437: CEO Mama: Healing Generational Patterns, Reparenting + How Our Kids Impact Our Inner Work
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Hello, welcome back to the show. This is Lindsay, and this is a CEO Mama episode. This one is a reflection that I wanted to record on a recent episode on the podcast with Natalie and Nakia Homer. And if you haven't listened to this episode, I highly encourage you to listen to the episode with Natalie and Nakia because it was so beautiful and it covered such a wide range of topics. But one of the things that they talked about that I thought

warranted a deeper conversation specifically for CEO Mama was around this conversation that Nakia mentions that she had with her daughter. If you haven't listened, I really highly encourage you to pause me and go back and listen because I'm going to spoil a little bit of the episode for you. But Nakia mentions that she asked her daughter this question and was expecting it a totally different answer. And her daughter reflected back to her something that really surprised her. It was just such a beautiful moment in the episode and a beautiful moment for me listening to be like,

wow, this is such an incredible reflection. And so what she had done was she asked her daughter, her 12-year-old daughter, she said, what can I do better as a mom? What do you think I could do better? If you're listening to the episode with Nikkei, you'll hear the context around this conversation around people pleasing and trying to really stop generational trauma by doing things differently with your kids than we're done with you. And I think a lot of us enter parenthood and a lot of us come to our parenthood these days, especially moms. We're so cognizant of

how we're showing up in parenthood because we're high achievers. You know, we study it. We're aware. We want to be good parents. We want to do things differently. Like it's something we want to achieve almost, you know? And so I think we approach parenting the same way we approach our business or our other goals where it's like, this is something I want to do well and I'm going to work at doing it well. And Nakia was saying she felt that way and that she had come to her 12-year-old daughter to say, what could I do better? And was expecting to get some different answer. And her daughter said, you need to be less selfless.

You need to do more for yourself. I see you doing everything for me and my siblings. I see you doing everything for everybody else. I don't see you taking care of yourself or doing things for yourself, mom. And I think you should do more for yourself. And this was coming from her 12-year-old daughter. And you'll hear in that episode that her and Natalie have this moment where it's like, wow.

For a child to reflect that back to a parent is such a big deal and such a moment of dropping you right into the present of like, oh, wow. In trying to do everything for everyone, in trying to break generational trauma, in trying to show up, I've self-abandoned.

Like I've lost myself a little bit. And our children are often our biggest teachers, you know. And so to get this lesson from her child was this big wake up call for Nakia around needing to be more cognizant of what she needed and to make sure she was showing up in service of others genuinely and authentically and not as a response to trauma or not as a way of healing the trauma of her childhood where people didn't show up for her.

I really encourage you to listen to that episode and digest it and then come back to this conversation because what I want to talk about is what they then segued into from that conversation around reparenting. I wanted to talk about reparenting and how that shows up for ambitious mothers and how

a little overview of what it is. I'm not an expert at it, but I think it's such an important tool for ambitious mothers. And I think it comes into play for so many of us. And maybe we aren't cognizant of what it is or we're not doing it with awareness, but I wanted to talk about it because they touched on it in the episode. And I think it's such an important thing that we can do for ourselves as parents, as mothers, as ambitious women who are so good at apologizing

coaching and learning and skills and goals and upgrades and all these things in our business realm and in our health realm and all these other, you know, buckets of our life. But sometimes in parenting, you know, still losing ourselves or still over serving. And the reparenting conversation is so, so important in that context.

I want to dig into that today. If you've paused and you've come back to this conversation, you'll have a little more context. If you haven't yet, you can continue to listen to me. Go listen to the episode with Natalie and Nakia afterwards. But reparenting is this practice for going into your inner world and working with your little inner child on something.

rewiring and reshaping some of the beliefs and occurrences and things that happened in your childhood that are still informing how you show up today in your life. Natalie and I were just talking about this on another episode around how our patterns, even as kids, still show up in how we manage our business, how we lead

our team, how we interact with our coworkers or our business partners. Of course, not to mention our personal relationships and our parenting. And it's things like achievement orientation, doing a good job and wanting somebody to tell us we did a good job. It's the self-preservation. Like I don't need help. I can do it all myself. I don't want help. I'm going to do it myself and prove that I can do it myself. It's the self-sacrifice and the people-pleasing where you override your intuition or you override what you want to do and you go with someone else's opinion and you've

Yeah.

And so this practice of reparenting is to go in and do some inner work and look at where those patterns developed as a child and do some of the healing work with the inner child so that in your current present day life, in your business, in your parenting, in your relationship, you are not still repeating those cycles. And I think this is such an interesting conversation and nuance. And the reason I wanted to bring it into CEO Mama is I think a lot of what we consider to be burnout or

or frustration in the business, or I'm out of alignment with my business. I'm trying to sell something or teach something that I don't want to do anymore. A lot of that stuff that I think we blame on the business itself in the current moment is actually symptomatic of us making a chain of decisions

that have led us into a circumstance in the business where now we are dissatisfied or now we have abandoned ourselves and gotten ourselves into a circumstance in the business that either has made us burned out or we're now out of alignment with the business. And what's really happening is the decisions we made to get us there were because our little inner child was seeking, you know, we wanted validation for our achievements or, you know, we wanted people to tell us we're good at something or

or we like when people tell us we're good at something. So we built a business around that, or we have this self-preservation instinct of I'm going to do it all myself. So we build a business where everything has to be done by us and then we get burned out or we're people pleasers and we build a business with somebody else or for somebody else because we're

That's what they wanted. And now we don't love it anymore, but we're stuck because we need it to survive. You know, we've built an income. We've dedicated all this time. You know, there's the sunk cost fallacy thing going on. And I just see it so often and we hear it in CEO Mama. And, you know, I see it so much on just in the communities that I'm in and on Instagram and masterminds and all these things of, man, like,

is it your business or is it your inner child wounding? And like, I'm not a therapist. I'm not a psychiatrist. I can't diagnose these things for you. But I think these are big questions that we get to start asking ourselves when we find ourselves in burnout, when we find ourselves not lit up by our business anymore, when we find ourselves bleeding into our motherhood or our relationship with the self-sacrifice energy or burnout.

self-preservation energy or the achievement orientation where I'm doing it for the validation and not because I actually want to choose that choice. I think those are opportunities for us to go, wow, like how did I get here and why? And what's the deepest root of how I got here? And reparenting is this practice where

you go and ask these questions of your childhood and you really look at where do these patterns first emerge or where do I remember first feeling this way or exhibiting those type of behaviors. And I'll give a really personal example. I think sometimes it's easier to ground these concepts in personal examples. But when I was listening to Nakia talking about her conversation with her daughter and her daughter said, you need to be less selfless. You need to do more for yourself. And Nakia said,

I realized a lot of what I was doing for my children, I was doing to heal the trauma of my childhood because people didn't do that for me. It wasn't necessarily that I was doing that because they needed that from me. Like they were good, they were fine. And they were obviously super self-aware and little oracles because they gave her such wise feedback.

And she said this thing about, you know, it really made me realize I was doing a lot of what I was doing in my parenting as a response to my childhood trauma. And I was like, dang, I feel that because for me, I was the kid that I broke up fights between my parents or I would greet my dad at the door to prevent a fight between my parents with an A on a spelling test or with some achievement or something I had done that day that I know he would acknowledge and like would appreciate.

show, you know, that I'm a good student or I'm a good kid and would like give him some sense of pride in me as a deflection so that he and my mom wouldn't fight about whatever thing they were going to fight about. I mean, I have so many memories of doing that as a child, of going and achieving something to get validation and to like

neutralize a tense situation or to, for lack of a better word, like manipulate the relationship between my parents so that they wouldn't have a tense conversation and they wouldn't fight about it. And I'm like, wow, that pattern. I remember that so early on of like being so cognizant of needing to have something that I did well that day at school so that when my dad got home at night, I could present. I have a secret announcement.

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that to him. And so I'm like, man, that pattern, I feel that even now, you know, I feel that in work and all the businesses I've had. And even now in my role at Boss Fever, I'm like, I want something good to happen every day so that I have proof of how good I am at it. And that can neutralize any negativity. And I feel it in motherhood where I'm like, I want my kids to tell me

They had a great day that they love being my kid and all these things. And I'm like, it's so interesting, like in loving them so much and wanting to not ever put them in a situation where they have to achieve something to, you know, neutralize my big emotions. I still find my little inner child wanting their validation. And so this stuff runs deep and I'm not a psychiatrist. Obviously, I'm not an expert at this stuff. I just like to bring things that I think are

interesting and relevant and tell my own stories. And maybe you see yourself and find yourself in these stories. And just like little sneak peek, these are the kind of things that Natalie and I nerd out on behind the scenes as moms and as ambitious women, because it's so fascinating, the more self-aware you become and the more of these tools you discover, like the reparenting tool where you really understand that, oh, reparenting yourself is actually a practice. Like you really can go in

and look at the experiences from your childhood and remember, and like go back into the mindset of little Lindsay, little seven-year-old Lindsay, a nine-year-old Lindsay, 10-year-old, you know, like when I had these experiences that I remember and coach her through it in a different way as you now, you can go coach your little child, inner child through something to better serve you now in the moment and change then how that wiring shows up in your current life. These

patterns in business and patterns in relationship, patterns in motherhood that burn us out or make us feel so out of alignment. If we can go and do this reparenting work and find the root cause, then we can start to shift things and change things. And I think that's why it matters so much to me and why I'm so interested in these conversations and why I think as in CEO Mama, as ambitious mothers, this kind of work is just as important as any strategy in the business because this is how our lives feel. And I

why are we doing any of it if it doesn't feel good? And if we're not taking care of ourselves, and when Nakia said that in the episode, it brought me into awareness of how much I do for other people and how little I was doing for myself. And that my 12-year-old had to be the one to say that, to say, mom, you're so selfless. You need to do more for yourself. And I'm like, yeah, as an ambitious mother, doing things for myself is always a big conversation in my head of

There's so many other things I could spend this money on, spend this time doing. So spending it on myself or by myself is a big internal conversation, you know, and I think I'm not alone in that. And so I want to bring it into your awareness and I want you to really give yourself permission that some of the things that feel uncomfortable or feel hard or burn us out may not actually be our current circumstances fault.

it may be that we are bringing patterns into our current circumstances and that if we go and do the work on those patterns, the current circumstances are just what they are. And we get to choose a different response to them. And we get to choose how we feel. And we can change how things feel to us by going back and doing some of this inner work versus the other option that we have, which is to blow up the business or to change the business partnership or

or to quit the job, or whatever the thing is, the big drastic thing. And it may be that that is still the right decision. But I think sometimes when we pose this question to moms, it's like, well, if you're burned out and you want to blow up the business, maybe that's like the right thing to do is blow up the business. And like the universe has your back and you'll land on your feet. But that doesn't feel safe. Like this business is my sole income. You know, this is the security of my family. I can't just go blowing things up. But I can go do some inner child work. I can go do some reparenting work.

and learn how to change my belief patterns and my response patterns and my nervous system calibration points so that the things that are currently burning me out or the things that are currently causing me to self-sacrifice, I can show up differently in. Anyway, I don't want to like harp on this too much. This can be just a little short and sweet episode for you. I really, really encourage you to listen to the episode with Nakia and especially if you're a mama and really hone in on this topic

It's about in the middle of the episode where she talks about this conversation she had with her 12-year-old daughter. And then she talks about reparenting and how important reparenting is to not only being a good parent now and to current parenting, but also into how you show up in the world and how you show up in your business and in the seasons of life that we go through when you've gone back and done some of this work.

you can handle the harder seasons more easily. You can respond to the hustle seasons with less self-sacrifice because you have more awareness around why and what's required of you and the boundaries and the non-negotiables, even in those hard seasons. And so please go back and listen to that. And then if you're interested in reparenting a

a quick google or chat gbt search i don't want to prescribe how to do it because i'm not a psychologist but i did a quick search even before i recorded this and there's articles on positive psychology and some other websites where you can find just easy tips for reparenting but you know honestly it's the practice of being gentle with the little inner child that's inside of all of us especially if you are a mom and you are parenting little babies little children now and it's such mirrors

for our inner children and they are such teachers. God, I feel this every day with my kids where I'm just like, you guys are like little mirrors for little Lindsay. And I get to decide every day, not only how today Lindsay parents her five-year-old and seven-year-old, but how today Lindsay re-parents little Lindsay.

And it makes me emotional to say that because so much of what I want to do for my kids is for them to have a different experience than I had. And I think so many of us feel that way of like, I don't want my kids to feel the things I felt as a kid. And so I'm going to be so intentional about their childhood being different than mine. And that's beautiful. I feel that too. And if that's really true and we're going to do a good job at that and we're not just doing it as a trauma response, we also have to be reparenting our little inner children at the same time.

We have to be going in and taking care of our hearts and our little souls that didn't get what they needed. And they get to heal along with us doing it differently with our present day actual little children, ideally preventing them from having the same wounds that we have. I thought this was a beautiful episode. It's a really important topic to me. This inner work stuff is so critical.

to how you feel in your day-to-day life. And I just can't stress enough how at the end of the day, all the strategy, all the funnels, all the marketing, all the social media, it all sits on top of you and how you show up in your life and how you feel in your life and how you are as a human day-to-day. Because if you're not good, none of that stuff's going to work or it's not going to work for very long. So

I hope this was helpful. I hope you go back and listen to the episode with Nakia Homer and that you do some searching on reparenting and the tools to do that. That's a journaling practice and some self-inquiry questions you can ask. It's pretty open-ended. It's pretty simple to get started. All you need is your journal and the willingness to do it. I just believe it's been so transformational for me. It's a huge part of my continual inner work practice and growth. And I really ask myself a lot of these questions every day with my own kids and in my own practices. And I hope you will too. And I hope it's supportive and helpful.

So as always, thank you for listening. If you have any questions or you want to chat more about this, my DMs are always open, especially for CEO Mama related stuff. You know, this is a huge passion of mine and I love supporting our community of ambitious mamas always. So shoot me a DM. Natalie and I have talked about this a lot on recent episodes of CEO Mama, but we are also launching a CEO Mama membership in early 2025s. And we'll cover topics like this. We're going to bring in experts to talk about stuff like this. We'll have templates and practices for you to implement

We really want to bring a lot of these tools into the CEO Mama community. And CEO Mama membership is for anyone at any stage of business. It doesn't matter how much money your business makes. So if you're interested in being a founding member of the CEO Mama membership, you can go to bossbabe.com slash CEO Mama, fill out a founding member application, and we'll have even deeper conversations and tools and all kinds of experts and stuff like that on topics like this inside of there. So thank you, and I'll see you on a future episode.

Okay, I have some really exciting news about CEO Mama. So those of you that have followed along for a while know that we have a CEO Mama Mastermind, which is for ambitious mamas in the seven or eight or even some nine figure range in their businesses. And we love this program and we'll continue to run this program. But we have also heard the feedback that it would be amazing to have something from CEO Mama that was at a lower price point and

accessible to anybody at any stage of business and brought the community and the resources and the tools that we have at the higher level in CEO Mama to a bigger community. So we've heard you and we are so excited to announce the CEO Mama membership. It is launching early 2025, but we have founding member applications open right now. So you can go to bossbabe.com slash CEO Mama. That's bossbabe.com slash CEO Mama membership.

and fill out your founding member application. And we will be in touch shortly with more details. And I really, really hope to see you in there. We're so excited about this program. This is one of my biggest passions inside of Boss Babe is the CEO Mama brand and the community of ambitious mamas in here who are trying to do both things well, who really want to find that harmony between their devotion to motherhood

and their ambition and their businesses. So if that sounds interesting to you, make sure you go fill out your founding member application at bossvave.com slash CEO mama. Can't wait to see you in there.