By you clearing out your

wounds and finding out how

no matter what's happened in

your life, how you can

use it to your advantage,

gives them an example of what's possible

to do the same. So that's pretty cool.

But no matter what you've done or

not done, you're worthy of love.

The same thing for your kids.

Well many of you, who

have beautiful children,

gyrate in the perceptions,

the self-perceptions of how

well you do as a parent.

Sometimes you feel proud,

sometimes you feel shame.

Sometimes you build yourself up.

Sometimes you beat yourself down.

So there's many gyrations as a parent.

So my presentation today is about

maybe taking a look and maybe

it's time to stop beating

yourself up as a parent.

So why do we beat ourselves up? Well,

anytime we compare

ourselves to other people,

and we think that somehow

those children and that

parenting and that parenting

style is better than ours,

we sometimes minimize ourselves

as a result of exaggerating them.

We may not see the

whole story. Many times,

we don't see some of the downsides of

that style, of that parenting structure.

And we then go and compare

ourself to that and judge ourself.

Anytime we compare ourselves to others,

we're going to distort our view of

ourself. If we put them on a pedestal,

we'll minimize ourselves. If we put them

in a pit, we'll exaggerate ourselves.

And neither one of those

minimizations or exaggerations are us.

That's not our authentic self.

And sometimes we have expectations

that are not necessarily individual

because of a comparison of an individual,

but to an ideal, a social ideal.

A lot of things we taught in

school are moral hypocrisies.

They're expecting human beings

to be one-sided. You know,

I've asked thousands of

people, and I mean thousands,

how many have ever been bullied

before? And most every hand goes up.

How many have you ever bullied

somebody? Most every hand goes up.

But then sometimes the schools

say zero tolerance for bullying.

But yet every human being, including

the people who are bullied and bullying,

are there, and they've been there and

done that, and they've survived it,

and they lived it, and life went on.

So sometimes we try to overprotect

our children and then we

need something like the bully to come in

their life to kind of wake them up and

make them grow up.

I'm a firm believer that

support and challenge,

maximum growth and development occurs

at the border of support and challenge.

And sometimes one parent

is the over protector,

and the other one's the the

challenger and aggressive one,

and the two make up love.

We have this fantasy that support without

challenge and kind without cruel and

nice without mean, and

positive without negative,

is somehow what we should be doing.

And these moral hypocrisies

nobody's going to live by,

but everybody's going to think

they're supposed to live by it,

and then beat themselves up.

And this comes from sometimes

people that are wounded,

that have been maybe challenged in their

life and were addicted to peace and

kind and sweet and everything else,

and then when they got the challenge

that they needed to grow, they judged it,

and then they went out and became

parenting experts to try to prevent people

from doing what they're frightened

of and they're wounded by.

Sometimes parenting experts are actually

just people who've been wounded by

things and projecting the opposite

of what they've been wounded by,

to try to protect people in the society

from their wounds instead of growing

through their wounds and

finding how it served them.

I'm a firm believer that some of the

things that we think are terrible and that

we would want to prevent

actually served us.

And so beware <laugh>.

I had this lady who was in Washington

that attended my Breakthrough Experience

program. And she was I'm going

to guess around 33, 34 years old.

She had a couple children

and she read this book about

how to be the perfect mom kind of thing.

I called her Miss Tofu for a joke

because she was trying to make sure that

everything was natural foods and

natural cotton diapers and hand

cleaning, I mean, it was just crazy the

extreme she went to. And then of course,

she was now working her butt off doing

things and she was a doctor and gave up

being a doctor to go

and be this perfect mom.

And then in the process of doing that,

she was upset with her husband because

he was having to work harder because they

both had an income and now all of a sudden

he's having to work harder and all of

a sudden they have a

bigger house for the kids.

And now she's wanting him to come home

and do the thing she doesn't really want

to do,

but she thinks she should be doing it

because that's what she read in the book.

And she didn't realize until

I asked her a question,

was the person who wrote the

book a doctor? And she said no.

And did she have a source of income that

was potentially greater than what she

being taken care of by her husband?

And she said, no. I said, well,

anytime you compare yourself with your

set of values with somebody else that has

a different set of values and you

expect to live in their values,

you're going to beat yourself up.

So she was making herself

feel like it was overwhelming,

she felt she was not

living up to expectations,

she was projecting anger onto her husband,

and she was withdrawing from her career,

which was upsetting her and taking it

out on the kids and taking it out on him.

And she was trying to be this so-called

perfect mom, according to this book,

written by somebody that didn't have a

doctorate degree and didn't have a way of

getting income and had a husband that

was taking care of her and was focused

mainly on kids and had the time to go

and do cleaning of diapers and maid

service.

So I made her stop and kind of put things

into context and wake up and make sure

she wasn't trying to compare herself to

somebody else with a different set of

values and then create a moral hypocrisy

on herself about how she should be.

Anytime you hear yourself using language

like, I got to, I have to, I must,

I should, I ought to, supposed

to, I need to, whatever,

you're probably injecting the values of

outer authorities about how you should

be. And if you do,

you'll probably beat yourself up as a

parent because you're thinking you should

be this.

But if you look very carefully

that sometimes the very

things you do are exactly

what's needed for the child and it

just doesn't match the norm. You know,

if I look at Sir Isaac Newton, his

father died when he was a child,

when he was born, literally on

the day he was born, I believe.

And then he had a mother that had to go

out and find another man and she had to

temporarily give the child

over to somebody else to

take care of while she was

trying to find a man, to take care

of her because she had no income.

And so he basically raised for a

while without a father and a mother.

And you know, we could easily

say, well, he was a, you know,

kind of an orphan for a while,

and kind of a foster child in a

while and was abandoned for a while,

we could come up with all those things

like some psycho babble and psychologists

like to come up with, to

blame and be a victim of,

but he became one of the

greatest scientists in history,

wrote Principia and did amazing

things and became, you know,

he's knighted by the queen kind of thing

and one of the great people in history.

Whenever I see people that think they had

a terrible childhood, I just go, okay,

what happened? And then I go and

find out, so how did that serve you?

And how are you using

it to your advantage?

And who else that's done extraordinary

things had that same beginning and wake

them up and make sure they don't get

caught in this social idealism about how

you're supposed to be raised.

Because I've never met two

people that were raised the same.

So what is norm and what's average

and what is ideal sometimes is murky.

And of course,

in different cultures there's

different motives and different needs.

And today kids don't usually leave

home until their twenties and thirties.

And when I was a kid, you're

out by teens. So, you know,

so if they're mollycoddled

into their thirties,

are they really being matured and grown up

or are they basically being

wussied and pussied you might say?

So these are all questions that

we could come up with, but,

the bottom line is did you learn

to communicate what you valued

and what you felt was important for the

child in terms of the child's values so

they would take on and inculcate some

of those ideas that you felt were

essential,

and did you teach the child how to get

what the child wanted and learn how to,

you know, achieve what it has?

Did you care about the child?

Did you have love for the child?

Which most parents do. You know,

I jokingly said one time

at a parent conference,

made everybody just absolutely

burst into laughter.

I said my definition of successful

parent was, did they survive <laugh>,

all these parents started

laughing. And because, you know,

the parents have to survive through

this experience of raising kids,

because the kids are fun,

they challenge and, you know,

take you to the limit

sometimes. But bottom line is,

do you care and do you love your children?

And are you intending to do what you

can to assist them in fulfilling what's

meaningful to them? And

really realize that you're,

sometimes what you think is caring is

actually a projection of your wounds onto

them.

And you're trying to prevent them from

going through what you haven't found the

benefits in your life that

you're still a victim of,

instead of actually empowering yourself

by finding out how whatever happened in

your life served you.

That's why I tell people to come

to the Breakthrough Experience,

to clear all the baggage

that they're carrying around,

because otherwise they're going to

project those fears and anxieties onto the

child. You know, I noticed that my

mom and dad had different views,

my mom would say, be careful about this,

and she'd be protective a little bit.

And my dad said, he'll figure

it out, and if he gets bruised,

he'll learn from it. That's how he learns.

You don't sit there and protect somebody

from learning their experiences.

I remember I grew up, when I was in my

twenties at Texas Children's Hospital,

I was doing a part job there, and

also Texas Heart Institute, St.

Luke's Hospital. And

there was a bubble baby,

and he was an overprotected baby,

and he had no immune response.

And so they had to keep him in

this bubble. And I thought, well,

this is a classical example.

The more you try to overprotect

and keep buddy safe,

and they don't get involved in

infections, they don't get anything,

sometimes their immune system

is not adapted and prepared.

So you need a little bit of challenge

in life. And, my experience is,

if you go through your life and find

out how, no matter what happened to you,

how does it serve you? And you

find out that whatever you see,

you look for its opposite. So if you

had somebody that was aggressive,

where was the over protector? Find

it. If you see them synchronously,

neither one of them are affecting you.

And then once the parent sees

that and parent understands it,

the more they're trying to protect

the child, the more somebody,

the bully comes in, or the

father comes in assertively,

or the sister or brother become the

assertive one, an aggressive one.

Once you see that there's a maximum need

for both the testosterone and estrogen,

the male and feminine, traditionally that,

today it's murky because

the gender spectrums.

But the reality is that you need both.

You need kind and cruel and nice and mean

and positive and negative and support

and challenge and peace and

war. And every family gets that.

So beware of idealisms and fantasies

about how you're supposed to be and should

be and gotta be, and have to

be, based on somebody's ideal,

which is usually a result of a wound

that they haven't seen the benefits to.

And then they set up an idealism that

tries to protect people from their wounds.

And then they call that parenting.

But the bottom line is the child is

going to need both sides. You know,

maximum growth and development occurs

at the border of the pairs of opposites,

support and challenge and nice and

mean, et cetera. So both are needed.

The estrogen of support and

the testosterone of challenge,

the rest and digest and the

fight or flight mechanisms,

we have an autonomic nervous system

for both, and we need both. You know,

if you overprotect a child and keep it

from ever having any challenges at all,

it's probably going to become

dependent, juvenile like,

it doesn't have any accountabilities,

responsibilities, it's, you know, that's,

we think that's the way it is.

I've actually seen people

think that's what love is. No,

that's keeping the child dependent and

not capable of handling reality and not

being resilient and adaptable.

It needs accountabilities,

responsibilities and challenges,

and it needs assertiveness and it needs

to know how to deal with aggressive

people and all the different types of

people. The more experiences you have,

I think the more adaptable

and resilient you become.

So if you gave them not an ideal

according to somebody that wrote a book,

and by the way, if you get a

hundred books on parenting,

you're going to see

variations all over the place,

and they're going to range from

almost complete opposites. You know,

I was sitting in one of

my training programs,

teaching the Demartini Method that I

teach in the Breakthrough Experience.

And I had a lady there and she <laugh>,

she all of a sudden gets a call from the

police department and she says, I said,

what happened? And she said, I just

got a call from the police department,

my son's in jail. He got

caught with marijuana.

And that was back when marijuana

was not like it is today,

kind of open and sold, and it was illegal.

And so he got caught with

marijuana and he'd stolen a car.

So he stole a car and got

caught with pot <laugh>.

And she's sitting there just

devastated and beating herself up and

thinking, you know, I've

been a working woman,

I should have been home with my kids,

I should have been there

and I should have done this,

and I'm supposed to be doing that.

She's beating herself up and

thinking she failed as a mother.

And I'm sitting there just calm, just

watching this whole thing go down.

And there's a lady sitting right next to

her and this lady pats her on the back

and says, you know, to her,

says stop this whining,

that's a bunch of BS and

patterned interrupt her.

She turned and looked at her

and, why do you say that? Said,

my son three weeks ago got

caught with pot and stole

a car, exactly what your son did,

but I was there every single day,

took him everywhere he wanted

to go and did everything,

I sacrificed my career for my kids.

I did everything that you

swore you should have done.

And I thought I should

have done what you did.

I thought it should have been more of a

leader and more of a be true to myself

and go after what I wanted.

And they both had this illusion

that they should have done this,

and they all thought it was a greener

pastor. And then I said to them,

they turned to me and

I said, well, you know,

both your sons are going

to turn fine <laugh>,

they're going through teenage crazies,

and that's part of it. And you know,

sitting beating yourself

up isn't going to do,

let's go and have a conversation with

the son and let's go meet with him and

talk to them and find out what

they learned from the experience,

and what they're going to

do, go through it. Now,

one son ended up being

involved in a computer company

and has a massive computer

company and became a multimillionaire

and end up buying a car at

the dealership he stole a

car from, which is irony.

And the other one ended up

being a musician and was

not as driven financially as

much, but does what he loves.

And they both are doing something

amazing with their lives today. And so,

you know,

they're great contribution to society

and they went through a crazy period,

and they end up doing some

things, and that's part of life.

But you're sitting there and

now the parents, you know,

the parents sometimes when they see the

child do something that matches social

ideals, they take credit for it and they

go, I'm proud of you son. By the way,

when you say yourself, you're proud of

them, you're not proud of what they did,

you're proud of what you did to lead them

to that <laugh> pride is not what they

do, that's admiration. Pride

is what you did to get that.

And then you can also beat yourself up

and feel ashamed and you can gyrate with

all these different ideals that

you're comparing yourself to.

But the reality is, did you love

them? And did you give them both?

And and beware of the false, you know,

moral hypocrisies about one sidedness.

You know, I was told by my grandmother,

<laugh>, be nice, don't be mean. Be

kind, don't be cruel. Be pleasant,

don't be unpleasant. Be considerate,

don't be inconsiderate. Be generous,

don't be stingy. Be giving, don't be

taking. Right? Be peaceful. Don't,

stop fighting and all that.

And then five minutes later,

she'd beat the hell outta grandpa

and yell at him and ask for money or

something, the very opposite of

what she was just telling us to do.

And it was like, you know, tell

us one thing, live another.

So watch out for moral hypocrisies about

how you're supposed to be and look at

what you're actually doing and know

that if you live most authentically,

you're exemplifying what's

possible for them. Einstein said,

the greatest teacher's exemplification.

And if you're doing something that

you're really inspired to do and it's

meaningful and it makes a difference

in the world and it contributes,

and you learn the art of communicating

what you value in terms of what your

children value, which is

changing as they grow,

and keeping current with what they value

and finding out how what they value

serves you

so you can respect them

enough to communicate what

you value in a way that they

win, and they get what they want that way,

then you end up having some sort of

dialogue and communication that's probably

respectful. But beware of

ideals and fantasies of one

sidedness because frankly,

I'm not a nice person,

I'm not a mean person,

I'm not a kind person or a cruel person.

I'm a human being with a set of values.

And if you support my values,

I'm nice as a pussycat and kind.

And then if you challenge me, I

can be mean as a tiger and cruel.

I'm both and every parent that I

know has got both sides to them.

They have a set of values and they can be,

they can have their buttons pushed and

become aggressive and they can be very

passive and they can be nice and mean

and all that. So calm down, <laugh>,

calm down the expectations of yourself

to be a one-sided individual by some

social idealism that's not even real,

promoted by somebody

that's usually wounded,

that's setting up an ideal

that is basically because

they were hurt by the other

and they're now trying to create an ideal

or some social construct or idealism

that society thinks you're supposed

to do, that's not necessarily true,

that doesn't necessarily

make you stand out. You know,

our main education system in school

is not necessarily designed for

entrepreneurs. It's designed for drones,

to work for a company and

to get in debt with banks,

to get a house and a mortgage, a quarter

of which is basically storing crap.

And when you stop and look at what

you're basically being educated to do,

it may not be the most masterful

path. So beware, you know,

Paul Dirac, the Nobel Prize winner said,

it's not that we don't know so much,

we know so much that isn't so.

So beware of the idealisms that are

making you compare yourself to things that

aren't necessarily true and then beat

yourself up thinking I should have done

this. Did they, did you love your

children <laugh> in your heart?

You know,

if a child's born and imagine you got

a baby in your hands and it's just,

you know, hours old or whatever, and it

looked up to you, and it could speak,

and it said, what are your credentials,

<laugh>? And you kinda laugh, you go,

well, I don't have a lot of

credentials of raising a kid. Well,

obviously educating yourself,

but beware of educating yourself on

social fantasies and ideals about how it's

supposed to be by wounded individuals.

Get real about human behavior.

That's why I've been studying

human behavior for 51

years because we go through

them,

we go around the world and we find all

kind of variations about how people are

raising kids and doing things,

and somehow there's children that come

out of it and all those children are

needed, you know, everybody's

needed in the world. And you know,

my sister was raised by the same parents

and she's different than I am and I'm

different than her.

And she's a magnificent girl and

lady in life and I'm a pretty cool

guy. And I think that we both turned out,

even though we came from different things

and went in two different directions

and that's part of life.

And to say that, you know,

well this was wrong or this was right,

I think is a waste of money and time.

I think it's wiser to go in there and

find out how no matter what happens,

serves you.

And if you can teach your children

how to be resilient and adaptable,

well that's probably going

to be their advantage.

So by you learning how to do that,

by you clearing out your

wounds and finding out how

no matter what's happened in

your life,

how you can use it to your advantage gives

them an example of what's possible to

do the same. So that's pretty cool. But

no matter what you've done or not done,

you're worthy of love. And

the same thing for your kids.

And they're going through their journey

and they're in a different environment

than you and they're living in a different

time than you with different factors

and different variables and

different needs. So beware, <laugh>,

beware of the people preying on

you about how you should be and

have to be and gotta be, otherwise

you're a bad parent or whatever.

Love your kids.

Love yourself and embrace

the polarities of life.

And basically do what

you can to, you know,

give them the greatest

opportunity in life.

And that basically showing them how to

be resilient and adaptable and to find

out what's really important

to them and live by priority.

Those are great ideals.

But at the same time,

don't beat yourself up if you don't

live up and compare yourself to other

people.

Compare your daily actions to your own

ambitions and drives and teach your

children to do the same and not

compare themselves to others,

because if you compare yourself to others,

you're guaranteed to have

a distorted view about you.

And most of the people you think you

put on pedestals or pits aren't who you

think. If you put people on pedestals,

you're blind to their downsides.

If you put people in pits,

you're blind to their upsides.

And if you put them on pedestals or pits,

you'll put yourself in pits and pedestals

and neither one of them are authentic.

So love yourself enough to embrace both

sides of yourself and love other people

enough to see both sides of them. And

don't be fooled by facades. If you do,

you won't be vulnerable to ideals and

moral hypocrisies about how you should be.

Just love your kids. There's an innate,

intuitive feedback system

inside us to help us become

authentic and to help us

come into sustainable fair

exchange and to love and to

appreciate people.

And if we listen to that and follow our

highest priorities where we are most

executive function and most self-governed,

we'll do well with our children.

And just know that no matter what,

your kids are going to like

and dislike half of you.

I'm sure that if I was to ask my kids,

you know, what do you like and dislike?

They could come up with a

list and I could do the same.

But bottom line is love is a combination

of things you like and dislike.

That's the truth about love

anyway. So love your kids,

embrace both sides of yourself and them.

And let's get on with appreciating

no matter what's happened,

how it serves and teach your children

how to be resilient. If you do,

the best way to do it is by

you doing it yourself. Anyway,

I just wanted to share

a few ideas on that.

And that's the reason why I teach people

the Breakthrough Experience and have

people come to that,

because in there I show you how to take

the things you're judging in yourself,

that you're beating yourself up about,

or beating other people

about and judging in them,

which is a source of

your beating yourself up.

Anytime you put them on a pedestal,

if you don't know how to bring them off

the pedestal and you out of the pit or

bring them out of the pit

and you off the pedestal,

if you don't know how to do that,

come to the Breakthrough Experience

so I can show you how to do that.

If you're beating yourself up because

you think you messed up as a parent,

come to the Breakthrough Experience so

I can show you how to dissolve that.

If you're blaming your family because

you thought it was dysfunctional, beware,

it's an illusion. Look deeper.

There's a way of finding the

hidden order in the apparent chaos.

And I love helping people do that in the

Breakthrough Experience because it can

change their whole perspective and

no longer be angry and victim of this

so-called history they have, which then

makes them go to the opposite extreme,

only to teach them the lesson. You know,

your children are going to express your

repressions and if you're repressing

things, because you don't want to be

like a parent that you're judging,

you're going to create a

cycle every other generation.

But if you learn to appreciate both

sides of your family, your parents,

and love both sides of yourself, and

demonstrate that for your children,

you're probably going to do pretty well,

because they're going to end up learning

how to love both sides of themselves,

because you've got both

sides. So, you know,

trying to get rid of half of yourself

and be only one side is futile.

You don't need to get rid of half

of yourself to love yourself.

That's why I want people to come to

the Breakthrough Experience so they can

learn to love their whole self and

love other people the way they are.

Because when you love people for who

they are, they turn into who you love.

So just know, love your kids. <Laugh>

the bottom line, that's the bottom line,

did they make it <laugh>? Anyway,

I've got three beautiful

children. They're all different,

and they all have different views about

me and things they like and dislike

about me and the mom. And

that's part of the journey.

And but bottom line is I know

they love me and I love them,

and that's what you want to do. So anyway,

I just wanted to share with you some

ideas on parenting and I really hope that

you come to the Breakthrough Experience.

I know the Breakthrough Experience

is eye-opening, mind expanding,

life-changing, trajectory

altering, and fulfilling,

the path of fulfillment, because

I know it can make a difference.

I've seen thousands and thousands of

people transform their lives and resolve

the issues they have with their family.