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We're so glad that you're here with us today. So in the last couple episodes, we've been talking about different themes that we teach our children, whether it's intentionally or unintentionally. And these are themes that they're taking in by what you're saying or more so by what you're modeling. And that's what we mean by intentional or unintentional. You could be saying one thing, but what are they seeing on a consistent basis of what you're teaching them?
But before we jump into today's episode, we would love if you have a chance today to sit down and just do a quick written review for our podcast. This really does help us to get in front of those who really need to hear our message. So let's jump into today's episode. So the theme that we're going to be talking about today is this idea of comparison versus just focusing on what you need to get done and doing your best.
And I think this is something that we actually see a lot when we are doing EMDR and we're talking about what are some past traumas or past experiences that they've had that have just kind of plagued them. And I think this idea of comparison comes up a lot in sibling relationships. And it may be that the parents didn't intend to pit people against each other. They're just trying to use another child as an example of what to follow or kind of what they want to see.
But a lot of times when that happens consistently, the other child feels not good enough and feels like they've always been compared to their sibling. Right. And I think one of the things that's important to know about this is talking about this idea of tabula rasa. Now, that's a Latin phrase that means blank slate. And in the past, people had theorized that human beings were essentially this blank slate, that they would become or be whatever you put into them.
So you had this just blank canvas that you could craft the person to be anything that you wanted them to be based on the inputs that you gave into them. But one of the things we've really been finding through psychology is that people come with certain inborn traits and personality aspects that are not things that were necessarily directly crafted from the environment that they were experiencing. And so you may have one kid who's very high academic achieving and they're very interested in that.
And then you may have another kid who is just not interested in that very much at all. And it could feel very frustrating from a parent's perspective. Why aren't they choosing to be interested in academics and why aren't they putting in as much effort as their sibling is putting into it. And that frustration often comes out in how we talk to them. Why can't you be more like your brother? Your brother's trying so hard,
he's doing so good, and he's top of his class. Why don't you do the same thing? That one child didn't necessarily choose to be great at academics, it's just they had an inborn aspect that made them more prone and easier for them to go that direction. Whereas this other child has some other level of interest, something that grabs their attention much better, and so then they they have a tendency to gravitate towards this.
And you can do a lot of damage to people trying to fit them into a box that they don't actually fit into because that's not really who they are. And I think a big part of being a parent is trying to figure out who your kids are. And this goes from a biblical reference, but figuring out what their bent is. So there's a Bible verse, Proverbs 22.6. It says, train up a child in the way he should go. And when he is old, he will not depart from it.
This is kind of a one-off verse, meaning there's not a lot of context around it. So you can read the verse before and after, but it's just kind of like a singular statement. Now, I think a lot of times from a Christian perspective, we read that and we can apply that to, oh, train them up in the faith, and then when they're old, and they will not depart from it.
But I've also heard people when they're talking through this verse say that it's not just train them up in the way that you want to train them, but it's train them up in their bent. So it's train them up in the strengths that you see in them or identify what direction this child should go, and then encourage them in that direction. If your kid is very academically inclined, you encourage them in the academics.
But if your child is more artistically inclined, it's not to give up on academics, but it's, hey, why don't we encourage this aspect, this artistic aspect, and allow them to enjoy and explore that area. But it's so hard because as a society, there are definitely aspects that we value more, and we want to see our kids exhibit those things that we value a lot. And academics is definitely something we highly value.
But when you are comparing your one child who's naturally gifted in that to your one child who's not so naturally gifted in that. It's going to crush them because that one child is not trying not to be good at that. It's just not something that their brain is maybe even structured towards or they just have a lack of interest. And even as an adult, just think, how easy is it for you to force yourself to do something that you have zero interest in or are totally bored by?
It's not easy at all. And for a kid, it's even harder. And so when you're talking to them and you're training them up, you want to make sure that you're encouraging them to be excellent in what they're are doing by just doing their best, not compared to any other person, but just doing what they are capable of. And we're not saying to not challenge them and not push them if it's not necessarily in their bent or if it's not necessarily something that comes easy to them.
Because we want to push and challenge them and stretch and grow them, but we need to make sure that it's not this constant comparison. And this could be something as easy as cleaning their room, right? Where you encourage them to clean the room, you tell them what your standards are, you help them along the way, and you're training them and you're walking with them to teach them what that means. Just a side note, I think a lot of times we say, go clean your room.
And they come out and they say, okay, mom, it's clean. And in their eyes, it is clean. But with anything that we do to teach and train, we need to sit down first and show them what it means to clean. Because for us, we've had years and years and years of experience to know how to clean. Music.
So first, you have to know that you're going to be teaching and training them, and that probably requires you to be with them to show them how to do it, rather than just banishing them to the room and saying, go clean your room, without ever teaching them. And I think parents do this a lot of times for a lot of different things, right? It's things that we have in our minds that we've done and we know how to do, like go clean the bathroom, go put the dishes away.
But when they're first starting out doing anything new, having the patience and the grace to be next to them, really teaching and training them. But jumping back to the other idea of saying, when you are telling them to go clean their room, you want to make sure that you're not saying things like, why can't you ever clean your room? So-and-so always keeps their room clean.
Because like I said before, if they kind of see this consistently, they're going to have that feeling of, I'm not good enough, or I'm always being compared to my sibling, rather than just kind of putting their head down and doing their best. And that's really what you want. You want them to have excellent effort and for them to do their best in everything they do, reaching their full potential and their capabilities.
And this is something I think that I really want to make sure that we instill in our kids to not always be constantly worrying about what the people around them are doing and that they're not worried about the people around them seeing what they're doing. I just want them to be able to do the right thing when no one is looking and to really have that idea of the audience of one. Like you are there and you want to honor God in doing the right thing no matter what.
No matter what your friends are doing, no matter if people see you pick up that piece of trash. You do the right thing when no one is looking. And I think this also goes on to the idea of intrinsic versus extrinsic benefit. And so an intrinsic benefit is a benefit that you get inside. You feel a benefit. An extrinsic benefit is an outside benefit that you receive. So if you're doing things for the accolades of other people, that's an extrinsic benefit.
I'm doing this because other people will look at me and think kindly of me and they will be happy with me. Now, the problem with that is, again, you're only doing something if other people find value in it or other people appreciate that you're doing that or other people are actively seeing you do that.
But then once the audience is gone, then you have no motivation to keep doing that thing if the extrinsic benefit is the only reason that you're doing it versus an intrinsic benefit is I'm doing this because when I do it, it makes me feel good. I appreciate it. I don't need accolades from other people. I don't need to get any outside benefit because I'm getting all the the benefits internally. And that's a much more powerful thing that continues on a positive behavior much longer.
Now creating an intrinsic benefit versus an extrinsic benefit, you have to stop and consider, what am I doing? Am I saying, hey, watch what other people are seeing and other people are seeing you do that, so then you need to be careful. Or, hey, you need to understand that's not the right thing to be doing and you want to want to choose the right thing because it ends up being good for you.
And so the way that we phrase things and that we present them to our kids help to train them if they're going to get an intrinsic versus an extrinsic benefit out of it. And I think this is something I'm regularly watching with my kids to see, okay, what's happening here? Or is this an uncomfortable situation for them?
And always kind of looking out for little red flags. And actually something happened in church this morning is super cute between me and one of my kids, they were sitting with their grandparents a couple rows away and they were turning around and looking at me and smiling even though there's a row of people in between us. So they're looking through this row of other people and just looking at me and smiling or making faces and we're just having a good time.
I looked at that and I recognized, okay, she's not feeling any shame or embarrassment or worried really about what the other people around her are thinking. Thinking, she's just more thinking about connecting with me. And she's getting this intrinsic benefit of taking that time.
And even though we're not sitting together, of trying to connect with me in that moment, and not worrying about the extrinsic benefit of making sure everybody around her isn't going to judge her or think about her for what she was doing. Now, she wasn't doing anything disruptive. It was just like little faces we were making. And it was something that she definitely could have been embarrassed about. But I looked at that and I was pleased because it's like, oh,
that's good. She's not really worried about what other people around her might be thinking. She was just worried about what was happening between me and her and appreciating that time we had together. When I had a great interaction this week as well with one of the swimmers on our team, and I actually haven't even told you this story, Tim, but one of the swimmers on our team is also a swim coach for when our kids take lessons.
And so I was talking to him and we have the championship meet coming up. And I just asked him to go ahead and take a look at our kids' different strokes that they're going to be doing for that meet. Because Tim wasn't there, So I just thought, you know, he could give them some pointers or tips on what they could work on that day in practice. But that morning I was divvying up the ribbons from the two meets that we had prior.
And he has a brother on the team as well. And so as I was putting out their ribbons, they got a lot of ribbons. They're really great swimmers. They're some of the older kids on the team. And this is probably the first real conversation that I had with him. And I was just kind of joking around with him and saying, hey, do you and your brother ever kind of joke around about the ribbons that you got and who got more?
And he was so sweet and he just said, no, ma'am, I actually don't even look at my times because that starts to get me nervous. I want to be at the point in my swimming where I get into the water and I do what I have to do. I don't look at the times. I don't look at my ribbons. I just do what I have to do every single time. I almost want to be like a machine. Where the stroke and what I'm doing in the water is just so natural.
And I loved hearing that from him because it wasn't this extrinsic motivation. It wasn't even him against his own time. It was him just doing what he needed to do, stroke after stroke, lap after lap. And I thought, oh my gosh, I'm so glad that my kids are learning from him because he was very insightful on the technical things that they needed to work on, but he also had the right motivation. And that was just so encouraging to hear.
And actually, you know, that's not a way I've ever thought about it before. But that is definitely an aspect that I had to overcome that nervousness. So nervousness about performance, not only for myself and being disappointed if I didn't perform well, but also worrying are other people going to see me and if I don't perform as well, or I don't beat people I'm expected to beat, feeling a certain sense of embarrassment.
But that is all stuff that takes away from what the main focus is, which is I need to make sure I'm doing my technique and doing my turns good and focusing on doing all the machine type aspects that I need to do. And that warrior nervousness about the extrinsic world removes my attention from what it should be on, which is inside of myself. This is actually something we talk about with our clients a lot, it's a thing called the locus of control.
And the locus of control is where are you putting your control in? If you put it in an external thing, the problem with having an external locus of control is you're not in control of things outside of yourself. And so that puts a certain sense of natural anxiety. So if I sit there and I worry about what other people are thinking about my performance, that's an external locus of control. It puts me in a position of weakness and increases a sense of anxiety.
Versus if I take that locus of control and I put it internally and I work on myself and I think about my technique and I think about how can I make sure I perform this technique to the best of my ability. That's something that I can actually control, something I can actually manage. And it was actually something throughout my career that I had to really work on learning how to manage and focus in on what was important, which was my technique, which would help my end performance.
And so even with your kids, even with the idea of pleasing you, right, I do think kids have this natural desire to please their parents most of the time. But again, pleasing you is an extrinsic benefit. And you want to really try to, again, encourage and enhance that intrinsic benefit because that's where they have more control.
Trying to please other people, especially depending on the people you're trying to please, it can be a fool's errand where it's something where it's like Like you can't really actually accomplish that. Or they get too focused on pleasing everybody and then they're people pleasers. And then the problem when they're doing that is that they're spending their entire life trying to please other people to try to get this extrinsic benefit from them. But then they have no intrinsic benefit.
They're not happy with their own life or their own circumstance. And a lot of times they end up getting burnt out and frustrated and angry because nobody else is caring about trying to please them. And so sometimes it can sound kind of selfish being more intrinsically motivated. But again, it's a place where you have more power and more control to actually accomplish those things versus the extrinsic benefit.
There's zero guarantee that you can, by your performance, gain those extrinsic benefits. You know, and there are times when there is a benefit to using the people around you to kind of push you and challenge you and some of that healthy competition. But our main point is that we don't want that to be their motivation or we don't want them to always have to look around or be overly concerned about the people around them and comparing themselves to others.
Where then it begins to affect who they are and things like what you wear and you go out and then you're sad that no one said anything about your outfit or you do a speech or a presentation that you had to do and because no one said anything or encouraged you after, you feel just kind of defeated by it or you post a picture and you're constantly looking at how many likes or how many comments you get and you're constantly looking for this external and this extrinsic motivation.
And when you don't get it, it crushes you. And we're not here saying that extrinsic benefits are completely bad. They're definitely not completely bad. Like when you go to work and you go to work because you get money and it pays the bills, that's something that you have to do. But also to note, once that money dries up, if you're not getting paid at that job anymore, you stop going in and you stop doing that work.
And so mostly when we're talking about the intrinsic benefit of things, we're talking more about emotional moral benefits, that you need to do those things because there's an intrinsic benefit to you for doing them.
Because again there are extrinsic benefits that we get and things that we have to do just to survive absolutely but just like with that job as soon as they stop paying out those behaviors tend to die but if it's a behavior we want to continue on something that we don't want to go away just because we're not getting a payout for it outside of ourselves then that's something that we really need to focus on making
sure that we instill this intrinsic idea like I feel good when I do this Oh, for sure. Like I was saying, I do think that there are times where that comparison or that competition can kind of push you forward. And I think sometimes it can kind of give you a baseline or a gauge to help you plan. And so, for example, in homeschooling, I rarely care about comparison.
Like I don't compare my kids to other people and where they're at in their reading level or in their math level or if they're potty trained or not. Because I know that they're OK where they are. But I do sometimes look outside to kind of help me plan out things. So I have a couple of really great friends that I'm homeschooling alongside. side. And the kids are the same ages as mine or within a certain range.
And so a lot of times I'll ask one of my friends, hey, what lesson book or what level is so-and-so on in math? And I love asking her that because her child is actually one year ahead of me. And so it helps me plan out for the next year. And I don't get stuck to that. I don't think, oh my gosh, if we're not at this level, then we can't. And our math only goes up to middle school. So it was so great to be able to have a conversation with her recently and say, hey, what level is so-and-so on?
Okay, great. What are you thinking or what are you planning after that? Because it gives me options and ideas. is not that I think, oh my gosh, whatever she does, I have to do. But we've kind of done the same thing along the road because it's worked really well for us and we can bounce ideas off of each other. And it's such a blessing for me in homeschooling because you really do need that community to encourage you and uplift you and give you ideas.
But if I ever get into a community or a place where I feel like, oh, it's a competition and my kids, you know, outperform theirs, that's It's not something I'm interested in. That's not something I want to be a part of for my own sanity and as a parent, but also for my kids. I don't want to be in constant competition. I don't want my kids to ever feel that way. And, you know, we've been homeschooling since our oldest child was of school age. So we've always homeschooled our children.
And early on, you know, we had a lot of concerned people that really did love us and loved our our children. But they're really concerned about it because at that time, it wasn't the norm. I think it's becoming a lot more popular. And especially after the pandemic and people had to go online, people began to see, you know, maybe there's a different way that could work better for our family. But for us, we just kind of kept our head down and we kept doing what we were doing.
And one of the areas that was of concern that was brought to my attention was in reading. You know, we had a lot of input where someone was saying they're not reading enough. They're not where they should be in their reading. You really have to make sure that you work on this. And I wasn't worried about it. Tim and I talked about it. We knew what our family goals were. We knew what our mission is. and we just kind of stuck to what we were doing.
We stuck to the plan that we had and we just kept tracking. We just wanted them to, kind of like we're talking about on this episode, do the right thing when no one's looking. Just keep going and doing your best. And so now a lot of times I have to stop them from reading. So maybe it's bedtime or maybe they're sick and I really need them to rest. Or sometimes I need them to stop reading so that they can come and eat. But now they are a voracious reader.
And I love seeing that because I can see the joy of reading. And I think that's a perfect example of this. Because sometimes we can get so worried about standards and the people around us that we get distracted. And then we try to throw in all this new stuff. And then that gets It's overwhelming. And we're trying to meet the standards, right? It's that idea of keeping up with the Joneses.
But we really want to encourage our children and we want to encourage you guys to have the permission to just keep doing your best, to put your head down and don't worry about the people around you. Don't worry about comparison. You just keep doing the right thing no matter what. And I think too, just to kind of commend you on that, because that is something that I think is really hard to get kids to love reading.
And I think your more gentle approach and not worrying or putting a lot of pressure on it, cause them to not do it for external validation from you. But then eventually, when they did start being able to read, then they really started to love reading. I think that's something that most parents want their kids to do. But then they they get too caught up in are they where they're supposed to be and then putting anxiety on reading or making reading a chore.
And so then the kid ends up hating it later on. And then when they have the option to do it later, they never end up choosing it. And so again, going back to this idea of this intrinsic versus extrinsic benefit, when you want to train your kids to love something, they can't love it because you want them to love it. They've got to love it because of the way you interact with that thing you want them to love.
You're either going to do things that instill the love of that thing, or you're going to do the things that cause them to do it because of the extrinsic benefit they can get out of it. But as soon as that extrinsic benefit goes away, and with reading, that extrinsic benefit kind of goes away, like when they're 7, 8, 9, it's like you should be reading now, so there's no real accolades or benefit to doing it.
You're either going to keep reading because you like reading, and you get that benefit from it, or you're going going to stop and only read when you're forced to because the benefits ran dry. All right guys, that's all that we have for today. So just a brief recap. You really want to make sure you avoid comparisons, not just between your own children, but between your family and other people's family.
You really look and seek to try to instill in any area that you can the intrinsic benefit, the inside emotional benefit you get from doing the thing that you should be doing or that you you want to do, because that is something that is very powerful, that keeps that behavior going and going and going, versus that extrinsic benefit, just having the understanding that as soon as that extrinsic benefit dries up, so will the behavior.
All right guys, thank you so much for listening, and remember, your mind is a powerful thing. Music. Thank you so much for tuning in to this episode of Mr. and Mrs. Therapy. We hope that you enjoyed today's episode and found it helpful. If so, would you take 30 seconds and share it with a friend? Also, we'd love for you to leave us a review on Apple Podcast. It lights us up to know that this podcast is helping you. If you have any questions or a topic you'd like discussed in future episodes,
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