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Chief Parental Officer (CPO)
Parenting Secrets from the World of Business Psychology: How the strategies used to run the world's most successful companies can make you a better and more sane parent.
What It's About
A common inside joke in the field of psychology is that childhood or educational psychologists often have the most messed up kids. Similarly, many parenting books may tell you what meconium is or the specific hormones that get released in puberty, yet leave you utterly unprepared to actually raise a child.
This talk introduces the concept of framework-based parenting, leveraging the strategies that top executives and business psychologists use to run Fortune 500 companies to help you raise your mischievous progeny.
You will leave with a set of overarching principles that can be applied to almost any parenting situation, a few specific examples (that almost every parent has faced), and a renewed hope that you might survive until bedtime without shame-eating Oreos in the back of your closet.
Take-Home Points
Parent for the long-term, not the short-term
Parent for skills, not outcomes
Parent as if you and your kid are on the same team
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I Used to Be a Real Human
How to balance being a parent with your work demands, household chaos, and actual adult life.
What It's About
The hardest part about being a parent isn't the midnight feedings, the potty training accidents, or the teenage hormones. It's the instantaneous transformation from being your own person to being "so-and-so's mom".
Even though parenting is the most important job we do, it's rarely the only thing on our plates. We have jobs, marriages, houses to manage, finances to maintain, careers, and ambitions that don't involve finding your kid's shoes before the schoolbus gets there.
This talk helps parents find that balance where they know they're showing up 100% for their children, but they don't have to sacrifice everything that made them an individual before their name was "mom".
Take-Home Points
Find a conceptual balance that makes you proud and happy (at the same time).
Develop realistic short-term and long-term plans.
Create a daily routine that isn't impossible.
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Be Your Own Mother
The need for parenting doesn't go away as you get older. Regardless of who your parents are, the need to parent yourself is more and more important with age.
What It's About
Even though we moms are usually focused on mothering our own children, the need to be "parented" never actually goes away. Just like tying your shoes, remembering a jacket, or remembering to put the car in park before you get out, mothering is one of those skills that people eventually need to learn to do for themselves to qualify as healthy, functional adults (regardless of our relationship with our actual mothers).
Whether they had the best mom in the world, came from a dysfunctional parent-child relationship, or practically raised themselves, everyone in the audience is a mom and knows the importance of mothering and being mothered.
This talk goes into the importance of turning one's mothering skills inwards. Being your own mother helps you know how to set boundaries, how to provide yourself with unconditional love (both tough love and the overindulgent spoiling kind, as situation dictates), and how to express compassion and tolerance for our mistakes, even while holding ourselves to maternally-high standards.
Take-Home Points
Sometimes you need to give yourself discipline
Sometimes you need to take care of yourself
To experience happiness, functionality, and success (all at the same time) you need to know when and how to do each one
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Parenting (and Working) in a Pandemic
The skills needed to parent in this quarantined, Zoom-dependent, coronavirus-driven "new normal".
What It's About
Parenting has always been a challenge.
Under normal circumstances, the average parent is over-worked, under-slept, perpetually worried, and stressed to the point of visible aging. This was true long before we ever heard of the coronavirus.
We now refer to that life as “the good old days”.
Courtesy of the pandemic, parents now have to navigate a wide variety of different responsibilities, trading our “parent” hat for ones that say “teacher”, “bouncer”, “triage nurse”, and more. This talk helps you prepare to perform each of these roles without having a teacher’s license, years of self-defense training, or a medical degree. For each role, you’ll get the wisdom of experts who are actually in that field, a guide for how to apply this knowledge to parenting, and a quick list of tips and tricks of the trade that will help you and your kids survive the pandemic as smoothly as possible.
Take-Home Points
You are still a parent more than anything else.
Give your kid(s) a long leash.
Give yourself a long leash.
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Parent-isms That Backfire
Sometimes what we say to kids doesn't have the impact we intend.
What It's About
Parents mean well, we really do.
We want our kids to get good grades, stop hitting their siblings, and, yes, clean their plate at dinnertime. It shouldn't be that hard, right?
Wrong. Sometimes these harmless sounding statements don't work. Even worse, they often backfire to cause unexpected and unwelcome side effects for us and for our kids. (Just like your prescription for headache medicine may accidentally cause vomiting or make you spontaneously sprout a leathery tail.)
Liz discusses some of the most common parent-isms and walks you through the ways they can go wrong, why they could negatively impact your kids, and what you should say instead.
Common Parent-isms Include:
- Get Straight A's
- Don't Be a Quitter
- Do You Need Any Money?
- Finish Your Homework
- Give Your Aunt a Hug
- Waste Not, Want Not
- Win Your Game Today
- Clean Your Plate
- Be Nice To Your Friends
- Don't Talk Back (to Your Elders)
- Don't Hit
- Sit Still
- Don't Watch TV
Take-Home Points
Parent for the long term more than the short term.
Aim for skills more than results.
You and your kid are not on opposing teams (no matter what they say or how they act).
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Balancing Parenthood and Work Life
How to juggle all the tasks of parenthood with the demands of business without losing your mind.
What It's About
Gone are the days when one parent brought home the bacon and the other sat at home working on their needlepoint.
(I'm honestly pretty skeptical those days ever existed in the first place.)
Modern day parents have a normal job, a few side hustles, some volunteer work...all on top of their actual parental responsibilities.
This has resulted in an immense amount of stress for parents and kids alike, an unprecedented level of complexity in the lives of parenting, and a giant heap of mom guilt no matter which way you allocate your priorities.
This seminar teaches parents how to balance all the key areas in their life in a realistic, practical, and actually-feasible way. Parents will learn how to stop feeling guilty for not being everything all at once and start intentionally making a path that they will find fulfilling, liveable, and enjoyable, no matter what other moms post on Facebook.
Take-Home Points
There are only 24 hours in the day (and this rule does apply to you).
Parenting is not forever...at least not in the same way.
What is right for you (and your kids) and what you think you "should" do are often very different things.