Hello and welcome. You’re listening to SuperPower Mommas and I’m Laura Greco. I am so excited to be with you today as we talk on the topic of knowing your self worth matters. I have Wendy Perrotti with me.
I just love Wendy. I’ve known her for, oh I guess about a year, right Wendy?
Yeah.
She is an ICF certified. Credential and professional certified coach. She’s a speaker and a trainer of over 25 years of experience in helping individuals and groups nationwide to effect change in themselves and others, which is really the key part of this. And I’m so excited to have you with us, Wendy. She’s also a mom of two children.
So welcome to the show and welcome everyone who is listening.
Thanks, Laura. I’m really excited to be here.
Good. Well, I’m excited to have you. So Wendy, we always start off our shows by asking what your super power is. So what’s your super power? Well, I actually ask it as a super power of my momma super power. So what is your super power?
Yeah, I would say if I had to break it down to my momma super power, it is seeing my kids as a whole in the moment and not sort of projecting or future casting what this moment might bring and it was a hard one super power. I didn’t come by it naturally.
Okay. So seeing your children as whole and complete with nothing else going on.
Yeah. It’s so easy, I think, as moms to see what your kids are doing or how they’re showing up and project what that might mean for the next month or the next year or 20 years from now. And once we go down that fear road, we’re completely disconnected from them and they feel it even when we’re not reacting on that, they feel it. So teaching myself, having taught myself to kind of dial that back and say, “This is the person who is, this little person who’s here with me right now.” And just being able to see them fully and love them where they were at helped so much in communicating, especially as I got older.
Yes. Well, that is a really great super power to home, because really is a foundational in the relationship that you share with your children. Am I my right?
Absolutely, absolutely.
Yeah. And I would love to know how you take this super power and its use for you as a parent first.
Yeah. You know, I think when I started to realize where I was doing and where I wasn’t doing it, my son was, my kids are 17 and 19. My son is 19 and my daughter is 17 right now. So my son was a young teen, maybe he was 13, 14. And really in that anybody out there who has boys knows, they go through this period where they just stop communicating with you. They grunt and they’re smelly and they lock themselves in their rooms. Just all of a sudden there is this completely other person playing video games and as parents, we were wondering, “Oh my gosh. What’s wrong?” Started that future casting, what does this mean for him? What’s wrong? Is there something wrong? Is there some, is there better parenting we should do? And I noticed that the is more my husband, and I tried to help, really tried to help the further Max got from us.
I asked him questions about things he was interested in.
And one day, it just dawned on me, “Oh my gosh, we are talking at this kid and the things we’re saying at him as much as we’re trying to be helpful are all about this future that we’re projecting on him.” And so, I think it was then that I really started to look back to the moments that were better with both of my kids and they were the moments where I was just with them in that particular instance. And right then, it was hard, but I started to sort of shift and rather than asking him questions that were more to satisfy what I needed to know to make me feel better. I asked him questions about things he was interested in. I sat and watched him play video games, I asked him questions about his video games. Sometimes I just sat there in silence with him and little by little he started coming back into a real relationship with me.
Little by little, he started sharing with me so much more than I ever would have dared to ask for. And he, I think, was able to do that because he didn’t sense any fear in me. He could see that I just dug him, right? I just thought he was awesome exactly as he was and his comfort level rose and the armor fell away, and probably the biggest lesson of my parenting life.
You know, this really speaks to something that I run into and speak about or with the clients I work with to asking questions and getting curious without attachment to the outcome. It sounds like that’s exactly what you were doing.
Yeah, exactly what I was doing. As you know as you know I’m a coach, I work with individuals and professionals on this sort of this very concept, right? All the time, to help people grow and develop. And yet as a mom, it’s so much harder. It is so much harder to do this stuff when it comes to our kids because obviously, we love them so much and the stakes we believe are so high.
Yeah.
They’re really not. They’re going to be just fine.
Like the stories we tell ourselves, right?
Yes. It’s, what I call, future casting and the slippery slope.
Yes. So now, when did you become a coach? When were you, when did that start for you?
I started my business almost five years ago.
Okay. So you were a mom first?
I was a mom first.
So what brought you to the place where you decided you were going to reach out and help others?
And yet I realized that in losing myself, my ability to serve was declining and my own happiness and fulfillment was in the toilet.
You know, I think it was like many women in their forties, which is where I was at the time. I had done some really cool things. I built a really successful business with my husband. I was a spokesperson, a national spokesperson for the American Red Cross before that. I had started this family. I was mostly a stay at home mom, even though I was selling and marketing for my husband’s company. And I started to realize I was entangled in everybody else’s life. Like there was not any real me that was identifiable by me anymore. So their emotions, their ups, their downs, became my complete compass point. And I was in service to my husband, my kids, the business 24/7. And I got there, Laura, because I wanted it. I mean, don’t get me wrong, that still, it remains the most important part of my life.
Right.
And yet I realized that in losing myself, my ability to serve was declining and my own happiness and fulfillment was in the toilet. I was not becoming the model that I wanted to be for my kids, especially my daughter. So I started my own exploration. I’ve always read research, I took a lot of classes. I went back to my psychology roots and really discovered that the way to bring myself back was all in thinking. It was all in the thoughts that I had. And as I started to shift those thoughts, the emotions shifted with it. The confidence came back and you know, once you’ve had that kind of a revelation in your own life, you want to share it with other people, you want to teach other people what you know, at least that was the case for me.
I love it. We’re going to stop here, we’re going to take a quick break. We’re going to pick up on this, because this leads right into what I want to talk about and I want to thank you and honor you for sharing that part of your story.
Thanks.
Please let everyone know where they can find you.
Yeah, my website is my name. It’s wendyperrotti.com.
Great. And when we get back, we’re going to continue on this discussion of knowing your self worth matters. And I’m Laura Greco and you’re listening to your SuperPower Mommas, so hold on, we’ll be right back.
To listen to the entire show click on the player above or go to the SuperPower Up! podcast on iTunes.
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