Welcome to the Become a Better Parent Coach Podcast
Hello hello Welcome y’all! I’m Robyn Gobbel and I’m so thrilled you’ve joined me for a week of free audio training to become a better parent coach and ultimately- to love your work again.
The parents we work with are tired. Recently, a mom asked me for help with interviewing the millionth therapist for her child. Y’all, she’s tired. It’s interesting, because in a way, these parents are so tired and so bombarded with information, that actually the last thing they need is more advice. And yet every single day, parents are begging me for more advice. Every day, I hear from parents of kids with the most challenging and baffling behaviors.
Many of the parents I work with – not all but many – have kids who have had some pretty hard things happen. Things like divorce, adoption, abuse or a pandemic. All of the parents I work with have kids with vulnerable nervous systems and big, baffling behaviors. Some of these kids have neuroimmune disorders like PANS, PANDAS, or Lyme. Some are neurodivergent in other ways, maybe they are diagnosed with ADHD or they are gifted or experience sensory processing differences. Some just have sensitive nervous systems. Some are vulnerable due to the lack of felt safety that folks with oppressed and marginalized identities experience, trying to just make it in a world that simply isn’t designed for them.
On your journey to become a better parent coach and love your work again, I’ll be introducing you to Nat. Or- maybe you already met Nat when you read my new book Raising Kids with Big Baffling Behaviors. Nat is not so different from any other parent who carpools bargain hunts and wishes for more free time to be with their friends, or even just get in a walk, or a shower. There is one big difference though, at least as Nat sees it, between Nat and the other parents. Nat’s kid doesn’t seem to act like her friends kids. And she can’t figure out why.
Nat has read all of the books. She goes to all the conferences and workshops, she learns all the latest brain science, and she takes a lot of notes. Then she comes to me and says, but what do I actually do?
Perhaps you’ve met your own Nat before- or maybe you ever ARE Nat- though of course, Nat is just a composite of the 1000s of parents I’ve met in my work. You’ll follow Nat in the next four days in this pop up podcast training. If you want to follow her beyond these four days, you can eavesdrop on an entire year of parent coaching sessions in my book Raising Kids with Big Baffling Behaviors.
Nat, and parents like her are doing exactly what they’re supposed to do when they’re afraid. They’re looking for immediate answers that will fix their immediate problem. I adore parents like Nat, and they are drowning. I adore helpers and healers and educators like you. And I know most of you are drowning too. Nat needs to find a helper who actually helps a helper who has a deep understanding of the neurobiology of behavior, Understands why her kid is behaving in the bizarre way that she is, and then can offer tools that actually help.
But more than that, Nat needs a helper who can hold the intensity that she brings, because her family is intense, her kid is intense. And the energy in their family is well intense. She needs a helper who doesn’t get overwhelmed and says I can’t help you anymore. She needs a helper who doesn’t get overwhelmed and tosses out tool after tool after tool after tool without any real understanding of what the problem is, or what kinds of things will actually help. She needs a helper who can tolerate her big feelings, even when they’re directed at the helper because holy bananas she just sometimes has really big feelings. And of course she does. Her family is consumed by chaos.
Most of all, Nat needs a helper who isn’t so burned out and overwhelmed by feeling ineffective, like an impostor, or so helpless and hopeless that they’re leaving the field. This is why I’m offering you, dear helper, this free podcast training. And this is why I’ve created my immersive, year long training program for parenting professionals called Being With.
In this week of free training, you’ll get the science behind behavior, the children’s, the parents, and yes, even yours. And believe it or not, this is the first step toward decreasing burnout, loving your work again, and becoming a better parent coach.
When we’re on the edge of burnout, it’s easy to fall back to the things we learned about behavior when we were kids ourselves. Things like behavior is a ploy of manipulation, or that it’s something that is only changed by upping the ante with consequences. When we start to lose our connection to what behavior really is, which is simply an expression of what’s happening in the body and in the autonomic nervous system. Our brain is driven to make up a lot of stories about behavior. Those stories often lead to us personalizing the behavior ourselves, or making sweeping personal and characterological judgments about the other person.
We can feel engulfed by the behavior and then we obsess and ruminate on it, or we push it out of our mind and completely disconnect from it. This engulfment from the energy that our clients bring, or on the other hand, that complete disconnection from it, this is a path to burnout, because it means we are out of true attunement and resonance with both ourselves and our clients.
What’s exhausting is being out of attunement and resonance, that is what leads to burnout. Understanding what behavior is, is just one step to being a better parent coach, but a really non negotiable one. And being able to stay in connection with ourselves, that allows us to stay fully present and fully resonant with our clients, even when there is nothing that we can do to change things for them, even when they are dysregulated. And even when that dysregulation is directed squarely at us.
As counterintuitive as it may sound, the more we can stay truly grounded in what behavior really is, the more we stay grounded in the moment, lean in and really be with families in the moments when what our nervous system really wants to do is just make it stop. Being with families in that way and being with ourselves in that way- that’s the antidote towards burnout and becoming a better parent coach.
No family should have to go through four, or even millions of therapists or parent coaches, before they find one who truly understands the impact of parenting kids who have had hard things happen, and can be with all parts of them. The parts that need the help the most.
I was that therapist in Austin, that therapist that families called after they’d already been to four or what felt like millions of other therapists who not only didn’t help, but unfortunately, often made things worse. I’m confident that I can help Nat and parents like her. I’m not confident, of course, that we’ll see any specific behavior change.
I mean, they’re just way too many factors completely out of my control for me to be confident and that, but I am confident that I can help Nat. My decades in the trenches with struggling families have convinced me that what parents like Nat need more than anything, is to learn how to stop playing behavior whack a mole with their kids behavior, and feel empowered to become their child’s expert.
So in this podcast, you’ll have a front row seat to hearing how Nat and I reveal and understand the root cause of all unwanted behavior,- fear and energy and arousal and activation and the autonomic nervous system that flips the switch of felt safety from connection- safe- to protection, not safe, including her own.
And yes, dear helper, yours, too. I also know that all the interventions in the world are useless unless Nat learns those interventions from someone who believes that absolutely all behavior makes sense. And there’s nothing wrong with Jess’s kid or Nat. And this- this is actually the most important part. And neuroscience proves it.
There simply just aren’t enough helpers in the world to offer Nat and the millions of parents like her what she needs. But now, there’s one more. And that’s you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for joining me for being here. For not quitting.
Episode One of this Become a Better Parent Coach podcast will air on Monday, October 30, with one episode going live every day Monday through Thursday, November 2. But learning is way more fun and impactful when we do it with friends.
So be sure to join the Facebook discussion forum – the link to the the forum on Facebook was in the first email you received when you signed up for this Become a Better Parent Coach Podcast. And I’ll also put it down in the podcast show notes.
I’ll be hosting two live Q and A’s in the Facebook group during the week of the 30th. One on Wednesday, Nov. 1 at 2pm. Eastern, and one on Friday, November 3, at 12pm eastern.
At the end of the week, you’ll be feeling solid in this paradigm shift. And although that isn’t the entire journey toward ending burnout, loving your work again, and becoming a better parent coach, it’s an extremely important first step.
If you’d like to go further and connect for a year, with a group of pretty amazing changemakers in the world, you’ll be invited to join the 2024 cohort of Being With I’ll be talking about being with throughout the week.
You will gain tremendous value from this four day podcast and if at the end you’re considering joining Being With you’ll get a great taste of what it’s like to work with me, which is exactly what I want.
If you’re not considering joining Bing With then you’ll get a great free four day training and begin your path to becoming a better parent coach. And don’t worry, you’ll get a notification on Monday the 30th that the episode one is live so you can get started right away
We’re gonna have so much fun. Thank you for being you for working with kids and their families for still doing this work. And still looking for ways to love your work and be a better parent coach. These kids and their families they need you and you need you. You need to find that spark that love that joy again, because you deserve your work to be fulfilling to be something you love. This work is simply just too hard otherwise. Okay, I’m super excited. And I will be talking with you again on Monday the 30th…and if you just can’t wait until then, you can listen to episodes on The Baffling Behavior Show or grab a copy of my new book Raising Kids with Big, Baffling Behaviors- wherever you buy books online. Bye until then!
