Autumn is my favourite season, and I feel like the crisp air and crunchy leaves almost challenge me to get honest and reflective so that I can shed what no longer serves. This Autumn, I’m asking myself if I can shed my need to be right. You know those moments where you say something to someone important to you and afterwards wish you’d just kept your mouth shut? I started off today having a yucky experience with one of my daughters, the details of which I’m not going to share

If parenting feels like a struggle and joy a distant memory, I’ve been there too. Here’s something to play with… A powerful way to create a feeling of connection with children and young people (including teenagers) is by really listening to them. As the feeling of connection increases, the feeling of struggle decreases. If you want to give this a go, you could start by asking yourself these questions… When my child is talking to me, what am I listening to? A lot of the ti

I have a question for you: If you knew that it would improve all your relationships and make life more beautiful, would you want to get better at listening to others? If we’re really honest (this is for all of us, me too), what is often called listening may be better described as waiting for our turn to speak. Would you like to hear a few examples of things I've found myself doing while supposedly listening to someone else? 1. Scanning my memory bank for something that relate

My article last week about being a mediocre mum seemed to land with people on my mailing list. Here I take a look at the kind of things that can hold a “good mum” (or “good dad”) pattern in place and have us struggling as parents. It's also relevant to just about any relationship you can think of. From a very young age, we are given messages about what it means to be “good”. These messages come from home, from school, from media, from all around. It also seems that as young c

Let’s take sitting exams at school as an example (it’s topical in our house right now and a great example). “Anxiety” is a label your brain has learned to put on sensations that arise within the body. These sensations are completely normal and it’s not surprising for them to come up when thinking about sitting an exam. The intensity of the sensations that your brain labels as “anxiety” is not an indication of how you will perform in the exam, nor of how you will feel in