd be in the room by himself. But he wasn't, I wouldn't say he was struggling, like he was being mischievous. And like, maybe there's something underneath it, but it seems like kids have this burgeoning sense of agency and sometimes they're troublemakers or like do things that they know are wrong. And I'm

• 1:14:10Tim Ferriss?

  wondering how you handle some of those situations because you could try to develop a narrative around like the feeling or the pathology underneath it. But I guess maybe at face value, perhaps there are instances where kids are just doing stuff they know is wrong because it's fun or whatever. What do you do in, in those type of instances? Or how do you think about them?

• 1:14:30Speaker 02

  Let's be more specific. Like your brother's saying Tim hit me, but you didn't like he's lying? Is that the situation?

• 1:14:35Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, that's an example. I mean, it doesn't weigh heavy on my conscience, but it was annoying.

• 1:14:39Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:14:40Tim Ferriss?

  And like, when I look at his personality as an adult, it's like, yeah, he's playful and kind of a prankster and.

• 1:14:45Speaker 02

  Likes to stir the pot?

• 1:14:46Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, he likes to stir the pot. He's very, very smart, but I'm like, yeah, it makes sense.

• 1:14:50Speaker 02

  I would say I definitely don't think my approach is about pathologizing things or even always like seeing the feeling underneath. I actually think what's core is this idea. And I'm going to say it again, but I really think it's so different from how we usually intervene that it is worth repeating, that you have a good kid underneath whatever is happening there. So, okay, why is my good kid stirring the pot? Right? And I, my third kid is like this. I mean, the stuff and the fact that he's my third, me and my husband always say like, we delight in him because I think we're less worried. He will do stuff like. Hey, why do all the bathrooms smell like pee? And we just knew we should ask him. I just knew I should ask him. This one, he was like five.

• 1:15:31Speaker 02

  He literally goes, oh, well, I just thought it would be funny in every bathroom to first pee into the garbage can and then dump it into the toilet. That might be why. First of all, I just tried to stop myself from laughing. I'm like, that is actually so funny. Like, you also didn't tell anyone for days. You just were entertaining yourself. It's just funny. And I'd go, can you not do that anymore? He's like, yeah, no problem. And he never did it again.

• 1:15:56Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:57Speaker 02

  Okay. No, I think it's really easy to be like, what is, like, my kid's a psychopath. Like, what are you doing, right? But I think for me, and maybe it's because of my third, what did I do? I think actually, the most underutilized strategy in parenting, and this sounds like a joke, but I do want to name it to make it official, is doing nothing. Is doing nothing. Because you know what helped me do nothing? I have a good kid. Did something actually really smart and funny. I just funny, and he's entertaining himself. Like, I see him as a 20-year-old in college. I know exactly who he's gonna be. And I kind of know over time, can like rein it in. And it's not like he does that, like, in the middle of kindergarten classroom, you know?

• 1:16:38Tim Ferriss?

  At the airport, yeah.

• 1:16:39Speaker 02

  But he's maybe like your brother. He thinks funny things. He's industrious. He comes up with his own plans, you know? And I think the idea, wait, I have this good kid. Like, I don't have to take this all so seriously. Maybe I can trust myself to know when this veers into the domain of, like, really bad or too much. And maybe actually what I do is just say, hey, can you not do that again? And maybe I know my son is always gonna be a kid looking to kind of push the envelope. Knowing that about him means I'm less surprised. I can set up boundaries a little differently. And I can actually, and this is what I think is missing a lot, and it goes back to knowing your kid's a good kid. I can delight in him. Delighting in your kid is so important as a parent.

• 1:17:22Speaker 02

  Your kids feel that and it changes and it doesn't make behavior okay, all of it. But that element, and I think that's what's missing when we're in really bad cycles. We just, we love our kid, but we actually really stopped liking them. We don't even realize that and it's really painful for everyone.

• 1:17:37Tim Ferriss?

  I want to ask a question also from my employee I mentioned earlier, which I was very curious about myself, which is if your kid is hanging out with other kids who are bad influences, what does an intervention look like? And I think my parents actually did a very good job on this with me, but it was simpler in a sense because no smartphones. We were living in a rural area, so if I wanted to hang out in our little downtown and get into stupid trouble with a bunch of troublemakers, it's actually quite difficult. And I couldn't, it was too far away for me to bike.

• 1:18:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:18:16Tim Ferriss?

  And they held the keys to the car, et cetera, et cetera. But they were good with certain things that I hated, like curfews for coming back from like hanging out downtown after a movie or something, which was in retrospect, very, very smart because a lot of those people ended up in jail, ODing, et cetera, et cetera. They would not have been good influences.

• 1:18:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:18:35Tim Ferriss?

  What is the move? What does it look like?

• 1:18:37Speaker 02

  So I think there's a lot of degrees here. Only a parent listening is saying, hey, when I say bad influence, yeah, like there's stuff that feels legitimately dangerous. My kid's older, there's, I don't know, there's drugs.

• 1:18:46Tim Ferriss?

  I could give you a specific example.

• 1:18:48Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:18:48Tim Ferriss?

  For a younger kid.

• 1:18:49Speaker 02

  Great.

• 1:18:49Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, so I noticed when I was a kid, I'm very sensitive to animals. And there were a few boys who legitimately liked torturing animals. Like they liked inflicting damage on animals. And as far as I'm concerned, that's just not a good trait. But it's like, okay, so some kids.

• 1:19:14Tim Ferriss?

  You know, fucking with frogs or squirrels or whatever.

• 1:19:16Speaker 02

  Peeing trash can?

• 1:19:17Tim Ferriss?

  No, no, like, like mutilating animals is a step beyond peeing in the trash can.

• 1:19:22Speaker 02

  I would say so.

• 1:19:22Tim Ferriss?

  But that kid is also like, maybe fine in school, well behaved, et cetera, et cetera. And so you're like, hmm, that kid seems to have zero empathy. Like, that's not even, not even registering on any scale. I don't really want my kid to be around that.

• 1:19:40Speaker 02

  Totally. So let's, again, go to Grease. So torturing animals, that's like, kind of a known concerning trait in a child amongst psychologists. Right? It's part of like a triad, you would say, you know?

• 1:19:50Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, good grooming for serial killers.

• 1:19:52Speaker 02

  Definitely concerning.

• 1:19:53Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:53Speaker 02

  So that would probably be the same, almost level to me as a parent is, oh, my kid is hanging out with kids. So again, I think there's legitimate danger.

• 1:20:00Tim Ferriss?

  Sure. And that stuff, I don't think the parents even have visibility into, unfortunately.

• 1:20:04Speaker 02

  So there, I think, one of the things you say to your kid, and I've now said this a bunch of times in this conversation, my number one job is to keep my kids safe. That is such a powerful thing to remind yourself. Now, safe doesn't mean risk free. It doesn't mean I keep my kid in a bubble, but keep my kids safe. And so I'm not gonna let my kid hang out with kids who, again, it's not like they have bad manners. It's not like they do something that's like a little pushing the edge and funny like my son did. Like, this is kind of where we would say is over the line. So what would I say to my kid? Hey, wanna go hang out with person X and Y? Listen, sweetie, this is part of a bigger conversation. This is where this line helps so much. My number one job is to keep you safe. And sometimes that means not hanging out with certain kids who are doing really dangerous things.

• 1:20:50Speaker 02

  And I know as an adult that some of what those kids are doing are dangerous. And so I'm not gonna take you downtown to be with them. Now, again, my kid's probably gonna be angry. I don't have to say to them, because I know my role. But don't you understand? I don't, like, we really lower ourselves to our kids' level. Like, I'm asking my seven-year-old to approve of my decision? Can you imagine a CEO being like, we're going through layoffs if they have to? And they're going to everyone's desk. Is that okay? Okay, that's okay. It's okay. Or a pilot being like, we have to make an emergency landing. Everyone vote yes? I need everyone's yes vote. Come on, don't you understand? It's like, you just have to do the thing you need to do when you're in a position of authority.

• 1:21:31Tim Ferriss?

  To do your job.

• 1:21:32Speaker 02

  Now, exactly, do your job. There's something else, though, that happens a lot. So maybe it's not animal cruelty.

• 1:21:37Tim Ferriss?

  Right, I mean, another instance from when I was a kid. A lot of those kids ended up getting into a lot of trouble later. Whether it was going to jail, drugs, you name it. They stole stuff. And it was a small town. So like, people kind of knew, like, eh, these kids are bad seeds. I mean, I know that's a big label, but like, not a great influence to have around your kids.

• 1:22:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:22:02Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:03Speaker 02

  So, yes, again, I think that would fall under my role around the boundaries. That is, my job is to keep my kids safe. That doesn't mean no risk. It literally does mean safe. That might lead to hard decisions that my kid's not happy with, but are part of my kind of being the true authority in the adult my kid needs. I do think the emergency landing is the most helpful thing. If my pilot said, we're making emergency landing, and someone on the plane said, but wait, I have a really important podcast interview with Tim Ferriss. And they're like, you know what? Fine, forget it.

• 1:22:35Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:35Speaker 02

  You don't want that. Our kids are going to face tricky situations. And again, every parent knows the line between safety versus kind of playground. You can't play with us. You're a poopy head, right?

• 1:22:48Tim Ferriss?

  Right, right.

• 1:22:48Speaker 02

  And then I think it becomes a little more nuanced there.

• 1:22:51Tim Ferriss?

  One thing you said, that doing your job doesn't mean taking or exposing your kids to zero risk. And it actually made me think of a friend of mine, different former special forces guy, amazing guy. You'd never guess in a million years that, eh, maybe. No, he's not like obvious. He's not in your face. He's more like a gray man for people who get the lingo. But he has two daughters, and he's a very jovial, fun guy. He's very easygoing. He's as tough as you would expect, but on the surface, like, his interactions are very, he's actually very soft. But he ended up...

• 1:23:32Tim Ferriss?

  Basically, creating this game with his girls where each birthday, they have a birthday challenge and it's something that's hard for them. So for like, and it goes up as they get older. They get to choose like their 10 challenges. It's kind of like having your employees choose OKRs or whatever. So they got into rock climbing and then into like, I'm gonna do the cold plunge in the lake for this long. And then I'm gonna do kettlebell swings with this and this many of this and that and the other thing. So for those people who've ever seen the movie Hannah, he's basically training both of his girls to be Hannah, which is like training this guy's daughter, Eric Benas, the actor, to be Jason Bourne.

• 1:24:10Tim Ferriss?

  But he has inoculated them against a lot of types of fear by expanding their exposure to all of these different stressors and kind of making a game of it. And they do fail at points, but they get to contend with failure and then recover from it. I'm wondering if you proactively have done that with your own kids or how you facilitate exposing kids to this broad range of emotional experience so that when they get into the quote unquote real world, they're not fragile?

• 1:24:44Speaker 02

  Yes. Yes. Anti fragility is definitely a big, big goal. I guess I think that I don't often have to insert that as much as I have to be mindful of not removing it. There's a lot of opportunities for kids to be frustrated, to take on challenges. I mean, we're really talking about feeling uncomfortable.

• 1:25:04Tim Ferriss?

  Right. So don't do their job for them.

• 1:25:07Speaker 02

  Not doing their job for them and not narrowing the range of their resilience, right? If my kid is only resilient when they get the job and have an easy project and go to a dinner where all their friends are and get driven there and there's never any traffic, they're gonna be in trouble, right? They're gonna be in a lot of trouble. But we can't expect them to expect anything different if that's kind of been what we create for them during their formative years. So here's a good example. I'll talk about my youngest.

• 1:25:33Tim Ferriss?

  This is the one who pays in the garbage cans?

• 1:25:35Speaker 02

  This is my, call him my resilient rebel.

• 1:25:38Tim Ferriss?

  I like this kid already.

• 1:25:39Speaker 02

  He has something. He really is. He's my kid who wanted to get money to get a certain baseball card that my oldest son, and he couldn't, was going to the store and he didn't have money and he had two somewhat loose teeth and he pulled them both out by the end of the day.

• 1:25:58Speaker 02

  Because he figured he could get money from the tooth fairy.

• 1:25:59Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:00Speaker 02

  And he did. And I was like, wow.

• 1:26:01Tim Ferriss?

  Smirk good, industrious.

• 1:26:03Speaker 02

  Very industrious. Hi, tolerance for pain. But I think he wanted to play sports and he's my third, so he's been playing for a while. He tried out. He made two teams for different sports where he knew nobody. He knew no kids. To me, this is such an amazing life experience. Joining a team where you know nobody. And I would say in both teams, he's not on the stronger end. That's a really powerful life experience in terms of, again, the capability you will build. We think our kids are gonna find the capability before, and then we get frustrated. Come on, you can do it. It's not a big deal. Everybody in life finds capability after surviving, not even after thriving, just after surviving something hard. The capability is on the other side. You can't expect someone to access it before. You just have to tolerate the before.

• 1:26:48Speaker 02

  Now, I think it could be easy to remove that. I'm gonna make sure I call a friend to join the team with you. Right? And in some ways, we take our own anxiety and we add it. You know what I mean? Versus, I really felt like my job, to me, here's such a powerful line. I remember before he went to his first basketball practice, and this team happened to be a team that they already knew each other for a year. So not only did he know no one, there was, you know, I'm really nervous. I said, that makes sense. I almost feel nervous if you weren't nervous. Makes sense you're nervous to do something new.

• 1:27:19Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:20Speaker 02

  Right? And then after, you know, we walked home and he said, you know, I think when they introduced everyone, I felt better, you know? I said, you'll probably be a little less nervous at next practice, but you probably also will be a little nervous. And I think this idea of like, when we build our kids' capability, your friend who has all those challenges, that sounds amazing. And there's all different ways to do things in different families. I guess for me, I see with my kids, there are so many opportunities in life.

• 1:27:44Tim Ferriss?

  I should say, it's not like the lynchpin of his parenting. He's actually just like, super active with his kids.

• 1:27:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:27:50Tim Ferriss?

  And like, role models it.

• 1:27:50Speaker 02

  To me, one of the most important things for building capability and anti-fragility is actually this idea of validation capability. This is hard, and I can do it. Often, when you do only one with a kid, It backfires. So we'll be like, this is really hard. It makes sense. You're nervous about practice. Ooh. And we just live in that world. And sometimes our kid feels like, you're validating my emotions, but I'm just kind of like building my anxiety. Or we leave that out and we do the opposite. It's no big deal. It's just a basketball team. You're gonna be fine. Kids have been doing basketball forever. Right? That's often not great. And we think that's like, building resilience. The lack of validation doesn't help your kid cope with the emotion. And so it's also not that helpful. Both is really powerful. Oh, makes sense that you're nervous and you're a kid who can do

• 1:28:34Speaker 02

  hard things. Oh, it makes sense. You're not sure how this is gonna go and you're feeling a little uneasy. And I just know five minutes in, it's gonna feel a little easier. That idea that I can see my kid where they are, and I can almost see a more capable version of them than they can access. By the way, I think great CEOs do this too.

• 1:28:51Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:51Speaker 02

  Right? This is a hard project, and I know you're the one to figure it out.

• 1:28:54Tim Ferriss?

  Or good partners.

• 1:28:55Speaker 02

  Or good partners.

• 1:28:56Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:57Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:28:57Tim Ferriss?

  I'll give a public thanks to my ex. She was very, very good at all this type of communication and perspective taking. So she was able to teach this old dog some new tricks, which have stuck. And it's been incredibly valuable. Have you had any personal sort of parenting slips that you learned a lot from? Because one of the questions I often ask, so I'm force fitting it a little bit here, but it might work, is like, do you have a favorite failure? Meaning like, something that didn't turn out the way you hoped, or it was a miss, whatever, but it ended up teaching you so much that in the long term, it was beneficial?

• 1:29:34Speaker 02

  I hear my, my daughter's voice in this moment, saying, I started good inside for you. And the reason she says that is because I had my first kid, and at this point, I also have my private practice, and my first kid definitely had his meltdowns. He had his difficult moments, but there was something relatively linear, relatively about his development. It kind of did the thing. Okay, oh, you're so upset. You're gonna figure it out. I'm here with you. No, you can't have that truck. I'm holding it. I'm keeping you safe. And he kind of responded in kind. He would kind of, okay. And then I'd have all these people in my practice saying, Dr. Becky, like, I'm doing the things you're saying, but I swear they're making everything worse. It's making everything worse. It's not working. And even though I in general like curiosity over judgment in the back of my head,

• 1:30:17Speaker 02

  I was thinking what anyone would think like you're just not doing it right. You know, you're not doing it right. That's all but moving on. And then it actually kind of in these sessions would make me have to innovate. I'm like, okay, well, that's not working. And I kind of do love problems and thinking through things like try this, try this, you know? And then I had my second kid and I feel like after a year and a half, I remember being like, I need to call all of those people that I was secretly judging. It's like, oh, my God, I know what you're talking about because I am watching myself do the thing. I was telling you to do when I was doing it with my son and I'm watching my kid scream. Or by the time she was old enough to talk, be like, stop talking. I hate you. And I was like, what are you talking about? I'm being an amazing parent right now. Why are you saying that?

• 1:31:01Speaker 02

  And I would say for a number of months, I really miss it was like a dark place. Like, what is going on? And what is my kid? And why can't I give to her the way I know I can show up for my other one? And, and then I feel like after that period, this is usually what happens. I feel overwhelmed. And then I have this thing I say to myself when I'm feeling really overwhelmed and like full of like self blame and pity where I say like, okay, Becky, wash yourself in it. Fully embrace it. You're horrible. Everything's horrible. Like go all the way to the extreme. Then I'm gonna go to sleep and I say, and tomorrow I'm going to turn it into fire. Cause there's a lot of energy and feeling awful and overwhelmed. And if you can like allow yourself to embrace it and not fight it, then I feel like there's

• 1:31:46Speaker 02

  a day where you can like use all of that for something productive. I feel like that's what I did. And I started to connect these crazy dots in my head. I was like, okay, so there are all these families out there who are telling me the same thing I'm seeing with my kid. Like these kids, when you try to talk to them about their feelings, even in the best way, they explode. Their meltdowns are like animalistic, hissing, growling, like really, I mean, really intense. They act like a caged animal. And then I thought about probably 30% of the adults I was seeing in private practice for really deep therapy and the struggles they had in adulthood, a lot of fear of abandonment, a lot of emotion dysregulation, a lot of really low self-worth. And it was crazy, Tim. I mean, I was like, oh, my God.

• 1:32:29Speaker 02

  They were all my daughter and they were all those kids like I saw this whole thing. And it led to this body of work where with the adults, I was doing this really deep therapy, kind of going back to some moments and really reworking them in this like experiential way. And they would tell me things, I'm not joking, that I would then do with my daughter.

• 1:32:53Tim Ferriss?

  Could you give an example?

• 1:32:54Speaker 02

  Okay, here's an example. So your kid has this meltdown and some parents listening will be like, yeah, my kid has meltdowns. Okay, I'm not talking about the run of the mill meltdown. I am talking about it truly.

• 1:33:05Tim Ferriss?

  The exorcist.

• 1:33:06Speaker 02

  The exorcist, it's animalistic because these kids, and I call them deeply feeling kids, they experience their feelings as threats. And so if your feeling is a threat in your own body, think about what you would do to get rid of it. You have to like expel it onto someone and they're so porous to the world that they get overwhelmed more easily. And they fear being overwhelmed and then they fear they're going to overwhelm you. And basically with these kids, their shame sits so close to their vulnerability. So whenever they feel vulnerable, shame makes it explosive. And then when you try to get close, like, hey, I'm here for you or hey, you're mad. It's too close, they actually do, it sounds so existential, but they fear that they are toxic and then they will kind of make you toxic.

• 1:33:51Speaker 02

  And so they say things like, get out, I hate you, leave me alone. And then as parents, we kind of take the bait, fine, I'm just trying to help. And then we leave these kids alone, they're completely, 10 out of 10 is regulated. And then they basically learn, see, I really am as bad and toxic as I worried I was. And we see this all the time in adulthood, act itself out. And so this is a good example of what came from this most amazing adult I worked with forever. We went back to this moment in our childhood work again and she'd be in her room because these kids would be in their room and they're out of control, screaming at a parent, get out. And kids are oriented by attachment, which is a system of proximity. So when they say get out, not calmly, we all say get out and someone's like, sure, I'll get out. But they are like not in a place to be making a decision.

• 1:34:34Speaker 02

  What they're really saying is I'm so terrified, I'm going to terrify you. And I'm so terrified, therefore I'm bad because if I terrify you so much that you can't even be near me, I'm a vulnerable kid that basically means like I'm not going to survive because I need your attachment to survive. And I remember going through like what she needed in that moment. And I remember like kind of going through this visual of this like wise adult being in her room with her, staying, even though she screamed, get out. Because I always say with deeply feeling kids, when they're in that 10 out of 10 state, their words are not their wishes, they're their fears. Honestly, all of us, most of us.

• 1:35:08Tim Ferriss?

  That's a really interesting reframe. Can you say that one more time?

• 1:35:11Speaker 02

  When we're completely out of control and overwhelmed and we scream things out in that state, our words are not our wishes, our words are our fears. And I think even the visual, if you have a kid like this, what they're screaming, they're actually screaming to their feelings, not to you. Get out, leave me alone. I have the chills. Like, they're not talking to a parent, they're talking to these like terrifying sensations in their body. So we went through this, this visual, and I'm in the room, kind of like visually with her.

• 1:35:39Tim Ferriss?

  And you're doing this with your client?

• 1:35:41Speaker 02

  This is an adult. Exactly. This is what helped me so much with deeply feeling kids. One of the things, I'm just giving you one example. And I was like, okay, so, I don't remember if it was her mom, or just some sturdy adult, wasn't seeming scared of her. And he said, so she's standing at the door with you. And I remember this woman saying, she's not standing, she has to be sitting. And I kind of explored that in the imagery, and she was, if she's standing, I just believe she's about to leave. Like, I don't believe she's committed to this. So she was sitting at the door. And I'm like, okay, so she's sitting at the door. This goes into so much more about deeply feeling kids, that in these moments, they need containment, they literally need to be with you in a smaller space, because they're so fearful of how their feelings come out of them, and like take up all the

• 1:36:22Speaker 02

  space that they need to essentially have us hold space with them. Like, your feelings only go this far, and I'm sitting with you at the door. Like, I would never let you kill both of us. So my sitting here with you is almost a way of saying, like, you are not so bad and awful and toxic after all. And if I cannot be scared of this, one day you will not. And every fucking time, when you do this, and it's more details than just this, your kid will end by crawling over to you like a dog, and coming into your lap for a hug. Because that's like exactly what they need. But that idea that you can't even be standing, I kind of knew in these moments, she was screaming, get out! It's like you're not in a place to be making good decisions for yourself. It would be like if my kid was trying to cross New York City street,

• 1:37:05Speaker 02

  completely out of control, like, don't hold my hand. You're about to die in our coming traffic. Like, there's something deeper, I'm gonna hold you. And I knew I had to be in the room. But I remember as soon as my client told me this thing about sitting down. I remember with my own daughter and talking to clients. I had all these clients at the time who had these kids. Because like I was kind of getting these referrals from these kids labeled as oppositional defiant disorder. Difficult, dramatic, all of these diagnoses. I was like, wow, oppositional defiant disorder. You cannot like a child who you label as oppositional defiant. And we were all trying these things. And everyone at the same time was like the sitting down and kind of imagining yourself in this just really sturdy way. It shortened the meltdown by like 90%.

• 1:37:50Speaker 02

  And again, that came directly from my work with. I think so many of my best interventions come from actually the work I did with adults. Understanding what adults needed when they were kids and reverse engineering that to today's parents.

• 1:38:04Tim Ferriss?

  Fascinating example. And I can envision it and I can see it working. I suppose I've used different words for it. But a friend of mine recently recommended a book to me, which was something like a highly sensitive person or something like that. Because I am, what I say to people for myself, and I was like, this is a kid too, is like my senses are very, very sensitive. Very porous. And it can be incredibly overwhelming sometimes. And I've become better at

• 1:38:34Tim Ferriss?

  using that and managing it. But as a kid, I mean, forget about it. Different story.

• 1:38:39Speaker 02

  You're probably, what I would say is a deeply feeling kid, mine too. And I say to her, you're a super sensor. Because with these kids, I live in New York City. And we'd be getting near the garage where we park our car. And she would not want to go into the garage. The smells of even near the garage. So easy as a parent to say something to a kid like, you're so crazy. What are you talking about? It doesn't smell any different outside here. And if you think about what you're really doing is you're saying to a kid, I know how you feel. Better than you know how you feel. Now, again, the boundaries matter. Might there be a time, especially when she was younger, where it's, yeah, I get it. You smell it. It's awful. You smell things I don't smell. And I'm picking you up. I have to carry you in the garage.

• 1:39:23Speaker 02

  That's independent from my action. But again, when we can't separate those two, we usually say super invalidating things to DFKs. We tell them they're dramatic. We tell them they're making a big deal out of nothing. The principle of all human behavior is we all need to be believed. And so if you don't get believed, you escalate the expression of your behavior in desperation to be believed. Then usually people lead with more invalidation, which means you escalate behavior further to try to get the original thing you were looking for. And with deeply feeling kids and parents, that's a cycle we really reverse.

• 1:39:55Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Trip down memory lane. That's wild.

• 1:39:59Speaker 02

  I'll send you the workshop.

• 1:40:01Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:01Speaker 02

  We have a lot of adults do it separate from their kids. It's all the same stuff.

• 1:40:05Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it is all the same stuff. If you could put, metaphorically speaking, a message on a billboard, it could be a quote, it could be an image, anything non-commercial, just something to get out to very large number of people. Could be a reminder, a request, anything. Mantra that you find useful, anything at all.

• 1:40:27Speaker 02

  Can I pick more than one?

• 1:40:29Tim Ferriss?

  Of course.

• 1:40:29Speaker 02

  Not on the same billboard. I don't know about the branding of all them at once, but I have too many things.

• 1:40:34Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah. You can definitely have a couple.

• 1:40:36Speaker 02

  Okay. So I'm going to start with one that's probably most linked to our conversation so far, just my ultimate mantra. This feels hard because it is hard, not because I'm doing something wrong. And again, to me, the idea that we struggle and it doesn't mean it's our fault is life-changing. I remember during COVID when my kids were doing work and like work from home, you know, when they were like in school at home, that was like the thing I put on their desks. And I think when you're talking about kids working on math or learning how to read, doing a puzzle, or doing something at work, or managing your first conflict in your romantic relationship.

• 1:41:09Tim Ferriss?

  You put it on their desk like a placard or like a little dry erase board or?

• 1:41:13Speaker 02

  I mean, I just like took a, I took like a post-it note and wrote it messily and just put it up there.

• 1:41:18Tim Ferriss?

  And say it one more time?

• 1:41:18Speaker 02

  This feels hard because it is hard, not because I'm doing something wrong. The difference between understanding something's hard because it is versus thinking it's hard because basically you failed has massive life implications on what we'd be willing to take on next as a challenge. Like, yeah, that's just a hard math problem. If it feels hard, that's because you're doing it right because it's supposed to be hard. Oh, I'm doing it right versus I'm not good at math. I mean, it's just remarkable, especially academically when kids are young, how that how powerful that is. If I could put something different on a billboard. You're sponsoring many branding campaigns.

• 1:41:49Tim Ferriss?

  You have infinite bill bar budget.

• 1:41:50Speaker 02

  Okay. It would be one of two things. And this is like different versions of a similar idea. Parenting doesn't come naturally. The only thing that comes naturally is how you were parented. Or we were never meant to parent on instinct alone. Whole idea of maternal instinct has had a profound impact on parents. Profound and awful. And it's not to say I don't think there's some instinct in us. Obviously, I get that. But it would be like a doctor saying like, I didn't go to medical school. Like, I have surgical instinct, surgical instinct. And you're like, yeah, I'm just not going to see you. Like, and if your friend said that.

• 1:42:24Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's gonna be a hard pass.

• 1:42:25Speaker 02

  Right, it's a hard pass. And it's just so interesting that I think we take learning seriously at every point in our lives. And then we get the job that's the hardest and most ongoing and most important job we'll ever have. And we're socialized to think we're supposed to be learning before, like a CPR class, a pregnancy class. And then, once your baby's like one, the narrative I hear from parents, we hear this, honestly, because at Good Inside, I think way more than trying to help you through a tantrum, we're trying to elevate parenting. Parenting deserves education because that's a good complement with instinct. Like, there are things to learn. It doesn't come naturally.

• 1:43:09Speaker 02

  And I really, we have moms especially all the time say, I feel like it's a sign I'm a failure. Which, to me, I just don't know anyone who goes to medical school and says like, oh, I have to go to medical school. School to become a doctor unlike my friend who I don't know.

• 1:43:24Tim Ferriss?

  Has a surgical instinct.

• 1:43:25Speaker 02

  Has a surgical instinct or I get my surgical tips on Instagram and I think that's enough. You would say to a doctor, yeah, that's cool. You want to stay up to date in some tips, but you probably need a foundation. And I think this goes back to fault, you know, where it goes back to how when we struggle, especially as women, we tend to think it's our fault instead of maybe something more useful, like a little bit of anger of like, wow, the system is pretty stacked against me. Nobody is setting me up to have clarity in my job, to know what to do and to actually feel resourced and supported. And then I think we'd find parenting hard, but we wouldn't find it as impossible as we find it today.

• 1:44:03Tim Ferriss?

  You said one of two things. Was there another variant?

• 1:44:06Speaker 02

  Oh, just some version of part of me, I like to be punchy. If I was going to put something on a billboard, I wanted to create, you know, a conversation. So maybe I'd say something like, there's no such thing as maternal instinct, not because I even fully believe that, but just to start a conversation on the limitations of that framework. And I think the massive amount of shame it's created, especially for women and shame leads to an animal defense freeze state, freeze, you don't act. So what's kind of amazing and fucked up is if you can convince women that they should be able to parent on maternal instinct alone. It's just a great way of kind of ensuring moms forever feel really bad about themselves and don't talk about it.

• 1:44:50Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that resonates. I mean, what do I know? I don't have kids, but just what I've seen with friends is there seems to be certainly, there are maternal instincts.

• 1:44:59Speaker 02

  For sure.

• 1:45:00Tim Ferriss?

  Right. Just like some people may be better suited to empathy and bedside manner as a surgeon, but you also want them to go to med school.

• 1:45:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, two, as I, two things are true.

• 1:45:11Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:45:11Speaker 02

  Two things are true.

• 1:45:12Tim Ferriss?

  And what I've seen amongst, because there are all these battles in the parenting discussions, right? The attachment parenting versus the sleep training versus, and man, oh, man, these get intense. And I'm watching some of these things because I'm curious. But if one of the stories that sometimes pops up is related to mothering in different, let's just say for simplicity, indigenous cultures and.

• 1:45:44Tim Ferriss?

  What gets lost there is, overemphasized is the instinct in what that means and what you can rely on. What gets a little lost is societally, as you said, how for a lot of women in industrialized Western cities, let's just say, or westernized cities, or certainly coastal US in a lot of places, in those societies, I've spent time in Ethiopia and all over South America and so on, it's like from a very young age, they are being taught how to take care of kids, in whatever way makes sense culturally in that context. But it's like from a very young age, like they're getting training, that's like being born into like Jiro dreams of sushi and it's like, all right, you're gonna start with washing

• 1:46:28Tim Ferriss?

  the pots. I mean, like from a very, very early age, they're being taught and getting a lot of practice, which is just simply not the case for a lot of women these days. So it would seem to make a lot of sense that they need to have the opportunity to be resourced, as you said.

• 1:46:48Speaker 02

  And I think the resources, again, that I always want for parents extend so beyond just your interactions with your kids. Like, learning to set real boundaries is life-giving, like in every area of your life. And I think that's why when people are kind of involved in the Good Inside system for a while, like when we interview users, it's interesting after a while to say, oh, I asked for a raise for the first time. My girlfriends from college always go away, and honestly, my partner always gives me a hard time every year, and so I don't forego. And for the first time, I realized, wait, Dr. Becky, like you said, those are my partner's feelings. I can care about them, but I don't have to take care of them, meaning my partner can be upset and I can go on my trip. And then we always say, like, what about those tantrums? Remember how you came? And they're like, oh, is that

• 1:47:32Speaker 02

  why I came in? Right? So I think what I want for parents and what I'd want the billboard to also say is-

• 1:47:37Tim Ferriss?

  Tantrums are the gateway drug.

• 1:47:38Speaker 02

  They are, kind of. You know, we come- Our kids' problems, they're really a signal that probably there are so many opportunities for us to learn things that are, yes, going to help them, but are going to end up helping us even more. I want for parents, really, to feel like they do more than just put out the latest fire in their home.

• 1:47:59Tim Ferriss?

  Mm hmm. So you are, and I love this about you, well-known, as I mentioned, for your specific scripts, your word-for-word scripts, even though the intention is to use them to highlight principles. I understand that. What are your most requested, the fan favorites most requested as far as scripts?

• 1:48:21Speaker 02

  What do I do when my kid's having a meltdown that I just totally don't understand? So like, what do I do when my kid's freaking out about something I don't understand? Anything about boundaries and saying no. How do I say no to someone without feeling guilty? How do I say no to my in-laws when they keep popping over? So anything about saying no and boundaries and repair.

• 1:48:40Tim Ferriss?

  Repair.

• 1:48:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, I feel really stuck and I just, I can't get myself to go to my kid's room and say the thing. I always feel like a script is like a door opening. Sometimes we need someone to open the door for us. And then when you get in the room, like, okay, I can do this. That's kind of what a script can be.

• 1:48:54Tim Ferriss?

  What specific boundary setting or saying no, like within that subcategory, what are the things that tend to come up the most?

• 1:49:03Speaker 02

  Honestly, almost always when I'm asked a question, my answer is almost always reframing the question. How do I say no without someone getting upset? I mean this with love. It's just a bad question.

• 1:49:14Tim Ferriss?

  It's a bad question.

• 1:49:14Speaker 02

  It's an impossible question. How do I say no and tolerate someone being upset? It's a great question. Love that question. So I'll shift to that. Usually when we feel stuck in life, it's because we're asking the wrong questions, not because we don't have the answers.

• 1:49:25Tim Ferriss?

  100%.

• 1:49:25Speaker 02

  But I think scripts that-

• 1:49:27Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, because you can also get a great answer to the wrong question and that can lead you astray.

• 1:49:31Speaker 02

  Right. It was like, questions are roads you walk down to make sure the road, it's like the destination you want to end in, not kind of a cliff or something unproductive. And I'll share some of them here, just because some of them aren't good to put out there. So how do I say no? I think saying no well, really comes from knowing your why and really being grounded more in your experience than the other person's. The reason it's hard for someone to say no is because they've actually already vacated their body. And if it's me, let's say, you know, here we are on Monday, but let's say you ask me, hey, can you do Monday at 3:30? Can't for whatever reason. Oh, my God. What's Tim going to think about me? And is Tim going to be really upset? What am I going to say when Tim says that that's the only time? You can't say no from that place because your no and setting a boundary comes from your

• 1:50:14Speaker 02

  place of authority. And if I vacated my body and I'm now spending all my time in Tim's head, you've lost yourself.

• 1:50:21Tim Ferriss?

  In your fantasy of.

• 1:50:22Speaker 02

  You've lost your in your fantasy. Exactly. Tim's probably like, why are you spending so much time in my head? I would have just figured it out with you. That's what we do. So I think step one is actually coming back to ourselves. Like, why am I saying no? Okay, I'm I'm saying no because I don't know, pick up my kids from school or whatever it is, right? It actually becomes a lot more self evident. I'm not able to make that time because whatever the reason is, right? And then I think one of the best thing with scripts, when you're saying no, naming your intention, naming it, not just thinking it is really helpful in communication. I'm really excited about recording. I am unable to do this. I would love to find another time, right? Making it really, really obvious what your intention is really does get in in helpful

• 1:51:03Speaker 02

  way. It prevents someone else from misinterpreting it from you thinking, oh, Becky just doesn't want to be in my podcast, right? And it also makes me feel sturdier because I'm kind of connecting to you along the way. One of the ways to think about boundaries and how to actually set them because there's a lot of people who are like, I know I want to set them, but it's the holding and I just feel so uncomfortable. And my mom's mad at me or my kids mad at me. Okay, so right now we're sitting on opposite sides of the table, but imagine we're on a tennis court. I'm on one side of the court behind the baseline and you're on the other side. But instead of a net, I don't know, there's like a glass wall. So like, I could see you. But whatever happens on your side would stay on your side. Okay. The reason boundaries become hard to hold because I'm on my side, setting a boundary. So maybe it's saying to my mom, oh, you want to come over to

• 1:51:48Speaker 02

  see the kids. It doesn't work for us. We have to find another day. Or maybe it's saying to my kids, oh, TV time is over. Or no, sweetie, we're here to buy a birthday present for your cousin, but I'm not going to buy anything else, even though you see that thing you want. That's my boundary. And on your side is your feelings. So if you're my mom, you're upset. And maybe your version of upset is guilting me. Who knows? Right? And maybe if you're my kid in the toy store, you're upset, probably your version is screaming meltdown, or who knows what it is, right? What we say to ourselves all the time is, I can't.

• 1:52:20Tim Ferriss?

  Set boundaries. I feel so guilty.

• 1:52:23Speaker 02

  Right?

• 1:52:23Tim Ferriss?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:52:23Speaker 02

  Okay. In my mind, guilt is a feeling you have when you're acting out of alignment with your values. That's why guilt is useful. If I yelled at a taxi on the way home tonight, I would feel guilty because that's not in my values to yell at anyone, definitely not someone trying to help me. That guilt would make me reflect, huh, I wonder why I yelled, what could I have done differently? Useful. But it's interesting when people say, I set a boundary with my mom because I just need the alone family time. But I feel guilty. I said no to my kid because I don't want to buy them everything at a toy store and I feel guilty. It's not guilt. It's actually life changing. It's not guilt. Because you're acting in alignment with your values. So then begs the question, what is it?

• 1:53:06Speaker 02

  It's our tendency to see other people's distress on their side of the tennis court. And this usually happens in childhood. We learn, we kind of say, I will take that for you. I will take your upset and bring it to my body and put it in my body to kind of metabolize it for you. And I will call it guilt, but it's not guilt. It is someone else's feelings that you're feeling for them. And not only is that not good for you, it's actually awful for the other person. Because if you metabolize, let's say, your kid's feelings for them, they never learn to deal with the stress. You can also never empathize because the only reason I can empathize is if I actually see your feelings as yours. So I actually have to, when I do this exercise, this workshop, where I'll say to someone,

• 1:53:52Speaker 02

  you have to give that feeling back to its rightful owner. So let's say I take my kid to a toy store and I say to my friend, I really do want to say no to them, but I have the money and I feel so guilty and even though I want to say no, okay, but now maybe it's not guilt. How do I deal with that? What happens is you're on one side of the tennis court and your kid's frustration, distress kind of starts to come over. And instead of going and hitting against the glass wall and going back to them, which by the way is what you want, you need people's feelings to stay on their side of the court. It kind of comes over to me. I'm like, I can't. What you have to do is actually must put your hands up and like push it back. And actually, the visual is powerful. That's my kid.

• 1:54:33Speaker 02

  Or my mom is upset. She can't come over. If I actually think about it, that makes sense. I'm allowed to say no, and they're allowed to be upset is like a great life mantra. They're equally true. No one's a bad person. My mom is not a bad person for feeling upset that she can't see her grandkid. I am not a bad person for saying the time doesn't work for me. Those two things just happen not to kind of be in line with each other. So I have to hold them at the same time. They're both true. Neither is wrong and neither is more true than the other. And if you see your mom's feelings as real, ironically, now you could actually empathize with her. Because as long as you're taking on the feelings, you can't empathize. You're responding to your mom to take care of your own feelings that weren't yours.

• 1:55:17Tim Ferriss?

  You're putting yourself in the washing machine as opposed to looking through the glass.

• 1:55:21Speaker 02

  A hundred percent.

• 1:55:22Tim Ferriss?

  At what's inside the washing machine.

• 1:55:23Speaker 02

  That's right. And so, holding boundaries, you get better when you picture that tennis court. And you start to ask yourself, am I really feeling guilt? It's probably not. Can I give that person's feelings back? And then empathy actually helps you hold a boundary. Oh, I get it, Mom. You wish you could come over. I know, I'd be upset if I were you too. Oh, does that mean I can come over? No, it doesn't. I'm just saying I understand. So that visual, I think, is powerful. Tennis court.

• 1:55:45Tim Ferriss?

  We have just a few minutes until our time.

• 1:55:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:55:49Tim Ferriss?

  And I thought I would just open the floor to ask you if there are any things we didn't touch upon that you'd like to mention, if there are any requests of my audience, my listeners. Any reminders, closing thoughts, anything at all that you'd like to add? And people can certainly find Good Inside at GoodInside.com. And we'll link to all your socials as well. Instagram, Dr. Becky at Good Inside, I believe. And we'll put all these in the show notes, of course. The book, Good Inside, A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be. We'll link to the TED Talk. We will link to all the goodies in the show notes. But is there anything else that you'd like to mention?

• 1:56:31Speaker 02

  No, I mean, I think that I find learning and reflection to be really such a brave endeavor. I really, really do, because if you're thinking about yourself, or you're thinking about why we do the things the way we do, or, oh, maybe I do want to intervene differently. Like, there's probably someone at this point saying, Maybe my kid is a deeply feeling kid. Like, should I go learn more about that? And I feel like that's very brave because to do that, you're going to be confronted by feelings of like, oh, shoot, I'm gonna do that. And we all have wondering questions of, did I mess my kid up? Which you didn't, but we wonder it and then we feel upset. And then to kind of push forward and say like, okay, I'm gonna tolerate those feelings in the pursuit of finding something

• 1:57:15Speaker 02

  that's going to end up feeling better to me. I just find, I find it very admirable and increasingly hard to do in today's world that we're all oriented around short-term convenience and gratification. And so for anyone listening at this point, I just want to say thank you. I want to say, you know, there's probably a lot of tolerance of uncomfortable emotions along the way. There's no one we care about in the world in the way that we care about our kids. We're so invested in it. So thinking about getting support, thinking about taking a workshop or getting a resource, on some level, it seems like, well, yeah, it's the person I care the most about, I'm gonna do that. But there is this like pull away of like, ooh, I don't know if I want to look at something. And so the people who are willing to do that, I just think that's like my type of people. And I love people who are, who can do hard things. So I want to say thank you. And then the thing I want to hold right next to that is everything I said today.

• 1:58:00Speaker 02

  And I should have said this in the beginning. Like, I myself definitely do not do 100% of the time as a parent. And it really matters to me that people know that. Number one, just because it's true and I don't want to misrepresent myself. But there's no perfect parent. Kids don't need a perfect parent. That would, again, be weird if we set our kid to think that their most important relationships down the road are going to be with people who are always perfectly attuned to their every feeling and need. That would be very counterproductive. And so, again, maybe we end with what we begin with is the most powerful relationship strategy I believe we have in any relationship is repair. It's our willingness to go back, to take responsibility, to say, hey, I wish I handled that differently. To then hopefully actually do a little bit of like

• 1:58:43Speaker 02

  the investigation or resourcing, we need to actually do it differently. But I want to leave parents or any listener with that. There's nothing more powerful than repair. There's nothing as important to get good at as repair, which also means you have to mess up. Because the only way you can repair is if you did mess up. And so I just want to leave people with that more kind of balanced human note. Because that's the thing I usually hold on to myself.

• 1:59:09Tim Ferriss?

  And for people who are curious, they want to explore the world of Good Inside and Dr. Becky Kennedy, where would you suggest they start in terms of dipping a toe in the water? Let's just for the purpose of applying some constraints, right? Somebody who doesn't, maybe they don't have the ability or the financial resources to go to like an extended workshop or something like that.

• 1:59:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:59:32Tim Ferriss?

  Where might they start?

• 1:59:33Speaker 02

  Let's say go to your local library and kind of request the book. If it's not, you know, in, definitely get on the request list for Good Inside. I would say come to goodinside.com and sign up for our emails. I'm bursting with new thoughts all the time and I always need containers for them. So one container is our email, our, you know, kind of weekly thoughts for me. On Thursdays, I send out Instagram, my own podcasts. I should say I'm on a podcast now, podcast listeners usually listen to other podcasts. So maybe that's best. It's just called Good Inside. We try to keep it simple and goodinside.com is kind of the home for everything we do. And then I would say if your kid is, I love to help people whose kids aren't just struggling. It's kind of like waiting to go to marriage counseling until you're like in a problem. It's never the best, but a lot of us wait.

• 2:00:16Speaker 02

  I really think of our resources inside our app as, you know, about your kids and your own emotional wellness. I think we make that very accessible, you know, compared to other emotional wellness resources. So that's there too.

• 2:00:28Tim Ferriss?

  Well, folks, there you have it. That is how you wade into the waters. And I'm so happy we could have this conversation. Thank you for taking the time.

• 2:00:36Speaker 02

  Thank you. This is awesome.

• 2:00:38Tim Ferriss?

  And took a lot of notes for myself also, best to be prepared. Might take a little while for me to get the kiddos online, but that is the plan. And I really appreciate what you are teaching. These toolkits are incredibly powerful. And as we have mentioned and alluded to multiple times in this conversation, you can apply these things everywhere. It is not limited to your interactions with your kids. And to everybody listening, thanks for sticking around. Thanks for tuning in. And as always, be just a bit kinder than is necessary.

• 2:01:19Tim Ferriss?

  Until next time, that includes other people, but that also includes yourself. And for links to everything we discussed, you can find them in the show notes, tim.blog/podcast. And I'll repeat myself, but thanks for tuning in. Until next time, take care. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half-page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've

• 2:02:02Tim Ferriss?

  found or discovered, or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog/friday. Type that into your browser, tim.blog/friday. Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.

• 2:02:45Tim Ferriss?

  Most people's finances live and say it does in places. This includes me. Accounts, cards, investments, and more that never talk to one another. It's hard to keep track of. This episode's sponsor and one of my team's absolute favorite tools, Monarch, is the all-in-one personal finance app that uses AI to give you a complete, organized view of your money. Accounts, investments, net worth, savings goal, all in one place, always up to date. A bunch of my friends also love this. Monarch has helped users save more than $200 per month on average. And you can ask it all sorts of things. You can ask Monarch's AI assistant anything about your money. "Am I on pace to hit my savings goal by December?" Or "How has my travel spend trended over the last six months?" You can ask it anything.

• 2:03:28Tim Ferriss?

  Monarch then analyzes months of data so you don't have to. And with AI insights, Monarch flags things you don't think to look for, so it can go beyond your question. And now you can get half off of your first year of Monarch with code TIM at monarch.com. That's just $50 for your first year at monarch.com with code TIM. One more time, monarch.com. That's M-O-N-A-R-C-H, monarch.com, code TIM.

• 2:03:55Tim Ferriss?

  Not to be a salty old dog, but in the early 2000s, back in the day when I was running my own e-commerce business, the tools were atrocious. They tried hard, but man, was it bad. You had to cobble all sorts of stuff together. I could only dream of a platform like Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world. And now 10% of all e-commerce in the US is on Shopify. Now, back to the early 2000s. Then, nobody even thought of AI. Who could have predicted, even in the last 24 months, the magic that is now possible with AI? Shopify has been ahead of the curve, and they are packed with helpful AI tools that will accelerate everything.

• 2:04:38Tim Ferriss?

  Write product descriptions, page headlines, even enhance your product photography. Best of all, Shopify expertly handles everything from managing inventory to international shipping, to processing returns, and beyond. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at Shopify.com/Tim. One more time, Shopify.com/Tim. In 2026, stop waiting and start selling with Shopify.