Every Parent Needs to Hear This

Rob Dial (0:30)

If you're in the United States or Canada, text me right now, 512-580-9305.

Once again, 512-580-9305.

Today, I'm gonna talk about what I believe is the greatest self-development journey that you will ever go on as a human, and that is raising another human. Think about this for a second. What if your child grows up and the voice inside of their head sounds exactly like the way that you talk to yourself right now?

Think about that. You can tell your kid that they're smart and that they're amazing and that they're beautiful. You can tell them that they can do hard things, and then they watch you stand in front of the mirror and call yourself fat.

Or you do something wrong, and then you say I'm so stupid out loud. Which one do you truly think that they're going to believe? Because we all know that actions speak louder than words. So what do you think your children are more likely to follow? What you say to them or what they see you actually do?

That's the part of parenting that nobody really prepares you for. Your kids aren't just listening to what you teach them, they're watching who you are. That is a enlightening and absolutely terrifying thought at the same time. But the beautiful part about it is that means raising your children can also become an opportunity for you to heal and re-raise yourself. And so today I'm gonna show you how to do both. How to raise incredible children and how to use the opportunity as parenting as your greatest opportunity to grow yourself. And if you don't have kids, don't worry. Today's episode is also gonna be really good for you to learn about how to grow. And so here's the key part of today. Okay. And believe me, this is easier said than done. Instead of telling your kids what you want them to believe about themselves, which is fine. You should definitely do that.

But really, what's more important is the things that you want your children to believe about themselves out loud. You need to say it to yourself.

You need to say what you want your children to believe about themselves out loud to yourself in front of them, and they will learn it without even realizing that they're learning it. They will learn how to treat themselves and what they think about themselves by seeing how you treat yourself and what you believe about yourself. There was an interesting study that was done in 1961 A psychologist at Stanford named Albert Bandera ran what's now called the Bobo doll experiment. So kids watch an adult. There's two different sets of kids, right? One group of kids watch an adult beat up an inflatable clown by punching it and kicking it and hitting it with a mallet. And then the other group of kids, the adults didn't hit the doll. They were nice to it and they just played with the blow up clown doll. And then what they did was then they left. They left the kids alone in a room with that same doll.

What do you think happened? Well, let me tell you what happened. The kids who watch the adult and they watch the adult get aggressive and they hit the doll and everything like that, they copied the exact same moves. They punched it, they kicked it, they smacked the doll. The other group that didn't hit the inflatable doll, guess what?

They didn't hit the inflatable doll either. They were nicer to it. They played with the doll instead of beating it up. So nobody actually said this is how you treat this doll. What happened? They watched it. They caught it. They caught it by watching what the adult did. And so Bandera called this observational learning, which basically means that kids learn way more from watching versus listening. So think about it. Like how many times have you yelled at your kid, stop yelling?

How did that go for you? Right? Or stop crying. How did that go for you? Because you were just telling them, right? Kids don't necessarily do what you say. They do what you do. And so here's the thing that really hit me hard when you really start to look at this deeply and psychologically. I did an episode on this not too long ago where I talked about the voice inside of your head and the whole point was that the voice in your head isn't even really yours. It is the internalized voice of the people who raised you. The voice in your head is a combination of your mother and your father's voices.

So I realized my son today is building his inner voice right now by watching me.