In recent years the term ‘Conscious Parent’ has started to gather momentum, but what does it actually mean?
In simple terms, it’s about being aware of how you parent. Being conscious means to be aware.
But it’s not enough to be aware. I mean, what are you being aware of?
Okay, so with awareness I just noticed that I yelled at my child, that I’m frustrated as all hell because no one is listening to me and I’m aware that I don’t know how else to deal with it, that I’m seeing my child out of control and can’t do squat about it.
I’m aware that I feel like a crap parent because of how my child is behaving and that when I react to it I am aware that I feel so guilty because I reacted and because I also don’t know how to react differently.
Does that make me a conscious parent?
Surely not, you conclude.
So, what is conscious parenting?
It’s about USING the conscious part of your brain to not only be aware of what’s going on in the present moment but using the conscious part of the brain to EFFECT CHANGE! Conscious parenting is about AWARENESS AND ADJUSTMENT!
Let me explain why this is important.
Your brain is essentially divided into the subconscious and the conscious parts of the brain.
The subconscious is made up of your habits of thinking. From the age of zero to seven, your mind had no analytical abilities, no conscious abilities. Everything that was going on in your environment was being downloaded into the subconscious.
You observed your parent’s behaviour and reactions to life, their words, their sounds, their beliefs, etc. Basically, everything they did, you perceived with your subconscious mind. With repetition of seeing these behaviours and responses to life, your subconscious mind started to develop those very same programs, and you began to create your personality.
Now this explains a lot about why you’re suddenly finding yourself parenting way too much like your parents for your liking. The programming on how to be a parent has been sitting in your subconscious for all of these years, waiting for the conditions of your environment (ie becoming a parent) to trigger these learned responses, beliefs, and reactions!
You may have already been playing out some of these habitual personality traits in other areas of your life for years too.
Your conscious mind, on the other hand, is where you are aware. It’s where creativity lives. It’s where logic and reasoning occur. It’s where the analytical mind becomes the doorway between the conscious and the subconscious. You can deliberately (ie consciously) direct the mind in any way you desire, but you have to be aware to do it.
You can choose to be happy for example, if you are consciously directing your mind to look for happiness and think thoughts that trigger the chemicals (emotions) that make you feel happy.
So why aren’t you doing that already?
Why are you ‘choosing’ to stay angry and reactive and give into your subconscious mind?
Because the subconscious mind is made up of 95% of how much you think!
The conscious mind is only made up of 5%.
I use the analogy of a steering wheel of the car being the conscious part of the mind (the 5%) and the sat nav/autopilot of a motor vehicle being the subconscious. When you are consciously steering your mind in the direction you want to go (ie you’re using logic, reasoning, will, and desire – all parts of the conscious mind – to direct your life), you will lead in that direction.
However, if you take your hands off the steering wheel, the sat nav/autopilot will kick in and take you in the direction you’ve been programmed to go.
In other words, the subconscious takes over and you start acting in those pre-programmed, well-practiced (sometimes for years) ways of thinking, feeling and behaving.
This is why you find yourself parenting from a reactive state and in the complete opposite to the parent you want to become.
It’s because you’re not parenting Consciously.
Now back to my original definition of Conscious Parenting.
Conscious parenting is about AWARENESS & ADJUSTMENT.
It’s not enough to become aware of the programs you’re running that are triggering your behaviours and emotions. Sometimes being aware can weaken the habitual connection, but when you’re breaking a habit, you have to replace it with another.
This is where ADJUSTMENT comes in.
You have to retrain your mind to change.
There are two ways you do this a) Repetition and b) Hypnosis
When you’re in hypnosis, your mind is put to sleep (no different than you going to sleep at night time) and you are downloading the information you want your subconscious to be programmed to think habitually.
If you do that with repetition you can retrain your subconscious mind to change.
But you don’t even need to see a hypnotist to do that. You can do it while you sleep!
There are lots of downloads you can purchase that will help you to train your brain while you sleep by putting some headphones in your ears and listening to the hypnosis. I love using hypnosisdownloads.com as they have thousands of cheap downloads that will help you to do exactly this.
However, hypnosis is not the only thing you can do and in fact, I believe you need to do more than just that if you wish to accelerate the rate of change in your thoughts, feelings, and actions.
You see, you can go into hypnosis at night time, and start programming your mind, and that will work over time, but if you wake up and start to play out the same mental thoughts, feelings, behaviours etc, you’re going to be strengthening your current programs, and the new program has to keep competing with this well-practiced old programming, so it elongates the time it takes to change.
But what if you could use your conscious mind to accelerate the process? Now this is where we come in. We teach parents how to use their conscious mind to train their subconscious to be calm, connected and happier parents.
This is where REPETITION kicks in to help you with the ingredients of AWARENESS AND ADJUSTMENT that make up change.
What if you were able to become aware of the pattern of your thoughts that keep coming up in your day to day interactions with your kids, and adjust that thinking over and over again, thereby training your subconscious to a new mind?
This is exactly what we do at the PSC.
We teach you the science behind neuro-plasticity (changing your brain) and teach you how to take a complex task like breaking the habits of thinking negatively and getting stuck in painful emotions and simplify it, so you have the knowledge, the skills and the support (from us) to EFFECT CHANGE.
Most people think that their external environment (like their children misbehaving) needs to change so that they can change their internal environment.
A lot of parents think that if they can just control their child’s behaviour, they will feel better, calmer and more composed. We hear this all the time – “Maybe if my child would just do as they are told, I wouldn’t have to lose my s**t”.
But it’s actually the other way around!
When you change your internal environment, you will watch your external environment start to change and we hear THAT all the time too – “I can’t believe how different my child is behaving just by me changing my reactions.”
For some parents, none of this is new. We’ve all seen the influence our good moods have on our child’s behaviour (and our bad ones).
But for others, they can be so entrenched in their own subconscious negative thinking/feeling/behaviour loops that they have been practicing for years, it feels almost impossible to EFFECT CHANGE.
But this is where we make it simple for you and help you to do this through our programs.
Now one more thing I want to mention.
The reason why you’re not being an effective parent when you’re stuck in those stressful emotions that are triggering your reactive behaviour, is not because you’re a stupid, hopeless parent who doesn’t know how to parent.
It’s because when your body goes into stress, it’s like being chased by a lion. Your body goes into fight or flight mode. It starts to make physical changes to your body so that certain areas of your mind and body are shut down so that you can conserve energy ready for the fight or flight.
One of those areas is the creative centre of the brain – the conscious mind. If you’re being chased by a lion is it time to create something new (like new thoughts or behaviours)? Is it time to use your logic and reasoning abilities?
No! It’s time to RUN or HIDE! It’s time to protect yourself. The area of your brain that gets activated is your hind brain that’s going to protect you. This is why you’re getting reactive.
You’re not activating the centre of your brain that helps you to change. In fact, the learning part of your brain has shut down altogether!! (FYI, this also happens to your kids when they are experiencing hormones of stress).
So, it’s not that you can’t be a calm parent who knows how to help your child with their behaviour.
It’s more just that because the stress hormones are being activated in your body, due to those habitual negative thoughts and feelings, the part of your brain you need to be activated to be more rational (rationale is another part of the conscious brain) has shut down and no new behaviours can be exhibited.
So, can you see how trapped we can be in our subconscious thinking/feeling/behaviour loops that keep reinforcing the same thinking/feeling/behaviour loops? Can you see why, to date, you have not changed even though you wanted too?
I want to help you to turn all this around.
You don’t have to stay stuck.
But what it’s going to take to change, is you guessed it, AWARENESS & ADJUSTMENT with REPETITION.
We will give you the tools to do this.
We will help you to become so aware that no subconscious thoughts slip past your awareness with you identifying it and then teach you how to ADJUST those thoughts and with repetition, effectively help you to retrain your subconscious mind how to think/feel and react.
AND we teach you to do all of these in the context of being a parent, something a lot of traditional self-help information are not doing.
Our programs teach you how to become aware of the thinking that’s triggering your stress and teaching you how to adjust your mindset when faced with those common challenges of parenting.
And then we teach you how to apply that information to child behaviour, loss of identity, anger management, relationships, time management and more.
So, if you’re ready to break the habit of parenting like your parents did, or to break your personal habits that are triggering you to become stuck in emotions of stress as a parent.
And if you’re ready to reactivate the logical, rational and creative centres of your brain that will enable you to become the parent that you want to be, then we are ready to show you how.