Things I learned this week:  This week I share a few of my thoughts about how important it is to be a healthy parent.  And by healthy I mean more emotionally and mentally healthy so that you can respond more with love to you children.  I talk about how we all need to make sure to also think about what a "good" parent looks like for us. After meeting our children's basic needs of, food, shelter, and water, we can add in love and all of the other items that we decide we want on on the Take a minute to define it for ourselves not just let others say this is what a good parent does or the media says this is what a good parent does - we get to decide.  The other thing I pointed out that is good to remember is not to judge whether you are a good parent on you children results.  Sadly we are not in control of what they do, but we can do out best to invite, reward or discipline, encourage and help but ultimately they will decide how they want to become.  That last thing to remember and which is something I really especially need help with is remember the empathic listening technique that was taught with the 6th Habit from 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey.  Empathic listening happens especially when you are talking with you children and there is a lot of emtion involved.  So you listen and the you tell them what you heard as well as tell them how you perceive they are feeling about it.  Simple things that according to Stephen R. Covey gives our children (or anyone for that matter) psychological air.   The I share this idea of decluttering the mind.  Just like you would clean our a drawer or closet we can declutter our mind.  And just like decluttering stuff we being by taking everything out and looking at it.  So with the mind, we get a piece of paper or notebook and just begin to write about all the good, bad and ugly thoughts we have about a certain topic.  And after we get all out thoughts out we look at them, maybe challenger a few and then we decide what we want to keep and what we want to just let go.  I got to a place after I did this with thoughts about work and my podcast to say "I am halfway there."  All the other things I can let go and redirect my brain to this thought.  

At the end of the episode I share the tale of the fire at dinner, the not out favorite musical and the sick son.  

Have a great week!