Episode 253: The Sleep Strategy Every Parent Needs | Kristine Petterson | Parenting Coach & Sleep Specialist
What if better parenting starts with being kinder to yourself? In this episode, Kara talks with Kristine Petterson, founder of Mindful Parenting Evolution, about how emotional health, nervous system support, and real rest can transform both your parenting and your self-worth. They dig into why sleep matters more than hustle, how to rewire habits shaped by burnout and shame, and why connection - not control - is the future of parenting. If you're a new parent, a cycle-breaker, or someone working on reparenting yourself, this conversation will shift how you lead your family and your life.
“Finding our power on a daily basis takes a simple touch back to ourselves. What is my energy level? What do I need? Am I coming from abundance? This pause gives us all the power we need. ”
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Follow along using the Transcript
Chapters:
(00:00:01) What Is Joy-Based Success and Why It Matters
(00:04:00) Teaching Yoga, Sleep Training, and Supporting Parents
(00:08:00) Learning to Prioritize Self-Care Without Guilt
(00:14:00) The Power of Physical Touch and Connection
(00:19:00) Redefining Power and Presence for Women and Parents
(00:24:00) Ditching Diet Culture and Finding Energy in Self-Acceptance
(00:29:00) From Self-Punishment to Gentle Parenting
(00:34:00) Building a Supportive Community and Healing the Inner Child
(00:40:00) Slowing Down, Listening In, and Trusting Yourself
(00:44:00) Parenting, Reparenting, and Making Space for Children’s Light
(00:50:00) Normalizing Repair and the Reality of Imperfect Parenting
(00:52:00) Group Coaching, Mindful Sleep Support, and How to Work With Kristine
Your success in the world is based on the amount of joy you're experiencing on a day-to-day basis and the amount of energy. That you have to put into all of the ways you create change, and you create abundance and positivity for the world.
That's Christine Petterson. I'm Kara Duffy, and this is The Powerful Ladies Podcast.
I am so excited to have you on The Powerful Ladies Podcast today. I had the pleasure of meeting you at your brother Andrew's art show that you were on our Superman team for back in October, and he had told me all about you when he and I first started working together. Started following you right away.
And I had told my team, I'm like, we're gonna have her on the podcast. What she's doing is so interesting and you're finally here. And that's my favorite when I've been waiting and now it comes around. So let's tell everyone who you are, where you are in the world, and what you do.
Great. Thank you, Kara. I am excited.
Two, you're such a force and it's beautiful to connect two forces together. It'll be fun to see where we go with this. Yeah. I'm Christine Petterson. I currently live in Moscow, Idaho, which is a sweet little town that just keeps pulling me back with its simplicity and ease and it's focus on community, and that is really what I'm all about these days, creating community for.
Spiritual folks who are looking to deepen their experience with themselves and spirit and what they can do in the world. And I also focused that on families in particular. So I started in education. I was working teaching high school for 10 years and had a lot of stress and insomnia, and I really struggled with boundaries.
I wanted to help everyone. All the time, and everywhere I looked was some problem that needed to be fixed and I've learned a lot since those days, but it's really interesting. That is where my journey started and I went from. Leaving public education to teaching yoga in schools. So I taught prenatal postnatal yoga and I taught yoga for preschoolers, which was just, I love that.
Yeah. Yeah. It's so needed. And I'm like, how can we do this at the youngest age possible? Start thinking of listening within when we're 18 months old, and I love that. Like we all needed that when we were 18 months old and yet we, I'm 45 and I'm still learning that listening within lesson.
How valuable it is.
And then once I had children myself, I realized how hard the postpartum journey is. So I spend a lot of my time when I'm not teaching yoga these days, coaching parents. I have a newborn sleep plan, so I myself struggled with sleep and after. Having an infant who struggled to sleep, I became a pediatric sleep consultant.
So I help families get their kiddos sleeping, and I am now doing that in a really mindful, respectful and kind way. And I'm sure we'll dive into this a little bit more, but the idea that you can have healthy boundaries and you can create a really strong attachment. At the same time that you hold boundaries to keep yourself and your family safe.
The power of and, you can do it and that, and you can have it all, and it actually works better. Yep.
Yeah. Little did we know.
Yeah. Did you always, like you became a teacher? I am assuming you were thought about being a teacher from a young age and I see a pattern of helping people, educating people, and especially embracing.
The either young parts of people or just young people in general is, would eight year olds, you be like, yep, that's exactly what I thought I'd be doing.
I have no idea what the eight year olds me would have wanted. It's so interesting to think about the 8-year-old me, right? There's like the, there's this 8-year-old inside of us and then there's this teenager inside of us.
Which is really interesting to think about both of them. In my case, both were very focused on performing and pleasing for others. Yeah, I was not directed at all or focused at all on looking inside myself and listening to what I needed. I was like 100% focused on looking out at the world and doing damage control.
So I'm one of those sensitive people who is. It just has this sort of an internal. Sensor. That's always ready. But my nervous system has always been a little bit on fire. Ready for the next tragedy or, I, as an 8-year-old, I was very involved with endangered species and we recently traveled to Mexico and I saw the green.
Ship. And I was like, I spent so much money and time in my younger days, like raising money and sending it off to Greenpeace. I got really teary and was like, there's so much of my childhood wrapped up in this.
So I wanted to help people and I wanted to save the world. And I saw a lot of hurting.
And a lot of struggle that I think I felt pretty powerless to face. Or or not to face, but pretty powerless to change. But I wasn't afraid to face it.
Yeah. I think that's a really interesting distinction because there are a lot of people I know who are a, who are just so disheartened by the things that they don't like in the world or wish could be different.
And because they don't think they can affect it, they just put up the blinders and go the other direction. Where I'm the opposite person where I'm like. I can't stop thinking about it till we fix it. So what are we gonna do? Yeah. And so I think it's interesting that you got to hold those two spaces of feeling disempowered, but also being like, and I'm just gonna stare at it.
'cause maybe if I stare at it long enough it will dissolve.
Yeah. And I think my adult self, I've done a lot of healing recently and I would say that my adult self doesn't necessarily agree with the like. It's not my job to fix everything.
Yep.
It's my job to notice what I'm in control of and what I'm not in control of.
And before COVID, I tried to do some codependent recovery, but it actually wasn't until. Like my own physical health and wellbeing and my, the wellbeing of my family was dependent on me saying no and me making a choice that other people might not agree with or might be disappointed in that, where I actually had to own this idea of self-care.
Before that I was like a self-care. I faked self-care. In fact, I love to joke with my clients that I would lie to my therapists just to let, help them think that I was doing okay because I wanted them to know that they were doing a great job helping me on my bad to healing. I, I didn't wanna be a disappointment, and so I would.
I would pretend that I was fine, and I mean that right there is just like a huge codependent red flag, right? That my wellbeing is always being rated. On what other people are observing. Or thinking about me. So it was a really interesting shift to be like, yeah, wait a minute. Check in with yourself before you make choices about your career and your vaccination status, and all of these things that. We have weighing in on our decision making process if we're sensitive. Carers of the world. Like growing up like that, it actually felt like I was making a moral and ethical choice to go against the world when I started taking care of myself.
Yep. It was hard so dare you become. Number two, let alone number one.
And so it's fun. I get to teach selfishness now and I'm like, let's reclaim this idea of selfishness and own the idea that your success in the world isn't based on other people's observations or judgements of you.
Your success in the world is based on the amount of joy you're experiencing on a day-to-day basis.
And the amount of energy. That you have to put into all of the ways you create change and you create abundance and positivity for the world.
And I think too you work in such a unique space of like new and young parents and the world is currently not set up to give parents of any kind, like extraordinary grace.
Like everyone's doing it wrong, not doing it good enough. Yep. All we talk about is what you should fix and change and improve. And I keep going back to the women in Mongolia who ride horses their whole pregnancy, strap their kids to their back, keep doing all their things. Those kids look like they're fine.
Like it seems to be working. They're not gonna piano, they're not going the other places. What are they modeling
for their kids? Yeah. Just like strength, resilience. I'm gonna do me. Yeah. And yet you're right, there's so much judgment on new parents. It's very rare to have someone asking whether it's your in-laws or, your.
Medical care providers or your sleep trainer, right? Like this is something that I'm really focused on, is just asking like, what's, what works for you? What's feeling best for you? What's your intuition telling you? And and I will say that a lot of responses that I get aren't based in like real intuition and knowing,
yeah.
It's
based in a scarcity mindset. It's based in a fear. It's based in trauma, so they're not able to answer honestly. Like how, what do I really feel or notice when I stand in my power? 'cause we're not standing in our power. We've been really disempowered as women in general during pregnancy for sure.
And. Our postpartum experience during my pregnancy, I really did not like limitation, defining what I could and couldn't do. Did I reduce the amount of sushi that I ate? Yes. Yes, I did. Did I eliminate it entirely? No. I also, I have a picture of me doing a handstand at, beyond the recommended time, and I was like, don't show this to my midwives who were of course my yoga students, so they knew. But yeah, I wasn't slowing down for anyone. And I also know that in my prenatal postnatal yoga training, which is interesting that you got the opposite feedback.
I got the feedback that the human body needs to be touched.
That touch between yoga participants and for me to come along at the end of class and put my hands on shoulders or on the head or, even just like touching pressure points where they could have sinus blockage or whatever, like these healing, there's so many things our hands can do that are really healing and helpful and the bodies.
Hormone levels are just getting ready to connect with this baby that's saying nothing but touch me please. Yeah. Cuddle me and snuggle me. So it's so interesting that our culture really doesn't promote that either, again, it's the fear over. Because there are people who may really struggle with physical contact during yoga class.
We never wanna touch any of our students. Ask first. I'm pretty good about asking first, but I'm also assuming if you're in my class, in a pre postnatal yoga class, that you came there to engage and deeply connect. So I do a lot of partner poses. All of my classes start with a warmup and some active standing poses.
And then in every class we balance together. So we use each other for balance, touch points. And then we also do a little massage, so stretching by pulling against each other. And lifting each other's heads and giving some traction and just having that kinesthetic feedback. Touch and connection is so vital.
And I don't necessarily think that people come to that class because of that, but if I don't perform those tasks, if I have another agenda for a few weeks, I hear about it. Yeah. They're like, can we touch each other today? Which
is so cool.
And. I, it broke my heart to hear that I, there's studies that we need six, 10, however many hugs a day to be optimum.
So for all the people who are living alone, like we have to be at like seeking hugs as much as we can, and then they remove the ability for priests and other spiritual leaders to hug people in prison. And of course there was a direct correlation between emotional behavior, acting out. Just the general life force of the people who were allegedly rehabilitating.
And I love that we wandered into this touch component because I don't think that it's something that is culturally accepted enough. Like everyone's yeah, especially in the US right? It's okay, give me my three feet of space. Like the excuse to not with coming in six feet during COVID, I think some people were like, yes.
And then I. I just think we're missing that component of there's so much communication to be had in it. Like it's very hard to hold someone else's hand or touch's shoulder without becoming more in tune with what's actually happening to them. Like it would be weird for me not to touch someone and feel something different that I couldn't sense from three feet away.
Yeah. So when you were talking about helping people rediscover their listening and their knowing and that spiritual side. Does that cross over into that space as well?
Of physical connection? I don't know. I was just thinking about that, like how sweet we can, how sweetly we can connect with people.
Through
eye contact. Yeah. And honestly, one of the coolest things I learned during. Our lockdown was that the energy that comes through a Zoom meeting is weirdly yeah. Like communicative and emotive. So I was always shocked at how rejuvenated and energized, I'm an extrovert, so I really looked, I continued teaching yoga almost immediately got on Zoom to teach yoga because I needed that touch point with other sweet souls out there in the galaxy to be, to be available, to see and be seen.
And I think you can do that anywhere. And if you're really making yourself available, you can also avoid seeing and being seen anywhere. Like we also know the people that really struggle
To be seen regardless of what mode of communication they have. Do I absolutely thrive on a nice eight Second, let's take three breaths together and just wrap our arms around each other and dig into this hug, because a quick one is not gonna do.
Absolutely. And I have I have people in my life who just know that's how we hug.
Yeah.
So when I see them in the grocery store, it's not a quick side hug. It's like I'm coming at you. I'm coming in for a big old hug. And then I have other people in my life who probably aren't comfortable with that.
But how cool is it that you can create those. Points of connection with people. And I do oftentimes at the end of yoga classes, say if you didn't get enough oxytocin in this class, then let's connect with two or three other people and you can give a silent hug.
Yeah.
It doesn't have to be a 20 minute conversation.
You don't have to open up a big old can of worms to see and be seen. You can just have eye contact and a juicy hug. I think it really depends on who you are and how you wanna connect, but I think the intention of connection being there is the key.
That reminded me of one of the coolest things I've ever done in a coaching training program.
They had everyone in the class line up in two rows. We faced each other and for a minute each you would rotate between your partners. Yep. And all you did was just keep eye contact for the minute. Yep. If you want a moving emotional experience that rips your heart out and you actually, did you just cry?
Oh it's like you see, like you are literally looking at someone's soul and like it took. 60 seconds was someone that I barely knew. Yep. And I just knew things about them. Yep. There was no way to not know them. And I'm like, why don't we do this more regularly? Like I, maybe I need to start doing it in my happy hours.
We're gonna do an awkward stare and then we'll all talk to each other. But it's,
I do it regularly in my yoga classes. I just have them sit knee to knee and take a minute and no one says. That was easy and I'd love to do more of those. And we laugh sometimes about you'd never do that in a grocery store, and it's my job as your yoga teacher to create uncomfortable spaces for you to like really dig into what it means to share humanity with another.
He like human who's going through all their own stuff that you don't have to take responsibility for. You can just bear witness. Yeah.
And we do this with our pets all the time. Like I often am just staring into brisket's eyes and I'm like, I know you're more than a dog. I know you are. You are my soulmate.
Yeah. You can't look into something's eyes for more than five seconds and then be like, I do want a hamburger. That's not how it works. Yeah. No. It's so interesting that we feel safe doing it with animals, but with people it's like, Ooh, this is gonna get weird. 'cause I think we know that they're gonna see us too.
Absolutely. And isn't that terrifying? And that's, I think it's the interesting thing, like the reason that we cry is that we see this like our friends are holding up a mirror for us.
Of we are getting to see deeply into like their sorrow and pain and their growth and healing, and we're also having to reveal this to ourselves and to them and to the world.
Yeah. It's like a journaling practice, right? Where you're just getting called out, but it's just a minute of staring into someone's eyes and you don't have to explain anything. That's what I love about it. Nope, don't have to explain anything.
There's no talking. Yep. Yeah. So you're in a position where you are, your whole world is set up to be empowering people.
You're also raising two powerful ladies of your own. How do you define the words powerful and ladies and when they're next to each other? Do those definitions change?
Ooh, that's really a great question. I love. The idea, and I say this a lot in descriptions of yoga classes or even online classes, I should be using it more.
Stand in your power.
And I think that can mean a lot of different things. To a lot of different people and sometimes power feels aggressive, but I really love the idea of teaching it from an alignment standpoint. So feeling your feet connected to Mother Earth, feeling yourself, like correcting misalignments.
Yeah. That happen while we're standing at the grocery store that happen while we're chopping vegetables or scrolling on our phones. Like how can we. Stand in alignment with who we are. Really take a breath and feel our heart beating and open to our deepest knowing and our deepest power.
I love this idea of just getting still and the problem, I think with finding our power on a day-to-day basis.
Is that we think it takes a lot of time and energy, but really it just takes touching back and knowing who we are, being present. Being honest about our energy levels. Yeah. But it is amazing how that presence gives you. Power. And it makes it so much easier to empower others. Yes. When you recognize that you, when you can stand and be really present and really open to your truth
It creates this never ending well of energy and abundance.
We go, I love where this is going. I love the idea of your whole world is connecting people to be in alignment so they can access their power. 'cause there, there are steps to doing these things. Like I joke that. I go to my hairdresser, my hair looks great, and I'm like, give me tips so I can do this by myself.
I get home, I can never recreate it. Yeah, because we're clearly missing step zero through six, like the foundation of which I am doing my hair there is, I am missing some core functions, and I think that's the same thing that happens so often when. There's all these people who are sharing their knowledge and sharing what's worked for them.
It's how do we get back to step negative five? Yeah. So we can meet people who need us the most where they are. Like how have you experienced that journey in bringing the growth you've had and going backwards to meet the people that you are serving in yoga, in the sleep training, and just everyone that you're building a community with.
Yeah, I think it's challenging and I look back at my own experience and I sought this knowledge from others for a very long time.
And was completely unable to access it because all of my effort and energy was going into just making it look. From outside appearances, like I was holding it together.
Yeah.
I could not do the healing. So I think a lot of what I do is just modeling, caring less about what other people think.
Yeah. And.
Tuning in more to what I really need. It's that time of year where everyone's making New Year's resolutions and as I like look through my Facebook feed and everyone's talking about the five pounds they haven't lost for the last 20 years, but this is gonna be the year that they spend 80% of their effort and life trying to lose five pounds.
That last five pounds. I'm like. I don't really think, if you listen within, that's your heart's desire. Like I think that's our cultural desire for you to like, look and feel skinnier and healthier and shinier and younger. I'm 45 and I'm really getting hit by the youth ads and I'm like, what would it look like to love myself with wrinkles?
And creaky knees and then how do I model that? For folks who don't have the energy to take care of themselves in the way they really need to. Yeah, because their self-care is performative.
And my head just instantly goes to, if your issue is five pounds, chances are that's an emotional five pounds.
So whatever you do like at the gym or food isn't gonna get rid of them anyway.
No. Also, if you take a minute to learn anything about diets and set points and metabolism. What we know now is that diets don't work, that our body has a set point it wants to be at. And you can work so hard to change it temporarily, see great results, and have everyone pat you on the back for the effort and the energy that you put into wearing that pair of jeans and three months later you're back at your set point feeling like a failure. So just. Love your body and feel grateful for where it's at. And know that you can be healthy at every size and then how much more energy you're getting, that 80% of the energy that you were doing, like meal planning and exercising and all of the things there's so much joy that opens up when you take, like when I took my disordered eating and my disordered exercise out of the picture, I was like, oh, I cannot believe how much energy I have for healing.
Yeah, and helping others because I'm not spending 10 hours a day either shaming myself or planning to restrict or punish myself well, so that I could lose that last five pounds.
And then on the other side too, being mad at yourself for wanting tacos. Yeah. Wanting a margarita like in, if you're gonna do it, at least enjoy it.
Like I, it's exactly we're so mean to ourselves.
And that actually has been an interesting, and I think I could, I have spent entire coaching calls with my clients on this idea of you'll never be able to stop punishing your children. Unless you can stop punishing yourself and all of the ways that we as adults threaten, punish, restrict, and otherwise make ourselves miserable and we're totally unconscious about it.
I wanna repeat that because I think that is a huge bell ringer of a aha moment. If you cannot change how you punish your children, if you don't change how you punish yourself. That's a big deal. And I don't think most people are even aware of how they punish themselves.
No. I actually sent this video I found to Andrew yesterday of this dad who was in a car with his daughter. His daughter. He was thinking, and his daughter goes, dad, what's wrong? And he's oh, nothing. He stopped himself and realized, he just turned off her intuition. Yeah. By saying like everything was fine 'cause now she's doubting herself or she knows he's a liar.
So he went back and he said, thank you for asking how I was feeling. I was thinking about something that's causing me stress. I'm okay, but I wanna acknowledge that you noticed it and you
noticed
this theme of noticing keeps showing up in different things I've been looking at lately. There was even last year.
A mother who changed her chore pattern, and this may even come from your page for like of a mother who stopped giving chores and started acknowledging kids when they noticed when something had to be done. The trash, the cleanup, and I, it may, it gave me this aha moment of how so many people are not trained to notice.
No. We love to turn off our noticing. Yes.
That
actually feels safer for us.
Yeah. And you and I are both oldest, so I don't know if being oldest, like you don't have a choice, like you have to notice on behalf of other people. Yeah. But it's like the classic guy trope of they don't notice when the sink's full.
They don't notice when you're supposed to show up in this way. And I'm like, how are we conditioning not just the stereotypical men, male trope. How are we conditioning all people to turn off their noticing, which I think is in alignment with turning off your knowing and your intuition. Yeah. So how are you helping people get.
Back to those things like are you pointing out to parents like, this might be how you are punishing yourself. Like how are you helping people make those steps back?
That is the biggest question. And that's the fun thing about coaching is that we get to ask questions and then the community shares out.
And I actually find that to be really helpful. Full. In fact, the most fun that I've ever had helping parents has been in a group setting where they're all cheering each other on.
Yeah.
And I asked the question. After saying, you can't stop punishing your kids unless you stop punishing yourself. And everyone's I don't punish myself.
But then when I ask the question, what? When you listen to your own voice inside your head, what does it sound like? What tone are you speaking into yourself? Yeah. What are the words that you're saying? What we find is that it's full of judgment, and it's usually a voice that sounds a lot like. A difficult member of an authoritarian person in your life.
Either a teacher or a member of your church, or a parent or a grandparent who wanted you to be something different than you were. Yeah. And that's really common. So you're gonna punish yourself in their voice and those punishing thoughts. Are maybe something that person would never say to you, but their voice is in your head because you, you took that on and you took that in.
So that's a really interesting part of opening that up. What is that voice? Inside your head, where is that coming from? What does it sound like? And then how is that different from your true, authentic voice And just teaching people how to speak to themselves, like they would speak to a friend.
Is huge and that's a really big change and we see a lot of parenting shifts coming from there because then again, when you can stop the punishing thought and say, okay, I know I'm experiencing this thought and these feelings, and that's normal, and everyone experiences these similar thoughts and feelings, I know I'm not alone and I can speak to myself as a friend.
If my friend was experiencing this, what would I say to them? And then actually write that down or say that, or text a friend and say, I'm really needing to hear this right now. And they're gonna say, heck yeah, that's exactly what you should be saying to yourself. So I have people create a lot of different tools for themselves.
So they either text me or email me or drop me a message, or they have a friend group that they've created that's like my healing friend group who are gonna be the voice in their head that they need when they catch themselves. But the noticing and the catching themselves is huge. And then you can start catching yourself saying those things to your kids.
Yep. But until you ca, you stop the cycle where it starts, which is like deep inside your eight year olds. Insecure, fear-based, scarcity, mindset, self. There's you can't like untrain or unlearn. The words you're then you're scripting. And I will say that many of my parents come to me and the first thing they want me to do is, can you just write me a script for getting out the door in the morning?
You just tell me what to say and not sound like an a-hole. And I'll say it and make me a sleep plan. And I'll say these things so that I'm not threatening to end all play dates and take away all their favorite toys, but until they go to sleep, right? Like we do awful things at the end of the day trying to get our kids to sleep.
And I'm like, I can write you a script, but actually what I really want is for you to go to the source and start changing the way that you're punishing yourself. And parents really struggle with it. It took me years. It took me probably two years of really working on all aspects of shame.
In
my life and that sort of internalized, judgmental negativity I had, whether it was because I was a woman or whether it was because I was bigger my body as a dancer or because I am a loud mouth who always has a lot to say, and so I'm constantly sticking my foot in my mouth, right? Like I and your friend going, no, you're not.
But it's interesting, right? Like in the moments where you're like, get in the car and you're driving away and you're like, I probably shouldn't have said all that,
but yeah. So yeah, it's really hard to change the dynamics that we have and it starts with us and it's a little bit scary.
Yeah, it is scary, but it's that conversation of. Real contentment, real happiness, all the good stuff. Even confidence. We can't feel it until we're dealing with the stuff we don't want to or asking the question we're afraid to really have an answer to.
Or like saying, safe and small sounds good in the short term moment when you're exhausted and burnt out, but it never leads to anything good. Like it, it just leads to, yeah, blah. And that's not the game I'm playing. I don't think you're playing that game either.
Oh, no. I it's really fun, the risks you can take when you are standing in your power and deeply connected to.
What moves you in the world and when you're deeply connected to that, making mistakes, sticking your foot in your mouth and having to go back and repair, it's not that big of a deal. Yeah. You know that's the price of admission of living, I don't wanna say fearlessly, but living with courage.
Yeah. Yeah. How have the women in your life. Giving you room and to be more courageous and to be more in alignment with yourself.
Yeah. That's interesting. I've always been a teacher. So my closest friends are my favorite students. Which is interesting. So I play a role of teacher to them, but I also think it's really important to always be getting like, feedback and interesting ideas from students.
And the students that I love most are very close friends now. And we're good at calling each other out. Yeah. We are, we're really good at at being there for each other and supporting each other. But we're also good at acknowledging I think you could use some support in this area.
How can I help you? Which sounds a lot different than you're not pulling your weight or you're disappointing me, or this isn't working for me. Yeah. I'm sensing you need some support. How can I help you? Yeah. And that's really cool. And I I. Grew up with a mom and a stepmom and they're both very different and amazing in their own way.
So I feel like I had a lot of great examples for creativity and and having a really strong social circle has always been really important to me. Whether it was my undergrad days or my teaching days at the high school or my yoga teaching days. I really love to surround myself with incredible women.
One of the things that we've been asking everyone this year is what do you want? What are you manifesting? How can this community of powerful ladies. Help you solve a problem, contribute to you. It's a big group, so what do you need? What do you want?
Oh, that's beautiful. Yeah. Here, so here's the really sweet thing.
I've been really moving slowly into this year. And usually I am like in November thinking about what I wanna manifest, and I have a big vision board and I've got like my words. My word for last year was expansion. I really wanted to grow my classes and reach more people. While that's my goal this year, I'm also a little bit more selfishly focused, like I wanna take a watercolor class and I want to learn to knit better, and it's things that I am, it's professionally, I'm really like focused on connecting with this really sweet group of people, and I have, this should I should be investing in systems so that I can have 50 people signing up for classes every month. Like I should be scaling, and I have to really ask myself like, is that. My voice or is that the, Instagram algorithm? Yes. Telling me what, where I should be putting my money. So it's a really interesting time for me, and I am, my mantra the beginning of this year is, it's safe to pause.
And listen.
Yep. I really resonate with that because my new year has not started the way I expected to. Not for any bad reasons, but like things just happened that delayed feeling, like running out the door and delayed the I think similar to you, like I started doing strategy with my clients in September.
'cause it takes a long time. Yeah. And so usually by now I'm like, let's go. Like we're in it. This year has been like, so much slower and I am actually okay with it. Yeah. And I have my board on my phone and the phrase is getting closer to what matters most. That's what this year is about.
I love that you can borrow it. You can. That's great. But it has been this weird reflection of listening more and slowing down and being like, hold on. Like I, I've already knew I was gonna be committing to leaning into my more feminine energy this year and like feeling versus thinking.
'cause it's so easy for me to jump into Logic Solution base and I'm like, hold on. And it's. I'm in that funny, uncomfortable space of it feels weird to take a second to make a decision. Yeah. So it's been really interesting.
Again, there's like all of these other forces around you. Yeah. I, there's I'm sure you've seen this, but the friends and also like coaches that I look up to posting things like 24 things I'm gonna do in 2024, and I'm like, yeah.
Is anyone thinking about 2035? Because is it really sustainable to continue writing lists for the year? Like I like 10 bullet points. That's about where I'm at right now. Yeah. But I think, I love what you just said about getting closer to what's important. What's important to me is not having 24 fricking things to check off.
Like I do not need a longer. Checklist of things to do. Yeah. To make myself better in the world. That is definitely not what I need. And it's an in, so it's an really interesting thing to ask yourself. What is important? What are you moving closer to? Okay. I'm really curious what it is what are three or four words that you can think of that you're moving closer to?
I am moving closer to, what was that? There's a word that I loved it clear clarity, like clearing things out and I'm using clear instead of clarity because it's like clearing out physical spaces, clearing out emotional spaces, like making room spaciousness. Yeah. And so what is that component?
I'm also moving closer to. Another layer of listening to myself. I'm such a believer, as you were talking about earlier, that we already know the answers and regularly I'm just giving my clients permission to do what they said they wanted to, but either doubted it was possible or didn't think it was a good idea or had a lot of doubt around it.
The self knowing and the self trusting component. There's always room to get deeper in that. So how can I get deeper so I can help my clients get deeper into that as well? And so I've been full-time entrepreneur. This is, I'm go, I'm in year six. I've done a lot of building, I've done a lot of expansion and there's always things to do.
And it's funny that you bring up like the systems component. 'cause part of what I do with my clients is. We only put the systems in that they need to stop doing. Like it's not to do more. It's so you can do less and the system can do it. And people have often asked can't you just put that into a course and I can watch it on my own time?
And I'm like, no, because if it's not your system, it won't work. Yeah. And that's a really hard thing for people to do. 'cause people want the solution now. Yeah. But we have to do that work of what do you really want? Because Just 'cause you should, doesn't mean just because you could. Doesn't mean you should.
Yeah. So you don't need Twitter. You don't need every social media platform. You, I told a person the other day, they don't need social media at all. I thought they were gonna have a heart attack at first, and then they were like, wait, I don't need to do real. I'm like, no, delete all of it. It's not gonna drive you revenue.
That's awesome. So why do it like. I'm sure in your world there's so much direct selling referrals. It's you know when people need, if you need less than a hundred customers a year to hit your goals, you technically don't need digital marketing. So yeah, that's all we're talking about nowadays. So what does that look like?
What does your sales pipeline look like? Yeah. Where do I
go if I'm not gonna be posting seven times a day? Yeah. And at the same time, like I bet that's really reassuring to hear, right? What other outlets can we go to? And I honestly, I love all the alternatives to that, right? Which is I do a lot of connecting with schools, whether I am Yep.
I'm talking to parents or I'm talking to their teachers and asking questions about how to teach more mindfully and. Parent more mindfully and even like how to work with your coworkers more mindfully. This is the hilarious thing, is at the end of our course, what parents always say is, I'm mindfully parenting my husband and my in-laws right now, like the beautiful thing of this system is that I am like really speaking kindly to myself and to my kids.
They're so much more cooperative. We're getting so much more done and we have so much more mindful connection. I'm doing the same thing with my partner and my in-laws, and it's changing the way I relate to everyone. So sometimes I have this this feeling this it's almost like an obligation sort of a feeling.
Like it's definitely coming from outside me, but what if I just changed this whole thing and did something bigger, but. I really love the focus on kids, and that as like a theme throughout my world. This like understanding, making space for kids to be more mindful in the world. They can't do it unless their parents are on board too.
And I really I really get and see where you're coming from in the sense of, if you fix the parent and especially the mother to children relationship, it starts changing the whole house. Which then changes the neighborhood, which changes the town. But you also know that it's not, it's like how do you empower kids at a young age when you know that come age like the second they're born, if not before, they are already having, they're perfect bundle of energy, beautiful, glowing self, like parts of it are getting shaded and shadowed.
Already. So like we have to teach kids how to protect themselves so they can stay as amazing and pure as possible. And at the same time, teaching adults not to take away someone's light because most of the time our light's been taken away. It hasn't been from a malicious place, it's been 'cause the adult is scared and doesn't know how to properly handle the situation.
And they have no time and they're all burnt out and decision to fatigue is maxed. Yep. And suddenly they do something or say something that completely changes how you see the world and you didn't need to. It's why I ask about the 8-year-old self because I really think that's such a beautiful age where kids are, have one foot solidly in anything is possible.
Imagination, dreaming, creating, and one foot in. Like adulting in the sense like when you're eight you can cook some food or make, prepare some food you like. When I was a kid at eight, you could ride your bike away from the house and go do something more adult-like even if it was buying a Slurpee.
So there's like an interesting being able to translate and exist in both worlds that I think I spend a lot of time getting clients back in. 'cause whatever we loved when we were eight is probably gonna indicate. What we still care about, like you still care about Greenpeace and the planet and taking care of things that didn't go away
well and our, I love also that if we can tap into our playfulness
Play has a lot more energy than work. Yes. The inner, if we can bring the same energy to our career that we bring to play, then how beautiful is that? So I love this idea of it might, you might not be classifying your work as play, but how can you bring a playful energy to it?
That's been, last year was one of my really big goals. Was expansion and inspired action, so like always taking action that I felt really excited about. And that meant if I looked at my list of things to do and one thing was just like not happening today, I trusted myself to move that to another day when I was inspired to do it.
And take, tackle these other things, right? Yeah. And when you wake up, like you may have on your list to go to, to get yourself looking great and go on social media and be live and post for all the world to see. And in that moment, everything in your body is screaming. No, just just sit on the couch with your messy bun and write the article.
Yeah, like how freeing is it to be able to say I'm gonna trust myself and I'm gonna write the article because I know it'll be so much better than me pretending that I wanna show up for my audience today. And then other days you wake up and you're like, clear everything on the desk 'cause I've got something to say.
And it takes no energy or effort on your part to show up in that way. And yet most of us don't have jobs. Where we can do this. So I'm feeling really grateful as I say this, that you and I both have jobs where within reason there's some wiggle room to like really listen to our inner intuition and follow the thing that's gonna be easiest and that we're feeling the most playful energy towards during the day.
I feel like we, I work especially with a lot of people who are like, my life is. So miserable in the way that I've set it up that I have to do yoga every morning and I have to get on the rowing machine for 40 minutes every night, and I have to go mountain biking every single weekend and take the, there's all these things I have to do in order to maintain my sanity.
And then you're like, I'm thinking what would happen if we just looked at creating a life that actually felt good when you went through the day to day?
Sorry. She fell off the couch. She woke up, rolled over and fell off the chair.
But yeah, it is just an interesting paradigm shift and I look at myself in my twenties.
And I wonder like how could I, if I had known better, if someone had taught me this theory in a course? Would I have been able to apply it? How can we teach our kids these things way younger?
Yeah. Yeah.
I think I would've I think I would've thought you got something there and yet our world is.
So regimented when you think about your high school agenda, like all the things you need to do throughout your day, it's just a constant barrage of bells and where other people need you to be and all the assignments you've gotta be juggling and turning. And I honestly don't know how we make it through that phase of our existence.
And no wonder we go on to be highly stressed out people who have really unhelpful and unhealthy coping strategies.
I still think the hardest I have ever worked were the last two, maybe three years of high school. Yeah. I have ne like college was easier. Oh yeah. Adult, like work was easier. Like the pressure, the full schedule between athletics and school.
And I don't like the fact that I thank goodness that I did that when there wasn't social media. We just got internet like at the end of my high school days. So yeah. I spent a lot of time when I wasn't doing something on the schedule, just sitting in my room and listening to music. Yeah. And thank God I had that time when I got it.
But like it's, I think there's an entire structure shift to look at and how we're educating and putting people through high performance systems because. Especially with how much the career path has changed. Like we don't need people to be machines anymore. We don't need people to follow these like such strict schedules.
And there's a freedom and a looseness of like people are adults. When we treat them like adults who can make their own choices, they tend to make the choices that benefit everyone. So how can, like, where's that room? Where's the room to trust people? I'm sure you're saying it like the more you trust other people, the more you start trusting yourself and vice versa yeah.
Yeah. And trust is a big one. In fact, trust is one of my words for this year. Just trusting that if I need to rest, I'm gonna kick ass tomorrow. Trusting that, I, I can. I can have a really tough day with my husband or my kids. And I can repair that. That's been a huge thing this year is like trusting the repair instead of beating myself up for a week because I lost my temper.
Losing your temper is normal. As a gentle parent, I tend to get I teach this and so I think I'm above it all. And sometimes it's really important for me to have super challenging moments with my kids. And remember. Oh yeah, like the, my life day to day is pretty hunky dory, and in most situations I have like a like fairy land, unicorns and rainbows response to everything.
And then some days I just lose my shit and I am not in a place where I can be patient or hold space for whatever you're dealing with. And and that's part of. Being human and yeah. You can make that repair. So the power of repair and trusting. That our relationships are stronger than our day-to-day mistakes is huge.
And that's something I wanna teach my kids. That like you can mess up and we'll still love you.
Yeah. Yeah. For everyone who wants to hire you, work with you, collaborate with you, where can they find and follow you?
Yes, I am@mindfulparentingrevolution.com. So if you are a newborn parent who wants to teach healthy sleep from the start, I would love for you to reach out.
We have two courses that are getting ready to start here in February. And one is sleep from the start. Super sweet. And it involves a group coaching aspect, which I find to be really healing. Most parents in their newborn phase of life, the, one of the biggest challenges is feeling isolated.
Insecure and lonely. And yet when we offer group coaching where parents can all come and experience this beautiful, healing, positive, empowering space, they're really afraid to do it. They don't show, they don't wanna show up and be seen. Yes, I challenge parents to show up and see and be seen.
It's so wonderful both in the newborn. Program and in the Mindful Parenting Program. So that's my other group coaching program, and that runs in two ways. I have an an eight week course that parents can take starting in February, and that is an amazing, like walkthrough, reparenting yourself so that you can parent your kids in the way that you really want to without punishment, without shame.
And with a lot more cooperation and connection, it's a beautiful experience. Some parents have taken workshops locally or have worked with me online or to sleep, train their kiddos, and they have gone on to join the monthly membership program so that parents can continue to have access to the coaching support and the online classes that they have in the eight week program.
So some parents are like, I just wanna jump into the membership. And and I'm happy to let parents do that too. There's a screening process. We're not gonna do it if it doesn't feel good, if it's not fun, and if we can't laugh at ourselves and and share in the humor that is present in all of our availability and challenges in life.
If that interests you parents, please reach out.
I have loved our conversation. I'm so glad that we finally did this. Thank you for being a yes to me and to sharing your wisdom with everyone listening and the powerful these community.
Thank you
all the links. To connect with Christine and Mindful Parenting Revolution, earn our show notes@thepowerfulladies.com. Subscribe to this podcast, give it a rating and review. And then come hang out with us on Instagram at Powerful Ladies. Connect directly with me by visiting kara duffy.com or Kara Duffy on Instagram.
I'll be back next week with a brand new episode and new amazing guest. Until then, I hope you're taking on being powerful in your life. Go be awesome and up to something you love.
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Episode 232: Sarah Croce | Co-Founder of Village for Mamas
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