One of the biggest mindset blocks I hear from people who are thinking about joining us at the Jai Institute for Parenting and becoming a parenting coach, is the pervasive idea of, “Who am I to be a parenting coach?”
It comes in different forms like, “Who am I to be a parenting coach when I just yelled at my daughter yesterday?” or, “Who am I to tell other parents how to parent their kids?” or, “Who am I to pretend to know what's best for someone else's family?”
Ultimately, it all comes down to the same thing: Imposter Syndrome.
Imposter syndrome is a very common issue for countless people. In interviews, Meryl Streep has said she still thinks to herself, “How are people paying me to be in this movie? They're going to find out I’m a terrible actor.” It's really understandable that we all have these very common thought patterns that keep us from actually stepping into our purpose, into our mission, into our destiny. More importantly, they also keep us from having the ability to help people, to have an impact in our area of passion.
My name is Kiva Schuler, and I am the CEO here at The Jai Institute for Parenting.
Our mission is to change the world by changing the way that parenting is done. We do that by helping parents who want to shift out of the old way of parenting, which is the dominant ‘power over’ model.
That approach is all about, “Do as I say, not as I do” and using control and manipulation and tactics to get our children to behave a certain way. We help parents move into a more empowered relationship with their children, in relationship with them.
We are using conscious communication and emotional intelligence, we're teaching values, and our primary parenting tool is communication versus manipulation. We show parents exactly how to parent effectively to raise amazing kids without resorting to the old tactics of punishments and consequences and diminishing little souls. That's our mission at Jai and so many people are interested in this way of parenting and choose to join us by becoming a Certified Parenting Coach.
That’s where many people come up against that inevitable, “Who am I to do that?” So, I wanted to address that a little bit in this post. I've been a coach since 2009 and what I know is that my lack of perfection, my willingness to show my mess, to tell it like it is and to tell the truth about what's happening in my life, makes me a far more powerful leader than broadcasting some idea that I've got it all figured out and it's all perfect here. Perfection is a lie.
There is no perfection, there's only authenticity.
Read that again.
From my perspective, when you say yes to becoming a coach, you're actually showing a willingness to let go of the idea that we can only show the parts of ourselves to the world that are perfect and shiny, that you've gotten validation for in the past. You are saying, “Here's all of me and it's all worthy. And, by the way, you get to love all of you too!”
Being a parenting coach is not about being a perfect parent. In fact, that would make you really out of reach for people and unavailable to meet them where they are. So you can let go of any idea that you have to be some kind of super parent to do this work effectively. In fact, I would say quite the opposite – the more real you are, the better. That being said, I think it's really important to understand what coaching is and what coaching is not.
If you think about the idea of being a coach in any context, for whatever area of expertise, essentially your role is to allow your client to claim what they want for themselves, to set intentions. So, if you were a fitness coach, you would help your clients set fitness goals. As parenting coaches, we help our clients set parenting goals. Then, we provide them the training, the accountability, the tough love support, or the super loving support, (depending on what's happening with that particular person), for them to actually follow through on their intentions, celebrate their successes and to create the change that they want.
What's profound is that as parenting coaches we're not here to tell other people how to parent. In fact, many of our coaches tell stories about having clients who still use more punitive measures with their kids and how their role is to help them use those approaches less and less, not to judge, not to make wrong, not to assert their personal values on another family. The parents get to choose that for themselves. We are the conduit. Of course over time, our hope is that the peaceful parenting practices that we choose are far more successful, so people become more and more comfortable letting go of punishments, consequences and spanking, if that's still happening.
We just want to make the world better and better and better.
So back to our original question: who are you to be a parenting coach? You're somebody that cares deeply about kids. You're someone who has a dream. I say to people all the time, “If you keep your dreams big, your worries will stay small.”
It makes me sad that there are people in the world that have a dream to do something with their lives and don't have the opportunity to follow through on those dreams. So if you have a dream of
becoming a parenting coach, whether it's here at Jai or one of the other amazing training organizations out in the world, I would invite you to keep your dreams big, and to focus on what you can do. When those little snarky voices come up, just recognize them for what they are, which is just fear patterns, looking to keep you in your current status quo. You don't have to listen to them. You don't have to pay attention to them. Just because a thought goes through your mind doesn't mean it's right or true.
If you struggle with negative thought patterns getting in the way of you taking action to move forward in your dreams, a great book that I recommend that everyone read is The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer. It was the first book I read that helped me realize that just because I was thinking something didn't mean that I had to believe it. It changed my life.
If Meryl Streep can worry about being taken seriously, I think we can handle it too and keep putting ourselves out there and taking big leaps.
So let me know what you think about this. If you struggle with this, let me know in the comments, how can I help? How can I support?
Meet Your Author, Kiva Schuler
Kiva’s passion for parenting stemmed from her own childhood experiences of neglect and trauma. Like many of her generation, she had a front row seat to witnessing what she did not want for her own children. And in many ways, Jai is the fulfillment of a promise that she made to herself when she was 16 years old… that when she had children of her own, she would learn to parent them with compassion, consistency and communication.
Kiva is a serial entrepreneur, and has been the marketer behind many transformational brands. Passionate about bringing authenticity and integrity to marketing and sales, she’s a sought after mentor, speaker and coach.
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