Playful Parent Coaching
Are you a parent wondering if you need to compromise what you love in order to provide for your family?
Wanting your kids to be successful is easy (and obvious). Allowing them to fall, watching them make mistakes, and feeling their struggles or hurting, is way harder.
It's tempting to think that helping them avoid all the mistakes you made and preventing the hard falls you had will help them, but sadly it does not work like that.
Allowing them to learn from their own experience is essential for them to be healthy and happy (which is less obvious).
For one thing, they are young and are going to make lots of mistakes. That is how they learn. They have to make their own messes and learn that they can get their way out of it. Getting themselves out of trouble is great for their self confidence.
How do you take your parenting to the next level?
You become a role model. You listen - really listen. You create a safe place for them to relax, integrate, and recharge themselves, for their next adventure. You help them make sense of their experiences. You help them avoid the cliff edges.
Some of the biggest challenges that young people are dealing with are:
* Not knowing how to learn from mistakes
* Not having role models to learn from
* Not understanding how their brain works and how they learn
* Feeling alone
* Constantly being asked/forced to do things that don't make sense or apply to anything they care about (many kids experience of school)
As a parent it is really, really easy to get sucked in, and miss the big picture of what is best for your kid.
An example is shielding them from the pain that they feel when things do not go their way - they don't make the team, they fail the test, they don't get in. It is so, so tempting to intervene. But if you step back it is easier to see that learning how to deal with adversity is a critical skill for them to learn. It will get them way further than the A in the class.
When you intervene in this moment, it deprives them of a great learning opportunity (which may well be painful and ugly).
How awesome will it be to support your kid on their journey to a life they love?
This is the power of Play Huge coaching. By engaging in a process where you begin to understand your kid using the structures and ideas from my book, Launch Your Life, you gain a perspective on what will really set your kid up for success. You will have a plan for how to help them thrive. You will learn to listen (even when they don't talk).
You will have a hand to hold when you notice yourself cringing when they deviate from the path that you took or the one that you are convinced leads to “success”. Through our coaching, you will learn to breathe deep, work your plan, and come to understand that there are lots of avenues to a great life. And that it is critical that your kid find the path that works for them.
You will come to see that helping your kid means allowing them to explore, make mistakes, and learn who they are. As young adults their work is to identify the path that flows out of their heart. Their journey is to get beyond all the "should's" (your should's and society's should's), and move towards the paths where real meaning and fulfillment will happen for them. Finally, they are working like crazy to build the confidence to begin this journey of discovery.
Are you going to make the journey harder or easier?
Supporting their journey will save them lots and lots of time, energy, and the wrong kind of struggles; and it will save you time, energy, and money, while it gives you a powerful place in their life. You do this by creating a place where they feel loved, supported, and understood.
My coaching will work for you if you find yourself in any of these situations. You are:
Noticing a shift in your kid, something has changed. It might be that you are approaching a big decision, like where to go to college or whether to go to college. It might be that they are hanging out with different friends, all of a sudden struggling in school, wearing different clothes, not talking to you anymore. Perhaps there have been other life events – a death, separation/divorce, loss, a big success. Maybe there is nothing you can identify, but something is different.
What ever is happening, you realize that you are feeling uneasy about the shift. Maybe it is because you notice yourself pushing too hard or feeling more distant. You might notice they are not as motivated about everything that needs to get done as they were or you would expect or even they want to be; perhaps they have said they are scared and uncertain and you want to support help them work through this place.
Wanting a strong relationship with your kid. The current situation is painful and hard for you to even think about, but you cannot imagine how or where to begin to re-build your relationship. You have a sense that it is going to be a painful process.
Thinking you are a helicopter parent. You may or may not be familiar with that concept, but you are seeing the signs that you are overly involved in your kids life. They might be backing off from you or you might feel they are overly reliant on you. While sometimes you like them being reliant on you – it does make you feel connected - you sense it is important to start backing off. 
But you are really feeling the challenge of backing off and letting them fend for themselves. It is scary. It is hard watching them fall down, make mistakes, get rejected, and such.
Hoping that your kid is still young enough that you can create a relationship with them that set you up for what is coming as they get older. You want to know how to cultivate their self-esteem and their talents and abilities.
My coaching focuses on seeing them and creating a place for them to feel safe, so they can venture out into their world every day and know that they always have a place to come back to where they can reflect, learn, and they do not have to work so hard.
Looking for a coach for your kids. You want to support their development of their strengths and abilities. Many young people today are really busy and under a lot of pressure, and you want them to be able to step back and see the big picture – or realize that there is a big picture.
Have you just gotten a diagnosis?
You and your kid may be dealing with a diagnosis of some sort – ADHD or some “learning disorder” – and wanting to figure out how to make it through school. They may be ready to accept the diagnosis or not, but they are frustrated and not feeling great about school.
You want some perspective and options for how to handle the situation and make sure they are learning what they need to be learning.
Working with me you will find a both the place and the way to start your journey. You will learn to make an effort and then learn from that effort. In other words, you will learn to take small failures and turn them into information. And in the process what you will discover is that every effort you make from your heart is appreciated and noticed by others – and yourself.
Working with me we will remember back when they learned to walk. That is a time that is filled with lots and lots of failure. And it is something you can’t do for them; they have to keep getting up and failing until they learn. Now they have to do the same thing, and learning how to watch, support, and allow them to discover the world.
I hear story after story about people are trying to resolve these challenges on their own. It is so easy to think something really is wrong with you, which causes embarrassed silence. You fall into the place where the only place you are working on the doubt, confusion, and wondering is in your own head.
It takes initiative and action to counteract this barrage. It takes connecting to and believing in that feeling, that gnawing, that makes you know there is more that is possible.
Are you ready to know the structures we will use in the coaching work?
This is big stuff. My commitment for the last 20 years has been to help people connect to their Real You. Hundreds of people and efforts later, I got to be with my own journey as a parent and a professional. This deepened my inquiry and insights, which I now offer in the belief (and hope) that they can be of service to you. Here are 4 keys that we will focus on in our coaching work:
1. A daily practice
Having a daily practice gets you in action and keeps you in action “a body at rest stays and rest, a body in motion stays in motion..”. When you have a daily practice you are committing an act of integrity. You give your word, you keep your word. When you do this you build trust in your self on many levels. Your daily practice may be meditation, yoga, rememberance, a morning walk, or lots of other things, but the important part of it is that it is time with yourself where you can quiet your brain and connect with the Real You and your intention.
2. Always have a plan (and remember the plan)
When you have a plan in place it makes the difference between getting triggered by the failed test or the rejection and seeing it as a learning opportunity. It's the difference between blind emotional reactions and intentional engagement. In other words, when trouble arrives, the only way to effectively deal with whatever trouble it is, is by having a plan. Without a map of what really matters for you it is easy to get lost. You will save enormous time, energy, and money being connected to the big picture.
3. Being seen & learning to see
You have got to know yourself and be connected to the real you. The only way to see others is to know what it feels like to be seen yourself. As parents (and partners, friends, etc) it is critical to learn to know your kids and understand who they are. By doing so you give them the gift of being seen. Being seen for who you really are deep down in there is massively re-assuring but far too uncommon.
4. The courage to learn
Courage is what it takes to keep trying. Failure is an essential ingredient of success. The journey of being a parent (and vitally alive person) includes creating bigger and juicer mistakes. It is amazingly powerful to believe that you can handle what you create and uncover when you explore the world. You want to help your kid become courageous and able to handle adversity.
It will take a lot of courage and perspective from you to act on these feelings. It will have to come from that deep place in you where you are ready to be seen and take the risks necessary to make a difference in your kids life.
How my coaching program works
We meet regularly each month to plan and strategize, discuss specific steps for implementation, troubleshoot problems, and brainstorm.
* Eight individual 60-minute sessions over a 4-month period. Typically, we meet by phone, but in-person meetings are available if you live near Portland, Oregon.
* Laser calls between scheduled meetings. Stuck trying to accomplish something? Frustrated at something you just tried out? Want to celebrate a success? Just need some encouragement? You can call between scheduled meetings to discuss these and other specific issues.
* Unlimited e-mail and text support. Did you notice a breakthrough in you? In your kid? Or do you have an idea of something you want to try, but want some reassurance first? If it’s not super urgent, just email me, let me know what you need and when you need it and I’ll respond, often on the same day.
* Powerful requests and “home play” for you to work on between our sessions. You’ll be exploring ideas and ways of being, as well as working your daily practices into your life.
With your commitment, at the end of the four months, you will have taken substantive steps towards being a powerful parent. You will also feel a genuine, stronger sense of belief in yourself. You will have a powerful idea of how to support your kid in living an amazing life.
Your investment
The Playful Parent coaching program is for parents who want to make a difference in their kids life and are committed to doing so.
The program costs $599 for the package of 8 individual sessions over 4 months. I accept Visa/MC through PayPal or checks and even cash. Plus you’ll need a copy of Launch Your Life (my book). And you will need to create a Play Huge notebook and work through the Know Yourself workbook.
This assumes that I will be working one-on-one with one parent. For partnerships or situations where more than one person needs support, let’s talk and find out what structure is needed.
This coaching isn’t intended for those who want to make minor improvements. This is meant to be an investment that will pay for itself many times over in love, opportunity, and peace of mind. It is also intended to prevent misguided and uninformed investments in further education, dead ends, and big ugly mistakes.
If you want to feel like you are really living your life’s purpose, and connected to your family, then I want to help you make it happen.
My best to you and your family.
Sign up now below and I will send you a form to fill out and complete to get started. If you are looking for the special Parent-Kid coaching package, it's here.
Playing Huge.
morgan