Episode #51: My Son and Disappointment

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Summary

Today’s episode is a little bit different. I’m inviting you to join me in a storytime that has a powerful message. This is a real story about something that happened recently with me, my son, and a lesson we both learned in the process of dealing with uncomfortable emotions, especially disappointment.

Last week, we talked all about making the data neutral, and I have a real-life example to share with you that illustrates how this works. My son taught himself to play piano from an app during the height of the pandemic, eventually getting to go to an audition he was incredibly excited about. However, he experienced what started as deep disappointment, and ended as an important lesson we can all learn from.

Tune in this week for the finest example of messy learning. We all experience disappointment, and it can be crushing to deliver disappointing news to our children. But when we give our kids the freedom to have their own experience of disappointment, allowing them to process the information themselves and not framing disappointment as a problem, everyone comes out of the other side stronger, and you can do the same for yourself in disappointing moments.

To celebrate one year of this podcast, I'm hosting a giveaway for all of my listeners. To enter, head over to your favourite podcast platform and leave a rating and review. Take a screenshot of your review and follow the simple prompts here to share it with me and submit your entry. One lucky listener is going to win pair of Apple Airpods! The contest ends on Tuesday, April 18th, 2023, at midnight and I'll be sharing the winner shortly after. Thank you so much for celebrating with me!

What You’ll Learn from this Episode:

• A common mistake high-achievers make when it comes to growth, learning, and disappointment.
• Why learning is messy and growth is uncomfortable.
• A story about my son teaching himself to play the piano.
• How I like to encourage my son, but also allow him to learn self-inflicted lessons.
• Why I decided, in this situation, I didn’t want to protect my son by putting bumper lanes on his disappointment.
• The reaction my son was able to have because I delivered some news he didn’t like from a neutral place of emotional safety.
• How to slow down and see that disappointment and discomfort don’t have to be a problem, and can be the currency of your success.

Listen to the Full Episode:

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Featured on the Show:

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• Piano Maestro App
• Carnegie Hall
• Episode #50: The Scale and Gathering Data

Full Episode Transcript:

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• Hey, this is Dr. Priyanka Venugopal, and you're listening to The Unstoppable Mom Brain Podcast, Episode 51, My Son and Disappointment. Today's episode is a little bit different. It's a little bit more of a story time, but with a powerful message that I really wanted to share with all of you. I'm going to be sharing a real story around something that happened recently with me and my son, and a lesson that I was able to learn again, and that I was able to demonstrate to him.

  This episode is a little bit of an extension of last week where we talked about making the data neutral, and I wanted to share this real-life example as it happened. I do have another episode coming out soon about the lessons that I have learned from my son, but today I really wanted to highlight how I handled disappointment with my son, and I got to teach us both something along the way.

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  Hey friends. Welcome to today's episode where I am doing a little bit of a story time sharing a real life story, because I think it demonstrates messy learning at its finest example. Learning doesn't happen perfectly. It's not like you learned something once and then boom, you're done. I think that we see this a lot, especially for high achievers, where we think hitting a goal, we've learned something.

  Maybe we've learned about weight loss, we've learned about a specific goal that we have, and you think you've learned something once and now you should just be able to hit that goal with ease. And this is such a lie. It is always going to be messy. Learning and growing is always going to be messy, and I want you to know no matter what phase of your life you're in, whether you're learning or growing, that when we allow for the messiness, we can create so much more growth.

  So that is what today's story time is about. Learning is messy, growth is uncomfortable, and it doesn't always have to feel so good. So, as you all have heard, maybe if you're new to the podcast you haven't. I have two kids, my son, who's seven and a half, and my daughter is four and a half. And my son from literally, I mean, the day that he was born, but more practically since he was like one or two, I would say, has been a musician.

  He picked up the ukulele when I wanna say he was maybe one and a half or two. He would listen to One Direction songs on our home music device. He learned all of the One Direction songs. He was two years old when he learned all the One Direction songs. He even dressed as Harry Styles for Halloween.

  If you're following me over on Instagram, I will insert a couple of clips because they are just so cute whenever I remember it. I just like to think back to those memories with such fondness. From the earliest age, he has been a musician. He would pick up instruments and just start strumming away, no lessons.

  He would just kind of start playing instruments and just fell in love with music, and it was kind of surprising because I don't think of myself as very musical. My husband is definitely not musical, but this is just something that just seriously, a unique trait about him. So, as he got older, probably around the age of four or so, when the pandemic first started, he was home from preschool and he just to kind of keep him busy because he wasn't in school and we were working, he got access to an app on an iPad that taught him how to play the piano.

  So, he taught, and I'm gonna put the information for this app on the show notes page, it's called Piano Maestro. You can go find it on the iPad. You cannot get it on your phone. It can only be on the iPad. I'm not affiliated, it's just an app I really love that he learned how to teach himself how to play the piano.

  So, he would get on this app and it made learning really fun. It was like a game he started with, like the thumb goes on, middle C. And over the course of probably six months, he just, I mean, went crazy over learning the piano. And I would say probably by the age of four and a half, four and three quarters, like by December, he had finished the whole entire course.

  There's like 50 levels and he could play songs two handed on the piano. I mean, just well beyond anything that I could have ever expected from him. And I would say probably about a year after he started learning on the iPad and we started to see, obviously he has this love for piano. He has a love for music.

  Maybe we should get him some lessons. And again, we were still in the pandemic at the time, so we started with just virtual lessons. We found a music teacher that would meet with him via Zoom and via Skype and would start teaching him how to play the piano. And I would say from a really young age, as I shared about my son before, he can be a little bit or a lot of bits defiant when it comes to instruction, and you're gonna hear all about this in the lessons that I have learned from him in a future podcast episode. But I would say that while he loved the piano and thankfully, he also really resonated with his music teacher, he was always a little bit defiant on learning.

  He kind of felt like, I know best. I already know how to do this. He didn't wanna go back to the basics because since he had self-taught, He learned some, I guess you would call them bad habits in how he would play the piano. And so, the music teacher would try to teach him, you know, how to help his technique, how to improve his form, and my son used to really not want to hear it.

  So, I would say the next year of his piano lessons, which were virtual, he would kind of have a little bit of a back and forth. The music teacher would let him jam out and do a lot of freestyle but in small moments, he would try to teach him how to improve his form, his technique, just to help my son kind of grow his skillset.

  So, moving forward, flash forward to recently, I would say, I mean my son's piano skills of course have continued to improve. We started getting in-person piano lessons and he, over the last few months, was offered the opportunity to audition for Carnegie Hall. And if you're not familiar, Carnegie Hall is in New York City.

  And it's a really big deal for anyone to perform in Carnegie Hall. And he was invited to audition where he had to basically perform for a piano instructor, a piano expert, and they would evaluate his audition, and then they would let him know whether he gets to perform or not. And this happened, I think this was in January when we had this audition.

  And I have to tell you for like a few months leading up to this audition, He was practicing, but he still did it with that flavor. Like I was just sharing like a little defiant. So, his teacher would tell him like, okay, you're doing really well, but you know, your tempo is slowing up here. It's slowing down.

  It's speeding up. Like his piano instructor would try to walk him through, you know, these are the areas that maybe you want to work on. And my son's response to that was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I already know. Don't, you don't have to tell me. And he would practice the piano, but it was a little bit cursory, like if I had to look at it objectively, he would jump on the piano.

  He would jam out in his way. But the way that he would play the piece, and the name of the piece is called Butterfly. It's a beautiful piece. You should go look it up. And actually, I will post him playing this on Instagram when this podcast is released. But his tempo and his precision in the fingering could sometimes be a little bit off.

  And so the teacher would try to give him this feedback. And my son's response generally was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I got it. Don't worry. I'm gonna just figure this out on my own. And so that's how he practiced for this piece. And I would say for me as the parent, I have kind of had this tendency to let him lead as much as possible when it comes to things like piano.

  So, and this is, again, this is just like maybe my parenting style. Again, this is like story time, so I'm just being very casual in the way that I'm describing this, but I try to give my son parameters and then really let him navigate and kind of learn self-inflicted lessons. And this was kind of one of those examples.

  So, I would encourage him or remind him like, Hey, your audition is coming up. Do you wanna practice? And he would sometimes get on the piano and sometimes he wouldn't. And I say that I did it in this way because I remember when I was a kid, I also took piano lessons. I never got anywhere near my son's level of expertise.

  Like I was at a very, very basic level. But I remember so many times my parents saying, okay, you have to like to do 30 minutes of practice per day. Like you have to, you know you're gonna have your piano lesson. Like you have to be practicing if you're gonna go for piano lessons. And I felt so forced to sit at the piano.

  I hated it. Like, do you guys ever remember being forced to practice a musical instrument when you didn't want to or like forced to do something? It's like you were physically maybe sitting at the piano, but you were definitely not mentally sitting at the piano. That was my experience in my youth, and I think that that really has kind of informed and colored how I drive you know, my parenting with my kids.

  I just remember that feeling of being forced to practice the piano. I'm like physically there, but I'm totally not like actually wanting to be there. And I remember not only did it not make my practice pretty ineffective because I did not get very good at the piano at all.

  Actually, I quit at the first possible chance, but I like mentally felt this like a burdensome feeling. Every time I saw a piano, I started to kind of resent the piano. Not just like, you know, I don't like you, but I'm like, oh, I hate it. I don't wanna go. I just like, it kind of distorted my, what might have been a natural love for music.

  It totally distorted that. So that's a little tangent. This is a story time as we do. And I remember I really thought about it like any extracurriculars for my kids. I didn't want to force them to sit on the piano for 30 minutes per day, but I did want to ask them why they might want to, right? So I've talked about this before, but I really wanted to have them on their own, feel inspired to take action.

  And again, there's a lot of nuances to this. That's not what this episode is about. I wanna really get to like the main point of today's episode, which is the disappointment as you can tell what's coming. He had his audition and I have to tell you, so me and my husband, we are, first of all, I dunno if you can even hear it, I'm so incredibly proud of him.

  Like just how amazing that he self-taught and he got himself to this point. And yes, I am so deeply grateful for his piano teacher, but really like, I just love that he has had this for himself. He feels so proud of himself with this piano. I'm so proud of him and me and my husband both. We took him for his audition and me and my husband were like, we were outside the room, but we could hear the piano and we're both kind of like waiting for him.

  Like, how's it gonna go? How's he gonna do? And my son, I'm just laughing at this now, but like whenever he has performed on stage, which is he hasn't had many piano performances again because of Covid. And you know, he only started in-person lessons very recently. So, he hasn't done many in-person performances.

  But when he does, he does this kind of like, it's very cute to look at, but he walks up to the stage, and he very quickly rushes to the piano and he sits down. He just starts playing. He doesn't take a breath, he doesn't like to settle in his chair. He doesn't compose himself. He just runs right into it.

  And he did that with the audition. So me and my husband were just kind of having a chuckle and we know that he's doing this because he's probably a little bit nervous. And he really, I mean, was so, so, so, so excited about the idea of playing the piano at Carnegie Hall. Like in his mind he's like, wow, New York City, it's gonna be such a big deal.

  So, he too kind of felt the importance and the gravity of it because he's something he really, really wanted. So, then what happens? We can overhear him. And what was awesome is that, from what we could hear, it sounded really good. It was like actually one of his best, you know, if he's practicing at home, like sometimes he would fumble on the piano at home.

  But when he did this audition to my, you know, very inexperienced ear, it sounded pretty good. So, he came out. You know, he was kind of quiet about the whole thing. I don't think he even introduced himself to the person that was evaluating him. He just did his thing where he ran up to the piano, just started playing.

  He didn't say hello or goodbye or thank you or none of that. He just played and then he left. And I remember we had quite a long wait. We had to wait about six weeks to hear whether we would get in by we, I like how I'm making this a we thing. Whether he would get this audition, whether he would get to play at Carnegie Hall, and I would say probably every week.

  This is not generally my son. My son is usually the kind of kid who will have an experience and then seemingly forget about it. It might be there in the deep recesses of his mind, but he doesn't usually ask about things again and again and again. But this was one of those things, I think it just mattered to him so much.

  I would say every week, probably twice or three times a week, he like, so did we hear yet? Do we know yet? Do we know yet? And we had to really just remind him that it's gonna take some time. They said about six weeks is when you're going to hear. And then we got the notice. So this happened about two weeks ago, and his music instructor's the one that told us.

  And said, he kind of pulled my husband aside, and took him to his piano lesson. The piano teacher said, you know, I just wanna let you know, we haven't told Kyra yet. Like you can tell him whenever it's comfortable for you. But he didn't get it. And I wasn't there for this. But my husband sends me a text message with frowny face emoji, sad face emoji, like, he didn't get it.

  And I remember the feeling. I felt like my heart dropped a little bit because I knew how much he wanted this, and I could imagine my mind. Again, this is like normal Mama Bears, we love our kids, and we want them to get what they want. Like, you know, he wants to perform at Carnegie Hall.

  This thing matters to him so much. I want him to have that experience because he wants it, because I love him. I want him to get what he wants. And so, I think very naturally, my heart dropped and I just started imagining his disappointment. So, we found this out on a Tuesday, and I decided I didn't wanna tell him on a Tuesday.

  First of all, I wanted to just take a minute to process the information. I wanted to just sit with it for a few days and just think about what the best way would be to share this information with him in a way where he could also process how he was gonna feel about it. I knew he was gonna have some feelings about it, and I wanted to give him space and time to handle the big feelings that he was going to have.

  So I decided not to tell him exactly that day and I waited until Friday. So now three days have passed and I wanna be kind of clear on this. Like I wasn't ruminating on how am I going to tell him and what's the exact right, perfect way? And like how can I minimize the damage and how can I minimize his disappointment?

  I accepted and I knew, and that's why I'm sharing this episode. I wanna kind of talk you through exactly what I did because it felt so powerful for me to do it this way, and it felt powerful for him too. And I'm sharing this not to say that I do it this way every time. Like I shared at the very start of this episode, growth is messy.

  Learning is messy. I have done this messily and imperfectly so many times to get to this point where I'm sharing this episode. So, I wanna just also just add that caveat. I did not start with dealing with disappointment in this way. It has taken a lot of learning and growth for me. To get to this point, but that was just an aside.

  I wanted to share, not for you to think that this is how I parent all the time. It's definitely not right. So, this was one of those things. I knew that I wanted to share it with him, but I knew that I didn't want to put bumper lanes on his disappointment. So, Friday rolls around and it's Friday evening. We are about to start movie night.

  We do Friday night movie night, and my husband is in the kitchen with my daughter, and I was like, hey. So, I wanted to tell you that we heard back from your audition about Carnegie Hall, and he looks up at me, he's like, oh yeah, you did. And I think that he had supposed that he was going to get it, which is why he had that initial excitement.

  And I was like, yeah. And they said, you didn't get it. Now I wanna just tell you what I did. I just paused. I just delivered the information as neutrally as possible, just like you didn't get the audition. And I stopped talking. Can I tell you, as a mom, it's so hard to zip my lip. I just, in that moment, what I want to do the minute that I tell him.

  But what I want to do is to add on a lot of things like, but you're an amazing piano player. But don't worry. And like you're gonna get the next one. And like, don't worry about it. You know what? Like, we don't even know. This probably wasn't even that big of a deal. We wanna put in so many qualifiers to dampen disappointment.

  Are you guys familiar with this? And I'm sharing this specifically because this was my youth. This is, I think so many high achievers have gone through this where you're striving for something. I want you to go back and think about that exam or that project that you had in school or in high school or college or grad school.

  Like you didn't get the A. Maybe you like, gotta B, C, D, maybe you failed something. And think about all the qualifiers. Like, but don't worry that doesn't mean anything about you. And like, let's just like, you know what? Let's drown our sorrows with an ice cream.

  Like this is something I remember so many memories for myself where the feeling of disappointment because again, we love our children. We don't want them to [00:17:00] experience discomfort. We put these qualifiers. So the hardest thing for me to do at that moment was to zip my lip. But I did it. I did it, and I'm gonna tell you why that pause was so important. So, I said to him, Hey, they called and you didn't get it.

  Zip lip. Silence. And on the inside, I'm like just trying to take slow, deep breaths on the inside. Like let's just let him have his experience. It's like, I think about what I have historically done with him, again, many, many, many messy moments, many learning moments where I have just inserted my experience for him, like, don't worry.

  And all of that. I wanted to give him the freedom to have his own experience without inserting mine. So I just zipped as in the moment, it did feel hard and he looked at me and his lip quivered for a moment and he was like, really? Why? That's what he said. He said, really? Why? That's the very first thing he said.

  And I said to him, you know, that is such a good question. I don't know. They didn't actually give us notes, but maybe we can find out. I don't know. Maybe we can ask them if they can offer us notes. Maybe we can understand why. I just wanted to share that that was his first reaction. And I think it's important because if I had jumped in and inserted my experience, like, oh, but don't worry, don't feel bad about it.

  Like, you know what, like, let's watch the movie and like, let's like go to the ice cream and like, let's try to circumvent your disappointment. First of all, I would've inserted disappointment. For him. And I wouldn't have gotten to hear his very important question, which is why. I wonder why I didn't get it.

  And I was like, I don't know. I think it was really powerful to give him that question where he, on his own, I could see his brain was starting to think. His lip quivered a little bit. And he was like, okay, why? And I was like, I don't know. We don't know yet. And he just looked at me and I just sat there in silence, and I want to say again, sitting in silence when your kid is processing information, particularly information that they didn't want to get is hard.

  I just wanted to normalize that, if that's been you, I see you, I recognize you, and I want you to know it's okay. But also, I want to tell you that you come out the other side. I got to let him, and he got to experience processing information that he didn't like. He was like his lip quivered and he just kept being like, oh, I don't understand.

  He was like, wait, so I don't get to go to New York City, so I'm not gonna get to play Carnegie Hall, and I wanna tell you what happened at that moment. I think that I have had a tendency, like I was just sharing to be like, no, no, no. We're gonna try again. Don't worry. We're gonna like go again. We're gonna go again.

  And in doing that, I would be teaching him that his experience right now is a little bit of a problem. Now I will eventually, and I'm gonna share with you the end of the story that I do eventually talk to him about how are we gonna get you to Carnegie Hall and how are we gonna make this happen? But I didn't want to rush there.

  I think so many times, and again, we don't just do this with our children, it's something that we were modeled to as children. So, we do this right now in our real adult life, right? Like when you're trying to lose weight, when you're trying to step on, again, data gathering from last week's episode when you're really trying to create a powerful result and you're not loving where you're starting, where you're not loving your current results. I don't want us to ever be in a rush to get away from where we are right now. Just be willing to slow down and then yes, we're gonna evaluate and figure out exactly why.

  So, at that moment, we just sat there. And you know what's so interesting? I think that this is interesting for me to observe as a mom because I didn't do this as a child, and it's a skill that I've been learning and practicing as an adult. That feeling of disappointment that he had and the emotional experience that he was having.

  It was temporary. So, he felt disappointed and then he kind of like, you know, hung out there for a few minutes. We just sat there in silence, and I basically wanted to create a space for him to share how he was feeling. And I asked him, I was like, so do you feel like talking about it? Or how are you feeling?

  And you know what, if you don't even feel like talking about it, that's okay too. Like we can just hang out and we can just chill. And just, I think not directing the direction of his emotional experience was really powerful. And I want to tell you, if you try this to anticipate and expect that silence might feel awkward, it might be like you feel like you need to fill the gap with something, fill the space with something, but you don't just like giving space and silence and however awkward it is.

  I like letting him process it on his own and kind of after a few minutes it wasn't really that much longer. After a few minutes he's like, you know, that's okay. And he's like, I'm gonna go get daddy and let's start our movie. I was like, okay, that sounds so great. Now, that wasn't just the beginning and end of his disappointment, so I wanted to say that.

  You know, not directing his disappointment in the moment was really powerful. But what really happened was the next night, so we read Harry Potter at night and during reading time every night, we kind of, I use it as an opportunity to kind of use the different characters of the book to pull out different characteristics about what he likes and what he doesn't like to help him kind of get language to how he's feeling, right? So we talk about Voldemort and Harry and Draco, Malfoy, and you know, Hermione. Like we talk about all the characters and the different characteristics they have and the characteristics that he likes about them.

  And I kind of use reading time as an opportunity for teaching, as you can tell. And let me tell you what he said. My son said to me, this is like we just settled in to read our Harry Potter time, and he's like, you know, I really am sad that I am not going to go to Carnegie Hall this time. And you know what?

  Having him come to me on his terms, I think felt really powerful for both of us because it was in his control. He got to have the conversation when he wanted to have it, not when I wanted to have it. It's just like let it be about him. And when he came to me, he was like, you know, I feel really sad about it and I really wanna play at Carnegie Hall.

  And I was like, okay. And I think that this kind of lended itself, because he came to me first with it. I was able to then ask him like, how do you think we should do that? And I think what was amazing about this, and what's so fascinating about this whole experience is even though he's only seven and a half, He was able to say to me, maybe we can get those notes, and I could figure out what happened in the audition that I didn't get to play.

  I think it's so crazy that he came to this on his own without me inserting it, and better than that. One of the messages that I was sharing with him, and I love to share with my kids, and I think that I have to go first, I have to be the example of this, but then really getting to model it to him and have them practice.

  I actually said to him right after that, you know, I wanna show you and just have you see, you're really getting through your sadness and disappointment. Like, look at how brave you are. Like look at you getting through sadness and disappointment and here we are talking about and figuring out how you wanna get to Carnegie Hall.

  And I wanna tell you that the experience of this wasn't to run away or solve the sadness or the disappointment, and I wanted to share the story to really paint that picture in that way by giving it some space and giving it a little bit of time and giving it like some breathing room. It's like he was able to just own and recognize that he felt disappointed.

  We didn't have to distract him with it with a movie or with ice cream or with accolades. And also, he came to the other side, he felt it, and then he was like, okay. Good to know. I feel sad, but I also still want to perform at Carnegie Hall. I wonder how we're gonna go figure this out. And somehow, I think that there's something really powerful about that experience because now as we move forward, as we maybe audition again, maybe we look for new opportunities or different festivals for him to perform at.

  He now knows something really important, and you better believe as his mom, I'm not going to let him forget it. He is capable of feeling sad and disappointed, and I think what this allows us to do, if he knows that he is safe, that he's capable of feeling sad and disappointed that he comes out the other side.

  I just think about how many more things he will go and try in the world in his life if he's not fearing sadness or disappointment. Because he learned, look at me. I just came out the other side. I'm still okay. I got through that and I'm still okay. And now he gets to learn at the age of seven, what I learned in my late thirties is that, wait a second, feeling sad or feeling disappointed, or having a messy moment that I didn't love, I'm going to be okay on the other side.

  I'm safe. I can go out and try again. I wanted to share this story and I wanna tell you that children, I think when they learn this message at such a young age, our voice to them, the way that we engage with them in these moments, it starts to become their inner voice. I can see how you know now when my daughter is feeling upset about something, I will hear my son tell her things that I have told him.

  He'll say, it's okay, Vara. It's okay. You're fine. It's okay. And I think that like what that starts to do as he gets older, and my hope for him, and I don't know that this is going to happen, but my hope for my kids is that the voice that they hear in their mind is that they don't have to fear trying and failing.

  In fact, what if they could try and then try and then try again? Because learning doesn't always feel so good. I just wanna say that one more. Learning and growing doesn't feel so good all the time, and I think that that's sometimes a mistake that especially high achievers make. We assume that learning, because learning sounds like it should be a good thing, right?

  We want to learn because we want to grow that somehow because it's a good thing. It should always feel good, but it doesn't. What if we didn't always have to feel good in our growth? Would you be willing to go through it? I think that just recognizing, wait a second, I could be willing to go through it even if it meant feeling uncomfortable simply because that was the area of my growth.

  And what if just being willing was the currency of your success? Here's why I say that the willingness to experience the discomfort of growth is your currency, because when you're unwilling as the opposite picture, when you don't want to, when you avoid or monkey emoji those uncomfortable moments, you're going to put or really try to put a bubble around yourself, and that bubble will keep your world feeling really, really small.

  It's going to keep you in inaction and worse yet, it's going to create a mounting belief that you cannot handle the discomfort of your growth. Really think about where fear has ever come from. Fear of trying hard and failing. It's come because we have believed that we cannot handle the discomfort of growth.

  So what I want you to know is that it's possible to simply be willing, and that could be the currency of the best, best, best things coming forward. I also wanna say that simply being willing to feel sad or disappointed or frustrated doesn't mean that you're actually going to sit in sadness and disappointment and frustration.

  No, you're going to go out, you're going to take massive action. You're going to hit goals, you're going to take action, after action. You're going to evaluate, and in doing so, you're going to feel proud and satisfied and calm and accomplished but along the way, what would it be like if you were willing for things to go awry, for things to be imperfect, for you to be willing to deal with the disappointment that might come with it?

  I promise you, when you challenge your fear of those emotions, it takes the power of the fear away. And I want you to know that to be willing, you have to first create safety. The only reason that we ever are unwilling to feel an emotion, the only reason we're unwilling to feel the possibility of disappointment or defeat or sadness.

  The only reason is because we haven't created safety for ourselves in that experience. That is what we get to do first. In the story that I told you today, I wanna really highlight where safety was created. It was created in my pause after I told him the news. So, when I said to him, you didn't get it, and I zipped my lip as hard as it was for me, I showed him and I demonstrated to him that it was safe for him to feel whatever he was going to feel. I wasn't going to insert my beliefs, my paradigms, or my emotions onto him. And I think that just by demonstrating that again and again and again, because this is not a perfect practice, it is going to be messy.

  He starts to learn that it is safe to actually feel any emotion and that he can come to me when he's feeling any big feeling and he knows that I will allow him to have that emotional experience. I think when we can create that safety, that's the first step to knowing we can be willing to feel anything and if we were willing to feel anything, think of how many more things we would try and how much more we will learn.

  I hope today's story was something that you enjoyed, and I love sharing these real-time stories with you because I think that when I share real examples of messy and imperfect moments and how I navigate them, it lets you see that learning is messy. Parenting is messy. Weight loss is messy. That project at work, that accomplishment that you are dreaming of, it is messy, but messy does not ever have to be a problem.

  We don't ever have to be afraid of it. In fact, we can glean so much from it. I hope you loved this one, and I will see you all next week. Love you. Bye. I would love to celebrate with you. The one-year anniversary of The Unstoppable Mom Brain Podcast is just around the corner. My intention with starting this podcast has been to share my voice, perspective, and experience as a busy working mom who has solved a problem.

  I love bringing you these episodes that discuss strategy and mindset, and I hope that you have felt a breath of fresh air and even shifts in your life from this podcast. So, let's talk about how I would love to celebrate. I'm hosting a giveaway for all of my listeners. To enter the giveaway, head over to your favorite podcast platform and leave a rating and review of the show.

  Your ratings and reviews make this podcast more findable, which I think is just the absolute best way to celebrate this podcast. When you do that, take a screenshot and send it over to us at theunstoppablemombrain.com/celebrate. One lucky listener is going to win a pair of Apple AirPods, which I think is just fitting when it comes to listening to this podcast.

  Don't wait to enter your ratings and reviews mean so much. So head on over to your favorite podcast platform. Leave a rating and review of the show, take a screenshot, and then head over to theunstoppablemombrain.com/celebrate and you'll follow the simple prompts to share your entry and information.

  The giveaway ends on Tuesday, April 18th at midnight. I'll be announcing the winner shortly after. Thank you so much for celebrating with me in this way, and I love you all. Have an amazing week. Bye. Thanks for listening to the Unstoppable Mom Brain Podcast. It's been an honor spending this time with you and your brilliant brain.

  If you want more resources or information from the show, head on over to theunstoppablemombrain.com.