Lori Petro on Parenting, Patterns, and the Value of Support
Choosing consciously is genuinely hard work. Support matters so much for exactly that reason, because plenty of people don't feel like they have any, and without it the old patterns are the easy place to land again. Picture not having a friend who can say, "That didn't go well, I saw it. Try this instead," or even just someone willing to let you dump the frustration after a rough moment with your kid. If there's nowhere to send that feeling, no way to channel it, things stay stuck. The outlet can be a person. It can also be exercise, or art, or making something.
Writing is that outlet for me. Storytelling, really. Almost none of it gets seen by anyone, but putting it down is how I give those emotions and those stories somewhere to go. And stories are what they are: stored memories carrying the feelings that got attached to them when they happened. Once you start processing them by telling them, you stop handing the same patterns forward.
Eric asked about the coaching side of her work, since parenting coaching isn't something a lot of people have run into, and wondered what it actually involves and how someone might find a coach.
Lori started with what's already out in the open. Her YouTube channel, TEACH through Love, holds more than a hundred videos, most of them short, in the range of five to fifteen minutes, often closer to six or seven. Each one tackles a specific situation. Something like "How do I get my child to stop hitting?" gets broken into concrete steps you can follow on your own.
Beyond the videos, she's built online communities, and those have turned into her most valuable resource for parents. Give people a place to bring their stories and something shifts. When you sign on as a client, you're brought into a private Facebook group, and the connections that form in there keep surprising her.
Online coaching and classes have grown more common lately, with so many options floating around. For anyone curious what a session with her feels like, there are free classes on her site. Go to the website, open the free section, and pick from the webinars you can log into. That gives you a taste of it before committing to anything.