Not By Chance Podcast
Not By Chance Podcast
Are You Reading the Stories Your Teens are Writing About Themselves?
What if you could read your teen's thoughts about themselves? Would their story of their worth match yours about them? Dr. Thayne talks about how the stories we choose to tell ourselves can lead to vastly different outcomes, ranging from destructive to a springboard for success.
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Intro
Self Esteem Stat
Student Body President
Daughter Wants To Drop Out
App Announcement
Driving To the Airport
Closing Self Esteem Talk
Outro
There are as many ways to parent as there are parents in this world. But there is one way to parent that wins every time. And that's doing it intentionally. This show is about helping things go right before they can go wrong. Each episode is chosen to help parents like you, who may be overwhelmed or uninspired, find the ideas and motivation to give their best efforts to the people and place that matters the most. I'm Dr. Tim, Thayne, author of the book and host of the podcast, not by chance, I believe that a family's success and happiness is not by chance. So welcome to the podcast built especially for intentional families. Let's jump in. Well, everybody, thank you for coming today or listening in, whether you're watching this by video or listening to it, thanks for being here. Because this is episode one of season four. I want to thank my podcast manager Talmage, Thayne for helping me do this, he has been prodding me along and helping improve the quality of what I'm doing. So thank him, as we get started here today. I want you to start by, with this little piece of research that I find really profound. And I wonder about the true impact of this reality. And that is that 85% of the world's population have a thinking disorder that have low self esteem. Or they at least believe that they've got a low self esteem and wonder what the true outcome of that is, think about it. Because when low self esteem is essentially the lack of belief in yourself in being able to be effective and successful at different things in your life. And if that belief is not there, you literally are missing the engine of action. In fact, it could be the opposite of that it may actually freeze you in everything that you're doing. So think about the impact of 85% of us in the world having a low self esteem, that is kind of the elephant in the room in every situation that we might be in. So it's at the core of so many things. And that's why I wanted to talk about that today. Last night, I was on a on a Zoom meeting, and there was a breakout sessions. And I ended up with about 10 people in my breakout session. And in it, we were given a scenario of basically a family that had moved from one area to another area, they had two children, a 15 year old daughter, a 12 year old son. And they described in this scenario, some of the challenges these two kids were going through and some of the some of the ways they were feeling about themselves. And my first thought was, how does anybody know in this scenario, what these kids are thinking and feeling? And maybe what their unintentional thoughts are, but the scenario had all of that listed in it. And so I posed to the rest of the group, I said, Wouldn't it be awesome? If, if the people most important to us in our lives, we had this ability to see this invisible thought bubble above their head, and we could see what their self talk was and what their thinking is. And in many of those cases, we'd be shocked, I think, would probably disagree with a lot of that. We might see things in their lives that show that they're stuck. There may be school refusal, maybe they're they're Surly and angry a lot of the time maybe, maybe they're just sad and depressed and anxious. You know, whatever those outward manifestations are at the core of that, at some level is their story. They're telling themselves that they may not even know they are, it's going to be things like in that thought bubble. You know, I'm not smart, or I'm not pretty, or I'm not able to do this hard thing in front of me. Or people don't like me, or I just don't think I'm gonna be successful in life. You know, whatever those things are, wouldn't it be nice to be able to read that in the stock bubble? And then, in our own way, start to help them make those adjustments? Well, the reality is most of us don't even know what's in our own thought bubble, about ourselves, because that's the, that's the trick here. We think it's a reality instead of we're living our reality instead of living the stories we're telling ourselves that's what we think. Okay, so today, I hope by the end of this podcast, you have some concrete ideas and thoughts about how to actually maybe build your own self esteem, but also help those around you to improve there as well. Several years ago, a couple of decades ago, actually, maybe longer as I think about it, I was at Virginia Tech, getting my PhD. And so I'd moved my, my wife and I and our little son out there. And then later, we had our second son Talmage, who, as I mentioned, is our podcast manager. And we're out there going through school, well, my brother lived, only a couple states away, maybe it's even nearby, but in Ohio, and, and one Christmas, we drove down to his place and spent Christmas with him in his family. While we were there, we were talking about the good old days, we were talking about, you know, what happened is we were kids and, and as I started to listen to his story, I was stunned, because he started telling the story about himself. As someone that was friendless, that was always kind of on the wrong side of the teachers and the high school. As someone that wasn't very popular, and the girls didn't like and all of that. Well, what stunned me about this is that it was almost the exact opposite of what I saw him as I was just a year younger than him going through school. And so I saw something very, very different. And I remember, at that moment, I thought, wow, I am theoretically by the way, I learned that the stories we tell ourselves have have a huge impact in our lives. But this I was now being confronted, like firsthand with this very limited story of his experience that he had crafted into a narrative about himself. That led to I'm sure being stuck in a lot of ways. I didn't really know what to do with that, even though I was a therapist, master's level, I was getting my PhD in marriage and family therapy. I, this is personal. This was not just a client that I didn't know and I could be impartial with and all of that I actually had true data from my own experience that and of course, we were very close. That told me that he was kind of a rock star he was he was actually the student body president of our, our high school as a senior. Now you would have never guessed that would be part of the story listening to him. And, and but but in reality isn't that position certainly wasn't our school, actually a popularity contest. So he was basically the most popular guy in school. And from my perspective, all the girls loved him. And he could have dated any of the girls in our, in our school because he was popular, and he was kind and he was good. And I noticed too, that that he didn't have quite the correct story about his family life. I always saw him as maybe the the golden child, because he was always the one willing to help my mom out. If she had chores to do, she could always count on him to take care of those chores. So it's kind of interesting, isn't it, how we can have a lived experience, but actually select out of that just little parts that are disconnected from all the other things floating through the river of life, and pull it out and say that defines me, that really is who I am. The reason I want to drive this home, this story situation is because we can we can see that the stories are not really the full truth. They they are, there's no way we can take into all account all experiences and all data to come up with a comprehensive full story of ourselves based on reality. It has to be selected. And so each of us do that. And for whatever reason, we will select oftentimes stories or narratives about ourselves that are completely unhelpful. Just last night, we were sitting on a couch in our front room, and my wife and I and and our daughter Afton. And she was looking a little stressed out, let's say and she's kind of slouching on the couch and her feet up on the autumn and she's she's trying to explain to us how much she has in her life and how difficult things are. There's a lot of things going on in her life right now. She's young adult, she's going to college, it's a new semester. She's got a serious boyfriend. She's she's trying to get a new job and start working for us and other other part time jobs and so on. And so she's overwhelmed. Right. And my story about her is that she has been this really competent, steady, you know, daughter that has just been dutiful and, and just takes care of things and does well in life. And so when I see her really struggling, I think to myself, I think it's okay to kind of let her be a little flexible. Because what she said, she goes, I'm freaking out here. She goes, I think I need to drop all my classes and take a leave of absence. And, and just just work, just do one thing. And I was not sure about that. But I was in my mind, thinking, how can I relieve her have some of the stresses in her life, she deserves it right, she's been so good. done so well. I think it's okay to relieve her from that. Thank heavens that I've got a, I've got a co parent, and that she's able to take a different perspective. What she did, and that's amazing, what Roxanne did is I looked at and I was watching this with kind of two minds, I'm having this experience as a parent directly with my daughter, but I'm also watching her mom, and noticing what she's doing. And I want you to look at these as tips on how to help other people with their self esteem. One of the things she did is she said, Let me, let me suggest that some of the things you're feeling are very temporary, right now, you're tired, this is new, all of these things are kind of unknown. It's almost like, you know, you're you're trying to juggle a lot of things at one time, at a level that you've never done before. And she said that, you know, with give it a little time, you know, keep going for a couple of weeks. And I think you're gonna find that what you're carrying, will get easier to carry. So there's tip number one I would say is that instead of buying into someone's like a child or a teenager, or a young adult story that I can't do this, remember your story about them. And that it's they have strengths they don't even know that they have, because they're telling themselves some other kind of story that's, that's causing them to get stuck in the situation. And Roxanne was able to kind of keep herself from sucking into that story, believing that story. And just going with that story, where I was struggling a little bit. And and so super helpful in this case that she was taking a counter position. The other thing that Roxanne did that I just loved, she said Afton, you can do this. And she didn't stop there, she started to give her concrete evidence in her life of hard things she had done and ultimately become very successful at. And I just thought, that's great. We'll talk about you know, there are times and places where a pep talk is really all they need. We don't need to necessarily unload the burden that they're carrying, and take it off them. But maybe lift them and strengthen them and help them understand they have the tools to actually accomplish it. I will say that I wasn't a complete, you know, I didn't buy 100%. And I wasn't trying to lift her from all lift all of her burdens off her shoulders. But I did kind of salvage it a little bit at the end, because I said you know what, after and I agree with mom, you can do this, I know you can. The other thing that might help you Afton is that this is really a four month window. And then it's summer break. And so you've got this time bounded experience, where it will be intense. And it'll get easier as you go with some of these things because your competence is going to grow. But overall, this this kind of Sprint that you're on is just a sprint, it's not going to be forever, and you will have relief. And it's almost that light at the end of the tunnel. Everybody needs to know that I want to share something very exciting with you. I'm in a bit of a transition, I'm going to be really focusing instead of the day to day on Homeward Bound, there's other people stepping in to help operate the company. But I'm going to be focusing on a really exciting project that's been on the side for a long time. That's going to come to fruition over the next few months. And one of the cool things about this is that I'm actually kind of able to, for the first time joined forces with all of my family members. They all have talents and skills that will enable us to get where we want to go with this new project which is by the way, an app that will help parents help their children and teens develop self confidence and help them obviously with the mental health and all of those Other parts of their life. So it's like this technological way to get everything we've been doing over the last many years into the hands of as many families and parents as possible. I remember years and years ago, the very one of the very first families that we worked with, at Homeward Bound, I was in their home and over a three day period. And then as we were leaving, going to the airport, the father was driving me to the airport. And he kept saying, Tim, look at all the houses on the side of the road. And I guarantee you that every single family would benefit from what you helped our family do over the last three days. And he had pointed at the next, the next little town or the next community that we'd see on the side of the road, he'd say, all of them, Tim need what you have shared with our family. And then he asked me this question, he said, How are you going to help them all? And I just said, I don't know, I really don't know. And at that time, I was just figuring I was trying to help one family at a time. But the exciting announcement really is that we're developing an app that is going to help many, many families at the same time, essentially facilitating the things that I was basically helping that family do so many years ago. And technology is able to help us get there. And my family, which has been so core to everything I've done in my life, is going to be a big part of that. So over the coming weeks and months, I'm going to share with you in this podcast, the progress we're making, the different people who are part of it and what they're doing and to help launch this app. And so it's going to be really exciting, I hope you enjoy it. And I'll give you an opportunity also to be a part of it. As we are looking for those early adopters, those people who will help us beta test those people who will give us suggestions on how it's working in their family. So soon I will share with you a page a website where you can go to you say yes, I'd love to be a part of this project. Now, here's the thing about self esteem that I think we all know, self esteem does not come out of this nice, smooth, easy life, where we have win after win after win. It comes from a struggle, it's the struggle, and then the ultimate ability to conquer that situation that actually creates in us a belief that we can do hard things and the more of those little things that mount up, the greater our self esteem. And the more generalizable that belief in ourself becomes, because we'll venture out this way and out that way. And we'll try new things here and there. Unfortunately, as parents, sometimes we'll get in the way of the struggle, and get in the way of that other exploration. What's the worst that could happen? The reality is the worst that can happen in most cases is she fails a class in this case, she'd have to retake the class. But in the process, I guarantee you there will have been some personal growth, that would happen, and ultimately she would succeed. All right, so for the takeaways for this podcast, I hope that you can express your belief and other people in ways that they can really accept that share stories about other people that they know maybe it's yourself of how you were able to succeed in similar situation and point out their own strengths and how they can do the same thing. Because it's as they conquer difficult things. That's how they're going to build that self esteem, if they're going through a tough time, give them a light at the end of the tunnel to help them know this is not an ongoing forever thing that they're going to make it through. Because as they do that, that becomes a star in their on their resume, so to speak, that tells them they can do hard things, help them take just the next step. And sometimes that's all they need in order to take them the next step, and the next and the next. And ultimately, they will complete something that they didn't think that they could. And that becomes a part of their story. I can do hard things. They may not have realized that it was just one little step at a time that they got there. So in closing, I don't want you to buy into the your own stories about yourself if you're struggling with self esteem. Know that first of all, stories about yourself and about the past actually can be rewritten. That's something that most of us don't realize. We don't realize that that's possible to actually modify the effects of our history on our present. The bottom line, one of the greatest things you can teach your kids and yourself is to rewrite the stories of your past so that they become empowered worrying, instead of disabling or holding you back at the heart of that is, is the opportunity that each one of us have to craft, the stories that we tell ourselves that become conscious and real, that ultimately lift our self esteem, empowering us in all kinds of ways in our lives. Parents, your time is valuable, and I'm grateful you spent some of it with us. What you're intentionally doing in your home life is inspiring and unmatched in its importance and long term effects. Ask yourself, What am I going to do because of what I've learned today?