In this inspiring episode of The Fresh Start Family show, Wendy delves into the crucial ingredients of positive parenting mastery. With a combination of personal anecdotes and professional wisdom, Wendy passionately discusses how parents can become fluent in this compassionate approach to raising human souls. Opening with a note on the countercultural nature of positive parenting, Wendy introduces listeners to the transformational journey that lies ahead.

Encapsulating Wendy’s heartfelt revelations, we discover her passion for assisting parents in transitioning from punitive methods to nurturing techniques based on connection and respect. She outlines the “three C’s” – Commitment, Community, and Consistency – that lay the foundation for mastering positive parenting. Wendy’s own story of growth and realization serves as a testament to these principles, establishing a genuine connection with the listener. She emphasizes the long-term benefits of this approach, painting a vision of family legacies filled with mutual respect, safety, and understanding that defy societal norms.

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Episode Highlights:

• Commitment to positive parenting is essential; fully immersing oneself in learning and applying its principles can lead to significant family transformation.
• Community is vital; surrounding oneself with like-minded individuals and mentors can provide stability, support, and encouragement during challenging moments.
• Consistency in applying positive parenting techniques ensures growth through practice and learning from inevitable failures, leading to mastery over time.
• Mentorship plays a key role in achieving mastery in positive parenting, providing guidance and a steady presence to navigate doubts and maintain progress.
• Positive parenting is a long-term, transformative journey that not only improves the immediate family environment but also paves the way for healthier generational legacies.

Resources Mentioned:

• “The Five Regrets of the Dying” by author Bronnie Ware.
• Follow Wendy on IG: @FreshStartWendy 

Not able to listen or prefer to read along? Here’s the transcript!

0:00:02 – (Wendy): Well, hey there, families, and welcome to a new episode of the Fresh Start Family show. I’m your host, Wendy Snyder, positive parenting educator and family life coach. And I’m so happy that you are here. So this month here at Fresh Start family, we are focusing on mastery when it comes to positive parenting. And I have felt my heart really calling me forward to support parents who really want to get to a place where they are completely fluent in this language of positive parenting. And as time goes on, the more I do this and the more I work with families. I just had a speaking engagement a few days ago where I had the honor of meeting so many new mamas.
0:00:48 – (Wendy): It’s so nice to be back to in person events, but it is more apparent to me than ever that positive parenting, connected, firm, and kind parenting is really just so countercultural. And today we’re going to be talking about the three c’s of positive parenting mastery. And I just have such a passion for helping parents who really want to transform and upgrade their family legacy because there’s just so many aspects to positive parenting that make it the type of thing that if you are kind of half in, half out, or kind of not sure what to do with a ton of fears that show up for parents that often will cause people to be wishy washy or maybe do some things but not others, what I find is a lot of families just remain stuck in kind of that in between land where they kind of think they’re doing positive parenting, but they’re still having a lot of struggles and disconnection, and then they revert back to punishment or threats, and maybe sometimes they don’t even realize they’re doing it.
0:02:00 – (Wendy): So as I’ve watched the families who have become the most successful and have really gained the full fluency and either graduated from my programs or come to me and shared with me just the massive amount of transformation that’s happened in their home and their family legacy. There are things that I realize are very common with those students of mine and then also within my own journey. So today, as I cover these three c’s, I hope it inspires you to just really want to become a positive parenting ninja. This was actually Terry’s idea.
0:02:40 – (Wendy): He just mentioned it as I was talking about how God is really pulling me in this direction of creating fluency for a lot of parents, which is like high level mastery. I’m actually opening a program that’ll launch in April that is our full mastery, highest level support program that I offer here at fresh start family. It is like very deep mentorship with me for seven months. But as we were talking about this, he’s like, yang.
0:03:07 – (Wendy): He’s like, you want to create the positive parenting ninjas of the world? And I was like, yes, that’s exactly what I want to do. And so now I have an idea for a children’s book that’s going to be called positive parenting ninja, and it’ll just be really fun, so watch out for that. I have a million ideas that flow through my brain every day, and Terry always keeps me laughing and gives me some great ideas. So one day, I’m going to have a parenting book called Positive Parenting Ninja.
0:03:36 – (Wendy): But, yeah. So over the years, it’s been six years now since I founded Fresh Start family, and I’ve had the honor of walking thousands of families through the coursework, the foundations course, the fresh start experience formerly known as the bonfire, and also certifying many, many parents in the fresh start family approach who have gone on to become full blown parenting coaches. And so, as I look at this, all this experience with kind of a bird’s eye view, or what I often refer to with my students as the drone view, I really do see some elements that are present for all the successful families that reach the full fluency that cause a parent to be able to fully shift out of the autocratic parenting styles into connected, firm and kind parenting strategies.
0:04:27 – (Wendy): So there’s a lot when it comes to positive parenting, and I think what happens is parents get stuck in the just tell me what to do, right? Like, what do I do if a child is doing this? Or just give me the answers. A lot of us end up wanting that fast fix overnight results. And I remember back when we were just starting with this work and we were just kind of raising our hands. Stella was three years old. I had just started staying home with her, and I really was worried. And I kept thinking, like, someone’s got to be able to have an answer here. That’s really just going to fix things, right? So for a few months there, before we actually got into the work of positive parenting, we had her in a lot of doctor’s offices.
0:05:18 – (Wendy): And that was the season of my life where it was all focused on her, right? Like, something had to be wrong with her. She was ADHD or odD, or maybe there was just some type of learning deficiency or something that was causing this little human to be so resistant and so difficult. And, I mean, I googled things like exorcism. I thought maybe she’s possessed. Maybe something’s like that wrong with her.
0:05:50 – (Wendy): I watched documentaries on bipolar disorder. I was just really looking, I think during that time, for the external, someone with an external wand to say, oh, here’s the diagnosis, here’s what’s wrong with her. And now, either with medicine or therapy, everything’s going to get better and things will just be fixed. I wasn’t consciously thinking like that back then, but when I kind of think back to that time in my life and the feeling in my body, I really was hoping they would come back with like, oh, yes, you’re right, she’s got ADHd or something like that. So I think as a culture, especially as time goes on and we get more and more used to this idea of the iPhone world and the Internet and everything is at your fingertips immediately. You can find out anything you want within 15 seconds on Google and you can find a program to learn anything under the sun.
0:06:53 – (Wendy): It can just be tricky to believe and think very long term for your legacy and your family and remember that really the best things in life, in my opinion, come and happen with the three c’s that I’m going to talk about, but with really a lens of long term sustainable growth and health. So how do we get out of this idea that it’s going to be a quick fix and that it’s really externally based on how our kids need to change into?
0:07:31 – (Wendy): How can we completely expand our education and really dive deep into becoming fluent with understanding what’s going on with our kids and how to communicate in healthy ways that actually influence these little human souls that look just like us to do what we want, but with grace and dignity and connection? How do we understand root causes and misbehavior and trusted psychology that helps us understand how the brain works? How do we replace punishment with compassionate discipline? Like, all these are puzzle pieces of positive parenting, that when a family commits to becoming fully fluent and understanding what everything looks like, that is where things really click and children start to thrive. Parents start to thrive, the family unit starts to thrive. Like all that good thing just comes together.
0:08:28 – (Wendy): Because without all of it, it is a longer season of just running in that mildly frustrated, confused, not quite sure what’s happening. So we have a tendency to go to blame. But when you come in and really commit to that fluency and do everything you can to just learn everything, practice everything, get supported, all the stuff, then we just see families thrive a lot more easily. So one of my favorite books of all time, and this may sound weird, but I love these kind of deep conversations, is the seven regrets of the dying by Bronnie rare.
0:09:13 – (Wendy): And it’s just such a beautiful book to help us remember that. There is such beauty and power in really remembering that. I know it may seem morbid, but I love actually thinking about my legacy and the end of my life. I actually think of it quite often because, man, as I’m now 46 years old, so I’m, like, pretty midlife. Holy smokes. Has it flown. It’s flown by. I’m halfway through my life, and it feels like it has gone so fast, and it feels like it’s continuing to go really fast, especially now that my kids are 13 and 16.
0:09:56 – (Wendy): I mean, Stella is trying to get beach volleyball scholarships right now. We’re starting to tour colleges as a sophomore in high school. I mean, it just feels like tomorrow she’s going to be out of the house and away at college. But I just find so much inspiration and motivation when I think about what do I want long term, and then backtrack from there. And so when I read Ronnie Rare’s book about the seven regrets of the dying, and I learned that the number one thing that she sources or she cites, that the patients that she had the honor of accompanying out of this life into the next, what she shared that was so common that almost every single one of them, I should say the grand majority of them said, was that they wished they had lived a life more true to themselves and, like, what they wanted versus conforming to what other people wanted.
0:10:59 – (Wendy): And so I just know with all my heart that parents, when they have children, they want more than anything to create a family legacy that they’re proud of, and where connection and relationship and trust and safety and compassion and patience and empathy and, yes, firm kindness. Right? Like, yeah, we want to have legacies where people remember that we set strong boundaries and we didn’t just let people or systems walk all over us. Like, I want that to be part of my legacy, but I really want people to remember me and my children to remember me as someone who led our family.
0:12:10 – (Wendy): And what I really want people and my children to remember me by is that I led with compassion and connection and that we were such a tight knit family that nothing could take us down, that we got through the highs and lows of life together as a unit, and we had unconditional love. All this stuff, like, I know all parents I trust, and I believe that all parents want this for their children when they’re born and when they decide to have a family. And then, man, as soon as the toddler years come around and twisted books get into your hands that tell you you got to hurt and harm your kids in order to raise good humans and how to just do weird stuff and how you got to get control and make sure they know who’s boss.
0:13:04 – (Wendy): And cultural conditioning starts to chip away at our visions and our dreams and we just end up conforming. We just end up caring more about obedience and having the appearance that we have it all together instead of really understanding what’s happening for our kids and slowing down and remembering that our children and our spouses and our family comes first. It is just so easy to conform to society and fall victim into being led down these paths where in my circle, in my work, I just have so many families who are led down the path where some really twisted toxic messaging, especially in the church, in unhealthy evangelical circles, it’s preached that really caused them to hurt, harm and humiliate their children for years because they’re told that it’s godly discipline.
0:14:05 – (Wendy): And what happens, finally, thank God for so many families, is they really start listening to that internal gut intuition that this is wrong, something is off, and we’ve got to pivot and get the support that they need. And that’s why so many incredible parents inside of our frustrated experience really find comfort in knowing that they’re not alone. Because we have a lot of families who are really ending that kind of painful generational cycles and just refusing to conform to society in that way. But even if you’re not had an uprise, raising up in an unhealthy evangelical circle or a high control religion that preached that kind of hurtful rhetoric around, especially punishment around kids, but even if you didn’t grow up in that just culture in general definitely will take you in a direction that is the opposite of compassion and empathy and connection and unconditional love and all that kind of stuff. So again, it’s just really easy to get going down a different path.
0:15:16 – (Wendy): But what if we just decided that we cared more about what we want and what our vision is for our family than we care about what our mother in law thinks? Or if our friends from college are going to approve of the conscious or positive parenting route that we’re taking? Or what if we cared more about what we believe in than we did our mother in law? Or the neighbor that sees our kid meltdown in the middle of the road and watches us have patience instead of threaten them at dinner time once a week?
0:15:59 – (Wendy): What would it look like if we cared more about living a life that was true to us and really getting in touch with what we want long term, what we want our legacy to be. I had a student once share the most beautiful kind of vision she had at the park one day. Her name’s Rachel. She was sitting at the park and with some moms on a playdate, and they were talking about how their grandmothers had survived the most horrendous things in their lifetime. Many of them had lost kids.
0:16:34 – (Wendy): They had lived through the Great Depression. They had survived wars, like, all these crazy things. And these mamas were saying, like, gosh, I just have so much respect for how much strength they had and just the way they lived their life with courage and the other things that she was saying. And Rachel paused and she said she got emotional because she thought to herself, wow, one day our kids are going to be possibly talking about us at the park.
0:17:05 – (Wendy): Us, their grandmothers, who were the first ones who had the courage to fully become fluent in connection based parenting. They were the first ones. We were the first ones. Many of us are first time generational cycle breakers, but we were the first ones who refused to hit and harm and humiliate our children into submission. We were the first ones who ended cycles of unhealthy conflict resolution or zero conflict resolution. If you come from a family like mine, where there’d be huge fights and then you never talked about it again, it would just get brushed underneath the rug.
0:17:42 – (Wendy): But she went on and on, talking about just how our grandchildren and our great grandchildren may be talking about us at the park one day and the courage we had to go outside the box and get the help that we needed and really change the entire future trajectory of the Snyder family. Or for her, it was the shell family. And I just thought that was so moving to help us remember that the decisions we’re making today, even though it’s like, I know everyone’s busy and there’s a lot going on and we’re all trying to juggle it all, but I am just such a purpose driven person that I find that thinking about the end of my life actually really inspires me to make sure I’m living a purpose driven life where I’m prioritizing the most important things.
0:18:37 – (Wendy): So, as Bronnie rare shares in that book, she says, if we make the right choices, we will be able to die with peace of mind. I’m like, heck yes, I want to die with peace of mind. I don’t want to be on my deathbed with just regrets. Right? And, like, disconnection. I know my family lineage or family tree. There’s just so much disconnection and broken relationships. Relationships that never healed like I have.
0:19:09 – (Wendy): My beautiful mama is like, what is it, Coliny? I don’t know. Her and her sister don’t talk anymore. My mom’s like 75 now, and it’s just wild. Like how many relationships there are that just dissolve and the conflict resolution is just not there. It just wasn’t something that was passed down to me like healthy conflict resolution, sitting with uncomfortable emotions, like holding space when you disagree on things, making amends after hurtful things have been said, assuming integrity, forgiveness, compassion.
0:19:48 – (Wendy): My mom taught me so much about forgiveness and compassion just because she’s awesome. But it was never something that I learned and saw my family doing on a grand scale when it came to family, so to speak. So I just know that so many people get to that point of their life and the regrets that they have are so strong. But there’s no going back, right? There’s just no going back. Not to say we are not meant to forgive ourselves for the years where we might have hurt and harmed our children because we really thought that that was the right. Like, that was my story. I spent almost a year really trying to punish Stella.
0:20:30 – (Wendy): Just submission. And I would take it back as much as I could take it back. I really wish I could take it back. And I’ve done so much healing work that really has helped eradicate shame from my life so I can parent the way I want to heal the relationship with her, which I just am so thankful for. The tools that I have and that we teach at frustrated experience, because it’s just been so meaningful to not have that cloud of a year hang over us in our relationship.
0:21:00 – (Wendy): Not that it didn’t have an effect, it did. Right? And I’m clear, I am aware of that. And I’m also a firm believer that we all leave marks on our children, whether they are physical or emotional. Like every single one of us as parents, we don’t get out of this without leaving marks. And so doing the work to eliminate shame from your life is really an important aspect of what we do here at the fresh start experience, especially in our high level mastery program, because shame will keep you stuck.
0:21:33 – (Wendy): And shame is not helpful. Shame does nothing, as Brene Brown says, to actually help you change your behavior for tomorrow. But when we talk about getting to the end of our like, there is no changing our behavior. Like, we have the family legacy that we have. And so just thinking about ending my life with such peace of mind and clarity and inspiration about the way I chose to live and the things I taught my children and what I handed down, that was absent of fear and force.
0:22:08 – (Wendy): And I wasn’t perfect, but you get my gist. Okay, so I feel the same way about parenting. If we make intentional choices and really put in the work and the effort and are willing and courageous enough to do the healing work now and invest in education and prioritize this type of peaceful conflict resolution, compassionate discipline, healthy communication, understanding root causes, working with our kids instead of trying to make them change, focusing on connection versus correction, all that kind of stuff, then we get to benefit in the teenage years, in the adult years, right?
0:22:53 – (Wendy): That’s what’s so cool now about my journey is with a 13 and 16 year old. It’s just so much fun. It’s so much fun. And to have such a high level of influence and trust for your kids as teenagers and also a non expectation of perfection, that felt so good to learn how to up that ante in this work. But it just feels so good and it just feels so awesome to be connected and to have the relationship of my dreams that I never had with my mom and dad.
0:23:29 – (Wendy): And I’m living that now every day, but it’s because of the work that I put in and the way I really jumped in with all my heart back in the day. So speaking of that time, and then I’m going to cover the three c’s here in just a minute. But speaking of that time, I remember my full commitment happened when I decided actually I was going to become a parenting coach. And so I remember it was probably like maybe a year or two into me learning positive parenting and starting to go to classes.
0:24:05 – (Wendy): And my teacher, her name was Susie, she invited me in to a certification program. And my first thought was like, that’s hilarious. I went to school for marketing. I spent, like a decade building a career as an event planner and an executive assistant to the president of an action sports company. And I was just like, what are you talking about? And she was like, I think you’d make a great coach. And she just went on to explain to me that deepening your learning, really, yes. It makes for a great coach, but it also always benefits your family.
0:24:46 – (Wendy): And so this was a season where we were still trying to hit our groove with application and consistency. And I remember I came home and I was like, terry, hmm. This is really interesting. And I think we might have just gotten a tax return or something. And I was like, or we were due to get a tax return. And I was like, hey, what would you think if I decided to invest in our future. The idea of making some extra money doing coaching did sound appealing because I had decided not to go back to work to my corporate job, because I could not stand the person I would have been working for. And after a decade of being at this amazing company, I was like, I’m out.
0:25:30 – (Wendy): And I had always wanted to stay home with my babies, and I had no idea what God was going to do when I hit rock bottom caring for said babies and really became just in a pit of despair. Right? Like, that’s when I found this work, is. When Stella was three, I had left my corporate career, and parenting just turned out full time. Parenting turned out to be so much harder, sent me into a tailspin. That’s when I discovered positive parenting, and then a year or two later, decided to become a coach or get certified to become a coach. But when I came home and I asked Terry, I was like, what would you think if I invested some of our tax return into the certification program?
0:26:07 – (Wendy): It’s an educational program. It’ll set me up to be a coach. And I don’t know, who am I to be a coach? And I still lose it so often. And Stella still gets in trouble sometimes. Or I think by that point, she might have been in kindergarten maybe, or probably not yet. She was probably still in preschool and she was still having her moments. It was like Stella really hit a groove after, I’d say first grade is when things really started to smooth over, and we started when she was three. So from three all the way up to what, probably six is when we were really just learning, applying, learning, applying, staying really tight knit with my coaches, my mentor, all the things.
0:26:53 – (Wendy): So I said that to Terry, and he was, huh, that’s interesting. He was like, well, honey, I do know this. He’s like, I don’t know what this would turn into. I have no idea what building a parenting coaching business looks like or if you’d love it, he said. But I do have a feeling that this will be something, if you do it, that will only strengthen our family and probably transform our legacy and our home will benefit.
0:27:26 – (Wendy): So with that said, I’m all in. Do it. And I was like, okay. But it was just like one of those pivotal moments where you remember certain things, right? Like certain conversations. I have so many pivotal things that I remember from Stella’s preschool. For example, like her director, the director of that preschool, her name was Sandy Hatter. She had said some really pivotal things to me that I will never, ever forget. It’s almost like when I remember back to that time when Miss Sandy said to me, I was so worried about Stella. She was, like, getting in trouble and couldn’t keep her hands to herself. And if I said, go right, she would go left, and I would just kind of vent to miss Sandy and say, I’m so sorry, and I don’t know what to do. And Miss Sandy just looked at me one day and was like, hey, look. She was like a very firm, direct person.
0:28:19 – (Wendy): A lot of my friends and neighbors who went there were, like, super scared of her. But I loved her. I just loved her. She looked at me right in my eyes and she was like, listen to me, Wendy. There is nothing wrong with Stella. She’s going to be an exceptional adult. You just got to get yourself a full toolkit and learn how to work with her instead of try to make her change. And it was almost like this shaking moment of like, okay, we’re going to be okay.
0:28:50 – (Wendy): Nothing’s wrong with my kid. And I just needed someone to validate that for me. And now I have the honor of doing that all day long for my freshman experience students and my full mastery program students, especially. And so just thinking back to that time and just remembering those pivotal moments, but when Terry said that, I was like, okay, honey, let’s do this. And that’s really when my commitment level changed.
0:29:15 – (Wendy): So let’s get into the three c’s, because commitment is actually one, the first c. And so this is the idea of really doing the thing, not dabbling. I think there is a time for dabbling, and it’s fantastic. And if the pain point isn’t high enough, then cool. I get it. Right? Terry and I both had massive healing happen from a program called Agoscue, which is like alignment therapy. I had a really bad shoulder for a long time, and he had a really bad neck injury.
0:29:52 – (Wendy): And I just remember so many times, like Gosq would say to us, like, hey, I’d say, oh, I want my friend to come. Or, my uncle’s really struggling with back pain, and I would love for him to come here and they would just say, hey, look, they’ll come when the pain is bad enough. It was so true with parenting, too. I find that there is this threshold, and if there is enough disconnection with your kids or in your marriage, or enough of those chaotic moments where you’re just like, oh, my gosh, this cannot go on.
0:30:31 – (Wendy): I just literally freaked out so hard on my kids. Your heart’s beating fast. You’re shaking. What just happened? Right? Like, I have a few of those in my history as a parent that are very firm memories in my brain, or you just are like, man, we are really struggling in our marriage to get on the same page, or we keep getting the phone calls from school, or a kid really got in trouble and we’re just very concerned, whatever it may be. But oftentimes I do find that the pain point has to be enough to just really kind of have you make that turning point and dive in the deep end. And also, I will say that oftentimes, those pivotal, really dark moments, whether it’s like the worst tantrum you’ve ever seen your child have, or a moment where they get so aggressive that they’re throwing things that really scare you, or you feel really scared that they’re going to hurt their sibling.
0:31:36 – (Wendy): But oftentimes, in my experience, those darkest, just most awful moments for me when I remain open and allow God to use them for good, I often will make decisions right after that that either reinvigorate my commitment to change or doors will open once I am ready and accepting for the help. But again, they often come after those lowest moments. Some of the energy or some of the nervous system healing work I’ve been doing over the last five months refer to it as like a lot of times after contraction or really low moments, you’ll then come out and have massive moments of expansion.
0:32:25 – (Wendy): And it actually works the other way, too. A lot of times if you have these massive moments of expansion, sometimes you’ll have moments of contraction afterwards where you doubt yourself, you’re fearful, you lose your cool, you create an argument, you do something you regret. But then if you have the tools or the ability to stay open hearted and be looking for what is good is going to come after that contraction, then often the expansion is like massive.
0:32:56 – (Wendy): And so that’s what I found with so many of my clients and with my story, too, is it often comes after those really dark seasons that all of a sudden you’re like, boom, you’re on fire to do something different, to change the habits and the patterns and all that stuff. So diving in the deep end when it comes to commitment is really what I recommend. There is something to be said for small, mighty steps. That’s a great way to do it, too.
0:33:25 – (Wendy): And I think when it comes to commitment, it’s just being all in. That’s what I see. Get the families the most success when they do the work and they get the help and the mentorship to really alleviate the doubts. Now the doubts are not going to be just gone always. I remember still having doubts of like am I drinking Koolaid? Can you teach kids with just compassion and firm kindness? Or like, I don’t know, am I crazy?
0:33:56 – (Wendy): Do I just need to hit like, I do? Remember having some of those doubts and my commitment level again once I decided to become certified? That was really the pivotal moment where my commitment was super high. Like I would have the moments of doubt, but I was fully committed and believed with all my heart that, no, you don’t need to make a child feel worse in order to make them behave better. And so in module number one, in module one of our foundations course, for example, we go right in and we talk about the elephant in the room and we let parents know. To have success with this program you’re going to want to trust me and take a break from corporate punishment for at least two months.
0:34:41 – (Wendy): Like at least two months. Give yourself a chance to let these tools work because as long as you have the external controls, especially if you’re enforced in the home, you’re going to struggle to implement these tools. And not to say that if you don’t have a supportive spouse that the spouse is still like flipping their lid or reverting to corporate punishment or threatening. We have so many clients who still see success in their home and are the ones who lead the way to end the painful generational cycles. But it just takes a lot longer, of course, usually than the parents who have full commitment in the house.
0:35:22 – (Wendy): And they are like, we’re jumping in the deep end and we’re doing this, if that makes sense. And so jumping in the deep end and then just trusting that you’ll acclimate to the water is kind of what I like to say. So it’s like the past two years I’ve been really leaning into the idea of in my relationship with God, I don’t have to have it figured out, the how to, like how am I going to get what I want?
0:35:47 – (Wendy): I just have to ask for what I want. Be very clear about trusting that my desires are good and that they’re from God. And then he’s the one actually responsible for figuring it out and making it happen. And so that’s what I see with a lot of families who make the full commitment is they’re just like, okay, we’re going to do this. We’re going to go through the foundations course or we’re going to get ourselves a year into the frustrated experience, or I want to become the full blown mastery ninja, Wendy and I want to spend seven months with you in intensive mentorship whatever it is, but we will acclimate to the environment once we’re there.
0:36:34 – (Wendy): So it’s kind of the analogy of like, once you’re swimming, you get used to it and you start to enjoy the clean, fresh, clear water. There’s also an analogy to surfing I always think of when it took me a long time to learn how to surf, like years and years and years. And it was really the hardest sport I’ve ever learned in my life because there’s just so many elements of the ocean changing. I mean, there’s just so much so it did kick my butt for many, many years. But I remember this pivotal moment. It was actually my 40th birthday. I think I learned how to surf when I was like 27, maybe 26.
0:37:15 – (Wendy): And for so long I was like, okay, feeling like I was kind of a mediocre surfer. And then at age 40, Terry and I actually, no, I wasn’t 40. That’s right. It was Terry’s 40th birthday, so I was 38. That makes more sense. So at 38, we were out surfing and it was his 40th birthday. And Terry had always, Terry was my surf teacher. He’s like the best surf teacher in the world, but he’s the most patient, kindest, angelic type human.
0:37:49 – (Wendy): And he would always tell me, like, wendy, you got to really commit because if you don’t, it’s going to be harder for you. And so you’re going to be more likely to get sucked over the falls or not get into the wave and then be hung up on the top, and then you’re going to risk falling. And when you fall from the top of the wave, it’s way worse than if you fall when you’re in the pocket. And so he just would always tell me, honey, go for it. But I’ve always had a healthy dose of fear. I grew up as a springboard diver, actually, and when it came to the platform, I just didn’t love it.
0:38:22 – (Wendy): Had lots of friends who went on to get college scholarships, but I was just like, I’m out. I just don’t like the fear component. So I was always a little fearful and the same happened in surfing. But we were out this one day. It was his 40th birthday, and I just remember when it clicked for me and I went to paddle into this big set wave and he was like, yes, you got it, you got it, you got it. And there’s this thing in surfing where you put your chin down almost to touch the nose of your board and you just give like three extra scoops and full commitment style.
0:38:56 – (Wendy): I did that, and I got the wave of my life. Best wave I’ve ever gotten in my life. Biggest wave I’ve ever gotten in my life. And I just remember just being so ecstatic and being like, terry, it’s your birthday present, you getting to see me apply. All that coaching you’ve given me over the years, and I really get it now. And from that age all the way up till I was, like, 45, I actually switched into riding what’s called a hawaiian pipo. So now I do like my surfing is slightly different nowadays, but for all those years in my early forty s, I just was such a more confident surfer. I had way better waves. I could navigate the wave better. I got into more waves.
0:39:38 – (Wendy): It was just so much easier. Once I fully learned that full commitment actually sets you up to be safer and have more joy in your surfing, to have it be easier, if that makes sense, that’s commitment. All right, our second c is community. Community. So my question for you is, if you are hoping to get or on a path to get to positive parenting, fluency and full mastery, what does your community look like?
0:40:13 – (Wendy): Because, man, is this important. So here at fresh start family, I have the honor of holding what I call the energetic step point for my families. So we have hundreds of families from all over the world who are inside of our fresh start experience program. And then my full mastery program that I do once a year again, that’s going to launch in April, it’ll start. I only have 20. So that is like a very tight knit group.
0:40:41 – (Wendy): Lots of personal mentorship, very small cohort. That’s why the growth in that and the fluency and the mastery is like so profound, because it is such a small cohort with my personal mentorship. But in our main group, in our big, big group, and I do this for our full mastery program, too. But I am the one who holds the energetic set point because I’m the one out here who’s just many steps ahead of all the families who are newer to this work and trying to navigate what it looks like, right? So with a 13 and a 16 year old starting when Stella was three, I’ve seen.
0:41:30 – (Wendy): I’ve seen and navigated through all of the seasons, right? So all of the doubt, all of the like, oh, no, this isn’t working. Or all of the how do we pivot and go a different direction when the school systems wants us to do this? Or how does it work if we really lean on compassionate discipline instead of punishment in this situation? Or what if we do decide to buck up against the standardized system and do something different.
0:42:02 – (Wendy): Just all of it I really saw as like an experiment, right? I was an educator from early on, certified coach. But as I raised my own kids, it was just like, okay, everything’s an experiment. Let’s see if this actually works. And now that we’re at 16 with Stella, she’s the one that all of this work, she’s the reason why we’re here today. Families is my beautiful, strong willed Stella. But we’re pretty close to 18 now, right? So it’s like I get to hold this energetic set point for the community of stability, faith, trust.
0:42:36 – (Wendy): Nothing shakes me. I am not concerned when the unhealthy evangelical circles challenge conscious parenting. I’m steady. I’m confident. I am not shaken. When I hear someone has gone backwards and their kid is having aggressive behavior and throwing things or biting, I stay steady. I continue to assume the integrity in that child. I’m able to clearly see things in our community’s children about their true intentions and their needs and what they’re trying to communicate. Like all these things, I’m there to just hold this steadiness.
0:43:30 – (Wendy): And so I become like the thermostat. And I know for me, in being in mentorship groups with people who are ahead of me in certain things, like right now, I’m in a financial, healing, private group or a program, and then I’m also in a business mentorship program. And that is what happens, right? The leader and the mentor holds the energetic set point, and then you adjust to that. And the same thing happened back when I was learning positive parenting and I was becoming certified. It’s like my teacher Susie, she had kids who were older and had been through everything, and she had tested every single one of these strategies.
0:44:12 – (Wendy): Man, does she have stories. She was the best storyteller of all time. She raised four teenage boys with this work, many whom went on to be high level professional athletes and coaches. And she’s just incredible. She has such a great relationship with all of them. They’re all married. She has like twelve grandkids or something. Now she’s in her 70s, but she held the energetic set point for me. When I had the doubt or when I had despair and hopelessness or anxiety or questions, she was just that steady, really constant for me.
0:44:51 – (Wendy): And so you want to make sure that you really are somewhere where you are able to interact with and hopefully be mentored by someone who holds that steadiness of really just no doubt in their mind that all human beings deserve respect, compassion, that families who have relationship safety, mutual respect, firm limits, that these are the families that thrive. This is how it works. The people who have the knowledge and the education and the history and are able to just stay steady, even though there’s all this turmoil, right? Like, whether it be in your life or the world, whatever it is.
0:45:47 – (Wendy): That’s just what I find is so amazing about community. And if you’re anything like me, what you realize is as you get older, all of a sudden you realize that our friends from college and high school and all the things are fantastic. I love so many of my friends. Right? Sure. Are you currently recording? Yes. You can put on your headphones. Bye. Random so if you’re anything like me, as I’ve gotten, have I still cherish my friends from college? Especially, like, the college time?
0:47:15 – (Wendy): Terry and I just moved to San Diego. It was such a special time where we made such close friends. And as I’m getting older and really become passionate and settled into being a continuous learner, someone with an evolving faith, like all these things that I am so fired up on, I have met new people that I just get very fired up with to be around and to fill my everyday with. And honestly, my team is some of those people.
0:47:52 – (Wendy): I don’t know if this is smart business or not, but my team, my group of three women that hold the same exact, basically, viewpoint of humanity and the power of pouring into our next generation when it comes to parenting, and just the way that these women on my team raise their children and care so much about this company and the things that excite us, and we get to hang out every day together. I mean, we’re in three different parts of the US. One’s in the Pacific Northwest, one is in Tennessee, and one’s in Florida, and then I’m in San Diego.
0:48:33 – (Wendy): But we just find so much. I mean, I tell my team I love them, and I am just so happy that I get to be surrounded with people that are truly on the same page. Because things change over time. And instead of trying to force ourselves to be filled up in spaces that people may have been going in different directions, then why not find and feel really good about creating spaces or becoming part of spaces where you’re with people who love to keep learning, or people that love to nerd out on brain science and child development and human connection work? Or people just that really give a damn about the way they’re raising their kids and don’t just do what’s easiest, but are actually willing to step outside their comfort zone and bring more peace into their home and change the world.
0:49:33 – (Wendy): For me, the community factor has just been really important to create that and step into and really invest in spaces where I am with like minded people. And the same goes for when I’m learning something new in my financial healing group. The community there is just amazing. My business mentorship group and back in the day when I was first learning positive parenting, my mentor and the groups and actually the preschool that Stella went to had a community that they designed. We would meet twice a year. And just getting to know so many parents in, like, it just is what made me feel safe.
0:50:10 – (Wendy): And so we’ve talked about commitment, we’ve talked about community, and I guess one more thing I wanted to tell you about community, and then we’ll go on to our last c. So, with community, I think when you’re talking about surrounding yourself with people that really light you up, that pour into you, that are positive influences, but also look at as part of your community, like, do you have deep mentorship?
0:50:42 – (Wendy): I guess it’s been since I was. How old, Stello? I had Stella when I was 30, so I guess it was since I was 33. Now I’m 46. It’s 13 years. I guess since I’ve been in this work, I consistently have at least one or two mentors. And so do you have a mentor who is guiding you and helping you and holding space for you and teaching you new things and lovingly guiding you back to the path of integrity consistently over and over and over again.
0:51:12 – (Wendy): I will tell you, over the years, all of my mentors, and I’ve had probably ten now, ten over the 13 years that I’ve done, high investment, really spent quality time with, all of them were fantastic. Two of them I look back on and I’m like, oh, that wasn’t actually a perfect fit for me. And as time went on, I was like, we have different belief systems, especially with one of my mentors in the church that I spent two years together with in a Bible study, I was like, oh, okay.
0:51:45 – (Wendy): As time went on, I was like, I can see we just have big differences here. But at the same time, there was so much beauty that came from jumping in to the full mentorship and seeing where God took it. Right? So I don’t regret it for anything. But it’s just a question for you, is, do you have deep mentorship in your life? And if you don’t, I would encourage you to look at how you can get it, because it’s just life changing when you have someone that is just there to guide you hold you steady, help lovingly, hold you accountable, and just keep you focused as a north star.
0:52:27 – (Wendy): All right, you guys, last of the three c’s that we’re going to talk about today when it comes to becoming, like, developing full mastery in positive parenting is consistency. So there’s a beautiful quote. I’m going to forget the name of the guy right now. Forgive me, but the quote says, the journey of a thousand miles starts with one step. I want to say his last name is Zhao. The journey. Let’s look it up because we got to quote the people.
0:53:01 – (Wendy): It’s a chinese proverb. I thought it actually had a name to it. But a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. And, yes, that is so true, but the key is here. You got to keep walking. Consistency will create so many opportunities for failure, too. So, again, back to community. You just want to make sure you have a safe place to land. When the going gets hard, the going gets tough. Wasn’t there, like, an 80s song? When the going gets tough, there was.
0:53:37 – (Wendy): I’m going to have to dig this up after this episode. Dig that song up. But so with consistency. Consistency is so important. Taryn, my little guy and I and Terry are watching Sean White’s documentary right now. So Sean White is an olympic snowboarder. And holy smokes, the amount, the consistent training that guy did for, I mean, he was. I think he started going to the Olympics when he was 15 and probably won, I want to say, like, six gold medals or something.
0:54:08 – (Wendy): But he had so much consistency. But the thing that comes with the consistency of so much practice is so much failure. So it’s almost hard to watch this documentary because it’s so intense, because he’s like a freak of an athlete. He flies through the air for a long time. His nickname was the Flying tomato because he had red hair. And especially as he got older, as you watch this documentary, you’re just like, oh, my gosh, that is so intense. He keeps going for these tricks off the half pipe, and they’ll have these big airbags set up, and he just hits it wrong and he will fail, like, a large percentage of the time.
0:54:50 – (Wendy): And he just keeps going and trying and getting back up and going and going and going and going. And that’s how he won six gold medals. Right? So when you have consistency in your life and you’re really, like, showing up and you’re learning new strategies, you’re being constantly invited to change your paradigm about what’s happening for your children or retrain your neural pathways. So you can clearly understand what’s actually happening when it comes to their misbehavior. When you are escaping the punishment mindset and embracing compassionate discipline, when you’re doing all these things, you need to be consistent, right? Like you need to again be learning, applying failing, learning, applying failing and then being able be in an environment where you can get back up and just know that failure is just unfinished success.
0:55:43 – (Wendy): It does not mean that you’re a bad parent. It does not mean that positive parenting is crap. It doesn’t mean that gentle parenting isn’t biblical. It just means that it takes so much freaking practice to do this work sometimes. Especially if you are a generational cycle breaker, which many of you who find my work and fall in love with it, you are. I just attract you guys because that’s who I am, right?
0:56:12 – (Wendy): Again, I grew up in the home with amazing parents, but many lineages back. Fear and force was used often in the name of religion to force a child into submission, right? Like there was just lots of unhealthy conflict negotiation, there was a lots of temper rage. Like yes, it got passed down to me. And so as a generational cycle breaker, it’s just going to include a lot of the failure. And if you are not in a community where you have a safe place to land when you make mistakes, you’re probably going to quit.
0:56:50 – (Wendy): But just remember, real growth happens when you are surrounded with people who can hold space for you in your worst moments, not just in the good times when you’re patient and you’re like, hey guys, I stopped yelling. I haven’t yelled in ten months. Like look at me. No. And that’s great. We do so much celebration inside of our programs, especially in our full mastery program. But when you are really in a low time, when you’re really scared that your marriage is going to crumble, or you’re worried your child’s going to grow up to be a really mean human, or where you feel so filled with shame about what goes on behind closed doors in your home, or maybe what happened to you when you were little and you’ve never told anybody.
0:57:37 – (Wendy): Or the anxiety and the depression feels so thick that you just feel like no one would understand you. Or your reactive protective behaviors are starting to show up again. And you feel ashamed because you read the book, you listened to the podcast, you air quotes, know better. You want to have a safe landing place when those things happen, because they will happen. And that makes you human, not broken and not weak, right?
0:58:12 – (Wendy): But doing the work. Just know that. So consistency is our third c that we’re discussing today, and it’s going to create the moments of both expansion, which is like, yay, it worked. My kid apologized on their own and I didn’t even have to do anything. Or my child went to their room and did self calming and I didn’t force them into submission with a threat. Or my kid successfully did a peaceful conflict negotiation together instead of, like, smacking or hitting one another.
0:58:44 – (Wendy): We have a million success stories inside of our fresh start experience program. Those are moments of expansion. They will happen when you get consistent with learning and applying this work, especially if you have a strong mentor, and then you’re going to have the contraction and who is your net to catch you during those moments of constriction and freefall? Okay, so I just keep thinking of the Sean White documentary. Go watch it if you’re interested at all.
0:59:13 – (Wendy): But again, they have these giant airbags, and that’s what Sean uses to really practice all of his insane tricks off the half pipe. And that gives him the ability to have the consistency and the failure, but to not literally die. Because when you’re doing this work, by the way, you guys, your nervous system will feel like at times that it is going to die. Like your heart is going to pound out of your chest when you have a child rolling their eyes at you and they just threw a lego and it barely missed your head, and you grew up in a home where you would have gotten the smack down and you are wanting to be firm and kind and redirect revengeless behavior and teach with compassionate discipline. In that moment, your nervous system, when you do something new and apply the strategies that I teach you, you are going to feel like you’re going to die.
1:00:11 – (Wendy): And so are you. Surrounded with a safe group of people who are going to remind you you’re safe, you’re doing a great job. We’re here with you. You’re not alone. I had a really tough night the other night, too. Mentor me. Here’s how you can handle the teaching. Now that that tantrum or that really intense misbehavior moment has come and gone, here’s how I want you to teach. Here’s why everything’s okay.
1:00:42 – (Wendy): Here’s why your child is just communicating. We can teach him. Here’s the life skill he’s missing, right? Like, what does it look like? So just to sum it up, you guys, we’ve got community. We started off actually with commitment. So commitment, community and consistency are our three C’s to becoming fluent and mastering positive parenting. And I’m going to actually reveal what I believe is the number one way to become a master of positive parenting at a free workshop that we’re having that I’m teaching on March 26. I hope you’ll be able to join me.
1:01:23 – (Wendy): I put all the details in the intro, but actually, maybe I won’t say all the details here because I don’t even know if our registration page is open yet. But I know that I put plenty of information about the workshop that’s happening on March 26 in the intro or kind of mid spot to this episode. And if they’re not there yet, then just keep your eye on your email because I’m going to email you. But March 26 for now, you can definitely save the date on your calendar.
1:01:59 – (Wendy): 09:00 a.m. And 05:00 p.m. 09:00 a.m. And 05:00 p.m. I’m going to teach this workshop, and I’m going to reveal the number one way that you can really master positive parenting skills, like the number one thing that will help you do that. So I hope you’ll join me for that. But thanks for listening, guys. This has been a really fun episode just to kind of share my heart with you on what God’s been kind of leading me towards to fill you guys up as far as how do you reach that full fluency level where you feel like you are truly mastering positive parenting?
1:02:37 – (Wendy): All right, well, as always, if you love this episode, please screenshot and share it over on social. I’m at Freshart Wendy on Instagram. That’s where I like to hang out the most. I do a ton of teaching and stories over there just to help you with extra nuggets of inspiration and motivation. So make sure you’re following me. I’m at fresh start, Wendy, but thanks for listening. Thanks for sharing. I love you, and I appreciate every single one of you as loyal listeners.
1:03:05 – (Wendy): Bye.