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Coaching for Leaders
729: How to Raise Kids Without Raising Your Voice, with Jon Fogel
00:39:28
Jon Fogel: Punishment-Free Parenting Jon Fogel is a husband, a father of four, and a parenting educator. His goal is to teach how to parent more effectively, with less stress and more success by combining modern neuroscience,
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- [00:01]
Dave Stahoviak
Most of us aspire to lead well in every area of our lives, not just in the workplace. A key place for leadership with many of us is with our kids and the other young people in our lives. In this episode, how to raise kids without raising your voice. This is Coaching for Leaders, episode 729, produced by Innovate, learning, maximizing human potential. Greetings to you from Orange County, California. This is Coaching for Leaders, and I'm your host, Dave Stahoviak. Leaders aren't born, they're made. And this weekly show helps you discover leadership wisdom through insightful conversations. Often the conversations we have on this show are about leadership in organizations. Once in a while, though, it makes sense to take a little bit of a shift, and today, taking a little bit of a shift to leadership in another context. Leadership at home. You know, so many of us, either our parents have kids in our lives, have dear friends who have children, and we think a lot about leadership in the context, not just at work, but also in how do we do it in our families. And I know it's a place that I probably entertain more doubt in leadership than any other place. And yet the most important leadership role I have as a parent today, I'm so glad to welcome John Fogel, who's going to help us to nudge us in a direction that will help us to lead. Well, yes, at home, but also so many principles here that help us lead in just about every context. John is a husband, a father of four, and a parenting educator. His goal is to teach how to parent more effectively with less stress and more success by combining modern neuroscience, developmental psychology, counseling, and positive gentle parenting wisdom. He's the author of Punishment Free Parenting, Parenting the brain based way to raise kids without raising your voice. John, what a pleasure to have you here. Thanks for joining me.
- [02:02]
John Fogel
It's a pleasure to be here. Super excited to get into this conversation.
- [02:06]
Dave Stahoviak
Me too. And in learning about you and diving into your work, I came away with the sense like, this wasn't really your plan to be a parenting educator or to write a book like this, was it?
- [02:19]
John Fogel
No, no, absolutely not. You know, I've kind of gone through a bunch of different phases of my life, and I started actually in business and business management, and I kind of thought that that's where I was gonna land. And then I went into ministry, and then I started getting interested in psychology and all of these things coming together. You talked about leadership. Just kind of led me to this moment of realizing, hey, you know what? One of the things that I am not Doing the best that I could be doing, and specifically that I was never trained. This at all was parenting. And as I did the research and as I uncovered things and I became a licensed foster parent, and kind of along the journey, I realized, you know what? Very few people are trained in how to do this in any effective way. And many of us are just doing the things that are really hurting us much more than they're helping us. And so I started to tell my friends about it, and then that became a social media following, and somebody told me that they thought I should write a book. And so I did. And here we are now, many years later, as thousands of parents have kind of taken these principles and totally transformed their family.
- [03:34]
Dave Stahoviak
I love what you're teaching and the messages that you have given to us to help us to be good parents and be good leaders in the home. And whenever the topic of parenting comes up at some point, either in a book or talking with a friend, the word punishment does come up in conversation. I think it's one of the things that a lot of us struggle with. And you write in the book. For as long as any of us can remember, punishment has been a staple of parenting. Most people cannot begin to imagine a way of raising children effectively without correcting their problematic behavior with punishment. I know I couldn't. It took me years. But one day, I found the missing puzzle piece. If I was going to truly embrace this new way of parenting, I had to ditch punishment for good. That begs the question, what changed?
- [04:22]
John Fogel
You know, really, it all began with starting to question the base assumptions that all of us operate from, and. And that that's a good discipline. Whether you're in parenting or. Or in business, if you just kind of keep doing the things that everybody's always done, you're going to continue to get the results that everybody has always gotten or have always gotten. And so, for me, it was really going back to books like Tina Payne Bryson and Dan Siegel's the Whole Brain Child and asking the question, well, if punishment is not as effective as I think, what. If punishment is not as effective as I think that it is, because I certainly was raised with punishment. That was definitely the way that I was brought up. And as I started to pull the threads apart, and specifically as I started to learn about behavioral neuroscience and developmental psychology, what became very clear was that punishment was not working with a child. It was really working against the way children's brains work. And I remember the first person who ever said this to me and put it in such clear terms was when I was in foster care training and we were learning about these kids who were deeply traumatized and went through so many things that, that no child should ever have to go through. And as a result, they behaved in all of these really problematic ways. And the ways that they behave far transcended what most parents have to deal with on a day to day basis. We're talking about pretty destructive patterns of violence, destroying property, lashing out in really, really harmful ways to themselves and others. And the foster care trainer said, if you're going to parent effectively, you can't use punishment. And seem to sort of indicate in that conversation that punishment was not actually the way that anyone was learning any lessons, but was instead actually a byproduct of old parenting methods. And that most kids were learning and being disciplined effectively through the relationship with their caregiver, that the punishment was actually in some way counterproductive to that end. But many people could just, or many kids, I should say, could just overcome the deficits that punishment was offering to the relationship because they had a secure relationship with their parent that was grounded in a strong attachment. That punishment basically could be, even if it was not effective, it was not hurting anyone to such an extent that, that they weren't growing up to be well adjusted people. But with kids who didn't have that secure foundation, kids who didn't have that secure, loving relationship, punishment kind of showed its true colors. And it was so ineffective that punishing these kids for doing all of these problematic things just made them do those things more. And that really hit me like a ton of bricks. And I went on a tear just studying and studying, reading. I probably read 50 books on discipline, but also on neuroscience and like I said, behavioral neuroscience. And what became very evident was that punishment works against the way that naturally humans learn, that it, it cuts against the way that we want to develop strong moral character. And I, I was kind of left with this. Well, then what do you do instead? And what the book became, I had to, I had to come to terms with the reality that punishment was an ineffective tool that really spoke more to the dysregulation of the parent in those difficult parenting moments than any sort of efficacy with changing behavior or raising a child who is self disciplined.
- [08:04]
Dave Stahoviak
You mentioned Tina Payne Bryson a moment ago. She's been on the podcast before. She changed my view of so many things around discipline. And you quote her in the book and say from her, too often we forget that discipline really means to teach, not to punish. A disciple is a student, not a recipient of behavioral consequences. And I think about that and her work and you expanding on what her and Daniel have. Have done. And oftentimes when we think about punishment, the aim in our brains is to teach kids a lesson.
- [08:40]
John Fogel
Yep.
- [08:41]
Dave Stahoviak
Why is it that that doesn't work?
- [08:43]
John Fogel
Well, you know, the. Probably the simplest way that I can explain this is kind of one, one, what's going on in the brain when we punish a child, and two, just kind of an experiential, how would we feel? Right. And so I'll start with the experiential, which is whatever environment you're in, whether it's a marriage or in a work environment where you have a manager or. All of us have had at least one boss life who, who did not work with the way that we were trying to do things. I heard a quote the other day, most people don't quit their job. They quit their boss. And so when we just think of it from our own perspective, just as adults, and this is, I think, a really helpful tool for all of the parents out there. Consider that you were in a relationship with someone who treated you like most people treat their children. We realize very quickly why punishment doesn't work. If you went to work and you did something and you made a mistake or you made an error in some way and somebody just laid into you and said, you're bad for doing this, never do that again. You're so wrong for this. And you know what? I'm going to take away your lunch now. You don't get a lunch period anymore. You don't get to go out for lunch because you've made this mistake. And how terrible is it that you've made this mistake? I think all of us realize how degrading that would feel. And it would not encourage us to do better. It would encourage us to hide whenever we've made a mistake. It would encourage us to take those or quit our jobs, which, by the way, your kid can't quit you. Right. Like, they don't have a way of leaving that scenario. And so when we realize very quickly that none of us would ever tolerate being treated the way that many people, maybe even most people treat their kids. And so just from a gut instinct level, why is it that we feel that way? Why is it that we feel like, boy, punishment when I get punished for something, even things, silly things like getting a speeding ticket, we know now that giving people speeding tickets does not actually lead to them slowing down. Right. There's an immense amount of research about in this. We know that putting people in prison and the more severe their prison sentences. That does not actually reduce recidativeness, recidivity rates. And so because of this, we, we know punishment is an ineffective tool for adults. Why would we think that it's an effective tool for children? What's going on in kids brains when we punish them? I mean, this is probably the simplest way of, of understanding from a neuroscience perspective, is that when human beings are, when we're learning, when we're in our learning state, when we are in creative patterns, when we feel that sense of flow where we're really things are firing on all cylinders and we feel like, wow, I just, I can't wait to do the next task. That is when we are primarily in what's called our prefrontal cortex, which is the largest part of our brain. It's the part of our brain that makes us pretty uniquely human. Humans have more cortical neurons, meaning cortex, and their neocortex, than any other animal. It's what allows us to do things like have language, have this conversation right now. It's why we were able to build the cities that we were able to build and do all the amazing things that humans have been able to do is because of our ability to critically think that part of our brain, when that part of our brain is primarily driving, we can learn incredible things very, very quickly. Humans have a capacity. It's why when you fall in love with something, a new thing that you're interested in, like for me it was psychology. Several years I could just read and read and read and never get tired of reading about it. And I was retaining it at such a high level, I could have taken tests on it and would have aced those tests. On the other hand, when we are punishing someone, we're actually sending them into their fight or flight response. So we're sending them into survival mode, a different part of their brain, deeper, more animalistic, called the limbic system. And the limbic system is our emotion center and but it is also our fear center. And so we actually don't learn well at all when we're in our limbic system. Because the part of our brain that are parts of our brain that are making those connections to learn things actually shut down in those moments. And so if you're punishing a kid to teach them a lesson, what you're actually doing in that moment is turning off the part of their brain that learns. Because punishment by definition is causing someone some degree of discomfort or harm in order to get them to essentially obey or be compliant to what, whatever you want them to do. And so when we do that, when we say, you know, hey, if you don't do this, I'm going to do this to you, or if you don't stop this right now, here's what I'm going to do in response. We're actually terrifying our kids and people say, oh no, I'm not doing that. You don't know what's going on in your kid's brain. What's going on in their brain in those moments is that they get, they get nervous about your relationship with them, they get scared. And as soon as they get scared, the part of their brain that can do long term thinking, moral reasoning, that is their decision engine, what should I do versus what shouldn't I do? All of that we know from brain scans and FMRI scans and EEGs, that goes dark. And so you're turning off the part of their brain that learns when you punish them. And this is the basic fundamental principle that I try and offer in punishment free parenting is that if you're generally or exclusively relying on punishment, you are relying on one of the least effective tools that you could possibly rely on because you are making it harder for them to learn. In the moments when you're trying to, quote, teach them a lesson and you.
- [14:24]
Dave Stahoviak
Add in the book, quote, if you parent in such a way that you become the primary incentive for your child to behave or make good choices, I have some tough love for you. You won't always be there. And it's just like there's so much truth in that. And, and there's also this, I think that leads to one of the misperceptions that a lot of folks have, and I've certainly struggled with over time as well too, and still do a little bit, is that if you don't punish, you're not holding your kids accountable. And I know you hear that language from people when you are teaching these lessons. When you hear that, where do you invite people to start thinking about that differently?
- [15:05]
John Fogel
Yeah, this is probably the biggest critique that people who talk about this stuff in this way get, which is you're just letting kids get away with everything. And the way that I respond to that is just by saying, kind of reverting back to that. We'll consider for a moment that it's you, it's not your child is the reason that you don't go around stealing things, that you don't go around punching people, that you don't go around hurting people or God forbid, murdering people because you're afraid that you'll get caught and punished for it. The answer is no, obviously not. That's an incredibly pessimistic view of the world. Society is not built on the fact that, oh well, if I, if, if somebody does something, you know, everybody is secretly just wanting to hurt each other, but they're kept in line by police presence. It's a myth that many of us, we know from hunter gatherer tribes and things looking anthropologists going back for tens of thousands of years, this is not what has kept people in line. And so when I say no punishment, people immediately go to, well, okay, so that means that you're never going to hold somebody accountable. No, it means that you are going to present them with the consequences of their own actions. Not imposed consequences or punitive consequences or retributive consequences that you are imposing on them, them, but rather that you're going to direct their conscious attention to the thing that happened and then offer that to them. And, and, and that can be a painful experience in and of itself. But that actually works with the way that the brain works rather than against the way that the brain works. And so it's not that your child will never experience sadness or your child will never experience guilt, or your child will never experience the consequences of their own actions. All of those can be really helpful and useful teaching tools. The problem comes when we say no, the consequence is going to be from me as the parent. And so a great example of this that I like to use is like cleaning up your toys, right? A lot of people say, well, if I'm not going to punish my kid, they're never going to clean their room. Okay, well what if we just said, hey, we have to keep our room clean so that we can be able to play in it. And if your room's not clean, I'm not going to go in there and play in there with you. It does, it doesn't make me comfortable to be in that room when it's so, so messy. Or you might step on your toys and they might get broken. There may be a logical consequence that we can impose here and say, hey, anything that's not, we have to get the house clean every Friday or whatever day it is. Anything that's not off the floor, you're indicating to me, this is not something that I care about. And so we're going to put, we can, we can put those things in a bin and we can put them down in the basement. It seems like we're creating an environment where there's too much stuff and you can't keep it tidy, and you can't keep it organized. None of these things are punitive. They're also not letting your kid off the hook or not having any sort of boundaries with your kid. And so really, what we have to remember is that it doesn't mean that there's no place for consequences in your relationship with your child. It means that if the consequence is designed to make them uncomfortable or unhappy or, God forbid, feel pain, that those are the things. Those are the places where we need to rethink our strategy because it's not strategic, it's not effective, and that's the real thing. We have an entire chapter in the book, early in the book, on boundaries and holding boundaries. But the purpose of holding boundaries is actually so your child can have the freedom to make mistakes and learn from those mistakes, not so that you can constantly be in control of everything your child does, because, as you said, you're not always going to be there. And that's not preparing your child for the real world out there. And that's what people always come back to, oh, I want to prepare my child for the real world. Okay, well, the real world is a place where they're going to have to face the consequences of their own actions. They're probably not going to be punished for not cleaning their room. They're just going to have a messy apartment, and then somebody's going to walk in and go, oh, you're kind of a slob. Well, that's preparing them for that is not being punitive so that they hate it or they hate you. It's actually allowing them to feel the actual lived outcomes of their actions.
- [19:26]
Dave Stahoviak
It's such a lovely shift and how we think about these things, and there's so much nuance in how we think about these. Even the words we used used the word consequence a bit ago. And I think it's interesting that consequence and punishment aren't the same thing, but somehow we've all used those words interchangeably. Like, in society, it's like. Like punishment sounds bad, so we just change the word to consequence. But in practice, a lot of people are still using consequences as punishments effectively. When you think about that shift, what's. What's different about it?
- [20:03]
John Fogel
Yeah. So to me, a lot of it's semantic difference. The truth is, most parents use consequences euphemistically to mean punishment in the same way that most parents use the word discipline, which, as you pointed out, means to teach. Right. We teach with discipline. They will euphemistically use that. As you know, I Need to discipline my kid often means up to and including I need to physically hurt my kid in order to teach them a lesson, which we know from modern neuroscience and longitudinal studies that go back over the last 30 years. This is basically the worst thing that you can do as far as a discipline technique. It's totally unhelpful and only increases the likelihood that your child will do problematic things. But we kind of euphemistically use these words to mean punishment because we don't like how it feels to say, I'm going to punish my child. Yeah, I think to me the difference is consequences are all around us all the time. They're the natural outcomes of any action. And so I even say there are positive consequences and negative consequences. Positive. You know, we might call those rewards. Like, I was really nice to this girl that I met in high school and thought she was cute, and I was really friendly with her, and I drove her home one day when she didn't have a ride home from, from band after school. And the consequence of that is that I met my future wife. It's not a negative consequence. Right. For me, I look at that as the most positive consequence that has ever happened to me. On the contrary, I also have had many times where I've done things that were not great. I talk about, in one case, not studying when I was in college because I just kind of thought, I'll, I'll figure it out. I've never had a problem with this in the past. Consequence was that of. That was a D on my first test my junior year. In world civilizations, there are consequences all around us. Punishment is when we are doing something that is beyond a simple consequence, a cause and an effect. Punishment is when we add to a child something that is designed to be, and I use this word a lot, retributive. You did that, and so therefore, or you failed to do this, therefore I am going to make you uncomfortable or in pain, in some form of pain, whether social pain, relational pain, physical pain. All of these. Again, we can say, oh, well, I was just grounding them.
- [22:33]
Dave Stahoviak
Sure.
- [22:33]
John Fogel
You were taking away an opportunity for them to connect with their peers. I'm not saying that. There isn't a place to say, we got to stay home tonight for X, Y and Z reasons. But if it's because they didn't do what you wanted them to do, and now you're using that as a punishment, all they're learning in those moments is, wow, I'm, I'm experiencing this pain, and I'm not linking that Pain to the reason for it. I'm linking that pain to the person who's causing me to have that pain. And, and that. That's the real big difference here. That's why when I say, even when we deploy consequences that are beyond natural consequences, there are times absolutely. I talk about in the book, my, My son drawing a red Sharpie racetrack on a brand new deck that we had out. Out in the back of our yard. Yeah, the consequence of having a red Sharpie racetrack on the deck is a pretty great consequence for him. He looks at that as a net positive. Now I have a red racetrack on this deck. I like that for me, as the. Is the guy who just built the deck, it was pretty negative. I did not want a red Sharpie racetrack on that deck. And so I employed what we call a logical consequence, which is saying, hey, we have to set things right. We have to bring things back. We need to fix the problem that we've created. And sometimes children are not going to see the problems that they create as problems. They're going to see them as, hey, that's what I wanted. Yeah, but you're part of a family, and everybody else in the family is not a fan of the red racetrack right now. And so that consequence looked like sitting with me helping me sand it, sand down the deck until the race, red race, Sharpie racetrack was gone. He did some of the sanding. I don't say that we should be making our kids do physical labor in order to punish them either. But. But he had a part in it because he wanted to see. I wanted him to see, hey, look, this is the, this is the actual consequences that you have to sand down the deck. How challenging is that? And then later down the road, I said, you know what, we were gonna have to sand the deck anyway. But I'm really glad that you were able to see this for what it is. It wasn't punitive. It was us fixing the problem together. And so that's the big difference. It's. It becomes a consequence is a way that your child hopefully will take away. Oh, when I do X, the result is Y. Even if the parent has to impose to some extent a consequence, a punishment is when I do X, I will be hurt, I will be harmed, I will be in some way shamed, belittled, or experience some form of social, emotional, physical, or relational pain. And to me, and I think that the science bears this out, and this is. I have to keep saying that it's not just my opinion, it's what the data leads Us to. Those things are ineffective. Those things are not interpreted by the child as a positive thing. I'll give you one more example. I know that we probably have to move on from this, but the one example that I give over and over, and it just happened to me last week, again, I'm in my other job means that sometimes I have conversations with entire families and kids in a confidential and therapeutic counseling environment. And I said, you know, how's your week going? And this kid said, no, not so good. And I said, oh, what's going on? And kid said, well, last week I got in trouble. And I said, oh, what happened? Well, then they described all the punishment that they had received. And I said, so why did that happen? They said, I don't remember. And that is the perfect example. It's not the only time. This kid's. Well, how old are. They're eight. But kids who are four, kids who are three, kids who are six, kids who are 14, they will often be so wrapped up in the punitive nature of what happened as a result that they don't even remember what happened. And so I redirect to those parents, right. Hey, I understand that you were trying to teach them that whatever behavior it was that caused them to, quote, unquote, be in trouble and receive these punishments, I understand that your intention was to teach them that that was not a fruitful way to behave. How does not. How does hearing. I don't even remember. How does that make you feel? All they remember is the broken relationship. And we know why that is. It's because it turns off the part of their brain that retains memories in that way. They don't link it in the same way, because we actually shut down the part of that little girl's brain that connects those. Those threads, that learns those. Those things. And so when we do that, it actually paradoxically does the exact opposite of what we were hoping it does.
- [27:14]
Dave Stahoviak
You shared with me before this conversation that one of your favorite parts of the book is the part on reconciliation. And I think one of the hardest parts for parenting, at least for myself, is going down a path, maybe veering into punishment occasionally and then feeling really guilty about it or like. Like, okay, I screwed up as a parent. And one of the things you say is that that's actually one of the best opportunities to grow and to learn and to build your relationship not only with yourself, but with your kids. What's the opportunity there?
- [27:49]
John Fogel
Yeah. Well, let's start with why punishment doesn't work for us either. You know, before we get into how we can repair. If punishing your kid is ineffective because it turns off their brain, punishing yourself is no more effective. If you want to get better at something, you can't just be the world's largest critic on yourself. You can't shame yourself and hate yourself into change. It doesn't work. And so the first step in becoming a punishment free parent, often for parents, once they've accepted intellectually, punishment doesn't work. Actually, becoming a punishment free parent looks like learning to not punish themselves along with learning to not punish their kids. And one of the ways that's most effective to do that is to start employing what Carol Dweck called a growth mindset with relationship not only to your own ventures out in the world, but also with your within your relationships and saying, hey, look, either I win or I learn. And there's no win and lose, it's win and learn. And when you start thinking in those terms, you realize, oh my gosh, all of these times when I've, I've yelled at my kid and I've punished them and I've done all these things that I'm not proud of as a parent. If I just go to my child and in those moments apologize and seek to reconcile with them and say, hey, this is what I was feeling, there's no excuse for that. And I talk about how to apologize. Well, I give like a frame by frame, you know, this is exactly what you do. I call it cut the butt. So that parents often apologize. But really those apologies are like Trojan horses. They're just vehicles for another lecture. Hey, I'm sorry, but if you don't clean up your room, I'm going to really get pissed off. And then I'm going to, you know, give you this, that and the other. That's not in a real apology, right? Yeah, but renders the apology totally invalid. But instead when we actually apologize well, and when we take accountability for our actions and we do all these other things, what we're doing with our child is actually building the relationship stronger than before because of this base principle, which is that repair makes things stronger. We all feel this when we watch a rom com, right? When you go out and you watch 10 Things I Hate about you, or how to Lose a guy in 10 days or some other movie with the number 10. It's fundamentally about two people getting together in their 20s. Those movies always have a moment. Sorry to ruin every single one of them for you from now on, but those movies at about 2/3 to 3/4 of the way through that movie, the couple is going to have a huge falling out in every single one. Doesn't matter what movie it is, they're going to have a huge falling out. And the reason is all of us intrinsically know that the relationship is going to be so much stronger when they finally get back together, that if the movie was just great and they just fell in love and their love story carried on to the very end, and it was just never, there was never anything hard, that the relationship would not. Would be fragile, it would not be built on strength. And so the same thing is true with your kid. Every time you punish your kid, and this is not licensed to then go out and punish your kids so that you give opportunities for this. But even if you try and do your absolute best, you're still going to screw up. And you're probably going to screw up a lot more than you want to. Every single one of those moments is a moment that you have to just essentially mix cement into that relationship. But it depends on how you come back together. And how you do that effectively is to, number one, not punish yourself for screwing up, number two, to learn how to apologize well, and number three, to reconcile in such a way where you're going to try and seek to do better going forward. And when you do that, it's like I said, it's a mixing cement into that relationship. Your kid is going to feel more connected to you. And one of the things that we haven't talked about yet that I think is actually probably the number one principle in the book beyond just don't punish your kids. It's one thing to tell you what not to do. Okay, John, what do you do instead? The number one thing that we can do to raise really healthy, mature kids is be really healthy, mature adults around our kids and is to thrive in all areas of our lives and have our children see us doing that well. If you want a kid who grows up to not be so entitled, which is the thing that people always talk about, if you want a kid who grows up to, to apologize when they're wrong, to not be so defensive about their mistakes, to be a good partner, to be a good spouse, to be a good employee, to be a good leader, you have to show them how the number one way our kids learn. And we've known this for longer than we've understood the mechanism in the brain for why, but we have known for a long time that the number one way that kids learn is through what we call observational learning. It's not through anything that we teach them, it's through what they observe us doing. And so if you want your kid to be a person who goes out and apologizes, you have to be a person who goes out and apologizes. If you want your kid to cut themselves some slack and not beat themselves up and tear themselves down every single time they make a mistake, when you make a mistake with them, you have to model what it looks like to say, yeah, I was wrong, I made a mistake, it's okay, it's not the end of the world. And that I think that discipline in ourselves of being the type of person who we want our kid to become, that above all else is the way that we actually parent more effectively.
- [33:19]
Dave Stahoviak
John Fogel is the author of Punishment Free Parenting, the brain based way to raise kids without raising your voice. John, thank you so much for inspiring us with your work. I so appreciate it.
- [33:30]
John Fogel
Dave, thank you so much for having me.
- [33:38]
Dave Stahoviak
I'm not an Instagram user myself, but if you are, you should track down John on Instagram. I'll have his profile linked up in the episode notes. I've seen a number of his videos and they're so helpful on reinforcing some of the key concepts we talked about in this conversation and more from his book. Thank you John for all those resources and several related episodes. If this conversation was helpful to you, one of them is episode episode 310, how to reduce Drama with Kids. Tina Payne Bryson was my guest on that episode, along with her colleague Dan Siegel. I've been reading their books for a number of years. No Drama Discipline is the book that first got me introduced to her work, and I'm thinking about it for two reasons. One is because I was thinking about it last night in a conversation with our kids. The principles that her and Dan have been teaching for years have helped Bonnie and I, both as parents, in so many ways. The other reason I'm thinking about her is because she introduced me to John and his work and so great complement to this conversation. Episode 310 on no drama discipline. I'd also recommend episode 606, the Way to get into better conversations about Wealth. Kristin Keffler was my guest on that episode, an expert in how families handle wealth and resources. And this is a very closely related topic to families and kids and it is one of the dynamics that tends to come up in a lot of challenging conversations with families. Now. I think it's it's a helpful conversation to you, certainly, if you happen to have a family that has wealth or extended family that has access to wealth. I think it's also a very helpful conversation, and the way we approached it is what are the dynamics that families with wealth tend to show up with and to bring into the workplace sometime? And most of us interact with people who have wealth in some capacity as leaders. Either it's the owner of the organization or top executives or other stakeholders. I think it's a really helpful framework to be able to understand that world little bit more, to have a little bit of empathy. And of course, we talked about all the dynamics of that in that conversation. Episode 606 for that and then finally, another closely related topic, episode 639 supporting return to Work after Maternity Leave. Dana Greenberg was my guest on that episode, absolutely an expert in this space. Helped us to look at it through the lens of if you're a parent returning to the workplace after maternity leave, what are some practices for navigating that? But more of a focus of that conversation was if you're the leader, the manager, the organization, who's supporting an employee who is going out on maternity leave, on maternity leave, returning, how do you actually support that process in a effective way that honors everyone? Speaking of things most of us have not ever received training on, that's a topic most of us have not Oftentimes when it comes up in our organizations, someone hands us an HR policy, says here's the way it's typically done logistically. Yet we don't really talk about the emotion, the planning, all of the things that are so critical to really support that transition well for families and for organizations. Episode 639 A key conversation there. All of those episodes you can find on the coaching4leaders.com website. Now, mostly we're not talking about parenting topics on this podcast, but I think it's important to dive into some of the aspects I mentioned today on parenting. And sometimes we talk a little bit about personal finance on the show because so many aspects of leadership do cross so many different kinds of roles. And so parenting is one of the topics inside of our free membership resources. And there's a number of episodes we've done over the years, including with Tina. Bonnie and I have had a few conversations over the years. So lots more resources there, plus all the traditional topics that you would expect that we mostly focus on on the show. Leadership, of course. Vision, coaching skills, accountability. So many of the things that come up regularly. We have set up the free membership on the website, can find exactly what's relevant most to you right now. Set up your free membership by going over to coaching4leaders.com. Once you do, you'll have full access to that entire library. You can search through the dozens and dozens of topic areas that'll be relevant to you right now. And one of those things that have come up in the last week is someone asking me, one of our members saying I have a stakeholder right now who's a little bit skittish and is not trusting me and my team team for a whole bunch of reasons. And he asked me how do I actually work to restore my relationship with this stakeholder, make it better, have this person not feel quite as skittish around the work that myself and my team are trying to do to serve this person and support them? That was the topic of my most recent journal entry, how to make your stakeholders shine. Ways to approach those tough situations with stakeholders who maybe aren't so trusting, or all kinds of reasons. And what are some initial steps you can take that will help really rebuild or to build it for the first time, the relationship with a key stakeholder that is part of Coaching for Leaders plus if you'd like to get access to all the additional benefits inside of coaching for leaders plus, go over to coaching 4 leaders plus. You will find a bunch more details there, including all the details about my weekly weekly journal entries. Those are coming to you on email every single week. If you're a member of Coaching for Leaders plus Coaching for Leaders is edited by Andrew Kroger. Production support is provided by Sierra Priest. Next Monday, I'm glad to welcome my friend Tom Henschel back to the show. The host of the look and Sound of Leadership podcast, Tom and I are having a conversation about how to take initiative. Join me for that conversation with Tom and I'll see you back this coming Monday. Take care.