Speaker 1Hello and welcome to the How Not To Screw Up Your Kids podcast, the bucket emptying episodes. I'm your host, Dr. Mary Hamm, psychologist and parenting expert. So, pour yourself a cuppa, find a comfy seat and enjoy the conversation. Today's bucket emptying episode is all about affirmations. Now, let me explain a little bit about this. I've talked quite a lot about the fact that we all have an internal dialogue. It's that constant chat, chat, chat that narrates our day. So, you may well be listening to this podcast and there may be a little bit of chatter going on. Maybe it's your to-do list. Maybe it's a particular frustration that you have with a colleague or something that's going on at home. Maybe you're thinking, gosh, I've only got a few minutes. I wonder if I can listen to this whole episode. Stomach's a bit rumbling. Maybe I could make myself a cup of tea. Whatever it is, we have a constant internal chatter and we often talk about it that we've got this inner critic because usually we don't notice that internal chatter until we find ourselves in a situation where we feel overwhelmed, we feel stressed or we feel nervous. And the same obviously goes for our children. When we're talking about raising confident and resilient adults, it's all about a huge part of that is being able to tackle head-on that internal chatter that says, this feels scary. I'm not good enough. I can't do it. No one's going to like me. What if I mess up? What if I fail? It's a disaster. It's being able to have that internal dialogue because we can't get rid of it. We're going to have that all the time and we have that as adults. But it's being able to be comfortable with knowing that that internal dialogue is there, but that chatter does not then define our capabilities or our abilities. So when we're talking about that internal narrative, so we've got chatter, chatter, chatter, you can't, you can't do this. That's our critic. We also have the voice of our cheerleader, our champion, the voice of our best self, our best friend, whatever you might call that. That's the alternative voice that isn't the cheerleader that just says, oh my goodness me, you're so amazing. You can do anything. It's more of a pragmatic voice. It's the voice that says, I know this feels really scary, but you know what? Once you get started, you're usually fine. I know you feel you're not equipped to be able to cope with this particular situation, but there are people here to support you. I know you're worrying about failure, but you're going to learn so much in the process. That's the alternative voice. That's a much more pragmatic rather than, I want you to sort of move away from this idea that you've got the critic, which is negative, and then the cheerleader, which is positive. It really isn't. It's just about looking through a different lens. The critic always, their whole role is about protection. They want to keep you safe. They don't want you humiliating yourself. They don't want you, you know, being in a situation where you can't cope. But the whole point, of being able to be resilient and confident is to be able to push past that and reframe the situation into this narrative that actually isn't life-threatening. It's not the end of the world if things don't go to plan. And instead I can learn something from this. So this is the constant, almost tug of war that is going on for our children. And particularly when they're in a situation that they don't feel capable or able to manage. Same goes for us. So you can imagine that, the input, the chatter that is happening in those situations far outweighs, from the critic, far outweighs any input that we get from the pragmatic side. And this is where affirmations can come in. Now affirmations, you know, some of you may well have looked at them very much from this sort of, you know, in a slightly woo-woo kind of perspective. I'm looking at it from a very pragmatic perspective of your day, your computer, your, basically your brain is, like a computer. And it receives input through our conversations and the narrative that we have. And that input leads to the output in terms of our behavioural choices. Now, if the input is constantly saying, we can't, we'll fail, we're going to look embarrassed, all the disastrous things that are going to happen, then the likelihood of this incredible brain supercomputer output is going to be to make choices that will not, expand us or expand our children in terms of doing things that push them out of their comfort zone. So affirmations for me in the context of what I am going to be talking to you about as a bucket emptying opportunity here is about more input, but specifically inputting the more pragmatic, it might feel scary, but you can still do this. So affirmations in that context are, how can we begin to input into our brain some data, some information, some experiences and resources that is much more framed in a real world, pragmatic, opportunistic way of kind of expanding that capability and ability. And traditionally, I've talked about affirmations from the perspective of my mantras and the little cards that I sell as part of the card decks. For this episode, I want to try something slightly different, because it's a little bit different from what I've done in the past. It just occurred to me, our children use technology a huge amount, as do we. So why don't we utilize that technology in a powerful way through affirmations? So one of the things that we can do is helping our children and our teens come up with two different affirmations. One affirmation that is around recognizing the specific challenge that they're experiencing something. So the phraseology, and we will include this in a, a resource, a blank template, so that you can then fill the blanks. So basically, you'll be able to download it through the free resource library. And what you'll be able to do is basically fill in the blanks. So the first affirmation of the two is simply going to be, I've noticed that I am aware that I have a habit of feeling that I'm not capable when it comes to friendships. I am aware that I put myself down when it comes to friendships and assume that nobody likes me. For example, we'll give you some very, very specific phraseology around that. But the first affirmation is simply, I've noticed that, and I am no longer going to respond that way. That's the number one. So that's the first affirmation. The second affirmation is much more of an empowering one. The first one is noticing the challenge and the narrative that you have. The second one is about choosing to, I am empowered to, I will now respond with. So what you're going to have in essence is a template that you can download that will give you two different affirmations. And what I would like you to entertain, just consider this, and it may well be that you start doing it for yourself first as the parent, and then you might encourage your children to do that, is I want you on your mobile phone, there will be some form of recording app or system, within your phone, is I want you to record the first affirmation around noticing a pattern of behavior that you are now going to change. And I'd like you to record it anywhere between 10 and 15 times. You get to choose. So you're simply going to make, press record on the record mechanism on your phone. You are going to say that first affirmation. It's up to you, between 10 and 15 times. Just pick a number, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15. Just pick a number. And you're going to repeat that 10 times, 11 times, 12 times, 13, 14, 15. Yep. Stop recording. Okay. Now you're going to say your second affirmation. You're going to label that in a file that says affirmation one. And then you're going to say your second affirmation, which is this more empowering. This is what I'm going to do now. And you're going to record that again. Anything between 10 and 15 doesn't have to be the same as the first 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 times. So you've now got two powerful affirmations. And all I'm going to ask you to do is that you listen to affirmation one and you listen to affirmation two for 30 days. Get a little checklist. In fact, we're going to create a checklist for you. So you can tick off number one, number two, day two, day three, day four. You're going to listen to them for 30 days straight. Because the power of this is that our brain responds to the input, to the information we give it. Now, if we're going to listen to this for 30 days straight, we're going to listen to this for 30 days straight. So we're going to listen to this for 30 days straight. Rather than, what's the worst that could happen? Maybe I could just give this a go and we'll see what happens. So instead, I'm giving you a really powerful way of changing that narrative by recording your voice, because the voice in our head is our voice, so that you can listen to that while you're making a cup of tea, while you are just wandering around, tidying up something. So the idea is that if we can, model it ourselves. If we've got some resistance from our children, then maybe model it for yourself. see how powerful it has been for you and then we want to encourage our children to then do something similar for themselves what what I will say is really important when you are listening to your affirmations but put headphones in or listen to it out loud it doesn't matter like you're listening to this podcast it won't take very we're talking literally less than a couple of minutes all I would encourage you to do is to not listen double negative listen to it when you are doing something other than something that requires you to absorb information through words our brain our working memory part of our brain like our desktop cannot cope with listening to two pieces of information at the same time if we want that input to be unique to be listened to be absorbed to be taken in and to change the output we need to make sure that the input that we're listening to is devoid of any other distractions of any other words there can be noise you can as I said children could be tidying up their bedrooms they could be walking to the bus anything just not having conversations or listening to television or listening to the radio I genuinely believe that this could be a an incredibly powerful tool for you as a parent and also for your children so I would be really keen to hear from you and as to how you've got on with this I have been doing my own just so that you know I am now on day I decided not to do 30 days I'm doing 60 days and now I'm on day 33 so and I've full disclosure there were two days that I forgot to do it that's fine but I'm inputting so that I can get a different output so to help you we are going to create you'll be able to download some templates for affirmation number one I've noticed that affirmation number two and also a little checklist so that you can be ticking off those first 30 days so as always what you need to do is you need to head over to the free resource library so that's www.drmaryhand.com forward slash library where you'll be able to download the resource so all you need to do is you put in your email address and you'll then have access not only to this episode's resource but all the other free resources across all my other podcast episodes and as I always ask if you have enjoyed this episode if you enjoy listening to the podcast whether that's through YouTube whether you listen and through Apple Spotify or whatever mechanism that you do it is so appreciated when you just take a moment to rate the podcast out of five write a little review because by rating reviewing and following this podcast others find us that's how it works that's how these algorithms and mechanisms work so that other parents can find the tools and resources that hopefully you find valuable and we can spread the love so until next time you
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