We are all put in situations in which we lack confidence. Perhaps we are taking up a new hobby, meeting a new group of people, or embarking on a new career.

In today’s Self-Care Sunday tip, we take a look at how we can show up as empowered, positive versions of ourselves, even when we feel uncomfortable. After all, how we show up in these situations can determine whether we ultimately enjoy the experience or walk away feeling awkward and even embarrassed.

Showing up as our best possible selves is a skill, one that we teach in our Resilience-Based Parenting™ course, and one that all adults and children can benefit from learning.

Consider, for instance, what people look like when they do not have this skill. They can come across as combative or defensive, when really they are just feeling insecure. Oftentimes, they laugh at themselves, but not in a good way. Rather, their self-deprecation makes people around them feel uncomfortable.

The good news is, we can learn and...

Resilient people know that asking for help is a strength and not a weakness, so in this week’s Self-Care Sunday tip, we encourage you to reach out and ask for support when faced with a challenging situation.

But don’t just ask for any ol’ help. Ask for specific help from specific people.

Many people have a belief that asking for help—or even disclosing their troubles—is a sign of weakness. They think they should be able to handle their problems on their own. They don’t want to seem needy or broken, so they suffer in silence, pretending they are fine when, in reality, they are not okay and need help.

Everyone needs help sometimes, and often, we need specific help from specific people. We might need advice from someone we admire. We might need our sister to pick up our children from school. Or we might need financial support from a family member.

Disappointments, setbacks, failures, and obstacles that feel overwhelming are part of the human...

Resilient people know that their minds can get cluttered with negative thoughts and limiting beliefs, so in this week’s Self-Care Sunday tip, we encourage you to check in with your gut feelings when making decisions.

If no one tells you how important your gut feelings are, you might forget to listen to them. In fact, when we are kids, we are taught to abdicate our own feelings and instead listen to our teachers, our parents, our babysitters, and our coaches. And while sometimes this is appropriate, the danger is that we lose touch with this powerful tool.

We can feel in our bodies when something is the right decision for us, and we can feel in our bodies when it is not. We learn to think our way through decisions instead of feeling our way through decisions, which means we can overlook or intentionally ignore the welcoming and warning signs our gut feelings are trying to give us about the choices and decisions we need to make in life.

But whether we listen to them or not, our...

Resilient people know that events that seem bad in the moment can pave the way for good things in the future, so this week’s tip is to avoid judging the moment, and stay hopeful instead.

If you look back over the course of your life, you will be able to identify things you consider “good” that could not have happened without something you consider “bad” happening first.

Realizing this can help you choose to stay hopeful, even when things in the moment do not feel great.

This is perhaps best described using The Parable of the Chinese Farmer …

Once upon a time there was a Chinese farmer whose horse ran away. That evening, his neighbors came to commiserate.

“We are so sorry to hear that your horse ran away,” They said. “This is most unfortunate.”

The farmer replied, “Maybe, yes. Maybe, no.”

The next day the horse came back bringing seven horses with it.

In the evening, everyone came back and said, “Oh,...

If your kids aren't failing from time to time, they probably aren't pushing themselves. They are playing it safe.

No one who has reached a high level of success made it without falling flat on their face once or twice. 

Great athletes were cut from teams. Great comedians were booed off stage. Great business people went bankrupt.

And great scholars had more theories rejected than accepted. 

But, there are good ways to fail and bad ways to fail. 

When we extract the lessons from our failures, we grow. We become stronger, better, more resilient versions of ourselves. 

And we are more likely to have success in the future.

When we point fingers, make excuses, and blame ... well, that's the bad way to fail.

In Resilience-Based Parenting™, our toolkit for raising tweens and teens (and loving it!), we spend a lot of time helping families learn the skills for normalizing failure, overcoming failure, and recovering from failure. 

Join the waitlist today.

Conversations are our most powerful tool for teaching resilience, modeling the behavior we want our children to emulate, and connecting with our kids. 

In fact, the strength of our relationships with our tweens and teens can be measured by the strength of our conversations.

Conversations that are candid and non-judgmental create relationships that are trusting and resilient, whereas conversations that are one-sided and agenda-driven create relationships that are fragile and disconnected.

In fact, the conversation is the relationship.

The first pillar in Resilience-Based Parenting™, our 52-skill toolkit for raising teens and tweens (and loving it), is about empowering the conversation and changing the relationship you have with your teens and tweens. 

In this pillar, you will learn to: 

• Level with your teens and tweens
• Seek their opinions
• Master the fine art of validation
• Nurture "social competence" 

When you change the conversation, you change the...

In today’s Self-Care Sunday, we encourage you to consider the ways that you take care of yourself when you feel stress.

Most of us have, at one point or another, used coping techniques that are dysfunctional. We deny. We avoid. We blame.

And perhaps, during a global pandemic, we lie around eating pints of mint chocolate chip ice cream.

We use these dysfunctional methods of self-soothing (or self-destruction, depending on your perspective) for three reasons:

1. We all have stressors.

Rich, poor, single, married, old, young, happy, or sad: No one is exempt from stressors. Daily, weekly, or monthly, most of us have moments in our lives when the stress of trying to hold it all together becomes overwhelming.

This is particularly true now, when we are worried about health, finances, and the state of the world.

2. We are not taught resilience skills.

Though all of us will suffer, few of us are taught the skills that help us not only cope with our stressors, but also use them to...

The truth is that we all have to earn our own self-worth. We can't just force ourselves to love ourselves just because our parents told us we are perfect. Instead, we have to go out into the world and behave in such a way that we live up to our own standards and earn our self-respect.

Self-esteem and confidence are not things that can be handed out at awards banquets. They are not shifts we can make to our mindset without something to back them up. Self-confidence and self-worth must be earned.

How do we earn them? We stop living by other people’s standards and instead define our own set of standards for what makes someone worthy and lovable. And then we start living up to those standards by acting accordingly. We spend time using our strengths, and we live in alignment with our values.

When we spend time using our strengths, we naturally feel good about ourselves, and we feel empowered. Using our strengths feels good and ignites our sense of self-confidence. And when we live...

The stories you tell about yourself become self-fulfilling prophecies. They drive your behavior, influence how others respond to you, and either empower you to achieve your dreams or place unnecessary limits on your potential.

Let's look at an example. Imagine that you are a high school student and you tell yourself this story: "I am not very good at school."

This belief would make you feel insecure and anxious in the classroom, which would likely make you reluctant to participate, as well. This would cause your teachers to judge you poorly and give you lower grades, which would corroborate your belief in your academic ineptitude.

All this would probably make you less likely to try very hard at your schoolwork, which would further perpetuate the cycle.

On the other hand, if you told even a slightly more empowering story, the cycle would perpetuate on a more positive track. Imagine if this were the story instead: "It sometimes takes me longer, but I always figure it out."

This belief...