What's In Your Toolbox?

Good morning. Good afternoon. If you're catching this live, if you're catching this on rebroadcast. Hello, hello. Hello. Happy Thursday. My name is Mary. I am the co founder of a company called Girls Mentorship and I am stoked to be live with you today in the Cadre sphere. How is everyone doing? If you don't know me, like I just said, my name is Mary. I own a company called Girls Mentorship with my best friend and business partner, Jill Peterson. She is not here today, unfortunately. We are dividing and conquering the day and what we do, we own a company called Girls Mentorship.

Third time saying it. We teach life and personal development skills to teen and tween girls. So on this caretaker Thursday, we like to approach situations by helping those who love girls also help themselves. What we know is working with girls is incredible. They need life and personal development skills. Some would argue they need life and personal development skills now more than ever, especially with technology at the height that it's at. Comparisonitis, not enoughness, anxiety, depression, all of these things are through the roof in 2024, a major reason we love working with girls.

But we know that if we don't support the people that love girls, then the work we do with them falls absolutely flat. And we know that working with the people who love girls is equally as impactful because a lot of the time, parents haven't learned this type of work for themselves. So this idea of personal growth and development, this idea of getting to know self, is incredibly helpful in raising the next generation to be the powerful, capable leaders that we know that they can be. Because everyone benefits.

Literally, when I rise, you rise. And that's the. The coolest thing I feel like about being a part of the cadres sphere is you get to listen to other people's lived experience and take what you need from that. I don't ever want to fire hose anybody. I want to provide a buffet of options for getting better in one's life. And you pick and choose what you need in that moment. Hi, Shannon. The best part is really us getting to meet you where you are. Because I can remember certain parts of my journey, even to this day, where I definitely wasn't ready to receive certain information.

And if I'm not ready to receive certain information, it's going to go in one ear and out the other. So my invitation for you always in these toolbox Thursday talks, is to pick out what you need, apply one thing, work on that one thing until you feel like you've got that one thing down and then come back for more. So what are we talking about? Today? Jill and I are in primetime summer camp planning mode. Our biggest offer of the year, our Super bowl, if you will. Our summer camp. We host six weeks worth of summer camps.

They're week long sessions for girls where we go over all of this stuff, right? So we go over how to gain confidence, how to have empathy, self respect, personal responsibility. What are values? What do you stand on? If you don't know who you are and what you stand for, then you're gonna fall for anything. You're gonna go with where the wind takes you. We joke a lot with our girls that those blow up dolls at car dealerships is what it feels like when you don't know who you are, what your values are, and what you stand for.

So we're always, always, always looking at life through the lens of how do we help girls and families better themselves, not only with their communication, which is what I talked a lot about last week, but today I want to talk about expectations. What we find a lot with the families that we work with are mismanaged expectations, meaning we expect a lot from our girls, but we don't necessarily speak out loud what we expect of them. So they have a frame of reference of what we want them to follow.

So Jill and I are looking into developing a system, a program of sorts for parents to receive, like, daily messages from us that they can workshop with their kids in the moment. So it's for parents, it's for kids. Little easy messages for them to be able to have together to work on this thing called personal growth and development as a team. And what we were talking about yesterday was expectations. And the conversation I get to really help Jill parent her kids because I'm around all the time. I'm another safe adult for them.

I know we've talked about that a lot as well. What? The conversation we were in with them yesterday was appreciation. What do we appreciate you guys for? And what do you appreciate us for? And it was funny, because when we asked them three things that they appreciated mom and dad for, it was almost like a deer in the headlights look. They didn't necessarily know what that meant. And when they dug in just a little, they said things like, well, I appreciate when you buy me stuff, stuff like Christmas gifts, candy, new clothes, like those very quick hit things.

Right? And what we did with that was say thank you. We appreciate that you appreciate that. But let's dive a little deeper. Do you appreciate that we drive you to your baseball practice every day? Do you appreciate when we show up at your school for your awards assemblies. Do you appreciate when we compliment you when you're being funny or when you're being smart? Right. To get them to peel back the layers of the onion to go, oh, my gosh, my parents do do a lot for me that might go unrecognized.

Right. And her kids are eight and ten. So if we're not setting them up for success, to understand what appreciation means and to be able to voice that to somebody, they're never going to know. Right. We have these expectations that they're going to thank us for certain things, but how can we logically expect them to thank us for certain things if we haven't actually taught them what appreciation means? So then we flipped it and we said, these are the things that we appreciate about you. So they could really grasp onto what made them feel good, what really stood out about their personality, things that they could latch onto and pour a little bit more gasoline on that fire, if you will.

So, really small example in terms of how we pull more out of them, but set them up to understand what our expectations are for them so they're not going through life wondering if we're meeting the mark or they're not meeting the mark. We oftentimes get girls in our programs where parents hand them over and they're like, they're broken. Fix them, and it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Where was the miss here? Why do you feel like she's broken? And how did we get to a point where that's the language you're speaking into her, where did we mismanage our expectations along the way?

For her to continually miss the mark that you are setting, is the mark too high? Are you not having a conversation with her about what you expect of her? So my takeaway for you guys today, in order for you, the caretaker, to get your expectations met in a way that's healthy and manageable, and for your kids, or whomever you are managing to meet those expectations, or at least vocalize the fact that they don't feel like they could reach those expectations and or that they could well exceed those expectations, is to think about where you're not explaining yourself.

So we're going back. We're tying on communication. Like I said last week, we talked a lot about communication and where mismanaged communication was coming in. So we're kind of setting the foundation on this pyramid of communication. Then we're communicating expectations. Next week, we can talk a little bit more about what those expectations can look like. But where are you not stating what you need from the people you are looking after. It's okay to start these conversations early and often with your kids because the more early they hear it and the more often they hear it, the more they'll understand how to really bring those qualities out within other relationships in their life.

Think about them being an adult and them being at a job and their boss not being clear about the expectations of the job. Your kids will have the tools and skills to have a conversation with their boss about how they feel like their job performance is going, rather than bottling all of that up and exploding one day or feeling like they are not doing the job well enough and quitting or giving up on themselves. Right? The implications of having these conversations with your kids as early and as often as possible is huge for their continued success in life.

So takeaways from this conversation. Jot down a few places where you feel like your expectations with whomever you are caring for are not being met. And if it's up to you to sit down and have a conversation about what those expectations look like, you are allowed to zhuzh your expectations. Meaning you can go back to the drawing board and say, maybe I was being a little too harsh here, but I need you to step it up here. Can we be in agreement around this thing here so the relationship can ebb and flow just a little bit easier?

So I would love to hear in the community feed what those expectations are, maybe where you've mismanaged them, or what some new expectations are moving forward. And then my expectations of you, I would love if you stayed on a little bit longer. We have one more creator going live today. That Shannon Paul. She is fire. Her coffee talks are incredible. There was another creator before us today. I'm going to go back and watch his live. It seemed really intriguing, but today's Thursday, meaning we've got Friday, Saturday and Sunday full of incredible creators going live again.

Before we start a fresh new week, if you're interested in these type of conversations, we'll obviously be back on Thursday to talk caregiving. We also do a segment on Tuesday called trending Tuesdays where we like to bring in the Cadre sphere around what's going on in the world that has an impact on your kids, which will inevitably have an impact on you. So thanks for hanging out with me today. Let me know if you're watching this on replay and I will see you guys with Jill next Tuesday and I'll catch you in some of the other creators livestreams Comment sections.

Hope you guys have a lovely rest of your day, and we will see you again next week. Bye.