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March 26, 2010
Helping parents meet goals
Mirit Murad believes more effective communication is possible.
ELIZABETH NIDER
Doesn’t everyone wish that they could speak to their kids so that they’ll listen? Earlier this month, registered life coach and neurolinguistic programming practitioner Mirit Murad gave an insightful presentation to a room full of parents gathered at Richmond Jewish Day School, eager to learn techniques to enhance communication with their children.
After RJDS principal Rebecca Coen introduced her, Murad got right to the point. “My intention for tonight,” she told the crowd, “is to inspire you to be proactive parents; to be the best parents you can. It’s the beginning of a journey, not something you hear tonight and then go home and forget about, but something that I want you to work at with your children.”
Murad shared some of her background and talked about her decision, after 11 years of teaching elementary school, to change direction and concentrate on helping parents meet their goals and aspirations.
One of the traps parents can fall into, Murad warned, is when they assume that negative behavior will occur.
“You have a choice: you could focus on the negative and remember all the bad things or, instead, focus on what we aspire to have, but, for this, you have to be proactive. The brain is extremely goal-oriented and once you have a goal, the brain goes for it ... it’s all about mastering your feelings and making a choice: how do I want to be?”
To make this change, Murad encouraged parents to first recognize their values and then, based on these, each family can create a “family vision.” To illustrate the importance of creating a shared vision, Murad compared it to working on a ship. What does the crew expect from the captain? That he or she has direction – a vision of where to go.
“You are the captains of your ship,” Murad said, “and your house its own ship, and if something happens, be it sharks or wind, we need to stick together.”
Murad discussed the undesirable impact that reacting emotionally can have on successful communication. “When our values are violated, we tend to react very emotionally,” she explained, but “one of the key elements of being the parent you’d like to be is to have [fewer] situations when you are out of control.... The big shift happens when you stop thinking about ‘what [my child is] doing to me’ and started thinking about what they need instead.” By changing one’s state of mind, Murad argued, effective communication can materialize.
To effect that change, Murad recommended that parents take on a coach-like point of view and “mentally step out of the conversation, maintaining a detached position, being calm, having no judgment and listening to all elements from a neutral point of view.” She suggested that parents think about their children “as employees for a second ... look at them as ‘I am their employer’ – this takes all emotion out of it.”
When individuals are not reacting emotionally, Murad said, they are more in control and can lead the conversation in a more positive direction.
Murad asked parents to bear in mind that, “Every behavior has a positive intention ... and we need to think about what [the child] needs. Maybe [your child] behaved a certain way because he needed to calm down. Even if it was not an appropriate behavior, if we realize that there is a reason he did it, then we can talk to him. ‘What do you need? What happened?’ This helps the child know that we are there for them and on their side, [and this] will cool us off immediately and we will not take things personally.... Sometimes, the intention is really deep and primary. Maybe [your child is] testing your unconditional love or maybe they wanted attention.”
This doesn’t make the behavior acceptable, Murad continued, but it does help parents react without emotion.
Even with a plan, parents can still run into difficulties communicating effectively with their child, Murad said. She advised parents to try some verbal strategies to alleviate some of the struggle. According to Murad, using positive language – “Pour slowly,” instead of “Don’t spill your milk,” for example – is important because “our brain doesn’t understand negation,” so whatever a parent said not to do is likely to happen. Instead, parents need to express what they do want.
Ultimately, it comes down to creating and sticking to the family vision and behaving in ways that show children their parents are there to support and love them unconditionally.
To learn more about Murad, visit parentwithchoice.com.
Elizabeth Nider is a freelance writer living in Richmond.
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