Good Life Project - Lea Waters: Reclaiming Strength Out of Darkness

Episode Date: January 8, 2018

From darkness comes light. That's what we're told. But, it's not always the case.In today's moving conversation with Lea Waters, we explore how a childhood that held the darkness of abuse led to years of continued suffering, but eventually became a source of transformation and led to a life of profound light, beauty and strength.Waters is an Australian psychologist, the Founding Director of and professor of Positive Psychology at the Centre for Positive Psychology, University of Melbourne. She holds affiliate positions at Cambridge University’s Well-Being Institute and the University of Michigan’s Center for Positive Organizations and has published over 95 scientific articles and book chapters.Her first book, The Strength Switch: How The New Science of Strength-Based Parenting Can Help Your Child and Your Teen to Flourish, was recently included in UC Berkeley’s Greater Goods Magazine’s Top Books for 2017. Lea is the 2017-2019 President of the International Positive Psychology Association and serves on the Council of Happiness and Education for the World Happiness Council. She lives in Melbourne, Australia, with her husband, son and daughter.In today's deep dive, we explore Waters' journey from a childhood defined by a lot of pain to her attempt to "self medicate" led to a year's long eating disorder, then to her awakening to a bigger truth about who she was, where her self-worth came from and a commitment to harness the darkness of her youth as fuel for a powerhouse career in the science of flourishing, with a focus on raising kids who experience life to it's fullest.-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In order to say I grew up in an abusive childhood, you have to say my parents were abusers. And that's a very hard thing to do because there's never any black or white. And there was mental illness in the case of my mother. And so it was confronting. My sister did have therapy a number of years later. And I remember this because she called me up and I said, how did you go? And she said, did you know that ours is a case of child abuse?

And I said, yeah, I did. And she was like, spin out. That was the way she spoke, spin out. And there was like a pause between us. And then just this sadness. She said, it's true, though, isn't it? And I said, yeah, look, it's true. And it's not about blame, but it is about understanding where you've come from so that

you can start the healing process. Today's guest, Leah Waters, grew up in a tiny town in Australia, 800 people, and spent the better part of her childhood playing the role of protector of her siblings from physical and emotional abuse from her parents. That led to a lot of different ways of coping, some of them pretty physically destructive. Yet she latched onto what she sensed and knew was a fierce sense of intellect and ended up going to school, pursuing her PhD in psychology. But it wasn't until she got exposed to the world of positive psychology and strength-based psychology in particular, that a lot of things began to really change in her mind. And when she herself was about to become a parent, she realized that she wanted to take a very

different look at both the world, the way that she practiced her profession, she realized that she wanted to take a very different look at both the world, the way that she practiced her profession, the way that she would end up teaching as a professor at the University of Melbourne, and the way that she was as a parent raising a family. That led her down the rabbit hole of positive psychology and strength-based parenting became a field that she has done a bunch of research in and written a fantastic new book called The Strength Switch, which is all about strength-based parenting. And really powerful conversation, not only because she was incredibly transparent about her own journey and some recent loss that she suffered and how she's sort of dealing

with it and navigating it, but also because the work that she's doing is so critically important, both to how we understand ourselves as parents in the world, how we understand how to flourish in the world, and just how we understand how to be human beings in a rapidly changing world. Really excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. We'll be right back. Charging Apple Watch. Getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary.

Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is?

You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. We're going to dive into a lot of your work currently, which is around strength, strength-based parenting, positive psychology. I'm really curious, though, because you have devoted so much of your adult career to this and to focus on families and kids and how positive psychology interacts with that as a kid. Was any of this a genesis of your upbringing?

A hundred percent the genesis of my upbringing, do, because of the field that I'm in, make the assumption that, well, you must have had a very positive childhood. You must have had strength based parents. For me, I mean, like I said, I grew up in a small country town. I grew up with a mother who had a very severe mental illness. And so in my childhood, she spent time in and out of psychiatric institutions, multiple suicide attempts. And this was in the 70s so there was no conversation about these things. My father didn't really know what to do so it was a family secret. So mom would just kind of vanish for chunks of time?

Yeah, she would. And there were times in our childhood where things were okay. My father was a school principal, so we had lovely summer family holidays. He spent a lot of time at work, long hours as a school principal. There were times where things were okay, but there were also times in my childhood where things were really not okay. A lot of erratic behavior from my mom and when she wasn't coping so well, a lot of aggression, a lot of physical violence. And I'm the oldest of three children. So I just took on a lot of responsibility at a very young age to essentially be the parent to my sister's 15 months younger,

my brother's five years younger, and also be the parent to my mother. And so that was a huge responsibility to try and manage the emotions of someone who has very erratic emotions. And step in and protect my brother and my sister in those times where things were out of control and, as I said, a lot of physical violence and so a lot of psychological violence too, actually, and the physical violence ended as we grew bigger and older, the psychological violence that's still continuing. And I think of the two, that's the harder one because it's invisible and it doesn't leave a fingerprint and it's very hard to explain to other people what's happening but I took on this

responsibility and so that was challenging and I was required to step up into a role that I was not I didn't have the resources I didn't have the intellectual resources, the emotional resources to be doing the role that I was doing. Are we talking about your single digit years, early teens? Do you have a recollection of eating in those years? Yes, I have a lot of recollections as a young child. And then certainly in my teenage years, the memory is stronger. And so when I was 15, I developed an eating disorder and I became bulimic and I was bulimic for seven years. My younger sister was also bulimic as well. And I understand now that this is going to sound sort of counterintuitive, but it was a coping mechanism. So it's perverse, but it allowed me to cope with the situation that I was in

because I would use food, particularly the binging part of bulimia, it was an emotional suppression tool. So I would binge and that would push down fear and sadness and shame and everything would be numb for a while and then self-loathing would creep in and so then I would purge and I'm not going to go into the details of purging but it's a really brutal process were you and your sister both aware of each other doing this or do you know we we never spoke about it at the time as adults we spoke about it later on but i knew because we shared a bathroom and she knew as well but there was a lot of collusion in the family there's a lot of we just don't talk about anything that's going on so when i was doing my phd i did i was i just had know, you have those like inflection points in your life where something pretty small, which could just fly by without you noticing and you grab onto it and it

changes things. It changes your course. So I was doing a neuropsychology course and the professor was talking about this brain disorder called Wernicke-Korsakoff disorder. And it's a degenerative disorder of the brain and it's related to long-termorsakoff disorder. And it's a degenerative disorder of the brain, and it's related to long-term lack of vitamin B. So it's quite a common disorder for long-term alcoholics. And he just made this throwaway line. He said, it can also occur with people who have long-term eating disorders. And it just hit me like a ton of bricks, this almost casual line, almost like an afterthought. And so I'm sitting in this PhD program. The only thing that I knew I had, the only resource that I knew I had at that stage was intellect. And intellect had allowed me to do well at school. School was like a safe haven for me. And I didn't tell anyone at school what was going on because school was my happy place and it was predictable and there were routines and I did

well and I was praised. So I had this moment where I was like, well, I don't want to lose my intelligence because it's got me through. It allowed me to do well at school. It got me out of a small country town to go up to Melbourne to study at a university. I don't want to lose this. And so that's where I first started therapy. I was doing a PhD in psychology, but I first started therapy myself at the age of 22 and started working with a psychiatrist, was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. From all the up and everything that happened with your mom. Yeah. Did you have any sense that you might be suffering from that level of trauma? I did not. And it's sort of embarrassing to say because I was studying a PhD in psychology. I think I knew that things were pretty deeply wrong with my family, but the word trauma

was not something that I would have thought of. I mean, it makes perfect sense to me now. And I was very resistant actually initially. I was like, no, no, this isn't about abuse. This isn't about trauma. But working with a psychiatrist really helped me to see that that was the case of our childhood. And so I worked with him and I overcame the eating disorder

and that was a really important step in the healing journey. When you were doing that work yourself, I'm curious whether that also triggered, okay, so if this is me and I'm doing this and my sister was doing the same thing and the same behavior, like maybe she's actually suffering the same PTSD. Yeah. And at the time I reached out to my brother and my sister about,

look, this is what's happening, this is the diagnosis. And it took me a long time to accept that sort of diagnosis because in order to do that you really have to, in order to say I grew up in an abusive childhood, you have to say my parents were abusers. And that's a very hard thing to do because there's never any black or white, you know, and there was mental illness in the case of my mother and so it was confronting.

My sister did have therapy a number of years later and I remember this because she called me up and I said, how did you go? And she said, did you know that ours is a case of child abuse? And I said, yeah, I did. And she was like, spin out. That was the way she spoke, spin out. And there was like a pause between us and then just this sadness.

She said, it's true though, isn't it? And I said, yeah, look, it's true. And it's not about blame, but it is about understanding where you've come from so that you can start the healing process. So it's been a process for my brother and my sister too. And look, we've all handled it in our different ways. So for me, overcoming the eating disorder was a very important start. But then I had a decade of intermittent anxiety and depression and I think

partly because I wasn't using food anymore to suppress the emotion so they had to find other ways of coming forward and my sister also she overcame her eating disorder she also suffered from a lot of depression and anxiety and I grew up to become a psychologist and my sister grew up to become a social worker. But very sadly I lost my sister to suicide earlier this year. I'm so sorry. Yeah, it's hard for me to talk about but I feel like I should because I know I just think that we don't have enough honest and open conversation about mental illness, about suicide,

about trauma, about abuse. And I feel that we need to just be talking about this more openly and more honestly, maybe to help people, to prevent it, in my case to give dignity to my sister. Because, I mean, I'm a very articulate person and I'm a professor I speak all across the world I'm a writer I've never struggled with words but I do not have words to describe the pain of losing her in that way but I also don't want to keep it a secret because I'm not ashamed of what she did.

And I don't want to feel like it's something that I don't talk about because I feel like somehow that's me saying I'm ashamed. And I'm not ashamed of her. I'm so proud of her. She grew up to be a beautiful person. She helped a lot of people. She worked with prisoners. She worked with the homeless. She worked with kids on the street, foster children, adults who have intellectual disability. And I'm not angry

with her. I really truly understand why she made the decision that she made. She just carried so much pain for such a long time. And just got to a point where she she couldn't see a way out but she's at peace now and so my role well I'm not sure if it's my role but where I'm at now is she's 15 months younger so I can't remember what my life was like without her and so I'm at a point of just readjusting, recalibrating, particularly because my role was to protect her. And she has a 20-year-old son, so he and I are now sort of learning to adjust to life without her. And I just want to honour her legacy. She was a social worker, I was a psychologist. I now do work into like,

how do you create happy families? She worked with homeless kids, foster care kids. And I, in my own way, I'm just continuing on with her work. But that's a long way of saying to you that everything I do now is a hundred percent based on my own childhood, but maybe not so much in the, I know what it's like to have positive parenting, strength-based parents. I had this great gift. I had this great fortune, and I want to share that with other people. It's more to do with making meaning of the trauma and the suffering, not blaming, not accusing, having dignity and honor in the whole process, but using my strengths in ways that help to give other families a chance that my own family didn't have. Yeah. I mean, having been through what you've been through also, not that you sort of wish this to be the process, but I would imagine

also it has given you a certain empathy, you know, because you can sort of look at things from the inside out, not just the outside in, because it's in some way, some of the people, I'm sure many of the people you work with, you have lived a part of their experience. Yeah, absolutely. It's given me a lot of intuition. It's given me a lot of empathy, a lot of compassion. And, you know, where strengths, I research strengths and I create strength-based family programs and those kinds of things. But where strengths were important in my own journey was worked with a psychiatrist.

I became an eating disorder. I worked with a psychologist with the depression and the anxiety. And at that point in time, my field, the field that I was trained in, psychology, was very deficit-oriented. So it was very much about healing. And I needed to be healed, but it was about working through trauma, abuse, maladaptive thinking. And in my early thirties, the field of positive psychology was a very new field at that point in time. And I was pregnant with my first child, Nick, who's now almost 15 and has recently just got taller than me. So that's an interesting little moment where your baby,

all of a sudden you have to look up to ask them, like, you know, do you want a milkshake? And this field came forward and just, again, one of those inflection points where I bought Marty Seligman's book, Authentic Happiness. I read it sort of with a bit of professional curiosity. Yeah, because when that came out and when he took his seat originally as head of the APA, it was almost heresy. Yes, it was. In some fields, it was. Yeah,

absolute. And when I started as an example of that, when I was building the Center for Positive Psychology at the University of Melbourne, there was hostility directed towards me from people in my field. And I had a conversation with someone. I was trying to build the center and I was sort of going out and getting philanthropic money and business support and government support to build this center. And there were some of the psychology researchers at my university who were very hostile towards me for building a center in this field that they thought was lightweight, not relevant, not aligned to what

a psychologist should be doing. So yeah, it was new thinking. And I read the book and I just, I had this light bulb moment where I'm like, wow, you know, cause his call was we, if we're only ever fixing what is wrong with someone, then our profession is half-baked. And we have this great ability and knowledge set to also help build up what is right in someone. And I, that had never occurred to me. And I was a trained psychologist and I, you know, done a PhD in psychology and I've had therapy myself. And it just never occurred to me as a personal level to ask myself this question, what is right with me? I knew a lot about what was wrong with me and I knew I had weaknesses and I experienced mental illness. And I remember a GP I was working

with once because I've had a lot of physical ill health too and autoimmune issues and which often go along with traumatic childhood. And I remember him sort of saying, well, some people are cactuses and some people are orchids and you're an orchid. And I was like, great. I was like, what do I do with that? I know. I'm very precious and I have to be in the right environment. And look, that is just the reality, but orchids can be really beautiful if you do give them the right environment. And so I had this idea,

I was like, well, I've never thought about what is right with me. And I, as I said, I was pregnant with my son and I felt very confident in raising him that if there was troubles in his life, I'm very well qualified to help him with that. But I was also hopeful that he wouldn't certainly not have the troubles that I had gone through. Everyday troubles, yes, because that's part of life. It's night and day, light and dark, yin and yang. But I wasn't. I thought, well, what if life is going well for him?

My training in psychology doesn't teach me anything about how to help him amplify what is right with him and how to help him make the most of life when it's going well. And so I sought out a strength based psychologist and there weren't many at that point in time. And I went along to see him and he did the normal thing. So when you have therapy, the first sort of two sessions are really just a patient history and presenting problems. And he didn't say much. He took a lot of notes. And I never forget because at the end of the second session, he put his pen down and he looked at me, he just looked at me straight in the eye. And he said, have you got any idea how strong you are to have survived what you have survived, to have stayed open-hearted, to have intentionally

become a good person, to have these long-term stable relationships, to have done a PhD. There's such strength in you to have done that. And my husband jokes with me because for me, that was like this profound moment where no one had ever said to me you're strong I'd always been told you're an orchid you're weak you fall easily and much worse things than that too in my childhood but my husband does joke because he's like well you did go and see a strength-based psychologist so it's probably not that unusual that he told you you were strong. Right, selection bias. Exactly. And still. But still, you know, it just unlocked something inside of me because I had created a good adult life.

And Matt, my husband, we started dating when I was 20 and we've been together ever since. So I've had this safely attached relationship and beautiful long-term friends. And I had a lot of love, but I didn't have anyone saying you're strong. And what he did more importantly was over the course of that therapy helped me to put a spotlight on my particular strengths. And he helped me to see that during my childhood and during my teen years, I left home when I was 17, that I'd been drawing

on all of these strengths to help me navigate and survive and to help me take care of my younger brother and my younger sister and to help me to be a loving daughter towards my parents. But I didn't know that I was doing that. And so he helped me to see, for example, how my intelligence was this great strength and a great resource that allowed me to understand what was happening in the family system, do well at school, get myself out of a small country town, go to understand what was happening in the family system, do well at school, get myself out of a small country town, go to the big city, study at university level. He helped me to see how my social strengths and just my kindness had helped me to form just really beautiful friendships. So things were not happy at home, but I had really, really lovely friends.

And that was a life raft for me and it was my social strength that allowed me to do that and to keep those connections. And then also humour. So that is a strength of mine. It comes out in certain, you know, playful contexts and I know I look back at school and I was that kid who was able to make people laugh and even make my parents laugh and make my brother and my sister laugh. That was one of the things that I did to kind of just create a bit of levity. And, you know, humor is a transcendent strength. Humor is the strength that allows you to like rise above.

And you have that moment of tension, say in a work meeting, and someone just tells exactly the right joke, exactly the right minute, and everyone just cracks up laughing. And for a couple of seconds you rise above, you have this big belly laugh, you get oxygenated, and then you come back into the problem from a different perspective. And I think also in my case I learned early on that, you know, sometimes you just have to laugh because otherwise you cry.

But he helped me to see that these were true strengths in me that I had been using without realizing. And these were my life raft. These were what did help me to get out and create a more intentional and positive adult life. And so that was really critical because then once we got to that point, and look, it took me a little while to accept, yes, I have strengths without feeling like, oh, I can't speak well of myself. Exactly. The tall poppy syndrome, which is really big in Australia. Yeah. Because

what he helped me to do was he helped me to see that I was using my strengths, not to see myself as better than anyone else, but I was using my strengths to contribute to the lives of others. And I think that's a really important thing to say about strengths, that everyone has strengths. So strengths aren't the things that make you better than anyone else. They're not there as a source of inflated ego. When you truly connect with your strengths, that's when you realize that these are here to help me contribute positively to the lives of other people. And he helped me to see that. And then he was like, okay, like, what are we going to do? You've got these strengths. Let's shine a light on them. Let's use them more intentionally to craft the adult life that you want. So strengths for me were just a really important part of my own journey. And this all happened at the time where I was about

to have my first child. And so, I mean, put aside the whole professional part for a minute and the fact that I've researched strengths for over a decade and this was just I was like this is how I want to raise my children I know that they will have strengths and my job it's a very joyful job as a parent is to look at each of my children for who they uniquely are strengths and weaknesses but to help them see their own strengths, to help them use their own strengths more intentionally so that they have a life well lived and so that they contribute well to other people. So initially the strengths work was much more, I guess, from a personal side, but then I did start to bring it in much more into my own research program, using it in my consulting with

corporations and schools, and then setting up this strength-based parenting research program to look at, well, I've lived the personal benefit of it. My children are benefiting from it greatly, but that's a sample size of two. And I'm a researcher, so, you know, I want to be able to say this is generalizable and we can see this in large samples. And so building that research program to have a look at, you know, what happens to the life of a child or a teenager who, when they have parents who help them to see and use their own strengths in an intentional way. And the research program has shown that when you have a strength-based parent,

the teenagers and the children who report having a strength-based parent, the teenagers and the children who report having a strength-based parent, strength-based parenting is a protective factor, firstly. And that's a terminology we use in psychology to mean that it protects young people from states like anxiety and depression. It's a buffer for stress. It's not going to prevent your child from experiencing stressful life events, but it buffers the way a child reacts because they have their own internal toolkit. They can draw on particular strengths to say, okay, this sucks, but I have some resources that I can bring to this situation. So the first thing we found is that it's a protective factor. And then the second thing we found is that it goes above and beyond that.

So it doesn't just protect against some of the darker emotions in life, but it also enhances and enables some of the lighter emotions in life. So what we found in the research program is that teenagers and children who have parents who help them to see and use their strengths have high levels of life satisfaction, high levels of positive emotion, they're happier, they have more self-efficacy, they have more engagement, they have more persistence, they do better academically at school. So it's both a protective factor and an enhancing or enabling factor in a young person's life. Yeah. And it makes a lot of sense.

Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die.

Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever. Flight Risk. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. I think it'd probably be helpful to sort of define what we mean by strengths because it's not as thrown around as words like authenticity these days, but increasingly,

and I think in no small part because of a blend of the rise of positive psychology and then at the same time, the work that, you know, the CliftonStrengthsFinder, which sort of like came out of a slightly different approach. The word is used a lot, but I don't think there's a real clear understanding of what we're really talking about. So when you're talking about it, what are you talking about? Yeah, I'm so glad you have asked me that question now, and I feel I should have said that at the start of the interview. So you're right, it's used a lot,

and there are lots of different sort of research perspectives to it. And the way that I look at strengths is that we have, firstly, two broad kind of buckets of strengths. We have strengths of talent. That's the sort of Gallup work, the Clifton work. strengths. We have strengths of talent. That's the sort of Gallup work, the Clifton work. And we also have strengths of character. And so the strengths of talent are performance-based, they're skill-based, they're observable. And strengths of character are more to do with the positive aspects of our personality. They're not performance-based.

They're less observable because they're to do with our inner landscape. Although you can easily learn to start to see character in people. And we all do it anyway. We get a, you know, walk into a room, you get immediate sense of someone's character. So that's the first thing to say about strengths. And that's important because most of us, when we think about strengths, we think about the talent-based strengths. So we think about sporting ability or think about the talent-based strengths. So we think about sporting ability or musical ability or artistic ability or IQ. And we don't think to look at these strengths of character, a person's integrity, their honesty,

their kindness, their courage, their leadership, their social intelligence. What I'm trying to do with a strength-based parenting approach is to help parents work with their kids to maximize and make the most of the assets, the resources, the positive qualities that their kids already have, rather than spending all of our energy trying to sort of compensate for what's lacking and what's missing. Fix the flaws or the problems or weaknesses. And so it's important that we understand that there are both the talents and the character strengths because otherwise some parents could inadvertently be taking a strength-based approach but only be focusing

on these performance-based abilities and not recognising that actually my children, my child has all of these other strengths and they're the character-based strengths. They're a little bit more invisible. So that's the first thing to say about strengths. Then the second thing to say is that, I mean, most people, if you ask them what a strength is, they'll say strength is something that I'm good at. And that's true, but it's only part of the truth.

And so what the positive psychology research field has done is shown us that for something to qualify as a strength, it has to have these three elements. The first one is performance. So it's something that I'm good at. The second one is energy you'd be looking for is where do I see high performance in my child meaning where do I see that they're like above average now that can be talent-based or it can be character-based you know you see kids who have emotional intelligence that's above and beyond their years for example so where do I see above average performance where do I see consisted a pattern of consistent and repeated high performance and where do I see a pattern of consistent and repeated high performance? And where do I see a rapid learning curve? So that's the performance part, but you're also looking for energy. So when someone is using a true strength, they're really energized in the process of using that strength. So it's like it gives you energy rather than depleting. Exactly. Yeah. And they'll come out of it energized and they'll lose track

of time and they'll kind of yearn to want to be involved in something that allows them to use their strength. And then the third element is self-motivation. So with a true strength, because it's such an enjoyable experience to be using that strength that you're just naturally seeking out opportunities to use it. And why I think it's important for us to understand those three elements is because sometimes we can be doing something that we're good at, but it doesn't necessarily give us energy and we're not necessarily self-motivated to do it. So in psychology, we call this a learned behavior. And we distinguish a learned behavior from a true strength in that in a learned behavior, you're good at it, but

you have learned to become good at it because of some sort of external reward. So people keep asking you to do it because you're good at it, but it's not energizing for you and you wouldn't choose to really do it for internal, like self-motivated reasons. So we can make the mistake of as parents of seeing our child have high performance in something and thinking, well, that's a strength. I better help my child to use more of that strength without really looking at these signs of energy and self-motivation. And in the book I give that sort of example of two children

who are good at piano. So they both have high performance. They're both technically as good as each other. But you've got the one child who you have to nag them to do their practice and they don't leave practice feeling energized. They finish the minute they're supposed to. And then you've got the other child who almost can't walk past the piano without feeling compelled to just quickly sit down and play some little tune. And they just yearn to be there. So it's not just about what you're good at. It's also about what gives you energy and what you're driven to do.

There's this internal yearning, this kind of self-motivation piece that comes with a true strength. Yeah. I mean, what comes to mind when I hear that, it makes perfect sense. My curiosity is this. So I had a friend of mine growing up who would literally skip school because he'd just lie in bed playing guitar all day long. He became phenomenal at it. It's all he wanted to do. He wouldn't sleep so that's how we know, then that standard is so extreme that we sort of like we diminish it when we identify something that checks all three buckets, but it's not that extreme. And we almost say, well, it couldn't be my strength because I don't feel

like I won't lose my entire life in the name of the pursuit of it. The other thing that I think is really fascinating, I'm so curious what your opinion on this is. Some kids, I totally agree. And this goes for adults too, right? It's like you walk by the piano and you're like, oh, my hand goes there organically. I just want to do it. I want to play. There's something about the way my brain is wired where it's like, this is a part of me.

But then there's the other kid where in the beginning they're like, seriously, I have zero interest in this, but I have to have a musical instrument for school yeah and so i have to do something so i'm going to pick piano in the beginning there's really not a whole lot of interest but there's a structure around them that forces them to practice to a level where they hit like the most basic level of proficiency like the switch doesn't go on until then. And then they're like, oh, this is cool. And at that moment, it becomes the type of thing where they want to do more and more and more and more and more. Yeah, exactly. And so what you've hit on there is that there's a feedback loop between the performance, the energy and the self-motivation. And so you can have that

same scenario. You could have a student hit that level of proficiency and still continue on with, well, I just have to do it. I'm technically good at it. It's a learned behavior. I have to do it for certain grades. I'm doing it because my parents want me to. I'm doing it because I get praise for doing it. And so it could continue in that way. And it's really just a learned behavior, but it could also be what you're talking about is like a slow burn, what in the book I call a growth strength. So you've got the true strengths where they're pretty evident from a reasonably early age and they become much more evident

in the teen years and we can talk a little bit later on if you like about the sort of how the neuroscientists are catching up with why that is the case. But you can also have this growth strength. It's not immediately evident. You don't see a big sign of it in a younger child, but it's like a slow burn. And I think part of that is that nice feedback loop where they start to get a sense of proficiency and mastery around it. And then they start to enjoy it a little bit more. And then because they're enjoying it a little bit more, they're getting more energy. And because

they're getting more energy, they're more self-motivated to practice. And the more you practice, the better you get. So it turns into this beautiful feedback loop. And, you know, I think this is the interesting thing about strengths is that they're dynamic, they evolve. It's not a kind of category of like, all right, so these are your weaknesses and they're always in this category. And this is your learned behavior and this is your strength.

There's fluidity amongst those three. You know, they can change and grow over time. Yeah, which is so interesting also because I've had mixed conversations about that where some folks are like, it is what it is. Not so much on the weakness side but on the strength side. It's kind of like once you hit a certain age, it kind of is what it is. And you can maybe strengthen one a little bit or make it more, you know, dominant in your profile. Yeah. But it kind of is what it is.

And I don't like that idea. No, neither do I. Because I want to think it's more fluid like you're explaining. Yeah. Look, my understanding is it's fluid. But I totally agree with what you're saying. Even the researchers who are researching this, whether understanding is it's fluid, but I totally agree with what you're saying. Even the researchers who are researching this, whether they know it or not, you can see through the

way they're researching. Some researchers have what I would call quite a fixed mindset around strengths and talents. And you've got these, maximize them, make the most of them, invest only in these, don't worry about the areas of lower performance, that this is not where you would spend your time and energy. And then there are other researchers and scientists. And in the book, I talk about this idea of strengths flexibility. There are other researchers and scientists who say, who are probably more along the kind of self-improvement line. You can improve anything. So then the question is, where do I want to invest my energy? Where am I going to get the most amount of time or most return on investment for what I seek to improve?

Now, what we know about strengths is that they're partly nature and they're partly nurture. So my definition of strengths development is that strengths development equals ability times effort. You or I may be born with a slightly greater ability, let's say swimming. So I may have been born with a slightly greater ability for swimming than you. And that will be to do with my muscle constellation and my skeletal frame. But that's only half of the equation. A big part of the equation is the effort piece and what it is that you choose to kind of

repeatedly practice and build up. What the scientists do show us is that if you have a slight sort of genetic advantage, then when you, so you and I put in exactly the same level of swim practice. If I'm born with that being more of a strength than you, I will get what the psychologists call the multiplayer effect, which means that for every one increment, the same one increment of effort that you and I both put in, my ability gets slightly better, slightly better, slightly better. So your feedback is being amplified also and you want more of it. Yeah. That's not the same as saying there's no point in me working on this because I wasn't born with the same level of ability as the person swimming laps next to me. So I'm more along the lines of self-improvement

and everything can improve and you can get better. And then you just make wise choices about, well, what do I want to get better at? And there are some weaknesses that we do have to work on. Everyone thinks that because I'm a strength-based parent that I just ignore the weak spots in Nicholas and Emily, and I don't. We are actively and intentionally working on some of the weaknesses of Nick and Em. And probably I should define what a weakness is too, right, if we're talking about definition of a strength. So for me, a weakness, it's a very simple definition. A weakness is some kind of flaw that prevents us from being effective. And everyone has weaknesses. Even parents.

Even parents. Note to self, don't let daughter listen to this. Well, I mean, when I work with parents, this is one of the interesting things is that one of the core sort of concerns that someone has about taking on a strength-based parenting approach is that they'll come and they'll say, Lee, isn't that a little bit unrealistic? You know, does this mean that I'm just going to ignore all the weaknesses in my children? Does this mean I'm going to create this kind of like snowflake child or overinflated ego who just thinks that all they are is strength.

And what I found in the work that I've done, so I've done work running workshop, parenting workshops here in the States, in Hong Kong, in Canada and Australia and New Zealand, is that there's this lovely counterintuitive, and that is that as you start taking a strength-based approach with your children, it actually opens up the doorway for you to work on weaknesses in a much more open, less defensive way with your child. And the reason for that, I think, is that your child knows first and foremost that you see the good in them and that you're going to start from a basis of strength before you go in to work on weaknesses, idiosyncrasies, flaws, faults.

But to get back to that idea of a weakness, for me, the way I define it is it's a flaw that compromises your ability to be effective. So everyone has them. And I think there's three really important messages to send to your children. A, everyone has them. B, there's nothing wrong. It doesn't make, there's not something wrong with you. It's just normal.

And then C is, well, how many of my weaknesses do I need to work on and how much time and energy do I put into that? So in the parenting workshops, I get the parents to pick up the pen with their non-dominant hand. So for me, that's my left hand. And I ask them, you know, write your children's names with your non-dominant hand. And then at the end of that exercise, I say, okay, now swap it over to your dominant hand and do the same thing. And it's comparable to strengths. I didn't choose that my left hand

was my non-dominant. And that was just wired into me in the same way that some of my strengths, the particular strengths I have, I didn't choose those, you know, they're just kind of there. If you spend a lot of time working with your children on helping them to overcome their weakness, it's like always asking them to write with their non-dominant hand. They'll get better at it. Their writing will get more legible, but it's exhausting. It takes a lot more effort and they're never going to be, have beautiful crafted handwriting with their non-dominant hand. So invest in strength and look at what are the weaknesses that are limiting my ability to be effective? So, I mean, me personally, I have lots of weaknesses. Some of them I'm actively working on because they limit my ability

to be effective. Others don't. I'm not a very good cook, for example, and I'm pretty messy at home, but I don't think that limits my ability to be effective. I'm terrible at timekeeping. I'm the worst. You can ask all of my girlfriends. I'm always turning up late. And it used to limit my effectiveness, but now we have smartphones. So I have a meeting with someone, and my friends all know this. I'll meet them for lunch, and the first thing I'll do is put a little alarm on my phone so it calls me five minutes before I need to leave because I know I can't keep time myself.

So that's not a weakness that I'm choosing to actively work on because it's not limiting my effectiveness because now I have something like a smartphone to help me out with it. But then I have other weaknesses that are limiting my effectiveness, and so they're the ones that I work on. And so it's bringing this kind of wisdom into the process, and I think as parents, I mean, our first job is just to love our children, just to love them, you know, and be warm and be kind.

And then our second job is to help them grow and improve and develop so that they can grow into, you know, a fully formed, robust, resilient, good-hearted, productive adult. So then you have to ask yourself, okay, what, good-hearted, productive adult. So then you have to ask yourself, okay, what are the things in my child that I see, the weaknesses in my child that I see will limit their effectiveness? And they're the ones that we focus on working on. We don't have to fix everything in our children because there's a lot of stuff that we think,

oh, I have to make my child's room tidy and I have to get them organized or whatever it happens to be. But ultimately, you just step back and say, is this really going to be a limitation for them in their life? Because if I take away my energy in investing in fixing that weakness and I turn that to amplifying a strength, then they're going to grow up with these strengths that they can use to compensate for any limitations around weakness. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping.

And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday.

We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot? I mean, I wonder also if some of the perceived things that might limit effectiveness, we focus on both in ourselves and our kids, even though they're not the really, the things that generally move the needle, because there's some sort of social judgment around having that weakness and having it seen. And so part of the reason we focus on that is because we just want to belong more, even though in truth, that's not the thing that is going to make the biggest difference if

we can figure out how to resolve or get better at it. That is such an insightful thing to say. And I think that a lot of the work that I do with parents, and it's actually a big theme in my book, is that strength-based parenting is about helping your child to see and use their strengths effectively. But it starts with you as the parent. And part of that is knowing, okay, am I just doing this because of social pressure? Because I want my child to look a certain way? Because then that makes me feel like I'm being judged as I'm doing the right thing as a parent. We don't want them. We perceive that they'll be judged by their peers if they don't fit a certain mold. We perceive we're like, we don't want them, we perceive that they'll be judged by their peers if they don't fit a certain mold.

We perceive, we're like, we don't want them to feel that pain. Because we felt it as a kid. We assumed they're going to feel it too, but maybe they won't. Well, maybe they will, but if you also connect them up with their strengths, then they've got this. I think the two biggest outcomes of strength-based parenting are cultivating inner resilience in your children and cultivating optimism. And for me, I think that there's two such important outcomes for us to bear in mind as parents, because resilience is the ability to deal with, bounce back from, sometimes bounce forward from loss, adversity, challenge. And we need to instill

that in our children. And optimism is about the bounce forward. It's about instilling a sense of I'm hopeful for the future. I'm going to reach forward and create a good future. And so it may be that an example just pops up into my mind with my daughter, Emily, who's 10. And I mean, she's adorable. I love her, of course, because I'm her mum. And she's definitely her own unique girl. And she's a tomboy. And she's very sporty. And she made a decision this year to, and the school that my, in Australia, we have school uniforms. It's from the British system. I don't like it, but you know, that's just the way it is. Well, Emily's in fourth

grade and she made a decision this year to wear the so-called boys uniform. So she's the only girl actually in the whole of the elementary school who wears pants. All the other girls wear skirts. And she just said, it's because I play sporting games at lunchtime and I want to play on the monkey bars. And she made that decision and we were going to school and we had a parcel delivered in the morning. And so the courier, she answered the door and he didn't look, he just, she had her hair tied back and he just saw the pants. So he said, good morning, sir. How are you going? And we had a bit of a giggle at that afterwards and we're in the car. And I said to her, you know, some of the kids might tease you today at school and they might tell you you've got the boys' school uniform on.

And I said, you just tell them, no, I don't, I have the school uniform. And she said, Mum, I don't care if they tease me. It's like, oh, that's my stuff, not hers. Yeah, exactly. It's exactly my stuff. And I was so rapt that she was like, I just don't care because I'm comfortable and it's what I want to do. And I was fully preparing her for, here's your answer if they come back. And it was totally my stuff. Yeah. So I think that's part of

strength-based parenting is being more attuned to your own stuff and what you are projecting, the fears that you are projecting onto your children. And I think you're right. They do drive us to sometimes focus more on fixing the weakness because we don't want our child to be in pain or picked on or ostracized because of that weakness rather than just trusting the process of if I elevate strength, then I don't have to protect my child from this scenario because they've got this inner resource, this strength to be able to deal with that anyway. Yeah. I want to touch on something

because it's been on my mind a lot and I think it's on the public consciousness a lot, both as adults and how we're sort of dealing with the world as it is today and how kids are dealing with it and as parents, how we can help deal with it. And that is the idea of sort of generalized anxiety. Yeah. Not necessarily in relationship to a particular scenario or to a person, but to sort of the state of things in the world today and the like extreme state of blend of uncertainty and vitriol. And talk to me about this and how sort of more of a strengths-based approach to parenting can help. Yeah. It's such an important topic that you raise. And I want to say two things. The first is a bit of a disclaimer. Like I don't want to sit here and say strengths are the cure to everything,

but where I've seen strengths play, have a positive role in generalized anxiety is that when we're just walking around feeling constantly like in danger, under threat, and one of the sort of antidotes to that is a sense of internal stability and a sense of, okay, I can't control what's happening on the outside, but I've got this, I've got an anchor point. I've got confidence that I can navigate my way through. And that's what strengths do. So I see strengths as this like transportable psychological toolkit. It doesn't matter where you go, your strengths are always going to be with you. So when you are faced with these overwhelming feelings of anxiety, uncertainty, that to know that, okay, it's okay. I've got these kind of anchor points that I can go to. But I wouldn't say strengths in and of themselves are the full solution. And I'm a big

advocate of mindfulness. And I think that that's a really important part of bringing mindfulness into a strength-based approach. Because what mindfulness does is, well, it does lots and lots of different things, but one of the things it does for kids and for teenagers, you know, like at a bare minimum is to help them to have a little bit of a, just create that pause of, okay, my nervous system is over-regulated right now. I can feel tension in my throat. I'm thinking this. So be able to step back and explore with curiosity the thoughts and the feelings and the physiological reaction and just question, do I need to be this way in this moment? And so it helps with that sort of initial pause

response and re-regulating and calming down your nervous system. And then that's where strengths come in, I think. It's like, okay, so I've calmed myself down. What do I do next? We often use mindfulness as a tool to help us understand negative thinking patterns. But I think when you combine mindfulness with strengths, then you can do so much more with mindfulness. Because what I've done in working with a lot of kids in school is helping them to go into that mindful state when they are using their strengths. And what that does is it helps them to embody what it feels like to be strong, embody what it feels like to be using your strengths. So you're not just working

on teaching them about stress and negative thinking patterns. You're also saying, okay, in this moment, we're using a strength, let's be mindful. Let's tune into what am I thinking? What am I feeling? What am I hearing? And then it's like a place to return to. They know what it actually feels like. So my son, Nicholas, for example, he's a basketballer. And when he's shooting a basket and he's really in the zone, he says to me, mom, it's like telescope. It's like just this tunnel vision and it's almost like my arms are talking to the net. So he knows that feeling of that moment when he's in a moment of strength and then that helps him to return back to it.

So I think strengths help with anxiety at a kind of like a cognitive level, like a confidence level, like it doesn't matter where I am, I've got this transportable toolkit. But then when you combine the mindfulness piece, it also helps at that more embodied level yeah it gives you the meta-awareness to actually understand when you're in it and what does it feel like when you're in it exactly yeah yeah and it occurs that you know i think there's probably also a flip side which is that kakar said anxiety is a dizziness of freedom, that we try to eliminate every opportunity for any experience of suffering or pain or anxiety from our own lives and then as parents from our kids' lives too. But maybe elimination is not actually the goal.

Maybe a certain of that is actually a signal of investment, a signal that, you know, is completely natural. And the goal is, you know, it must be there if uncertainty is there and uncertainty must be there, possibility is there. So we don't want to actually eliminate it. We want to, more what you're saying, learn how to identify and maybe start to try and figure out, okay, what is a certain amount of generative healthy unease versus something that starts to lead to dysfunction? Yeah, totally agree. And, you know, as I said, the research program has shown that strength-based parenting is a protective factor.

And so it's not about being the helicopter parent or in Australia, we have this term, the lawnmower parent. Have you heard of that term? So, you know, you just visualize the parent with the lawnmower, the motor mower, like kind of mowing out this path in front of their child. So the child doesn't have to hack away at anything or, you know, stumble or fall. And that's not what strength-based parenting is about. It's not about protecting your children from suffering, from uncertainty. It's about instilling in them this internal toolkit. So when they face those things, they learn that they can cope so they're less afraid of them the next time around.

And as you said, this whole idea of post-traumatic growth, and even if you're not talking about trauma, if you're just talking about the opportunity that can come from uncertainty, is to just be comfortable to lean into that. But you can't ask a child to lean into certainty and fear if they have no internal anchor point. I mean, that's just, that's terrifying. But when they've got an internal anchor point, they know that they're not going to fly away or be knocked down. There's something kind of sitting so that they can see it within that uncertainty and process it and move

forward. And that's where I think strengths are really, really helpful. And I think strength-based parenting does two things of equal importance. And it gets back to the kind of resilience optimism stuff. I think one of the biggest gifts of strength-based parenting is not that you have to create a smooth path for your child. It's that you're teaching your child that they can be empowered in this process. They can learn and grow through it. And when life is going well, they can really use the multiplayer effect. They can really like amplify and gain and make the most out of life during life's purple patches. What I found in working with strength-based parenting is some people confuse it with sort

of positive parenting and just putting on this Pollyanna smile and avoiding anything negative in your life. And that's not what strength-based parenting is about. It's about embracing the duality of life, but the anchor point, the middle point is your strengths. And my own life has taught me that the suffering I've had, that's really defined who I am. That's made me who I am. So I would never be a person to say avoid darkness, avoid suffering, avoid uncertainty. But at the same time, you don't want to just throw your children

into that with no resources because that's when you end up getting the effects of trauma. So as we said here, it's called Good Life Project. If I offer out that phrase to you to live a good life, what comes up? For me, I think living a good life is feeling good, functioning well, and doing good for others. Thank you. My pleasure.

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or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. January 24th. Actual results will vary.