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The Hidden Reason Motherhood Feels So Hard for High Achievers · Motherhood Uncut

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: You're in the cereal aisle.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: Your toddler is on the floor, screaming, back arched, face red, the whole thing.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: And you feel it before you even look up.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: All the other shoppers.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: The woman by the yogurt, who is not even trying to hide her stare, and who clearly decided that she knows exactly what you should do.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: Your face goes hot.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: So you try everything.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: You bribe, you threaten, you crouch down and do that calm voice thing through your teeth.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: You count to three, but somehow the harder you try, the louder your kid gets.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: Here's what took me years to really understand.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: It was never about finding the perfect thing to say.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: What actually calms your child in that moment is the opposite of what your natural instinct is.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: Stay with me for a minute.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: I have sat with a lot of moms who have experienced this exact moment, not to mention I have so many times.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: But the put-together moms, especially, the ones who can run a team or a whole household and then feel completely undone by a two-year-old in a grocery store.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: So if that's you, you are in really good company.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: And by the end of this, you will know what to do with yourself in the middle of the meltdown, not just what to say to your kid.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the part that most women do not talk about.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: So let's start with what's happening for you, because reaching for the fix is the most natural thing in the world.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: You've probably spent your whole life being good at solving things.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: Something breaks and you handle it.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: That is a strength.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's gotten you really far.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: So when your kid melts down, your brain does the thing it always does.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: It grabs for the fix.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: What do I say?
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: What do I do?
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: How do I make this stop?
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: And please, Lord, make it stop right now because people are looking.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: I know.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: I have been there.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: Here's the part underneath it though.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: In that moment, it can feel like the tantrum means something about you.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: Like a stranger is gonna look at your screaming kid and decide that you are a bad mom.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the guilt.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: And guilt makes you grip harder.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: Your kid isn't giving you a hard time.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: Your kid is having a hard time.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: And in the middle of it, they're not really looking for the right words from you.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: They're looking for you, for your steadiness.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: A child this age can't find calm from the inside yet.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: They borrow it from the person they love most.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: And in that grocery store, that is you, which means you can't hand them a calm that you don't have yourself.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: So when you come at them all cranked up and embarrassed, trying to force it, there's nothing there for them to borrow.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: You can say every perfect line and it just won't land.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: They're not reading your words, they're reading your body, which brings up the question every mom asks me next, usually with a little bit of edge in her voice.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, but how?
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: I'm in the middle of a grocery store, everyone is staring.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: How am I supposed to just be calm?
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: Let me actually walk you through this.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: The first move isn't about your child at all.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's a question you ask yourself.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: What does this moment actually require?
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: Not what would end it the fastest, but what does it actually need?
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes the honest answer is that your kid is exhausted or drowning in the lights and the noise, and the meltdown makes complete sense.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes there's nothing to fix, and it just has to move through you both.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: Naming that to yourself takes the panic down just a notch.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: Then notice the thought that jumped in.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: Usually it's a pretty scared one, like everyone thinks I'm a bad mom, or he's going to be like this forever, or I can't handle this.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's fear talking, and fear is a terrible place to parent from.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: You don't have to argue with it, just notice it's a fear.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: And then before you manage your child at all, you steady yourself.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: One deep breath, feet on the floor.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: Something you say inside your head, like the one that I come back to over and over most is this.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: Is it possible that this is not a problem?
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: Is it possible my kid is having a hard time and I can feel all of it, and we can both still be okay.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: So none of this is a script.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: It won't look the same on a day when everyone has slept as it does on a day that nobody did, obviously.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: That's the point though.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: You're not running a technique here.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: You're deciding who you want to be inside the hard moment and letting your kid feel that.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: From that steadier place, you connect before you try to control anything.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: You don't have to fix the feeling.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: And the worst of it, your only job is to be the one thing that doesn't move.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you get down on their level.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you just put a hand on their back and let them be a mess for a minute without needing them to stop what they're feeling for your sake.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: People worry that this rewards the tantrum.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: It does not.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: What it actually does is give a little body the one thing that settles it, yours settled first.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: And when the wave passes, and I promise it will, you don't need a big talk, just a hand and a few plain words, something like, you got through it.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: I was right here.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: I know this kind of scenario firsthand.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: When my daughter was about four months old, there was an ordinary morning where she was crying, and I had tried literally everything.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I finally just sat down on the floor next to her and I stopped.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: I stopped trying to figure out what was wrong.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: I stopped running through the checklist in my head.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: I just sat there with a feeling, hers and mine.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: The anxiety didn't vanish, but something in my body understood, I don't know, maybe even for the first time, that I could be inside a hard moment and still be okay.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: And she felt that.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: She settled because I did.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: That's what moms tell me too, almost word for word.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: The moment they stop trying so hard, the kid starts coming toward them.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: Not every time, not like magic, but so much more often than the yelling ever worked.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: That's the part that undoes my clients a little because it runs backwards to everything that made them successful.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: At work, more effort gets more results.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: But here, past a certain point, the harder you try, the worse it gets.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: Do less, be more.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: Let your kid borrow the calm you found first.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: If this made something click, the next thing worth understanding is why your brain fights you like this in the first place.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: I made a video on the two brains every mother is working with.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: Steady yourself and then let them borrow that.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: I'll see you in the next video.