Being a parent can feel hard!
Being a parent is one of the biggest challenges you will face on your journey through life.
As a parenting coach, I work to guide my client from feeling like they’re just surviving to feeling more confident and thriving – even on the bad days!
My journey to becoming a parenting coach started when I became a parent and felt like I was completely lost. Read more about the subsequent burnout and recovery that I went on here.
Part of my healing process involved hiring a life coach and, after I had done a lot of work with mine, I decided to train to become a Life Coach myself.
I get asked all the time, “What is a Parenting Coach? Do you tell parents what to do?”
No. Not at all. It is not the role of a Parenting Coach to tell you what to do.
I know tools but you know your children.
Your family is unique.
I don’t give directions. My job is to encourage and support you in uncovering the answers yourself.
We all deal with ups and downs, with transitions both planned and unexpected. Marriage, divorce, health diagnosis, job change, a move across the ocean. All of these life events can impact your family.
My training as a parenting coach started when I got certified as a Life Coach. Life coaches work with people who are facing tough decisions, struggling with personal trauma, or navigating a difficult period in their life – all of which come up in parenting.
Instead of offering solutions like a business consultant might or talking about healing past experiences through cognitive behavioral therapy or another clinical approach like a counselor or therapist might, a Life Coach provides tools and non-judgemental support to guide a client towards finding his or her own solutions and inner strength.
Think of a sports coach. A sports coach demonstrates the techniques and provides the equipment for training but it is the athlete who must do the work themselves to improve on the field. It is this model on which Life Coaching is based.
And unlike traditional forms of psychotherapy or consulting, my role is to help you find your answers quickly. When you do the work yourself to identify solutions, you OWN THEM! Your brain incorporates these new thoughts organically and smoothly.
Has anyone given you advice and that inner voice in your head starts screaming, “Don’t tell me what to do!!!”? Even if, rationally, you know it is good advice? Mitch Matthews and David Nadler, my Life Coach trainers, call this the Intellectual Immune System (watch Mitch give a TedX talk about it here).
Science-based, client-tested
When a foreign cell, whether it is as tiny as a microbe or as large as a transplanted organ, is introduced into our system, our body’s defense is to label the cell and target it for destruction. Our immune system oversees this process. Even going so far as to have a memory so that, if attacked by the same invaders again, we can stop them quicker next time.
Our brains have a similar mechanism. The Intellectual Immune System is the defense system that our brains use in response to new stimuli, new ideas. Our brains are like giant super computers that, since childhood, we ask to process upto 50 thousand thoughts everyday!
To avoid overload, the brain finds the quickest way to process these thoughts. One way it does this is by labelling new as bad. Even if we consciously think the idea is beneficial, our brain’s instinct is to reject it.
Working together, I guide you through overcoming these defenses. I provide a safe space for you to discover and clarify your values and goals so that you can identify solutions that feel aligned for you and your family. But, it is you who, ultimately, creates the plan and does the work.
I’m not in your home with you so it won’t help you make sustainable changes if I do it for you. However, I’m always by your side, holding space for you, guiding you, and cheering you.
I am a life coach who specializes in working with parents. Since getting my certification, I’ve done additional training in positive discipline, yoga, mindfulness, emotional freedom technique (aka “tapping”) and other modalities. I also have a background in genetic counseling and have spent nearly two decades working in a clinical setting with families at-risk for genetic conditions.
These tools give me a full range of practices to share with you so we can discover, together, what works best for you.
There’s no cookie cutter approach to my parent coaching. There’s just a shared goal of work together to get you from feeling overwhelmed, overtired, and underappreciated to finding new ways to connect and create more ease and joy in your life.
