Hello, and welcome everyone. You’re listening to SuperPower Mommas, and I’m Laura Greco, your host. Today, our show is about parenting with confidence versus perfectionism. So, I am so excited to have Jody here with me. Jody Johnston Pawel is a licensed social worker in the State of Ohio and a certified family life educator through the National Council of Family Relations, and the CEO of Parents Toolshop Consulting. She empowers parents to become even more conscious, mindful, and effective by using her unique holistic system called the Universal Blueprint for Parenting Success. And I am so excited, I’ve known Jody for a couple of years now and really have enjoyed some interaction together as time goes on. So welcome, Jody. I’m so excited that you’re here.
Thank you, Laura. Thank you for the invitation. It’s really great to reconnect and I’m excited to connect with your audience today.
Yeah, and I’m excited for them to get to know you better. You have a lot more information about what you’re doing with parents and so I’m excited to have this brought out as we talk about this parenting with confidence versus perfectionism.
And your parenting style is kind of like the freeway that you take on your parenting journey, and the tools are things you just get along the way that you want them to kind of all fit, and take you closer towards your destination or your goals.
Yeah.
It’s almost like the elephant in the room.
It is, and it’s a really core mindset that everything else will build on, because it becomes very much a part of our parenting style. And your parenting style is kind of like the freeway that you take on your parenting journey, and the tools are things you just get along the way that you want them to kind of all fit, and take you closer towards your destination or your goals.
Yeah, very nice way to put it. Well, as always on SuperPower Mommas, we always ask because you’re a mom too, you’re a mom of how many children, now?
I’m a mom of two adult kids, and now I’m a grandma of two.
Yay.
So, I’ve launched two, and am supporting the launching of two. They’re local, so I’m very blessed to be able to see them often.
And you’ve been immersed in your work for many, many years.
Yeah, our 30. Well, actually since I was 8, but yeah, professionally, for 30 years, yeah.
Well, that’s great.
It makes me sound a hundred years old to say I’ve been doing it for 50 years or something crazy like that.
Oh yeah. But it’s okay, right?
Yeah, it’s definitely my first language and my parents were parent educators when I was growing up. They were maybe among the first 50 parent educators in the country.
So, I was very fortunate to learn parenting language and tools as kind of my first language.
Yeah.
But my personality certainly brought in my challenges in terms of being a parent, and actually, when we were talking about the topic of perfectionism, that, for me, was a big issue within my own personality in becoming a parent who didn’t necessarily pass that onto my kids in a way that would make them crazy.
That’s what we’re all about. Right?
Yeah, it’s hard being around a perfectionist.
It is. It’s hard to be one too, actually. It’s very taxing.
It is.
But what I’d like to ask you, first of all, we always ask our guests this, what’s your superpower? What would you identify as a superpower you have used?
I would probably say that my ability to read kids and really just people in relationships. Based on what I know, I’m able to kind of detect and intuit things that I can do very quickly. And, of course, my system helps me do that too. And then, as I take in lots of information, I’m always learning and always taking in lots of information, and then I learn best by teaching it to others. So I also have a real knack for being able to collect information, assimilate it, organize it, and then present it in a real systematic way that everybody can learn it, but they can apply it in a totally individualized way. And I didn’t realize that, that was kind of a SuperPower until as I’ve gotten older and tried to help other people replicate that and I realized that’s a real talent and skill that I’ve got that’s kind of unique.
Yeah, and it’s really something I think I remember from our other conversations that that’s actually what they want. Someone commissioned you to write a book around these systems, is that correct?
Well, I just kind of, on my own, came up with the Universal Blueprint for Parenting Success and as that started going from just local classes to then people finding it really helpful and sharing it with their relatives around the country and around the world, then people started asking, well, would this also work in my marriage? Would this also work to improve my business relationships and that kind of thing? And so, it was probably around 2011 I actually kind of officially, after 10 years, we did a 10 year long research project with parents, and about 80% of them said that they were able to successfully use the system not only with their kids but with other children and in adult relationships.
So, I really started testing the way I did my original system how that would work in adult relationships and partnered with about 10 experts in different adult relationships to take a look at a similar system, and there really was not that much difference. Obviously, you don’t discipline your spouse. So there’s a few things in terms of there’s three questions and five steps in parenting, there’s just four questions when it comes to adult relationships, and it really just has to do with what kind of relationship are you in. But everything that I teach is really based on human behavior and human communication, and we are all first and foremost humans.
And so you kind of start there and then we start getting more individual in terms of our personalities, in terms of the circumstances, what our beliefs are, and all of those is where in my personal growth, where I started learning more about the science of consciousness and our perceptions of reality and things like that, that I really started seeing a crossover in terms of the spiritual aspect of parenting and how parenting and just all relationships in themselves are so much a part of our own self-growth and our own healing, sometimes over our own childhood, and some of our own kind of imperfections, which we can get into the whole discussion about whether or not really is such a thing as perfection and imperfection, depending on how high you want to go. But yeah, that’s certainly is a big part of it.
It’s interesting that you said the science of consciousness.
Yeah.
That’s also a word that’s thrown around a lot. Do you want to expand on that a little?
And so it’s really important for us to teach children how to think.
Sure, yeah, because my mom was the Director of Christian Education in our church, I was raised in actually a very positive Christian environment. And then as I was an adult, I started becoming more familiar with metaphysics. And then I’ve always been very research based. I’m all about using our intuition and being really in touch with our emotions, but I’ve also seen some people get really sidelined in a way that isn’t healthy for their children or their parenting by, for example, I was just teaching a workshop over the weekend, I teach foster parents in Ohio, and we were talking about core values and how your belief system can create your sense of reality. And a parent asked, “Well, shouldn’t we be teaching our children some core beliefs?” Because we were kind of talking about when you teach children what to think instead of how to think, how they can kind of just blindly follow.
And we were talking about, I may be getting off track here, but I live 10 minutes away from Dayton, and in the last week or two we had the mass shootings here. So this has been a really big topic in the Ohio area, where I’m from. And so we were talking about, how can you have good kids who kind of take go down that pathway? And a big part of it has to do with, if they’re trained to just blindly believe what they’re told to believe, then they can get exposed to other beliefs that might not be healthy for them, terrorist or those kinds of hateful of beliefs, and there’s a psychology behind what those folks use to get people to buy in and to follow what they do. And so it’s really important for us to teach children how to think. And this really does tie in with perfectionism, because one of the beliefs behind the perfectionistic parent is that I know the right way to do everything and my way’s the right way.
So it’s not just the way I do things, but the way that I think, the way that I believe, and if you don’t believe that, if you don’t follow what I believe is the right way to think, be, and do, then I judge you for that. I judge you as being wrong. And sometimes we’ll use tactics like guilt trips and shame and those kinds of things to kind of guilt you into, well, if you, if you’re a smart person, then you’re going to believe this. Well, you’re wrong if you believe this and what I’m doing is right. So, in our brain, the science of that is that our brain always wants to be right. So however our subconscious gets programmed, whatever those beliefs are, that becomes our operating system that says, this is what’s right. And then the brain goes out and it filters all the information that comes in and it sorts out anything that doesn’t validate what we believe to be right.
So when we get this lens on the world that we believe is the accurate lens of our perception of reality, and then our brain, literally, there’s a part of the brain called the RAS system, it’s the reticular activating system, and it sorts what data gets in and what gets out and it literally will not ignore anything that doesn’t fit our current beliefs. And then we do things like, we get on Facebook or whatever, we choose our media, we choose our social media, we choose our friends, we choose based upon who validates that my belief system is right. And so this perfectionism can really lead to, in the more extreme forms, to kind of this righteous, self-righteous, attitude that I’m always right and I’m better than you and anyone who doesn’t agree with me is wrong. And it can be really damaging to relationships. And then it can also literally be damaging to ourselves and our bodies because it can lead to more toxic emotions.
The judgment, and criticism, and shame, and all those kinds of things create toxic biochemicals, which can then actually lead to disease and all kinds of stress related attitudes. And anyone who’s a recovering perfectionist like I am, and I jokingly say I’m in recovery, anyone who’s recovering from perfectionism can attest to how stressful it is to be a perfectionist, even if you’re only a perfectionist with yourself.
Very beautiful lead in to what we’re going to talk about after our break. Thank you so much, Jody, for sharing all of that.
You’re welcome.
Yeah, I would like to, before we go for break, just give everyone an opportunity to be able to visit you. Where can they go?
They can go to parentstoolshop.com, and I’ll give you a couple of freebies as we go through our talk today that after parentstoolshop.com you put a forward slash and I’ll give you a couple of resources that you can go out and get for free to support what we’re talking about today.
Beautiful. Well, you’ve got to stay with us then, everyone, because we’re going to be right back and continue our discussion in parenting with confidence versus perfectionism. You’re listening. Just hang 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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