healing your inner child + building a business

Welcome to Dear EverMore — today we’re highlighting the career story of Noa Stisin, one of our beta users. Noa founded her coaching company, Rewriting Childhood, where she helps parents, caregivers, and teachers recondition their ideas about childhood. In her coaching practice, she helps them learn to nurture a kind inner voice for themselves and the children they are raising.

We wanted to bring Noa on to talk about her career, how she went from working in corporate HR to starting her coaching business, and how important it is for everyone to discover their inner child so we can go from reacting to responding intentionally. We honestly had the best time talking with Noa and we hope you enjoy this conversation as much as we did!

Follow and learn more about Noa:

• Instagram: @rewriting_childhood
• LinkedIn: @rewritingchildhood
• Website: Rewriting Childhood Coaching

Some of her career advice:

• It happens in the workplace, too — when we get triggered, we end up responding at the age of when we were hurt. Noa mentions how she’s seen this happen a lot in the workplace between managers, leaders, and colleagues we work with — “they’re talking to me from their 7 year old self and I’m reacting from my 7 year old self”
• When having the hard conversation — Noa shares how important it is to understand yourself first, like how your nervous system is reacting, and being open and honest. If you need space from the conversation, consider saying “I’m not feeling very safe right now, and I need to take a little time to come back to this.” More often than not, people completely understand.
• You have so much to give the world — Noa initially went into HR because she really enjoyed helping leaders and employees work better together. However, she later questioned, “what am I doing with my life?” after having her daughter. Through listening to her gut and learning more about herself, she realized how much parents, teachers, and caregivers needed support to better support the children they are part of raising.
• Why it’s really helpful to work with a coach — Noa shared how impactful it’s been for her to work with a coach, especially getting the “outside perspective” to know herself better. Whether it’s 1:1 or with a tool (like EverMore), getting a fresh perspective and someone to hold you accountable can propel your growth.

Resources:

• Courtney’s article — “Who Am I If I’m Not Achieving?”
• Courtney’s article — “The Future of Work is Unfolding”
• Request an invite to our beta — join our Seedlings and own your career story via curated career coaching, growth paths, and building a shareable portfolio that’s unique to you!

Have a burning question you'd like answered on the pod? We'd love to give you advice! Submit your anonymous question. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Welcome back to Dear Evermore. I'm your host, Courtney, and today we're launching a new series, Career Diaries, where we go deep into some authentic career stories. Today we have Noah Stissen. I met Noah several years ago and have followed her journey into entrepreneurship. Noah has a coaching company, rewriting childhood, where she helps parents, caregivers, and teachers recondition their ideas about childhood so they can find inner peace and help their own children grow up with healthier, kinder voices. Noah was inspired by her experiences as a child in HR trying to change work systems and now as a mother. One of the reasons we wanted to feature Noah is because her coaching has a ripple effect. If more parents are rewriting their inner voice, that will benefit how they show up in other spaces such as work, and it impacts how future generations see themselves. So without further ado, Noah, welcome to the Dear Evermore podcast. Thank you. I'm so excited to be here. I want to start with like what you're doing right now, and then like let's work backwards into how we got there. So tell me about your business today.

SPEAKER_01 1:13

Yeah. So I started my business almost three years ago. And in the last three years, I've already rebranded, renamed it, done all the things. It's been fascinating to watch myself backwards. All the things that I thought that I wanted at the beginning, and how the more you grow, the more you learn, you get inspired by different things. And um at the beginning, it was very much parent-focused. And the more that I sent my daughter to school and watched her in a school environment and watched the teachers, the more I realized that it doesn't just stay with the parents. Teachers, nannies, caregivers, they all need the tools and the support and the information. Um so it all started with rewriting parenthood. And then I realized it's not it's not only about the parents, it's about the the the childhood and how that takes us to the adults that we become.

SPEAKER_00 2:22

Just obsessed with what you've been doing. And I want to go back to something else that you said, which is as when you're starting something and you're founding something, things change. And I'm living that right now with Evermore. The ideas that I had that I was really like pumped about early on, some of them are not working out because they're not getting that pool from like the user base and then having, or they're not accomplishing what I thought they would. And so adjusting to feedback and what I think is actually gonna serve our bigger mission has been a lesson I'm sure I'm gonna continue to learn. We're only six months old, but that's tough. And I do remember when you went through your rebranding and kind of like reading through your description of like how can this be all more encompassing of that community. So I think that's really lovely.

SPEAKER_01 3:13

Thank you. It was hard. I remember when I was looking for the first name, I was obsessed all the time thinking, trying domains. And my husband was like, the name doesn't matter, that can change. And I'm like, but no, but think about all these brands that have said the same name. And I thought, I have it, right? It was so like this is it. And then two and a half years later, I'm like, you were right.

SPEAKER_00 3:37

I'm changing. We had an entire logo commissioned for the name Happy People. And got locked out with a great designer where before we finalized everything, I was like, so actually, that's not gonna be our name at all. And even now, with like evermore snobs, I'm like, okay, this is perfect for us in this moment. People are ever more than their jobs, this works, but I'm with you. You never know what can happen in the future. And I think being adaptable is probably really important for anyone who's thinking about being a founder entrepreneur.

SPEAKER_01 4:12

100%. And so that's on the brand side of things. And then I even went deeper in the actual work, which I was also not expecting. At the beginning, I was loving the one-on-one coaching so much. Yeah, you can really notice the difference that you're making in someone else's life. And then one day something happened at my daughter's school that just provoked a lot of emotion. And I'm like, oh no, I have to I have to get this information out there much bigger. And I had a conversation with the directors at the school, and they were like, Can you come to our professional development day and teach us about this? And I was like, Yes, of course. And that was my first experience of being in front of an audience, 70 plus people. I'm actually teaching them a lot of the angle that I teach about childhood development, the brain. And I was so impressed that myself that I did that because growing up, presentations at school, I would go blank, it was just not my thing. But there's something so much deeper, like I know my mission, I do it for the children, and that took away any uh limiting beliefs or or nerves. I mean, I was still nervous, but you know, I had this, I need to do this for the children. Um, and so I pivoted again, and now I'm doing workshops for schools, for anything that we can any place where there's people that work with children, that are parents, I'm just going in and giving these workshops. And I'm so much more excited now about that than almost the coaching.

SPEAKER_00 6:02

I love that. I had a like an executive coach a few years ago because I was doing career coaching one-to-one and I had a similar experience. I loved it because it was so tangible how you were impacting someone's life. You really got to see the difference from like a conversation you had with them to the next conversation and how you were really nurturing them along their path and getting to see them get promotions, raises, new jobs, pivots. Like it felt so great. But I had this coach who was just like, okay, you're really good at one-to-one. You can do that forever if you want. She's like, but what if you did one to many? Like, what would that look like? And I've actually had individual iterations of that where I would try like consulting or workshops, and evermore is now that current iteration where it's like, okay, let's actually put it into a product that many people can use. And to your point, it is surprising how obsessed and like fulfilling I can become with something that wasn't like my original path or like iteration. So I think that's lovely. What do you think's been the hardest part though about all of this?

SPEAKER_01 7:10

My limiting beliefs.

SPEAKER_00 7:12

Yeah, tell me more about that.

SPEAKER_01 7:15

Um, it all really comes down to my fear of making mistakes. Because that's one of my biggest inner voices that was given to me. Making mistakes growing up meant not talking to you, meant withdrawing love, meant shame. And I didn't realize until I was doing this work how much that was affecting everything in my life. Instead of seeing mistakes as safe because it's inevitable as humans that we're gonna make mistakes, I saw them as you bet better watch out. People are going to go and get you if you make a mistake. So it's just it becomes really scary and it becomes just viscerally tightens your body and and so there's a lot of inner work that goes into this to reshift how you think about the work. And going back to what I said earlier, just focus on my mission that I'm doing this for the children and take it trying to remove the voices and people's opinions. Uh so kind of staying on that track of what pulls you forward to why you're doing this. Uh it's really hard.

SPEAKER_00 8:35

There's so much in there I want to dig into. I think like the first thing that struck me is you are doing this work where you are helping kind of repattern these caregivers, teachers, parents to think about how they are shaping children's inner voices at the same time that you are facing the inner voice that you were given as a child. And that's that's heavy.

SPEAKER_01 8:59

Exactly. And to be honest, that's what I loved so much about how I ended up with the name rewriting childhood. Because when I came up with that name, my husband said, But which childhood? And I said, Both is not only rewriting your child's, it's your own's. It's really about reparenting yourself and how you think about yourself. And it's incredibly hard, but it's so powerful and so empowering when little by little you see those shifts happening in real time.

SPEAKER_00 9:32

And I think what you said about, you know, the voices that we develop from our parents and how they react to things such as making mistakes. I know that when I was growing up, it wasn't so much that my parents reacted negatively to a mistake per se, but rather when I had an achievement, that was when I felt love. It was kind of a neutral feeling outside of that. And I think I started to really associate the concept of achievement with worth. And so if I I even wrote an article of like, who am I if I'm not achieving? Because I was really kind of trying to dig into my brain of like, if someone were to ask me who I were, I would just start listing achievements. And I realized that's not really who I am. And I kind of, and this is all happening when I became a mom too, where I'm starting to dig into my brain where I'm like, wait, what have I inherited and just kind of let be written for me? Versus like, do I even know who I am?

SPEAKER_01 10:28

I don't know if you're familiar with Dr. Gabor Mate.

SPEAKER_00 10:30

No.

SPEAKER_01 10:31

Something that he said in a podcast, um, is not only what happened to you, is what you didn't get. So how you're sharing I didn't have um much um punishment or um There is an absence of some. Like your parents didn't scold you for not for making mistakes, but they really praised your achievements. So right, it's not only it's the lack of what what else right? So by them just praising your achievements but not praising you in your hard times, you focused your whole life on I am loved when I achieve.

SPEAKER_00 11:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:27

And this is nothing against your parents. You I'm sure your parents are wonderful and they did the absolute best with what they could. And we grew up in that era where you have to tell kids they're smart, they're intelligent, they're right, that's when we praise the most. It's just we didn't know that when we didn't praise the whole time, when they show up great and when they show up not that great.

SPEAKER_00 11:51

Yeah, I my mom is kind of funny because she'll randomly message me on Facebook of all places, and she'll say, I read an article today that I shouldn't have um praised you for things like, oh, you're so beautiful, or you're so smart. She's like, I should have praised you for how hard you worked. She's like, and I never praised your effort. I'm sorry. And like, nothing. We never talk about it again. It's never mentioned and it's sporadic. I never know when it's gonna happen. But it is funny because I think she is having her own journey as like a grandparent now, where she's seeing that I am parenting different than her, and my husband is parenting different than his parents, and she's kind of watching us do this with our daughter, and I think she's realizing like interesting, there's a different way. And she has these little minute reflections. And I actually adore it because I like that she's reflecting on those things, but yeah, they're just so random. But that was one where I was like, yeah, that's like a good point. And I now watch her when she's with my daughter. She's it's not always perfect, but she's much more aware of how she talks to her. So like when she watches my daughter perform in a play, she'll she'll praise. She's like, You must have worked so hard to memorize those lines. You must have worked so hard to coordinate those dance steps. And I can see her wheels kind of turning where because I also got really wrapped up in like I'm innately good. And so when I wasn't good, I was like, I'm bad. And not, it's not necessarily this one was telling me that, but that was the connection my brain made because I thought that who I was was just God given, if you will. And that's what I was hearing. And so I I do think to your point of like rewriting childhood can mean so many things. I think I'm watching my mom rewrite my childhood. Yes, which is kind of interesting. And I don't even know if she knows she's doing it, but it is this tiny thing where I feel I feel like oddly loved when she sends those little Facebook messages.

SPEAKER_01 13:55

That's amazing, Courtney. It's amazing. That's like the epitome of where I would love this work to go, because it doesn't just stay with parents of toddlers, grandparents doing it with the with their adult children as well, because it's never too late. It's never too late. We have uh um, have you heard of neuroplasticity? Yes. So our brains can change, and if more parents, your parents' age did that, we would do so much more healing and good for the adults around the world right now. Like kudos to your mom. The fact that she's being so brave to reflect and to say, hey, I'm sorry. That's amazing. If my mom would never.

SPEAKER_00 14:46

And it's um, I love what you said, like we're always growing and like developing. And I think about this at work too, of these different generations of managers that people have had. And I can't help but like link management to being a parent because I actually became a manager the same day I found out I was pregnant. And so to me, I was learning both at the same time. So they're kind of interwoven. But I think that there's been like generations of managers and like management styles the same way there has been like different parenting styles. I think that with management too, like when you've had a manager where you have to like almost like survive them and then you watch them become better and you're like, why don't I get that? Yeah. Or you become a better manager and you're like, I'm gonna be the person that I wish I had. And I think that's kind of what I thought about as a parent and a manager of, okay, I'm gonna be the person I wish I had. But then also you learn over time that not everyone wants what you want. So you also have to be like adaptable at the same time.

SPEAKER_01 15:41

It's so hard. And I see it with my daughter every day. I'm a di I've I'm a different parent to her than I am to my son, not on purpose, but because she is the older one. And everything that I've gone through as a parent, I've gone through it with her first. So she's the one that triggers all my trauma that isn't healed and I had no idea about. So everything that I've gone through with her, I already have. And because I'm doing the work and I have my coach, I revisit, I work on it. When my son shows up similarly to how she showed up, it doesn't activate as much.

SPEAKER_00 16:23

Oh, that makes I mean that makes sense. I'm also an eldest daughter of an eldest daughter. And I feel like me and my mom both had some stuff that we needed to like like she had stuff she needed to work through.

unknown 16:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:36

And she's just not doing it. And then I had stuff I had to work through. And sometimes I think about like, what's gonna be my daughter's stuff that she has to work through?

SPEAKER_01 16:45

So generational trauma healing goes both ways. It goes downwards to our children, but we are also healing backwards or upwards.

SPEAKER_00 16:56

It feels like there's been such a trend of like more like millennials and like um older Gen Z are doing the work of like healing generational trauma. What do you think is like the catalyst for like all of these people doing that? Why weren't prior generations doing it or were they?

SPEAKER_01 17:16

It's the information that we have in our hand nowadays, right? And we're it's yeah, it's a blessing and a curse. On one hand, we are completely buried under our phones uh in such an unhealthy way, and on the other, we have access to so much more information uh that's helping us a lot with this if we're using it for this. So, first of all, right, is the science uh is access to the science, normalizing things like therapy and getting help and self-help books. Our parents' generation that was looked upon like, what are you crazy? You're going to the therapist? Like, is there something wrong with you? And now we we talk about it with our friends. Oh, my therapist said this. Yes. Or, oh I was I I have therapy today. I can't meet up with you, whatever it is, like it's so normal. Couples therapy is being normalized. I talked to my friends, no, no, we work couples therapies, like, yes, yes, we're getting help. I to be honest, I can't imagine a world where there's not a neutral person supporting either you or your couple you or your family you, because we're all bringing our own internal childhood experiences to all relationships. Um, so the axis um and learning about our bodies, learning about emotions, learning about um what the world can look like if we worked on ourselves.

SPEAKER_00 18:53

Yeah, I think that makes sense. When I was in college, I went to a therapist for the very first time and like worked through I think a lot of like how do I become like an independent person? I have three sisters who are younger than me, and I felt like we were like, it's like I almost didn't know myself without them in a like weird way. Um, especially because I have a sister who's only a year younger than me and like we were always in matching outfits. I was pink, she was purple, we always did the same thing. We had friendship overlaps, and so being away at college for the first time all by myself, I was like, okay, I just signed up for this program where you got free therapy if you could meet with like students. Um and that kind of stuck with me of like this helped me so much just become an adult. And then when I became like a, but I had all this other stuff packed away. And when I became a mom, it like all just came flooding out. And I had to go back to therapy and I almost felt like a failure at first of like, oh, I'm back in therapy. But I think you're right, it wasn't normal in 2004 when I was going for the first time. No one talked about it. I didn't tell anyone it was happening. And now doing it, I feel like I have a group chat with my sisters where we talk about what our therapists have said or like what we're working on, or you know, Ivan sometimes I'm like, hey, I'm going through this in therapy right now. I'm just a little feeling a little petty right now. Take everything I say with a grain of salt. And I think that that's been really interesting, just yeah, the huge change.

SPEAKER_01 20:25

A hundred percent. Um, and you said that you now or that once you became a mom, you started to revisit things. And that makes so much sense because I heard you, if I may, say that at the beginning, the first time you went to therapy, it helped you become an adult.

SPEAKER_00 20:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 20:42

And what I've been noticing is that at 36 most of the time I'm still not acting as an adult. Not because I don't believe it's because there's something wrong with me, but because the I'm reacting, I'm not responding. It happens a lot with my daughter. How she acts constantly triggers the child in me to come out. So I recently learned that when you get triggered, what happens is that you act the age of when that trauma happened.

SPEAKER_00 21:22

I've heard that.

SPEAKER_01 21:24

So I've seen this in my corporate world. Oh my god.

SPEAKER_00 21:29

That's where I've heard it seen it.

SPEAKER_01 21:31

So, you know, you talk about managers, you talk about employees. We're constantly being triggered by feedback, by how we're spoken to, by um and instead of seeing it from that perspective, we see it as what's wrong with this manager, or what's wrong with this employee, or we we judge so much from how we think others should quote unquote act versus. Seeing them for what's happening inside of them. That person is not responding from their mature brain, is responding from their trauma.

SPEAKER_00 22:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 22:09

And you know, I want to be careful with the word trauma because some people are a bit skeptical about the word. Some people think that we can't just be using it uh lightly, and I don't mean to use it lightly, it's just it's a representation of what it is. Uh that's the word that we have for what's happening. Uh, whatever happened when we were two, when we were five, I'm now 36. But if someone is talking to me in a way where I was scolded at from my parents, I'm it's like if I was responding to my parents as a 36-year-old. I'm not really looking at the person in front of me from a neutral perspective. This is another adult, right? They're talking to me from their five, seven-year-old, and I'm respond reacting from my two, five, seven-year-old.

SPEAKER_00 23:02

Yeah, I mean, it's so true. And I will say there's not often conversations like that in the workplace because you're kind of expecting everyone to be professional, whatever that means. And I I've definitely had some though, like really like sincere moments with people where they kind of let me into their value system or the thing that's been violated, and I can do the same, and that relationship actually becomes stronger. I had a leader one time scold me. And I don't, he didn't even mean to scold me, but the act of being scolded made me feel like a child. And I immediately like tensed up and was like, I'm gonna cry. So I was like, okay, I have to go to the bathroom. And I like literally like just left the room and was like in the bathroom crying. Um, because I was like, okay, I don't want to do this here. But it was like exactly how I would have reacted as a child. And I didn't even understand it. But I went back to that leader and I was like, hey, that really made me feel just less than and um not comfortable in that scenario. And then he broke down and kind of started talking to me about how he felt like something I said made him feel like he wasn't good enough and that I was challenging him, which is probably true. But at the same time, it's like, I want to be able for us to give and receive feedback from each other. So how can we do this more respectively to both parties going forward? But it's hard to get that out of people sometimes. It's hard to figure out. And I had one leader too who started seeing um a therapist and and he talked about like, yeah, I'm starting to realize like if something happens, that often it's triggering like an inner child, and I'm now hurt just like I was when I was 12. And but you can't necessarily read that on someone. And so I definitely think the more people do this work at any age, the more that's gonna benefit their ability to your point to like respond versus react.

SPEAKER_01 25:13

Well, and the thing is it is so complex. There's so many layers to this. Because what happens is even if what you think you're saying from a place of social engagement, feeling safe and calm in your own ways, can land so differently on the other person without that being your intention at all, because of their experience growing up. And so you can just you can't never know. So the best you thing you can do, in my opinion, is to be true to yourself, to your intentions. But then what we need to do is learn to share and learn to come up to the other person and say, This triggered something in me. I'm sure that you didn't mean it that way, but it's a it's a way of opening the door to get to know each other more. Um There's just no way on earth that you're ever going to know what can be triggering to the other person.

SPEAKER_00 26:20

Absolutely. How do you give advice to people who want to go have that hard conversation and say, like, hey, when you said this or when you did this, here's how it made me feel? Like, how do you help people break that barrier and then if you're receiving it, like not let your ego get in the way?

SPEAKER_01 26:40

Yeah. That's very hard, but I have to say I've been doing so much work. For the last year, I've been seeing a nervous system coach.

SPEAKER_00 26:48

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 26:49

And it's been amazing because I have been learning so much about my nervous system states, fight, flight, freeze, collapse. And I'm starting to see and observe others for their nervous system states. And it's allowing me to not take things as personally as I did. So it happens with my husband, and it doesn't happen all the time because I'm not superhuman, but when it does, I feel so good. Where he says something that usually would rub me off the wrong way, and I'm like, oh wait, he's not talking to me, he's talking to his mother. And so this work, it just really is so much about how you work on yourself. And we as a society have been expecting so much for the other person to change and the partner to change and the child to change, and it's so much about how you see the world, how you see others' behaviors. And when you start to understand that others are acting from their inner child and whether they're feeling safe or unsafe, gosh, so much starts to change in yourself because you don't take things as personally. So really the quote unquote advice is understand yourself first. Understand that when you have a manager that's coming and talking to you, it's gonna it's it's going to suck. It doesn't feel great in your body. But when you start to understand your body and you start to realize, oh I'm going into fight. But actually there's nothing really to fight about. I'm I'm feeling safe. Or how can I communicate to my the other person across the room, you know what? I'm not feeling very safe right now. I need to go take a moment and understand what's happening inside of you. Because I'm sure that your manager's not coming to you Well, I'm not sure. You never know. I want to believe that most of the time the intentions are pure. But if you were sat across a room when you were a child from your parents, being called into an office and sitting across a manager without them even opening their mouth is already triggering something in you. You're already not feeling safe. And so it's in you to realize what's happening in your system because you're never gonna be able to change the manager. You're never gonna be able to change the child, the parent, the whatever.

SPEAKER_00 29:31

We at Evermore talk a lot about like the concept of agency. Like there's only so many things you can control around you when it comes to your career and like really taking ownership of the things that are within your control. Um, I hadn't really thought of it the way that you just put it. And I thought that was also like beautiful and how you think about when you're sitting across from someone. And I know being like a manager and a leader and also being those things in HR and people, I have always tried to make myself as like warm and approachable as possible so that when I am sitting across from someone, especially to your point, like most of the time it's an innocuous reason. I'm here to have a one-on-one and check-in. I am here to talk to you about this project. There's nothing scary that's gonna happen, but the associations people have of HR, people, manager, leader, person in power who has power over my livelihood and employment is scary. And I have tried to like almost like mold myself a little bit in those scenarios to people. And I had to just like start letting those things go of like the best I can do is open the door. And if they don't want to walk in, that's okay. But I've also learned like little bitty tricks of like, if I know someone's really anxious, I send like the world's most detailed agenda, like in a meeting of like, hey, most detailed thing. I'll even like stop them in the hall or message them on Slack so they know, like, yeah, here's exactly I just sent you this meeting invite. Yeah, can't wait to talk about X, Y, and Z. And like even starting the meeting with like really looking forward, like reiterating, we are still in fact here to talk about X, Y, and Z. I've not brought you in here under false pretenses, but it is hard sometimes because I know that they're not reacting to me. They're reacting to every bad experience they've had with someone like me or every fear that they have about someone like me. But it's still really hard sometimes, to your point, to not take it personal. And I I do internalize it sometimes of like they don't like me. And I have to remind myself this isn't about me, this is about a system as a whole that feels scary. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 31:45

But I'll share something that I've found fascinating after becoming a mom, which is this figure self-authority thing is so real to the point where I have such a hard time dealing with teachers and heads of schools as a mother. Because I go straight into when I was a child. Every time I have to give some kind of feedback to the teacher or have a conversation with a head of school, I become a child again. It has been so hard for me to advocate for my daughter from a safe place because of what that environment entails in my nervous system. The idea of talking to figures of authority freak me out.

SPEAKER_00 32:30

Wait, that's so real because I'm actually older than most of the teachers at my daughter's elementary school and I'm so intimidated by them.

unknown 32:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 32:38

But I hadn't really thought about the fact that being inside an elementary school talking to an elementary school teacher might actually send me mentally back to a younger age. Okay, that makes me feel a little bit better about me being a 40-year-old acting terrified in front of this younger adults.

SPEAKER_01 32:57

This is biology, though. We think of it so much as like, I remember growing up, the one of the insults that they would use would be, you're so immature. Yeah, we are. Like it's biology. Um, in order to reach certain levels of maturity, that has to be nourished and nurtured and taught. And you know, the thing with the brain is that if you haven't taught certain things and skills and modeled things for the children, it doesn't matter that they're 30 or 40, they're not going to know how to do the thing. You should have known better. Even as a 36-year-old, I don't know better. Because each time I get triggered or I react a certain way, it's new for me. Even if you think it's the same scenario as it was a year ago or two months ago, everything around your environment in that moment is different. Whether how you've slept, whether if you've eaten or not, whether something happened the day before, everything is changing, everything is different all the time. And that has allowed me to have so much more grace for myself because I've used you should know better as punishment. Like, what's wrong with you? And now I understand that each moment of my life is different, and the same way that I'm trying to guide my daughter, I'm also a first-time mom every day. Every day my daughter is a day older, knows something more, does something different, and I'm responding to her from me learning something new every day. So I just completely reject the concept of you should know better.

SPEAKER_00 34:58

I love that so much. When I was a first-time manager, the first person I hired actually, this was their first job. And so I felt like every time something happened, like we would have, I felt like we almost became like we were peers almost, because it was like they've made their first mistake at work. It's also my first time as a manager navigating my team's first mistake at work. And I feel like I was applying that to parenting as well of like, okay, she's made her first mistake. It is my first time. I've made my first mistake. We're all just navigating this together for the first time. But I will say I do have, I think, this little inner voice that has a lot of shoulds in it. And I had the most excellent leader who I would sit in my one-on-one and be like, I should have done this, I should have done that, I should have known better, I should have prepared for this, I should have communicated this, I should have done this, and like basically would criticize every little knit I could about what I had done. And this manager was like, don't ever say I should. And every time I say should, they'd be like, they would like kind of like hold their hand out at me and be like, nope, say it again without the should. And it actually helped a lot because I didn't even realize how often I was saying I should about myself. But also realizing that I didn't actually need to confess everything I thought had gone wrong with something. I could be a lot more brief to show that I was reflective, but also that if I said nothing, oftentimes people were pleasantly delighted about what I had done and they thought it was perfect, and I should have just let them think it was perfect instead of, oh my God. Kelsey's gonna get like a little buzzer and buzz me every time I say should. But in my head, I was like, oh, I don't need to come in here and be like, here's everything that's ever been wrong ever. Because that's how my brain works. I like immediately will go to like everything that I did wrong instead of everything I did right. And I I mean, just even talking to you, I'm realizing now that's probably because only the good stuff was rewarded as a kid.

SPEAKER_01 36:58

Yeah. I'll give you a short example. I mess up with my daughter a lot because I'm a mum and I'm a human and I get triggered into my childhood trauma. And you know, every time I've done it, I thought, okay, well, now I've learned. So I've I've you know, I will I'll do it better next time. I still do the same mistake and it's so hard. And I'm learning and I'm trying so much to be kinder to myself, but it's so hard because I do not want to show up this way with my daughter. And it's like if I'm it's like if I got prepossessed. And the other day, again, I didn't show up how I would have loved to, and suddenly it hit me. This is the only thing I've known. I grew up where in in an environment where the only way that they taught was through shame. I'm trying my best not to, but sometimes a kid comes up and I will shame my daughter into something. She's been sucking her thumb a lot, and so I've been trying to guide her. It's not working, so I thought, ah, shame. No. But it just it happens naturally. I I don't even have control over it. I was thinking at night and I was like, Noah, this is all you know. This is all you've known for 30 plus years of your life, and you haven't had it modeled any other way. And you're trying your best with what you're learning now, you're gonna carry on making these mistakes because you're constantly showing up from how you were raised and what was shown for you. Like your brain has been deeply wired, which is why I'm called rewriting childhood, because that's my goal is to literally rewire how we think about ourselves.

SPEAKER_00 38:55

I think the idea of like this is like what you've known, like really does permeate so many parts of our life when I think about being at work and like coming into places and thinking, oh, it shouldn't work like this, because that didn't make sense to me. And other people were like, well, that's just the way it's always been. That's how we do it here. It's like what they've always known in that environment is, you know, one way of being or one policy or one way of operating or be one the hierarchy, like how information is communicated, how power is given, how decisions are made, all those things. And so being in culture for so long and just wanting to change everything, it can be hard because a lot of people are like, well, why would we do it any different? Or like it's hard to envision like what would different look like or what would it feel like, and playing against all these different like emotions and fears that folks have. And I imagine that that ripples into so many different aspects. Once again, with parenting, all I knew is I was like, I just don't want to have the same childhood I had.

SPEAKER_01 40:00

And that's why I work with a coach because I need that fresh perspective. I need someone to come and zoom out and show me what else is possible.

SPEAKER_00 40:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 40:10

Because otherwise, I cannot see it by myself. Every time I'm with my daughter, it's it's biology, it's generational patterns. They just get triggered. And so someone neutral comes in and they're like, what else is possible?

SPEAKER_00 40:25

For anyone who's thinking about having like an unconventional career or even taking an unconventional approach to parenting, like what advice would you give them?

SPEAKER_01 40:35

Um this has been a thing for me because I grew up um in an era where everyone around me, like I'm thinking about um bring your parent to school day so they can talk about what they do, right? And everyone was a teacher, a lawyer, a doctor, uh, right, all of these one-word titles. And a part of me was aiming for that in my life, right? Um, and then we live in a time where things are allowed to be a little bit more unconventional. Um, so I've struggled a little bit around this, feeling a little bit of shame that I wasn't one of these one-word titles and what that would look like. Um but also we have so much more access to understand how we can help others. Um So I think for me it's about this is gonna sound cheesy, but listening to your heart, listening to your gut, and really getting to know yourself well. What is your gift? What can you really give to the world? Um I studied my background was in communications and psychology in my undergrad. And then uh I moved to Austin, I did a master's in St. Edward's uh on leadership and change. And I I there was something inside of me that I knew that I loved, but I wasn't ever certain about it. And when I did the master's, I'm like, I love this idea of helping managers and employees communicate better and get along better, right? Because this idea of a boss has always been sold as this terrifying person. Right. Uh and you know, with all the emotional health talks that we now have in the workplace, um, we all need support. So that was my first thought. Okay, so I can work maybe in some kind of corporation, maybe in the HR side of things, and help coach managers and employees and how they can uh understand each other better and have better relationships. And then I kind of got slapped in the face with corporate America, and all I was doing was send separation agreements, which was not fun at all.

SPEAKER_00 43:10

I have been there.

SPEAKER_01 43:11

Um, and but you know, it was paying me well, and I was just like, whatever, living in Austin, you would finish nine to five, go live your life, travel, do whatever. And then I became a mum, and I went um to drop off my eight-month-old daughter at school uh to like meet the teacher, her first day and everything at daycare. And I just had this libel moment of like, what the hell are you doing with your life? NHR. Like this is not what you're meant to be doing in this world. And for me, that was like this huge shakeup of like, wake up! You have so much more to gift. Um, and you know, I thought, okay, well, I'll go back to my psychology stuff and become a therapist, right? That one word or counselor. Um, and I decided to do informational interviews with uh many therapists. And the last two is what completely changed uh the direction of where I was going with, because they were children therapists. And the message they gave me is listen, I love my job, but the children come and spend with me an hour, and then they go back to the source, quote unquote, of the problem. Yeah, it's the parents that don't have the tool the tools, it's the parents that don't understand attachment, that don't understand the brain of their own child. And so we go crazy because we don't understand. And so uh they said, Have you heard of parenting coaching? And that's how I got into coaching. I I got my certification, I started learning about child development. Um, and even after that, I was like, Oh, there's this connotations around coaching, people call themselves a coach, and then you know, and there's not a lot of um uh coaching licenses, things. So I just I kind of rejected this word of coaching as well. Um, and then eventually I just thought, what do I really do? And I'm like, translate. What I do is I help translate children's behaviors, children's experiences into an adult brain. Because a lot of us we take what children are saying as face value, and a lot of the the times they use words that they just heard someone else say. They don't even know what they mean, what what it what the word means. So they're trying out things, and we take it as if it was another 30, 40-year-old talking at us. Um, and to be honest, I think this is very translatable to uh to a working environment as well. Having that neutral person come and translate the employees' reactions to the managers. Like I just strongly believe in this neutral entity or person coming to support relationships.

SPEAKER_00 46:28

I love that. My favorite role was actually where the CEO and I sat next to each other on the org chart, and I didn't really report to anyone because my entire role was about translating the what leadership needed to accomplish and the team and how they were feeling, and try to find this path forward through kind of like the underlying design of the organization and the culture. And because I was advocating majority, like for the employees, the idea was that I needed to kind of be an independent party in this org. Um, but I love your origin story. I had something similar when I became a mom that kind of similar to something you mentioned earlier, where I thought, but I'm gonna be here and to live at home with this adorable child. I'm gonna be really, really good at it. I'm gonna be the voice of the employee. I'm going to fight the good fight. I'm going to go rogue. I'm going to feel good about every decision that I make because I'm choosing to be in this office versus at home. And if I'm giving up that path, I want to make sure that I'm actually making like a difference in what I'm doing. And it has definitely helped me like evaluate opportunities to decide if they're worth my talent and energy. And I definitely think finding out like what your gift is is something that not enough people are doing in their careers or in their life. I think they just go along with what they're good at or what they've been hired to do for getting to pause and discover like what is kind of the gift I'm going to give to the world. And I I just love that you phrase it that way.

SPEAKER_01 48:04

Thank you. Well, I'll I'll add two things. One, I could not have done or reached this conclusion without my husband's support. I love that. I think it's so important your support system. I've been allowed the mental and physical space to really reach that for me. And you just said something that's very important around uh people not taking the time to really listen to themselves. And I I believe that we're in a bit of a system where everyone is stuck. We're stuck on these roles and these um ladders, right? We become uh sales exec, an account exec, uh engineer, um software engineer. Okay. And then we're just looking into the next level. We go into account manager, sales manager, uh senior engineer. And it's just everyone is kind of stuck on this bubble um and not thinking outside their box because we have not been given a space of like what else can I do with my life? And a lot of what I hear when I talk about what I do is like, well, you know, I was raised uh a little bit like that and I'm fine. And to that I always say, is that what we're striving for? To being fine? We're in this world for a short time and the human being is here to thrive, not to survive. And fine to me sounds and just surviving, you know. I go to my nine to five, maybe I get up, pint after work, and then I go to the gym, and I the next day is the same, and the next day is the same, and we don't take the time to understand our inner voices.

SPEAKER_00 50:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 50:04

Our limiting beliefs. Are you just doing what you're doing because you don't believe that you can reach any higher? And if you don't believe that, why is it? And everything goes so much more deeper than what we think.

SPEAKER_00 50:20

I love that so much. That was such like a lovely, like, I feel like ending thought. Okay, if anyone is looking for a coach that's a parent, teacher, caregiver, we're gonna have all of Noah's information in the show notes. And if you are thinking about a coach for your career, I will very much shamelessly plug Evermore here. And that we can help you at all stages to get unstuck and figure out your gift.