Are You Unflappable? Adaptive Parenting & Beyond (podcast #171)
Being a parent is an absolute rollercoaster of a ride, with plenty of good and bad days and a whole lot of change in between. That's why it pays dividends to be an unflappable parent who sees change and is prepared to adapt. Too often we parents make plans, only to end up angered or upset when they change. Lean into being adaptable and willing to change, and you will be rewarded!
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About Renee Zavislak
Renee is a well-respected podcaster and private practice clinician in a variety of industries. She is also the creator and host of “Psycho Therapist: The Podcast,” is a licensed psychotherapist, coach, and nutritionist in private practice; she specializes in treating complex trauma, high conflict families, and anxiety.
Renée's homebase is Sonoma County, California, where she lives with her husband and son, and she travels to see clients in Los Angeles, New York City, and San Diego. In addition to weekly therapy sessions,
Renée works via multi-day intensives for individuals, couples, and groups that focus on holistic healing. When she isn't working or cooking, she can be found fawning over her Canine-American soulmate, Chili.
- The significance of being comfortable with making mistakes and apologizing to children.
- It’s critical to “catch” kids being good and shifting the focus toward desired behaviors rather than solely addressing negative ones.
- Approaching parenting with wonderment rather than expectation.
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Welcome back everybody to another conversation in the Parenting with Impact podcast. My guest today is Renee Zavislak, and she is the psychotherapist at least in podcast realms, and I am really excited to get into a conversation with you today to find out more about well, let me, let me start by asking you, what got you into this work. How did you come to be doing? How did you come to become a psychotherapist?
Renee Zavislak: I think that this is not an unfamiliar answer for a lot of us in the field, but I had a pretty chaotic, somewhat traumatic childhood, which taught me to pay extra attention to the behavior of everyone around me so that I could attempt to predict or maybe I had a miss, a misplaced attempt to control it as well. And so I spent a lot of time really focused on the dynamics between people in my family, how the people in my family were behaving. And by the time I was a teenager, it was most of what I thought about was human behavior. So I think it was, it has always felt like a calling, sometimes even a little bit of an obligation, which sounds negative, I mean it in a less negative way than that, but sort of like I don't know what else I would do. I have to do this. Around the time I was to start undergrad, I remember saying to a friend, well, everybody tells me all their stuff anyway, I might as well get paid for it. So I did the experience that people wanted to tell me things, um, as a young adult, I, you know, would be on vacation. I remember being at Club Med, and some woman that I had never met before cornered me, and within 20 minutes, I knew the entire story of her marriage that was falling apart, the sex life that didn't exist, and the total stranger. And this happens to me a lot.
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: My husband Jokes that he has told me your life story, same on his forehead.
Renee Zavislak: A very close friend of mine around I think we were in our early 20s, and I was talking about it, we were out, and it happened. And I said this happens to me all the time. And she said, You know what it is? It's that people can tell you. Aren't going to judge them. They can tell as soon as they meet you. And I think that that quality came out of all of the stuff that I had to confront as a younger person. And I mean, I have five Scorpio placements. I'm really comfortable in the darkness, right? So I had spent a lot of time already, I think, at a young age, getting acquainted with maybe some of my own darker places and shadow bits and things like that. And it did, I think, get me to a place at a younger age than most, where I am somewhat unflappable when it comes to the human condition, so I think that's how I ended up here. I mean, it doesn't feel, it doesn't feel it feels like work to me, because I'm busy and I and I, and I might feel like, you know, there are times when, because I'm doing so many things right now, I feel tired, but the work itself doesn't feel like work. Yeah. Like, if I didn't have to pay bills, I would still do this. I would just do it at home with no schedule. I would just set up my own schedule, right? Exactly? Yeah, everybody can just come over whenever they want to talk. It wouldn't look that much different. I'd be having the same conversations. In fact, I think I I don't feel like I am much different when I'm sitting in the office than I am when I'm at dinner with friends when I'm out. I'm kind of always doing the same thing, but sometimes I get paid for it.
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Well, and you do, and there is, I'm, I'm going to challenge you a little bit because I your your professionalism means that there's a level of permission, of course, some conversations that you don't that's exactly right. That is exactly right. I totally get what you're saying you are, you are in the being of what you do. Yes, always, always that about you already, and we just, just met each other. And.
Renee Zavislak: Yeah, it's pervasive, for sure. Yeah, so.
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: So I love that term, unflappable when it comes to the human condition. What a beautiful term. Thank you. And in our audience, we support parents of complex kids and the professionals who support them.
Renee Zavislak: I support that a decent part of my practice is supporting complex kids. Yes, I.
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Can, I can. I can only imagine more about that later. Yeah. But so here's, here's the thing that comes up for me, because I'm always curious where these conversations are going to go. As I said to you, I never really quite know and we often start with a question. After we ask, what brought you here? What do you think parents need to know? But before I ask that, if I may, I really want to look at this notion of what it means to be unflappable in the face of what's happening. Because I think the the challenge that the parents in our community, face a lot is, is that they're easily thrown off by what's happening. And I often say what I want is, when parents come to me, I want them to have kind of a Bring It On attitude, yes, yes. Bring it on. I got whatever is happening. I can hear, right? Because it's when they get thrown. Off their course, their center. That's when the challenges absolutely right? So talk a little bit about that. What does that mean for you?
Renee Zavislak: I think that for parents, especially, there are two big obstacles to being to being unflappable, right? And those are both judgments and expectations, right? I think that parents have so all of us, I'm a parent, you're a parent, right? Yeah, it's like it, yeah, okay. Parents have so many ideas, even if they don't want to, about who their kids are going to be what their kids are going to do, or what it's going to be like, and the grief work involved almost all parents now in having, especially right now, having those expectations not come to fruition. I think that's a really big piece of it. I think the other is parents. When my son was a toddler, we moved from the northeast to Seattle, and I was a stay-at-home mom for a couple of years, Seattle has this very intact culture of stay-at-home moms, and it's all centered around playrooms and coffee shops. So I spent two years in that world, and my moms are heroes. I love them, and they lie, they lie to each other so in the coffee shop, trying to wipe the crust out of my eyes, some woman's talking about how her nine-month-old is conjugating Portuguese and eating with a fork or a spoon at the table. She's not Why are you telling people that? But there's this thing that has been left over from I had hoped it died with like my mom's generation, but it hasn't, which is how the kids functioning is about how good the mom is. If your kid's not sleeping, you're doing something wrong. I have a client. I adore him. He is 30 years old. I am 53 years old. My kid is 17. His kid is one. And when I first met him, and we were talking about his son, and I was joking about sleep stuff. My kid was the world's worst sleeper, like a superlative level bad sleeper. And my client said, Oh well, our son started sleeping through the night after like three weeks. And I said, jokingly. I said, Oh, get out of my office. And he looked at me, and he said, we started right away with sleep hygiene. And I said we need to get out of my office. I was like to people. I said we did all this stuff too. Don't believe that, right? Yeah. So I like it.
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: To call it the achievement elite. Yes, there. And a lot of, a lot of what happens with stay-at-home moms is that the mom, it becomes my job to parent this kid, and so now I'm going to treat it like, like a job, instead of like, you know, a parent.
Renee Zavislak: Instead of like, yes, yes, excuse me, yes. So I think the judgment, the expectations, are big, and I think that there has been so much that has changed between when we were young, and what's what it's like for kids now that it's also really hard for parents to understand a lot of what's happening with kids, yes, yeah, and I think that's a really scary position to be. Things are changing so rapidly, so rapidly, so rapidly. And I think that a lot of being unflappable with your kids, involves staying curious, right? Just want to be in wonderment instead of an expectation. Right? Wonderment for all of it, the messy stuff, the stuff that there are heartbreaks, you know, my husband, I don't think he anticipated this, but it really rubs him that our kid doesn't like to read, and our kid doesn't like to read because he has a he's very, very bright, and he has some sort of we he asked when he was 13 years old, he asked for a full neuropsychological exam. He said I want to know what's going on in my because.
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Most 13-year-olds do unless they have a psychotherapist. Mom, yeah.
Renee Zavislak: And he had told me repeatedly that he had trouble reading because he was hyperverbal. Verbal was his thing as a child, he was not kinesthetic. He didn't like to climb. He didn't like it all he wanted was to talk. At three months old, he was so verbal, and he knew something was up with his reading. And one of my favorite parenting mistakes that I'm talking about right now is expectations and just assuming that I knew who my kid was. He's so right. He's so verbal, there's no reason there, therefore, right, right? And I would literally say to him, No, you don't he'd be like, but I'm not good at reading. I'd be like, Yes, you are. Stop, right? So we took him to this neuropsychologist who was fabulous, and she did the full exam. It's multiple days, and we come in for the appointment, and she said, so it's a very complex brain. It's a very complex kid, and I want to start with reading. She said, You know, I gave him a series of 10 words and asked him to repeat them back after five minutes, after 20 minutes, and he had a very unusual performance there, one of the highest I've ever seen. He gained words as he went if he didn't remember. Remember them, and I repeated them back. He figured out a way to remember them, and he was in the 98th percentile for that, right? Our kid, that's what we expect. That's our 98th percentile. Then she said, but when I gave him a paragraph to read and asked him to tell me what he'd read, he was in the 6% he has a major issue with processing written language. And I was like, Whoa, beautiful, my kids, he's been right more than I have throughout his life, which, that's my point, right? And.
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: They accommodate for themselves. Yes, in so many ways. I know I was a kid who accommodated for decades.
Renee Zavislak: Yes, I realized that I was too in different ways, not with things like that, but with attention things, right? And with, I mean, which was so common for girls, which is why nobody noticed we were struggling, right? Because we're better at accommodating. We don't have as much of the age. So I think that even those of us who think here I am walking around all the time talking to parents about their expectations, and I walk into the same situation all the time. And so that's the other piece. One of the things I talk to parents about the most, more than anything. If I were to say, what is something I talk to all my parents about, it's ego. It's old-school ego. Work like, just be comfortable being wrong. Be comfortable not doing it right. Like, if you're worried right now about how much of this you're going to do right, just don't stop because you can be miserable, miserable, like, just get comfortable right now, it's parents do not like a lot of them apologizing to their kids, and I think that it wasn't modeled for us, right? It wasn't and it's huge. And if you're paying attention, you're doing it a lot. I apologize to my kid a lot, right? He loves it.
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: He loves what they do, and the older they get, the more they love it. Yes, yes. Let's take a quick break and we'll we're going to continue this conversation. Welcome back, everybody. My name, my guest is Rene Zavick, and we are having a great conversation, right in line with everything that we're all about at Impact Parents, we're talking about judgment and expectations. We're talking about staying curious and they could make it okay to make mistakes and be comfortable being wrong, all the good stuff for us. Renee in our world, we call it a coach approach, alright? I like it, yeah, foundational coaching skills, yep. And really, what we're talking about is what it takes for parents to step into being unflappable in the face of the wonderment that is their complex kids and their complex kids in this bizarre world. I was watching or reading something the other day that was fascinating, because, what he was saying was that we are living in the most unusual time ever in the history of humankind because for the first time in history, we don't know enough about what's going to happen 20 years from now that we don't know how to educate our kids, that's right, yes, because the world is changing so rapidly, so fast. So I guess that, and I know that could be uncomfortable for people to hear, but I also want to say to you, parents listening, if you're feeling a little ungrounded, there's a reason for it, like this is right now we are living. What did Confucius say in interesting times? Right? So, so we're talking about unflappable and we're talking about their times that we're in. Where does this conversation go next?
Renee Zavislak: It's funny when you said we don't know what it's going to look like 20 years from now. I had like, a full body little mini panic response trying to do that, because I don't I've worked really hard to not future trip as much as I did in the first half of my life, right? So I try really, like, not to think too much ahead. And when you said it, and I thought, oh yeah. And I just sort of gave me this physiological shock for a moment, because, my goodness, I can't even imagine, right, that again, there's a lot of acceptance that comes in grief and letting go that comes for with all of this, for all parents. Because even if I think about when my son is 17, he was born in 2007 it's totally different, I mean, so different.
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: He was born into, he was three years old when the phones came.
Renee Zavislak: Out exactly, so he didn't even, I, you know, toddlers with screens. I was lucky. I had a few years before I had to contend with that, right? I mean, I thought it was like the worst thing ever that I let my baby watch a Baby Einstein video while I took a shower.
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: I mean, oh, my video, no television, right? Yeah, kill about that.
Renee Zavislak: And then it was like, geez, all bets are off now, but I not holding on so tightly to our own experiences, right? Right? Being ready to like, that's the fact that there's a sadness and not. Being able to share experiences with your kid in the way that, you know, oh, around in this area. I don't know if this is as common in the northeast because I don't remember this many programs, but there's a lot of alternative high school paths out here in Sonoma County, there's a lot of like, you know, half hybrid schools now and independent study schools and things for kids who aren't being as successful in regular school, and a lot of that's getting pinned on neurodivergence and the increase in autism diagnoses, but I've got a whole shtick about that. We can get COVID. May have had something to do with that, but COVID and just the bottlenecking of intergenerational trauma over hundreds of years that is now presenting is symptoms, I think, in people.
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: And an education system that's that was designed for factory workers and not for.
Renee Zavislak: Oh my gosh, that's the best thing that you've said. I say that all the time, the school was designed to make factory workers, right? Just it's an outdated model, right? But anyway, sitting with parents who are really struggling that it doesn't look like school, and so they're not having the same graduation parties that they had for themselves, and they're not having the right and the loss of, I mean, I in an ongoing way, culturally, we have this loss of, like, tradition and things like that. And I think that's all sort of coming together to make a lot of parents feel like they don't understand the world they're in. And what I and I don't want.
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: To interrupt, well, here's your option. I like an object because, I'm hearing you and I'm realizing so one of that one of the stories I talk about a lot in working with parents of complex kids is that we have to, as the word you're using, is grieve. We have to sort of let go of what we thought with the expectations we thought we were going to have so we can right. Here's the child we have, and that happens again and again and again, because every time their peers hit a milestone, they don't hit exactly you process it again and say it again. Yes, what I'm noticing now is this is as my kids are older, my kids are young adults, and so watching their peers and my friend's kids starting to get married. And, you know, my kid did get married but had a very non-traditional marriage. Part of that was covid and but I'm watching like you can almost watch everything kind of go into a V on media these who are, these kids are so traditional, and they're doing it just the way, like, and then these kids who are going a completely different direction, yes, yes, right? And it's almost like two worlds are happening. It is. It is like.
Renee Zavislak: That. And I think even the parents like, I'll just use my own family, my husband and I are both pretty I would call us definitely lefties and definitely, you know, artsy people and non-traditional people and all of those things. And we have been since long before we were parents beating the anti-capitalism drum, and we end up with this child who's all about it not following a traditional path. And my poor husband is like, wait, I meant it theoretically, but I still want you to go to college and get a job. And I'm like, Babe, we can't raise a kid who's not a capitalist, but want him to sort of perform capitalism for us first, like so I think there's these ideas that a lot of us are really comfortable with and we think we want them, yeah, and then they start to happen. And there's just this. Another thing that comes up, it has come up in in my own family, and it comes up often with the parents I work with, is parents getting a little bit jealous, even.
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Yes, because these kids, they have no qualms about asking for their worth, and for demanding parity in the workplace, and.
Renee Zavislak: All of it, all of it, they are not having any of it. And when we were talking to my son about, like, different options for where he was going to stay in school, in high school, and we gave him all of them, you could do homes, you could do this school, you can do that school. And I might, I remember a conversation with my husband. He said, Well, I didn't have these options, no. And it wasn't I didn't have them, therefore they're wrong. It was very much. And this is something I've encountered with many clients. I didn't have them, and I'm a little mad. He gets to
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Yeah, it's always jealous. It is. It's.
Renee Zavislak: Exactly what it is. Yeah, parents admitted on the podcast, like, Yeah, I think I am a little bit jealous, whether it's something like that, or whether it's all of the attention and love and care that I'm giving them that I didn't get, that they're taking for granted. Because that's Yeah,
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: And that happens a lot with complex kids. And as you were saying that I was thinking about, I remember being at a place where I was I was kind of jealous of my in-laws retirement. Yeah, I had young kids, and I was working so hard and now here I am looking at my kids, and they have choices, and I worked really hard for them to have these choices. Yes, yes, right, yes. And yet, still, there's this almost like hazing, quality of what we expected life to go through, that that we're not. Not holding them to but then we have to deal with that too. There's work for us to do here. Is this much work?
Renee Zavislak: I think this has always been, this has always been the experience and experience that parents have, which is it's, I think it changes the quality of it. But think of having ideas about what you think would be exciting for your kids, but when it comes down to it, being uncomfortable with it actually happening, right?
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Well? And what I will say is I, and I often say that when you have like, I'm a parent of three kids, and I often say, if your kids are very different, this is my patting myself on the back here, that means it's a sign of a good parent because you're letting them become themselves, yes, I agree, yes, yes, yes. And likewise, Patty and my kids are super different, yep, and in many ways, and not in others. But there is something about allowing them to go their path, which is what I raise them to do. Want them to encourage them to do. And now it's like, Wait, where am I am your path, right? I want to make sure that we're like there is something that again, I think we come to terms with again and again and again throughout our lives, in relationship with them. Yes, yes. They come from us, whether we adopt them or we birth them, or whatever, but they are not us.
Renee Zavislak: No, I was a teacher for the first decade of my adult life, and I had been, I was moving from San Diego back to the East Coast, and leaving a school where I'd worked for two years, and where the families were really involved, and I was close to a lot of them, and they made me this beautiful binder when I left, where the parents did it was those old sticky pages that photo albums had, yeah, wrote things to me on one side and the kids on the other. And there's, I'm getting like, choked up about it. There was a letter from one of the parents of a a who is now the student. Is now a mother. Aubrey is a former student of mine, and her mother wrote me a letter that said they had an Aubrey as their biological child. They had an adopted child. And I had talked to the mom about the fact that I hoped someday that I would adopt a child, and she wrote me a letter, and she said, no matter how you come to your child, whether you give birth to them or you adopt them, you will find that they differ from you in the most beautiful, marvelous ways. And my daughter is such a better version of everything I thought I wanted to be, and I remember that they will be different. It stuck. I mean, this was, I'm 53 I was 28 I mean, it's been 25 years, and I still think about it all the time.
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: They are so curious because I was thinking about asking you this earlier in the conversation, when you look at this issue of grief, at letting go, do you see, do you experience something different in parents who have adopted versus parents who have who are birth babies?
Renee Zavislak: That's an excellent question, and let me think about it for a minute, because I haven't before. Yes, I do. I think, and I think that a lot of parents who give birth to their children are surprised that they're having that sort of like because you came from my body, I have that much more expectation that you will be like me. I do think that there is that wonderment component is implied more in an adoption, right? Adoption, you're getting sort of thing, right? And I that it would, I think it would be beautiful if we all went into that, but with that same attitude, even to the children we birth, that we don't have any idea who is the where they're going to be, because we don't. I mean, it's, I see myself. Usually, it's neurotic things and specific anxieties that my kid narrates that feel like they were stamped right from my DNA into his right. Not so much the like, Oh, he got me something lovely. It's like, oh my gosh. That's, that's my anxiety. That's my
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Sorry about that kid.
Renee Zavislak: black, poor kid, got a double whammy from both sides. But, yeah, mine, mine too, yeah. But I think that it does. It does. I've, I've worked with a handful of parents who have adopted children, and half of them have both biological and adopted, and the other have only adopted children, and I think there is a considerable difference. I think that there's a part of the process of going into adopting a child, I think often involves, I know it does with the parents I've worked with before the adoption. It involves talking about these things beforehand. And I don't think birth parents do as much. Do it as much. You're right. I think I don't even necessarily do it as much with expected parents, or at least I used to not. I do it now because it's been on my mind more. But I think it would always occur to me to talk to parents getting ready to adopt, about this idea of, you know, before you, before you knew you were going to adopt, when you thought you were going to have your own children, if that's part of their story, what were the things you thought you knew already about your kid? I know my kids going to be so, you know, like we talk about those things, and traditionally, I don't think that birth parents prepare for birth that way.
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: I agree completely. I don't, I don't. I think there's that tendency to just like, we have this story, we have a societal story, that it's all-natural. And you. Well, birthing may be natural, but raising kids, there's a lot of architecture in there. There's a lot of structure and a lot of management, and oftentimes, I think that parents of adopted kids are more likely to ask for help and more likely to seek support. Yes, because they're not dealing with the guilt is different. Yes, it is. Got guilt, but the guilt is a little different, yeah, and parents who adopt their kids, who are not infants, especially, are almost anticipating trouble, because that's what they're warned, right? That it's been hard. The kid already has trauma. It's going to be difficult, right? They.
Renee Zavislak: And, another thing that I think really interferes with parents being in that just wonderment open-minded places also is something that I know has happened to parents forever, which is that parents adults, forget what it was like.
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Yes, and oh my gosh.
Renee Zavislak: Kids to do all sorts of stuff that we would never do, Like it's just when I was a teacher and I worked prime until that, that placement where I still, where I still know the kids, and they made me the photo album that was different before that, I worked in really rough inner city schools that was kind of like my thing, right? And those, you know, there's a lot of burnout in those schools, more than there are in other schools, for sure. And you know, we'd have a team meeting, and we'd be talking about a student who had any number of problems at home, and therefore any number of problems being consistent in school, and you're hearing teachers say, like, well, I don't even understand why he's not doing his homework. He doesn't even come to class. He doesn't let me ask you a question. If every day when you went to work, your boss was like, You're bad at this, you're bad at this, and you're annoying me. I don't like you. Would you go back to work? That's right. No, not. Would you eat something that makes you want to gag? Do you know any adult who sits at the table and tries to force found force feed themselves food they don't want? No. But we do all these absurd things that we do.
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: And that we didn't do when we were their age, and that's right, right? But we're going to do it better. We're going to do different All right, I hate to do this, but I have to start wrapping up this conversation, and I have thoroughly enjoyed it. Know Me, I could go on forever. We could probably both love that in common. Yes. So, Renee, how can people find out more about you? So.
Renee Zavislak: The easiest place to find me is on Instagram. I do a lot of free advice on Instagram, and my account is psycho underscore therapist, underscore Renee. My podcast is called psychotherapist. Two words and we're everywhere. Spotify, Apple, Amazon, all the stuff. And my therapy website, website.
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: I have one of those two websites because I know it's gonna be hard to spell, so we'll have my last name, but.
Renee Zavislak: It's, there's a Renee Zavislak therapy. It'll be, it'll be in writing, but you can find all of that through my Instagram. That's the place where everything is housed. Psycho, underscore, therapist, underscore, Renee, beautiful.
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: We will get it all there, and I encourage you to check it out. I look forward to checking it out.
Renee Zavislak: Thank you. This was so much fun. Thank you so much. This really.
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Was all right. So before we wrap the conversation, and it's been a really delightful conversation, I think ultimately about, how we as parents get in touch with being unflappable. I think that's really what it's been about. When I want to Is there something you haven't shared that you want to share, or is something you want to go back and highlight?
Renee Zavislak: You know, I think that everything's so different and so new, and we're used to exactly that, to everything that's happening right now for our kids being new and different, and yet we don't need to reinvent the wheel. There’s a lot of things we've known for a really long time about how to make your kids into whole people that we can still fall back on. And no matter how complex your kid is, they still need the same attention to developing autonomy and initiative and identity, and all you know, you go to the old Erickson stages, and that stuff still applies to all kids. And really it's like old operant conditioning stuff. Just catch them being good. I think if we all switched our paradigm from thinking about the things we don't want our kids to do the things we don't want them to say and the ways we don't want them to be if we just flipped it to, what do you want? We want? What are you moving towards on that it's not just our kids, our partners, our friends, our coworkers. Everybody pay attention to the things that you want and stop giving so much attention to the things that you don't want. And everything changes. Catch them being good.
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: So Renee has just encapsulated the coach approach in a nutshell, right there, everybody and so thank you for that. That was beautiful, and it's so reinforces so much of what we do in our community. So really appreciate it. Do you have a favorite quote or motto You want to leave her? Well.
Renee Zavislak: I do. Do, and I just spilled it. I accidentally, which was I do like to say that my favorite motto is to catch them being good. And so what I want to reinforce about that is that it isn't just with your kids, it's with everybody. My other one is the old Rudolph Steiner. There's a war outside because there's a war inside. And I think if we were all doing our own work, right, if we were all trying to capture that wonderment and dispense with our expectations and our judgment, and worked on getting the war inside settled down. Everything would be easier. And I really, like, I wish everybody would just try me on that, like, just try it. You know what I mean? Because I feel pretty certain it would work. But I think so much of the suffering, it's going circular. It's starting inside of each of us, and it's coming and making these big, overarching problems that then cause individual problems. And really it all needs to start. Everybody just needs to do their own work.
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Yeah, that's what we say all the time. The change you want for your kids starts with you exactly. Thank you. Thank you for what you're doing and for the amazing energy you're bringing to the work that you do. Thank you for the.
Renee Zavislak: Opportunity to share it. This was a blast.
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: It was a pleasure. So to those of you listening, take a moment to think about the conversation that you've just observed and participated in and maybe commented on as you're listening. Oh yeah, yeah, me too. What are the insights you're taking away from today? What's the awareness you have? What's your aha, and what do you want to do with that information? How do you want to bring it forward with you into your week? How can this serve you, yourself, your family, your being as you move forward into your week, and as always, everyone, thank you for what you're doing, for yourselves and for your kids. At the end of the day, you make an extraordinary difference. Take care, everyone. See you at the next one, bye.