How Changing Our Parenting Style Changed Our Lives. Tracy Pink Of And Exhale and Emily Hughes of Finding Flow Parenting

Q1 How has changing your parenting style changed you?

Emily

This is a big question because it really changed everything for me I feel like it supercharged my personal growth. Leaning in and getting curious as to why I was triggered and reactive, rather than being stuck in the emotion, helped me to understand myself so much better.  It's that thing of “the child that triggers you the most is the child that is helping you to grow” and I really feel that in my parenting. I think I am so much kinder and gentler with myself than I was and I think that this comes first from changing my belief about my children: “They are inherently good and trying their best with the skills they have right now” If I could afford such a generous mindset towards them it followed that I started to learn to afford a similarly generous mindset towards myself.

Tracy

When I started my journey to become a responsive parent rather than a reactive one, I had no idea how much it would change my entire life. I have learned so much about myself as a person. About my personal triggers, my generational patterns and how the brain and body interact with each other constantly. With all this new knowledge I have become very aware of my own body. How it sends me signals about threat all the time. How I am generally highly vigilant and notice other people’s moods and am very attuned to changes in voice and body. This I know comes from my child hood. Coming from a family with an alcoholic father I, very early on, learned that a change in tone could mean a big trouble. My awareness was the first step. I then started to choose to change my bodily reactions, to what I considered threats, and having researched thoroughly all the different ways you can release tension from the body I started to practice. You’ll now find me shaking and making strange noises when I feel over stimulated or under threat in an attempt to bring my nervous system back into a state of receptivity.  

Question 2: How have your children responded?

Emily:

One of the things I’m proudest of as a parent is that my children are really great at finding things to do to entertain themselves and can get immersed within an activity. It wasn’t always this way. It’s happened slowly and gradually as I started slowing down and prioritising their nervous systems above all else. This has meant consciously cultivating a slower paced lifestyle. 

My eldest son’s default nervous system response is fight and he was quick to hit and kick when he gets overwhelmed. I had an enormous amount of fear and shame over these behaviours and I felt lost as to what to do. The more I leaned into my own inner security, confidence and trust in myself the more I have been able to show up and support him and parent without fear of these behaviours. And the more I did this, the less the behaviours happened, my fear and reactivity towards these behaviours wasn’t helping either of us.

Tracy:

All my learning has had such a positive impact on my relationships with my girls. To start with we have a common language around our nervous system responses to stuff. We talk about how our bodies are feeling and how we can support each other in difficult times. What we each need when we are feeling threatened is different and only through this work have, we learned how to help each other with these feelings. Our relationships feel stronger than ever, they are in the transition phase going from child to adult and their brains are changing all the time. Having an awareness of this and an understanding of how this can affect their moods has meant I can be more responsive to them and not take their behaviours personally. I have become aware that they are having their own experiences which are shaping them as people and these are not all directly related to me or how I feel, or what I think I would feel if I was them.

Question 3: What Do you Love about Being a Parent Coach?

Emily

One of my favourite things about being a parenting coach is offering expansive reframes that evoke an “Aha! Oh I never thought about it that way” moment for my clients. We can get so stuck in parenting in the belief that “things will never change” and sometimes when we look at things differently through the belief “anything is possible” things can shift dramatically. I also love seeing how much progress my clients make from their initial session to the end of the 12 weeks. It's a privilege and an honour to witness these beautiful transformations.

Tracy

Being a parenting coach taps into the part of me that can see the alignment between people’s past experiences and the actions they take in the moment. When we have had an experience, our brains log that and when we come across a similar situation, we go into it thinking we know the outcome and then we react in a way that believes that to be the only outcome. This normally means we get the outcome we are expecting. So many of my clients say to me: I know what will happen when I do this. I love being able to support people in seeing that if they change their expectation of what will happen and try to come to a situation open to a new outcome, they will often find that the other person involved will react in a different way. Joining the dots in people’s experiences and helping them to see that they don’t have to keep creating the same cycle is really empowering both for them and for me. 

The noticing of the behaviours is something I have always been able to do but my training in parent coaching has shown me how I can use this skill to support others in finding a new path.

Tracy and Emily each offer 12 week parent coaching packages.

Emily Hughes www.findingflowparenting.coach www.instagram.com/findingflowparenting

Tracy Pink https://andexhale.co.uk/yoga-courses/the-ultimate-parenting-success-course/

https://www.facebook.com/AndExhalewithtracy https://www.instagram.com/andexhalewithtracy/

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