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What Should You Be Saying To Your Kids Everyday? Teen Whispering 101: A parent asked me “what’s the number one thing I should be telling my daughters every day besides the obvious stuff like ‘I love you’ etc”

After answering with a quick reply, I felt like I was doing her a disservice and needed to do a live video. The number one thing you can be saying, is nothing at all. It’s actually A C T I O N. When Jackie brings home a drawing from school, instead of saying some generic “oh wow that’s great honey!”, you get in the moment, and find yourself in the detail! “Jackie wow! Look you drew within the lines! That is so hard to do. That takes real talent. And look at how you blended the colors!” - I remember when I did my first water color drawing, my Pop said “wow! That’s really hard to do something so abstract”, her validation was so rewarding to me as a 7 year old. You can tell your kids “I love you” until they’re blue in the face, but if your actions are contrary, showing them that they’re not worth your time, they won’t believe a word out of your mouth. You know what it’s like- show of hands.... how many of you have had a guy say “I love you” and you were just like “oh pa-leeeeeeze! You are SO full of shit- you just want my goodie bag!” Well believe it or not, kids are REALLY smart. They pick up on all of the detail. And I do mean ALL of it. So when you’re out at the shops, and youre scrolling facebook, and not paying attention to what they’re doing, but your half ass talking to them while looking at your phone, only looking up when someone starts slapping the other, or causing a problem- you’re reinforcing negative behaviour. You need to get your head in the game, and show them that they’re your priority. Not to say you can’t have time to yourself- but you need to designate that time and be real clear on it- “Jackie- this is Mum’s time, and it’s important that I take care of myself or I can’t take care of you...” or when you’re in the middle of something and Jackie is trying to get your attention because she has something REALLY important to show you, you stop and let her know instead of not looking up and just shouting at her that you’re busy. You instead stop, look up at her, and say “Jackie darling, I’m in the middle of something important, but you are also really important and deserve my undivided attention. So let me finish what I was doing then I’ll give you my attention, fair deal?” Let me tell you why this is so important. Because what happens is, between ages 0-8, we aren’t fully conscious. We see everything in black or white. Right or wrong. There isn’t much space for grey. We create roughly 75% of our beliefs in this beginning part of our lives- and a majority of those beliefs are limiting! (Not true, unhelpful...) https://www.facebook.com/KonfidenceByKortney/videos/1816231275076593/ (Watch the live video on my Facebook page if you don’t like to read) Here’s an example. Let’s flashback in time. Say you are 5 years old, and your little Sister Sarah is 1. She’s sitting in her highchair, you’re sitting on the floor in front of the front door, and your mom is in the kitchen cutting up an Apple for Sarah. Frustrated because you can’t figure out how to tie your shoe, you yell out for your mom’s help. While all of this is going on, Sarah is thrashing around in her highchair and is no standing up, ready to topple over the front straight onto her head. Your mom immediately drops the knife and Apple, looks at you and say “hold on! I’ll be right there honey-“, then rushes over to grab your Sister. Here’s where it gets interesting. In your little 5 year old head, you create a belief that Sarah is better than you because she got your mom’s attention first. Or, better yet, that your mom loves Sarah more because she attended to her first, and you second. Not knowing that this actually isn’t the truth, and that your mom was simply doing her job as a parent and making sure Sarah didn’t crack her head open, you have now created this limiting belief, and stored it away in your subconscious programming. As an adult, every time you see Sarah on the holidays, for some reason when you get into a room with her, you just want to punch her in the ovary, and you can’t figure out why she just gets on your nerves so goddamn bad! Now take that example and multiply it by 10,000. 10,000 x 12 years of age... you can do the math. (I still count on my fingers... I suck at math. And that is NOT a belief- that’s a fact lol! That’s also a joke because beliefs control EVERYTHING in our life). That’s a lot of negative beliefs we create about ourselves and store into our subconscious programming where we don’t even know it exists. The subconscious mind is an incredibly powerful tool, and something we’ll get into at a later time.

But back to showing action, the other incredibly important thing you must be doing, is displaying a love relationship with yourself. You need to be acutely aware of how you’re acting in your relationship with self, in front of your kids. If you’re telling Sarah every day “I love you”, but then she sees you in front of the mirror with a disgusted look on your face saying things like “God! I look so old today!”, or “ughhhhh this shirt makes me look like a fat cow”... Guess what? You’re child is not going to believe a word out of herself, and she’s going to model behaviour that is unsavoury and incredibly unhelpful.

That term “role model” actually means something when you stop and break it down. We’re conditioned to just say words, and learn what it’s associated with, but not actually consider the meaning in its entirety. What is the “role” you are playing, and how is your child going to “model” it? They will copy your behaviour! So there’s really no point in telling Sarah you love her every day, if she’s learning to copy/model your behaviour in how you treat yourself. When you stop and think about it, what was your mother’s relationship like with herself? Can you see some of that behaviour in yourself? I’ll let you sit on that for a minute... No really! Take a few minutes and think about that. But the good news is, the buck stops here. The reality is, you get to make a conscious decision to become your own best parent right now- right this second! As well as forgive your parents for whatever you felt was lacking in your upbringing. Because lets face it- we did NOT come out of the womb with a how-to manual. Our parents were doing the best that they could with the tools they were given. And now I’m passing some more tools onto you, so you can in turn do the best that YOU can with the tools you’ve been given. As well as increase your toolbox consistently. I highly encourage any women reading this blog to come and join and us at GL18 in Las Vegas April 28/29th weekend for a life-changing weekend. One of the most valuable workshops I attended in my pursuit to become the world’s best teen whisperer when running Kamp Konfidence, was a program called Nurtured Heart Approach (NHA). NHA is a parenting framework that was created by a psychologist named Dr Howard Glassmen. Bless man was/is an avid horse whisperer, and realised that the same principles of energy that apply when working with horses, is the exact same as children. Specialising in, and designed for kids with adhd/asd, Glassmen created this framework which can be applied in not only parenting, but to all relationships. We’ll have a main stage speaker as well as a smaller breakout workshop in the line up at GL18. At GRRRL, we will continue to deliver life-changing and life-enhancing tools to help us all grow and co-create an INCREDIBLE WORLD! YOU GO GRRRL! And we’ll see you in Vegas!