The One Simple Secret To Changing Your Parenting Mindset, Part One

I am now reading a new book written by Mark Victor Hansen (of Chicken Soup For The Soul fame) and Robert G Allen (of Nothing Down Real Estate fame) called Cash in a Flash. Their book has about 15 chapters, and the first 8 have almost nothing to do with making money. The first half of the book is about changing your mindset and how you think. They believe, and I completely concur, that most of being wealthy is between your ears, not in your bank account and wallet.

There are exercises and step by step instructions that tell you exactly what to do. There are even “Wax on, wax off” instructions. You may have seen the 1984 movie “The Karate Kid”. At the beginning of the movie, the protege, Danny, is told by his mentor, Mr. Miyagi, to wax some cars. And he gives very specific instructions, wax on with your right hand counterclockwise and wax off with your left hand hand clockwise. Fifteen minutes later in the movie, we see that this taught Danny how to block punches in a classic karate defense. Hansen and Allen see this as strengthening the muscles needed to learn karate.

I immediately saw how this applies to parenting as well.

Most of us have an idea about how we would like to conduct ourselves as parents. We have an idea about what we should and should not say to our kids and how we should say it. Most of what is in parenting books is not new to most of us. The problem comes in, for many us. with doing the right thing. How do we learn what we need to learn and strengthen those “good parenting muscles” so that we can do what we should do?

So what it is that stops us from doing the right thing? Why do we scream when we know we shouldn't? Why do we get frustrated when we know it is unhelpful? It is our mindset. Our automatic, unconscious way of being and way of doing things. Our reaction is based on past situations, not based on the present situation that appears before us right now. At some point, we strengthened the “wrong” muscles and now we have to strengthen the correct muscles.

How do we change those reactions? How do we change our unconscious? How do we change our mindset?

In a word, we change it by how we talk to ourselves. We change our self-talk. And Hansen and Allen give some very simple and very powerful ways of doing that that I am going to share with you in part 2.