Dr. Becky Kennedy on Why Parenting Principles Work on Difficult Adults
Lenny's Podcast
Can a child psychologist teach anything useful about leadership? Host Lenny Rachitsky opened this episode half-joking that many adults at work behave like toddlers: they hoard resources, insist on getting their way, and need others to fix things for them. Dr. Becky Kennedy, clinical psychologist, author of Good Inside, and CEO of the parenting company of the same name, takes a more generous position. In Kennedy's view, families, workplaces, marriages, sibling relationships and extended families over the holidays are all systems, and "all humans need the same things. Whether we're one or five or 45 or 85." When those needs go unmet, people of any age express themselves in ineffective ways. Principles that explain behavior in one system can therefore be applied to another, and Kennedy describes that as an efficient way to learn: master one approach and use it at home and at work.
The conversation covered repair, connection, separating behavior from identity, generous interpretation, boundaries, "sturdy" leadership, resilience, and a phrase Kennedy considers central to handling anxiety in anyone: "I believe you, and I believe in you."
Repair matters more than perfection
Kennedy calls repair "the number one relationship strategy we have." She defines it as going back to someone after a moment you're not proud of, taking responsibility for your part, acknowledging the impact on them, and saying what you'll do differently next time. According to Kennedy, what stops people from repairing is the false belief that the goal is to be perfect. Her family has a saying that they now also use at work: "perfect is creepy." Only non-humans can be perfect. To be human is to want to do well and to fall short again and again.
The idea came from something Kennedy learned in clinical psychology graduate school. A professor explained that what distinguishes secure attachment, the kind of relationship a parent wants with a child, is the presence of repair. Kennedy remembers stopping short at this. Secure attachment did not mean getting it right all the time. It meant an adult who is willing to repair after the inevitable mistakes. That felt hopeful because it was something Kennedy could realistically get good at.
She gave parallel scripts for home and work. To a child: sorry I yelled, I had a stressful day at work, that wasn't your fault, and I'm working on staying calmer even when I'm upset. To a colleague: earlier in the meeting I cut you off and used a harsh tone; I did disagree with you, but that's no excuse for how I talked to you; things were going on before the meeting; I'm sorry and I'm working on it. In Kennedy's view, nothing restores trust and connection like repair. Once they are restored, children and coworkers cooperate better, and conversations stop running on defensively, so more gets done.
Connect before you correct
Rachitsky compared Kennedy's principle of "connecting before correcting" to Kim Scott's Radical Candor. Kennedy illustrated it with a scene from outside both parenting and work. Her three kids are finally asleep and she has sat down with a book for the two minutes before she passes out. Her husband walks in and says they have to do the taxes. When she protests, he tells her she has a listening problem and that he's taking away her dessert for a week if she doesn't cooperate. Nobody, Kennedy says, would conclude she has a listening problem. They'd say she has a husband problem. Yet adults do exactly this to kids, and people do it at work all the time.
Now suppose he says instead that he just realized he forgot to mention the taxes are due tonight, that he can see she's settling in with the book, and asks whether they can tackle it together as a team. Kennedy says the odds that she'll do the taxes "just skyrocketed." The reason is that he sees her as a full person in her own reality, not as an object in his world. By joining her world, he builds a bridge she can walk back across to work on his priority. For Kennedy, connection is therefore not a soft topic. It is what lets two people act in the same interest, and she calls it the foundation of cooperation at home and productivity at work.
When Rachitsky asked how to put this into practice, Kennedy said the first step is a mindset, and admitted that sounds annoying to people who want a script. Her reasoning is that "we feel people's intention, not just their intervention." If she chatted with Rachitsky about his life purely to get him to water her plants, he would sense the transaction and it would feel "dirty." Real connection means being present without an agenda, even for 30 seconds. She acknowledged this is hard for her too.
In practice, the moments are small. You put your hand on your child's back for longer than feels natural. You say "I'm happy to see you" and nothing else. You describe what your kid is doing ("you're making a tall tower") instead of peppering them with questions or taking over their play. At work, you ask about someone's long weekend without counting down the seconds until you can assign the week's tasks.
Kennedy was candid about her own struggle. She sees efficiency and relationship-building as often in opposition. Efficient people get rewarded for it at work, and they can develop a sense of moral superiority about it, wanting others to "get to the point" when the whole point for the other person is telling the story. Kennedy says her best time with her kids feels "so low stim" that she wonders whether she's doing it right, and she takes that feeling as a sign that she is. Rachitsky added that the most effective people he has worked with are the ones who really listen and never seem rushed.
Separating behavior from identity
Rachitsky asked whether the "good inside" principle, that kids are good inside regardless of their behavior, holds at work. Kennedy said it is useful there, but first addressed a common misunderstanding. Believing a child is good inside does not mean hitting is fine. Believing an employee is good inside does not mean late PRDs don't matter. The concept requires separating behavior from identity.
Kennedy argues that most personal and interpersonal difficulty comes from collapsing the two. People infer character from conduct: someone is often late to work, so they must be lazy. The good-inside framing starts from a different sentence: "This is a good person who is late," or "I have a good kid who's hitting." Kennedy uses her hands when she says this, one hand for identity and one for behavior, because physically separating them helps her mind keep them apart. She says that separation is, ironically, what makes it possible to change the behavior.
Her explanation of defensiveness follows from this. People get defensive because they believe someone is talking about their identity rather than their behavior. Once that happens, the conversation can't address the actual reason for the lateness. A hidden debate takes over about whether the person is good, moral and worthy. "The quickest way to have an unproductive conversation is to lose sight of the fact that someone's good inside."
She offered a script for the chronically late colleague. Start by saying you're on the same team. Kennedy said that if listeners take away only this, it is "the most amazing way to have a more productive conversation with anyone." Say that you know they're a good person, that they don't need to be told meetings must start on time, and that the consistent lateness tells you something is going on that you want to understand. Then ask directly whether it's something at work that makes them not want to come in, something at home, or time management, and propose figuring it out together.
Kennedy compared this to a good sports coach. No good coach tells a player who missed every layup "what's wrong with you." They say: you're a good player, something's off, let's get in the gym tomorrow. They might still bench the player for now, but the message is "I believe in you" and "we'll figure this out together." If a manager does not actually believe the person is capable, Kennedy said, that is a very different conversation and belongs in a different category.
The "most generous interpretation"
Kennedy says she has "an allergy to ideas that don't have action," so she wanted a concrete tool for the good-inside idea. She found it after hard days with her young children. Lying in bed at night, she noticed that the way she described her kid had made her stop liking him, even though she always loved him. Referencing Rachitsky's episode with Peter Deng about language shaping thought, Kennedy put it this way: "The story you tell yourself about your kid at night kind of becomes the parent you are the next morning." She suggested the same probably holds for leaders and their organizations.
She recognized she was defaulting to a "least generous interpretation." When her two-year-old laughed during discipline, her first thought was that he might be a sociopath. When she told him to stop jumping on the couch near a glass table and he jumped harder, the same thought came up. So she started asking herself for the most generous interpretation (MGI). There's no single right answer. In this case, it might be that her third child strongly needs to feel in control and doubles down when that feels threatened. She describes him as "0% people pleasing," so telling him "I'm disappointed in you" was never going to work.
Using MGI changed three things for Kennedy. She liked her kid again, which she says parents rarely talk about even though it is what keeps them up at night. She felt they were on the same team. And she came up with a whole new set of interventions.
At work, she imagined a colleague who keeps belaboring a point in meetings after everyone has moved on. The least generous reading is that they're being a baby or vain. A generous reading might be that they didn't feel heard the first time. That doesn't make it acceptable to go on forever. But it suggests a private conversation: in meetings, I wonder if you don't always feel heard, so you keep talking, the room gets annoyed and tunes you out, which probably makes you belabor your point more. We're in a bad cycle; can we work on it together? Kennedy says one conversation like that replaces endless complaining and no change, which she calls "horrible for culture and productivity."
She tied this to curiosity over judgment, which she considers mutually exclusive: you cannot be curious and judgmental about the same thing at once. She doesn't insist on her own phrasing. "Assume positive intent" or any other language that "hits your heart" works. She also suggests assuming the other person wants to work through the problem with you. A child who hits doesn't like feeling out of control, and a child lying to your face doesn't want to be lying. That doesn't excuse the behavior, but it softens you enough to see that you want the same outcome.
Bad behavior as feelings that overpower skills
Rachitsky pushed back. As a parent, it doesn't feel like his son doesn't want to throw things or resist getting in the car. Kennedy answered with some professional history. She was originally trained in rewards, punishments, timeouts and sticker charts, and says she loved it because her "very healthy left brain" likes logic and linearity: punish the bad, reward the good. She taught that to parents in private practice because it felt clean. But it contradicted everything she saw helping the adults in her practice change their lives. She could not believe that what helps a 35-year-old rewire their brain would be the opposite of what a two- or five-year-old needs to become resilient and confident. She said that contradiction is what led her to start Good Inside.
She also questions the phrase "you're making a bad choice." She does not believe a four-year-old deliberates about whether to throw something at a sibling, and she notes that adults who act out aren't in a decision-making state either. They escalate. Her core insight is that kids are born with all the feelings and none of the skills to manage them, so "bad behavior at any age can basically be reduced to feelings that overpower skills." The behavior is a real problem, but it's a symptom. The underlying problem is a missing skill for managing something internal, such as anger that a sibling has a toy or jealousy they can't handle. If the skill were there and accessible, the behavior would change as a result.
Seeing it this way turns a parent into a coach. Kennedy's analogy: nobody would punish a child into learning to swim, or send them to their room to come back once they can swim. Managing emotions, she argues, is an even more important life skill, and "nobody learns new skills by being sent to their room. Nobody learns new skills by adding shame." Shame widens the gap between feelings and skills. The right approach is to set boundaries around out-of-control behavior and then teach the missing skills. According to Kennedy, that changes behavior in the short term and "massively" in the long term.
What potty learning reveals about control
Rachitsky mentioned he was starting "potty learning" with his son through an online course that avoids the word "training" for this same reason. Kennedy pointed out that Good Inside offers a free potty course. She says she wanted it free because potty learning is one of the earliest lessons in body autonomy and skills, and parents most often go wrong by taking over the process.
Asked what the workplace parallel is, Kennedy said young children control only two things: what goes into their body and what comes out. That's why those areas get so heated. When a child, especially one who isn't a people pleaser, senses a parent stepping into one of their only two domains, they'll do "nutty things" to push back. She asked listeners to imagine the first ten minutes of a child's day: woken up, told the weather, told they can't wear that, told what's for breakfast, told their shirt is on backwards. If her husband woke her that way, she says, she'd spend the day grabbing control wherever she could.
Kennedy describes a temperament she calls "resilient rebels": kids who look strong-willed and defiant, whose core fear is loss of control, and who resist the moment they sense someone stepping into their domain. Adults can be like this too, and they can be hard to collaborate with. If asking to move a meeting gets a reaction as if "I took a knife to their heart," she suggests looking one level deeper. She was clear this example was hypothetical: maybe someone was promoted over them, their manager just changed, or their vacation was denied, and control and independence are the real issues.
Rachitsky proposed clarifying ownership: what someone drives and where the manager will be involved. Kennedy agreed and added a practice she values: naming your intention. For example: I want to go through this project in detail because I want to get ahead of some things, and I think that will help you do the most independent work. When you state your intention clearly, people tend to read your behavior through it. That matters most with people prone to feeling controlled. They both noted this is part of why people dislike micromanagement.
The sturdy leader and the three pilots
Kennedy says Good Inside's core purpose is to help parents become "sturdy leaders" so they can raise sturdy, confident kids. She likes the word because it evokes an image, and most people can immediately picture the sturdy person in their life.
She explains it with a turbulent flight. Everyone is screaming, and the pilot makes one of three announcements. In the first, the pilot says to stop freaking out because you're ruining the flight and making a big deal out of nothing. That doesn't calm anyone. Passengers worry the pilot hasn't noticed the turbulence and are unsettled that screaming makes the pilot lose it. At work, this is the leader who tells people to stop complaining.
In the second, the pilot opens the cockpit door and asks if anyone else wants to fly because the screaming is making them anxious. Kennedy calls this a massive overcorrection she has seen in parenting, where a child's feelings dictate the parent's decisions, and she stressed this is not what Good Inside teaches. Passengers are now afraid of the pilot, not the turbulence. At work, it's a leader who responds to complaints by turning a leadership decision into a consensus vote. Kennedy says some decisions are properly made by consensus, but others belong to the person with information no one else has.
In the third, the pilot says: I hear you screaming, it makes sense, you haven't flown as much as I have, and yes, it's very bumpy. I know what I'm doing, and this turbulence doesn't scare me. I'm going back to fly the plane and I'll see you in Los Angeles. The turbulence is the same, but passengers can breathe because their worry is contained. Kennedy names two parts of sturdiness: seeing someone else's experience as real for them, and holding onto your own experience so you aren't overwhelmed by theirs.
At home, that sounds like: I'm turning off the TV, that's my decision, I get that you're upset, I don't love ending TV time either, we'll get through it. Then you wait out the reaction before moving on to brushing teeth. At work, announcing an unpopular policy change (her invented examples were vacation days or days in the office) sounds like: I know some people will have a reaction; this is a big change and you're right that it makes things harder; your feelings make sense; here's why we're doing it; I have faith in us to weather this turbulence.
Boundaries are what you do, not what you ask for
Kennedy says a sturdy leader has two jobs. The first is setting boundaries, meaning decisions and limits that come from a position of authority, usually in service of a long-term goal others can't see or, in a toddler's case, can't hold onto. The second is validating the other person's experience without being taken over by it. She believes parenting has drifted too far toward validation, and says so explicitly: "validating kids' feelings is an incomplete parenting approach." It's half the job, and it fails without the other half. Boundaries are the skill she feels best about teaching because she thinks it's what people most often lack.
Her definition is meant to be immediately testable: "Boundaries are what you tell someone else you will do. And it requires the other person to do nothing." When people say their child or colleague doesn't respect their boundaries, Kennedy usually thinks they're actually making requests. Requests are fine, but calling a request a boundary hands your power to the other person because success depends on them. She tells parents, "I would bet on you any day over your kid."
Her example comes from her New York City apartment building. Her non-people-pleasing son would press every elevator button if allowed. "Please don't press all the buttons, other people are waiting" is a request: it doesn't say what she will do, and it depends on the child. The boundary is: "I'm going to stand between you and the buttons, sweetie, because I'm not going to let you press them." If he lunges anyway, she blocks him, and if he's upset, she can do the other half of the job, either saying "I know you wish you could press those buttons" or just looking at him kindly, while holding the boundary. The common alternative is threatening "no dessert," getting frustrated, and then serving sorbet at night on the grounds that fruit doesn't count. Kennedy says all of that undermines authority and comes from not setting a boundary in the first place. She calls asking a child to do the parent's job to avoid emotional fallout "job confusion."
Rachitsky asked about his own situation: a child who won't get into the car. Kennedy suggested trying a game or song first, then being clear about intention. She carries the child not to punish, but because otherwise she'll run late, get frustrated, and yell. She suggested something like: it looks hard for you to get to the car; I'm going to turn around and take a deep breath, and if you're still here when I turn back, I'll carry you, even if you're crying and kicking; I know leaving the house is hard sometimes, but we have to go.
She warned against expecting a reward for good parenting in the form of a child who suddenly announces they're ready. That may happen in some homes, but it won't happen reliably until boundaries have been set many times. Children aren't exploiting you. They're learning the rules. Two of her three children would scream and cry at that point. She returned to the pilot: if a pilot announced an emergency landing and then called it off because passengers were upset, everyone would be horrified. Even people complaining in Kansas would be grateful underneath. So when a new boundary produces a tantrum, Kennedy recommends reading it as evidence the boundary is working. She tells herself, "this is going according to plan."
Why people want a leader they can "locate"
Rachitsky asked whether people, both kids and employees, fundamentally want to be led instead of polled. Kennedy said both things are true. Consensus has its place, but leaders hold positions because of their experience, judgment and access to information others lack. She thinks parenting has overcorrected toward consensus and said she would need more data to know whether workplaces have too. She believes people respond well to something like: I've taken in everything you said, your voices matter, here's the decision I've made with all the information I have, it may not make sense to everyone now, come talk to me separately, and I have conviction that this is our next experiment.
She describes herself as drawn to people she can "locate," people whose feelings and point of view are clear. She prefers that even when she strongly disagrees, rather than being around people who mirror her. As someone with many strong ideas, she says she has learned she needs people who push back. At work, a leader who can be located and can say "this might not be what you want, but I believe it's the best decision" is, in her words, "very, very holding," though not in every situation.
A teenager's betrayal
Kennedy told a story from private practice that shaped this thinking. In a first session, a teenager showed Kennedy her arms and said she had been cutting for two years. Kennedy asked why this was her first therapist. The girl explained, snarkily, that her parents had tried to send her two years earlier, but she told them, "So you think I'm the messed up one in the family," and said she'd just lie the whole time and waste their money.
Kennedy says her heart still races remembering it. Something told her to stay quiet. After ten or fifteen seconds, the girl looked down, then up, and said: "Can you believe they let me make that decision?" Kennedy says the girl felt betrayed and uncared for. Kennedy took two lessons from it. At our worst moments, "we speak our fears, not our wishes." And at our worst moments, we are not in a good position to make decisions for ourselves. People don't want to be punished, but sometimes taking a decision out of someone's hands is an act of love.
She now gives parents of teens who refuse therapy a script along these lines: I'm going to drive you to therapy every Thursday; whatever you do in the room, lie or stay silent, is not on me; my job is to make decisions that are good for you even when you're unhappy, and this is one of those times. Kennedy reports that every parent who has told her they did this said their child, on some level, needed it. At work, she compares it to turbulent periods when people are anxious and waiting for someone to say: I've heard everything, here's what we're doing. She added that a leader can even admit they aren't completely certain, commit anyway, and plan to reassess in a month.
Rachitsky suggested that people will take whatever they can get away with. Kennedy responded with a more generous reading, using the Broadway play Punch. As she described it, the play is based on a true story of a man whose punch in a bar killed someone, and who later got to know the victim's parents after serving his sentence. When they asked what he would do with his life now, he said no one had ever asked him that or believed he could do anything useful. Kennedy thinks that when kids or adults seem to be "getting away with" things, they may really be asking whether there is an adult in the room who will help. In her view, kids act out more not to take advantage but because they feel more dysregulated when no adult will "put a container on their shell-less egg."
Resilience over happiness
"Resilience over happiness" is a chapter in Kennedy's book and a guiding principle of her approach. She admits she used to spoil small talk when people said "don't you just want your kid to be happy?" by answering no. She doesn't want her kids unhappy, but she argues that "optimizing for happiness in childhood is the quickest way to build anxiety and fragility in adulthood."
Her reasoning is that childhood is when kids learn what range of experiences they can cope with and in how many situations they can find their capability. What crowds out happiness in adulthood, she says, is the inability to manage disappointment, jealousy, anger and feeling less than. Happiness comes from being able to handle the widest range of difficult experiences, which is her definition of resilience. When a child says "I'm the only one in my class who can't read" and a parent jumps in with "that's not true" or "but you're so good at soccer," the parent is signaling they can't tolerate the child's upset. "Our kids can only learn to tolerate the feelings we tolerate in them." A child whose upset isn't tolerated concludes the feeling is unmanageable. As an adult, anything short of comfortable, happy and perfect then feels even worse. Between "no big deal" and "let me call the school to fix this," Kennedy says, there's a wide space where parents can help kids see they can cope.
Rachitsky connected this to a Kim Scott story. A manager withheld feedback from a struggling employee to avoid hurting their feelings, then fired them nine months later, and the employee asked why nobody had said anything. Kennedy offered a building metaphor. The first months of a working relationship are its foundation, and optimizing for comfort makes the building fragile. At six months, critical feedback hits someone who assumed the relationship was "butterflies and rainbows." She doesn't recommend listing faults on day one, but a resilient culture needs people who say "this is hard and I can do hard things," not "this is hard, so someone must be at fault and it should be easier."
"I believe you, and I believe in you"
Kennedy's formula for anxiety and struggle at any age combines two messages, and she argues the second is often missing. The "I believe you" half validates: this is a hard project, you've never done anything like it, it makes sense you're nervous. She recommends "it makes sense" as a phrase, along with one she uses with her kids: "I'd be nervous if you weren't nervous." The "I believe in you" half conveys confidence: we gave you this because we know you can figure it out, I'm here for questions, and I don't want to take the project away from you because that would take away the pride you'll feel at the end.
She described a day when one of her young sons was whining for her to finish a puzzle. Doing it would have ended the tantrum, but she had some extra bandwidth that day. She told him it was a hard puzzle, frustration made sense, and he could take a break. Then she explained why she wouldn't do it for him: there's no better feeling than watching yourself make progress on something you didn't think you could do, "and I will not take that feeling away from you." She said saying it felt healing for her as well. Parents and leaders, she said, should notice how often they take feelings of capability away from others.
Rachitsky said he had used "I believe you" with his wife, who asked him afterward what he had just done because it felt so good. Kennedy offered an image. Someone struggling is in a hole, not an abyss, and struggling because they can't see the way out. As a relational species, what we need is someone with one foot in the hole with us, which is "I believe you," and one foot out, which is "I believe in you," seeing a more capable version of us than we can see at that moment. Her example was a kid attending the first soccer practice after losing their starting spot. It'll be embarrassing and not fun, they'll hate watching from the sideline, and they'll come home having survived. She'll be there with a hug, maybe prouder of that than of a goal, because that's what helps in life.
She suggests people ask which half comes more easily to them, with no moral judgment attached. Someone who says "come on, it's no big deal, you can do it" leads with belief in; someone who climbs into the hole with others leads with belief. Knowing which you default to shows you what to practice.
Building Good Inside
Kennedy posted her first Instagram post on February 28, 2020, about two weeks before New York City shut down. She says she had no business plan and no premonition about COVID. She felt compelled by ideas that differed so much from what had been handed down as truth that posting felt "more like relief than intentional goal setting." After the shutdown, the account grew quickly. She began live workshops because she had more to say than a carousel post allowed, and she says the community that formed matters more than any of her individual ideas.
Community members suggested the "parent school" concept, pointing out they had spent more on gardening, cooking or Greek history than on learning to parent. Kennedy believes parenting is the last area where society glorifies instinct alone. She calls the "maternal instinct" framing a way to "gaslight parents," acknowledging this may be a little controversial. Instinct, she says, is just everything learned so far, which in parenting mostly means how you were parented. Left to instinct, she says, her response to a tantrum or a lie "is not going to be pretty." She describes podcast and social media tips as "flags" that need "ground," meaning a framework, or else parenting becomes whack-a-mole in a way people would never accept at work or even in tennis.
She describes the app as a personalized tool meant to narrow the gap between how parents want to show up and how they actually do. Parents describe their situation and receive short pieces, around five minutes, that combine understanding with an action. Core themes include boundaries, staying connected without exhausting yourself, communication with a partner, repair, and understanding why your nervous system gets activated. There's also an AI chatbot, which Rachitsky identified as "Gigi," that can spot common themes across incidents. Kennedy says she does two or three live events a month, and trained coaches run support sessions based on a manualized Good Inside approach, including unlimited monthly sessions for parents of deeply feeling kids. Kennedy said the company has 65 people, is profitable, and raised money a couple of years ago because of a large vision. She described it as a potential "Disney type ecosystem" built on IP, story and connection, with plans for 2026 and 2027.
Her second children's book, Leave Me Alone!: A Good Inside Story About Deeply Feeling Kids, is due in February 2026 and is available for pre-order. Kennedy calls these kids her "passion project within the passion project" and "the most misunderstood kids in the world," often labeled dramatic or oppositional, with parents sometimes told the problem is inconsistent punishment. Where resilient rebels fear loss of control, deeply feeling kids fear being too much. They push away the people they care about most at exactly the moments they need them, which confirms the fear. "Leave me alone," screamed from a bedroom, is their deepest fear rather than their wish, which is where the title comes from. She says adults sometimes recognize a partner or coworker in the description.
Using AI to make ideas visible
In the AI segment, Kennedy tied her tool use back to her "allergy" to ideas without action. People tell her they value how she turns deep understanding into something absurdly practical to say or do, and she says that is simply how she thinks, including as CEO. When she has an idea for, say, a new onboarding flow, she wants to see it fully realized. She has been using Figma Make to "vomit" ideas into UX designs or complete email flows. Her team sometimes wishes she had just described the idea before building it out, and she tells them they can throw the whole thing out because she isn't attached. She also mentioned trying Replit and Lovable, and using Claude and ChatGPT.
She believes people get the most from prompting by dumping out all their thoughts and refining afterward. She suggested that many people, especially women, are conditioned to present ideas only once they are neatly organized. She brings team members into the room to watch how she works through problems with ChatGPT so they can learn that approach.
Bringing a learner's mindset home
Asked for a final point, Kennedy addressed Rachitsky's audience directly, describing them as "forever learners" who would never say "it is the way it is" at work, but who often forget that mindset with their kids. If you yelled at your child, you didn't damage them forever. You may just not know how to repair, and if your own parents never repaired with you, you may be "the first person in my whole lineage to give a true apology to my three-year-old." Of course that feels awkward. She argues that treating parenting as a set of skills rather than an instinct is hopeful, because it's the same kind of learning people already do at work.
She ended with a concrete practice: a parental 360 review. She asks her kids, "If I could do one thing different this week to be a better parent to you, what would it be?" Sometimes the answer hurts, like "you could not be on your phone as much," and the job is simply to receive it. Sometimes it's "let me watch more TV." Kennedy says even that is a window into the child's world, and a parent can listen like the pilot who doesn't open the cockpit door: I'm so glad you told me, that's not something I'll budge on, but maybe we can do this instead. She notes that most employees would feel better about a manager just for being asked the question, and she says her kids' behavior tends to be better for the rest of the week after she asks.
In the lightning round, Kennedy recommended The Power of Moments, The Messy Middle and Creativity, Inc.; the Netflix shows Secrets We Keep and KPop Demon Hunters, which she says opens up deep conversations with kids; and Liberty wooden jigsaw puzzles, which force her to monotask and give her and her husband something to do together in the evening. Her life motto: "This feels hard because it is hard, not because I'm doing something wrong." What surprised her most about building a company, she said, was something she now thinks should have been obvious: "a company is just people." She can't do financial modeling or data analytics, but the skill of trying to understand people, carried over from her therapy practice, has turned out to be one of her most useful leadership skills.
Most adults in the corporate environment are really just babies in disguise.
All humans need the same things. Whether we're one or five or 45 or 85. When you look at bad behavior, the actual problem is someone doesn't have the skill they need to manage something happening internally.
Love your advice. It works not just for kids, it works for adults.
Our whole parenting philosophy is resilience over happiness. When we're thinking about a resilient work culture, we want people who can say this is hard and I can do hard things.
You teach that kids are good inside no matter their behavior. Is that useful in work?
The idea of being good inside inherently requires us to separate behavior and identity. We infer a lot from people's behavior. Someone's late to work a lot. Oh, that person's lazy. The quickest way to have an unproductive conversation is to lose sight of the fact that someone's good inside.
I definitely wanted to ask you about this idea of boundaries.
Boundaries are what you tell someone else you will do. And it requires the other person to do nothing. Making a request, it's not a boundary.
Is there a corollary to adult work environments in potty learning?
Today, my guest is Dr. Becky Kennedy, a clinical psychologist, author, and CEO of one of the most popular parenting books, podcasts, communities, and apps called Good Inside. Why would I have a parenting expert on this podcast? Because if you think about it, many of the people that we work with in the workplace act a lot more like babies than adults. And I'm half joking, but I'm half not. Think about co-workers that got really mad when they had to share their stuff, that always need to be the center of attention, that get really upset about not getting their way, that need other people to fix things for them. These are just a few examples, and there is a lot that we can learn about how to effectively deal with people at work from a parenting expert like Dr. Becky.
I have never heard a conversation like this anywhere that bridges the gap between parenting advice and leadership advice, and you will leave this conversation both a better leader and a better parent. We talk about the power of repair, the importance of building long-term resilience versus short-term happiness, why your goal as a leader is to become sturdy, the power of curiosity over judgment, a framework Dr. Becky calls the most generous interpretation, also a ton of really specific phrases that work really well with kids and adults who you're having a hard time with, and so much more. I am so honored to have Dr. Becky on this podcast and I hope you have as much fun listening to this conversation as I had recording it.
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Dr. Becky, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.
I am truly very excited to be here. I am an avid listener of your podcast and all of your content. So, I'm honored to be here.
I could say exactly the same thing. I'm even more excited. First of all, just what is Dr. Becky doing on this podcast? Let's help people understand what's going on here. I have an explanation, but I would ask you first actually. What's the idea here?
I think Good Inside, which is kind of I guess the company and, you know, the method around all the things I've thought about, is known for helping parents with parenting struggles and different things that are going on with their kids at various ages. But at the end of the day, it's a set of core principles that help us better understand human beings, our self, the core relationships we're in, why we do the things we do, and why we act the way we do in certain systems. And the system I tend to focus on the most is the family system. But the workplace is another system. A marriage is a system. Sibling relationships are a system. Extended family over the holidays, that's a system. And once you start to think through a lens of understanding how we operate in the system, any good principle can then be applied to any system. And I'm very oriented around efficiency also. So to me, what Good Inside really gives people is a way to think about themselves and a way to think about leadership. And whether we're talking about leadership in parenting or leadership in the workplace, it's actually the exact same principles that can be applied. And the good news for that is whether you're a parent, you're a leader at work, you're both, learning one system and applying it to multiple areas becomes a very efficient way to think about showing up in our relationships in a way that feels better to everyone.
Awesome. Okay. I love that explanation. I have another lens that's maybe funny. Maybe it's real. So I have a former podcast guest, Shreyas Doshi. He's one of my favorite product thinkers. He's been on the podcast a couple times. He's got this rant that most adults in the corporate environment are really just babies in disguise. They look like adults. They act like adults, but they're really babies. For example, they want to always be the center of attention. They don't want to share stuff they've accumulated. They want to keep their resources, their budget, their people. They get irrationally upset about things not going their way. Even when it's just like a terrible idea, they are just like, "Nah, that was my idea. I wanted to get this thing to happen." There's also just like power struggles and "no, no, I want this to happen because it's what I want." And they often just need people to fix things for them. For example, today my toddler, he just like grabbed this Yoto player that we have and he threw it across the room. He's like, "Pick it up." So with that, I think understanding how babies think and toddlers think and operate is helpful in the corporate environment where we think we're working with adults, but a lot of times they're more like babies. How does that resonate?
I guess my, you know, my most generous interpretation of what you just said is slightly different but similar, which is that all humans need the same things. Whether we're one or five or 45 or 85, we tend to need the same things. When the needs are not being met, we all tend to express ourselves in kind of ineffective, less than ideal ways. And so maybe that's my interpretation of agreeing with what you're saying.
Awesome. Okay. So, let's get into the first topic lesson. Let's talk about the power of repair. One of your more important and impactful lessons that you teach parents, explain the toddler kids version of this and how this is useful in raising kids and then just how this might translate into a corporate environment.
Yeah, I think repair is kind of the number one relationship strategy we have. And the thing that keeps us from repairing, which really is the idea of going back to a person after a moment we didn't feel proud of, taking responsibility for our part, maybe acknowledging the impact it had on them, and talking about what you would do differently the next time, is actually this very false idea that there's a goal to be perfect. Right? In our family, we say something, we actually now say it at work: perfect is creepy. I just think it encapsulates, like, you don't even want to be perfect. It's actually very creepy. Only nonhumans, you know, can ever be perfect. And what defines kind of the human condition is that we want to do well when we mess up over and over again.
And one of the things I remember learning in clinical psych grad school was that the thing that really differentiated secure attachment, which is the nature of a relationship you really want to have with your kid, is the presence of repair. And I remember the professor continuing to talk and I was kind of stopped in my tracks thinking, what? Oh, so secure attachment isn't defined by getting it right all the time. Secure attachment is just defined by we're all going to mess up, but secure attachment has an adult who's willing to repair. That felt very hopeful to me because it felt like something I could realistically get good at.
And over and over, whether it's with your kid, when you say to them, hey, sorry I yelled. You know, some version of I had a stressful day at work. That wasn't your fault, and I'm working on staying calmer even when I'm upset. Or we say to someone, I don't know, on our team, hey, earlier in the meeting, I totally cut you off. I used a really harsh tone. Honestly, I did disagree with what you were saying, but that's no excuse for me to talk to you the way I did. Stuff was going on before the meeting. I'm sorry. I'm going to work on that. There's just nothing to reestablish trust and connection like repair. And when trust and connection are reestablished, then whether it's your kid or someone at work, they cooperate better. You don't get into conversations that are kind of run-on conversations that are really an act of defensiveness, and you can just get a lot more done.
There's kind of an associated concept you talk about, which is around connecting before correcting, which reminds me of Radical Candor a little bit, of just this idea of challenge directly but care deeply. Talk a bit about this concept of connecting before correcting.
Yeah. Well, let's take it out of parenting and work, because I think it really shows the importance of connecting in all of our lives. So, all of us say about our kids, oh, my kid doesn't listen. My kid doesn't listen to me, right? But if you picture me on the couch, and let's say, I have three kids, they're all sleeping now. And I'm finally settling in for like the two minutes I have before I pass out, you know, cuz I'm tired. And let's say my husband comes out and just says, "Becky, we have to do our taxes." And you're watching the scene and you see me say, "Whoa, I just sat down to read a book." And he goes, "You don't listen to me. You have a listening problem. And if you don't do the taxes with me right now, I'm taking away your dessert for a week." Okay, Lenny, I'm pretty sure no one would tell me I have a listening problem. They'd probably say I have a husband problem if that happened, right? They'd be like, "Wow, you're..." But we do that to our kids and we do that at work all the time.
Now, let's say the same situation happened and he said, "Whoa, I realize I didn't tell you this. We have to get our taxes done tonight. You look like you're just settling in to that book. Can we get on top of this together? I know we're on the same team. Can we figure this out?" The chances that I will do taxes just skyrocketed, right? Why? Because he sees me in my reality as a full human being, not just as an object in his world to get something done. He kind of joins my world where I'm embedded in my own priorities. And by doing that forms a bridge. That's what connection is. So I can kind of walk back over to his world with him to do something that's a priority in his world.
So connection, first of all, just feels good anyway, but it's not such a kind of soft topic. Connection is what forms a bridge between two people so they can act together in the same interest. And so whether you're thinking about your kid not listening or you're thinking about things at work, coming back to connection is really the foundation for both cooperation and, at work, you know, productivity.
I love the way you phrased it at the beginning. The way you just said it, I'm like, "Oh, wow. I get why someone would start to listen." To help people actually do this in their day-to-day, what's the way to approach the way you phrase, like, beginning that connection conversation?
The truth is the first step is a mindset. And I know that sounds annoying because it's like, just tell me what to do. And anyone who knows me knows I love telling people script ideas, but we feel people's intention, not just their intervention. So the same intervention will be felt completely different based on our mindset. So if I'm going into a conversation with you, Lenny, and let's say, I don't know, I want you to do something for me. I'd like you to come water my non-existent plants, okay? And I'm like, I'm going to connect to Lenny first and say, "Oh, how's it going? Tell me this thing about your life." And you just know that is in and of itself a transaction to get you to do the thing I want you to do. Not only is it not going to quote work, it's going to feel dirty to you. You're going to feel it and it's going to feel off.
So, the mindset we need to be in, which is so hard, and I talk a good game, but it's hard for me, too, okay? Is trying to get into a kind of without-an-agenda mindset, even if it's for 30 seconds with someone. Being present with someone without an agenda is increasingly hard to do. But that is what connection is about. No one wants something of me. They just kind of see me, or they're recognizing something I'm doing, or they kind of plop down on the couch next to me.
And so, what could that look like with your kid? It's often very, very simple things, okay? And it's going to feel really small, especially for anyone who works a lot, where we get so addicted to accomplishing and dopamine. It's sitting next to your kid and putting your hand on their back literally for longer than feels natural. It's saying to your kid, "I'm happy to see you." And that's it. Such a nice thing to say when your kid comes home from school or you come home from work or first thing in the morning. It's watching your kid play and describing what they're doing instead of
peppering them with questions. Oh, you're making a tall tower versus, "Oh my goodness, is that a fire station? Oh my goodness, we can make the best fire station in the world." And I hear myself say that because I can say that, but it's not connection. Actually, at work, it's probably saying, "Hey, tell me a little about your long weekend." And not kind of counting down the seconds for them to finish so you can tell them what to start on this week, but kind of giving yourself permission to say, "Can I actually just kind of drop down into that moment?" Right? And so I think it's the mindset and then it's actually something that doesn't have an agenda that's just about seeing someone, noticing someone in a really, really small way.
I love this idea of just the mindset. That's such a powerful reframe of this, like don't think about what are the correct words to say. It's just actually just feel, okay, I just want to connect with you first for 30 seconds.
Yeah. And I want to reveal something about myself. Right. So, one of the things I think about is that efficiency and relationship building are often in opposition. We're doing one or the other. And one of the things I've learned the very, very hard way about myself, especially since I've been working the way I've been working the last couple of years, is my efficiency is kind of reinforced at work, right?
And a lot of us who can be very efficient and get things done, we can have a little morality about it. Like we listen to someone's story, we're like, "Come on, get to the point." When that person in our life is like, the whole point is that I want to tell you the whole story, you know? And I think if anyone's listening thinking, yeah, I'm kind of an efficiency-oriented person, dropping into relationship mode takes real intention. And it's hard, especially if in a big part of your life the efficiency is reinforced. So if it feels awkward and slow... I always call it with my kids, my best time just feels low stim. It just feels so low stim. I'm like, is this right? Am I doing this right? That's probably a sign I am, because not much is happening and I'm not being efficient with my time. I'm just in kind of relationship building mode.
What I think about as you're talking about this is the best people I've worked with that are most effective at work are the people that are really good at this, that you feel really listen, really care, just aren't rushed. And so I could totally see the power here.
Yeah.
So one of the core principles you teach, the name of your book and the name of your product and community and everything you built, is Good Inside. I'm curious if that's a useful lens in the work environment, too. You know, you teach kids are good inside no matter their behavior. They may be having a hard time, but they're still good inside. Is that useful in work at all? Are people always still good inside? I imagine not always.
I think it's a very useful framework and I'll say why, but I want to separate things that we often confuse. No part of me, if my kid, when they were younger, was hitting, would be like, "My kid is good inside, so who cares that they hit?" Or this employee is good inside, so it doesn't matter that they're not getting their PRDs in on time, whatever it is. No. And I think that's actually the other thing that's core to Good Inside, is the idea of being good inside requires us to separate behavior and identity.
Most difficult times we have personally or interpersonally come because we've collapsed behavior and identity. And it's easy to do because we infer a lot from people's behavior, or from our own, right? So someone's late to work a lot. Oh, that person's lazy, right? Seeing that person as good inside starts with this sentence: this is a good person who is late, right? Or I have a good kid who's hitting. And I do this thing with my hands because it actually helps my brain and body see the difference. One hand is identity, the other hand is behavior. And literally just separating them forces you to distinguish who someone is good inside from their behavior. And ironically, that's what allows you to effectively change and improve their behavior.
Because we all know what it's like to feel defensive. Do you know why we're defensive? Because we think someone else, instead of talking about our behavior, is talking about our identity. And then we can't even talk about our behavior anymore and being late, because we feel like they're accusing us of being a bad person or being lazy or not caring about the other people in the meeting. Now we can't even talk about the reason for my lateness because my whole identity feels wrapped up in it. So the quickest way to have an unproductive conversation is to lose sight of the fact that someone's good inside.
If I'm talking about someone at work, let's say again, who's always late, here's a quote Good Inside-infused conversation. And I would start by saying, first of all, I want to say we're on the same team. If that's the only thing people take from this, that is the most amazing way to have a more productive conversation with anyone. I want to say we're on the same team. I know you're a good person. You probably don't need me to tell you that we need to start meetings on time. We both know that. It's also been happening consistently, which lets me know something is going on that I want to get to the bottom of with you, because we need you to be there at 9:00 a.m. to start this important leadership meeting. So, tell me what's been going on. Is it something at work that feels bad that makes you not want to come in? Is there something going on at home? Is this, I don't know, a hard time managing your time? Whatever it is, let's get to the bottom of it together so we can figure it out.
So, that to me is that lens. And honestly, Lenny, it's the same thing we do in, I don't know, a good sports coach. I don't know someone who's a good, even professional, sports coach who's like, "You missed all the layups today. What's wrong with you? And here's what I'm taking away." It's like, whoa, you're a good player. Something's going on. Let's get in the gym tomorrow. Let's figure it out. I believe in you. I am putting you on the bench now because it's not really working out, but we're going to get to the bottom of this together. That comes from seeing the good inside someone.
Just hearing you say these things, I could always see exactly why this works. So a takeaway here is just kind of start with admitting to them and showing them, you know, they are smart. They know what is the right thing to do. They just maybe aren't doing it.
Yeah. And because now we can take that off the table. And if someone's thinking, "But I don't think that of the person," then that's actually just a very different conversation. We put that in a different category. But if you start talking about someone's behavior right away, and they think, which we all tend to think, you're actually saying, "I'm not a smart person," you're not even talking about the behavior anymore. Now, the language seems like it's talking about the behavior, but all you're doing is having a debate you don't even realize you're having, which is whether they're a good, moral, worthy person. That's just not an effective work conversation.
So, just kind of laying out that, you know, they are good, they are smart, they know the right thing to do, but here's something that isn't going the way that it should.
Yeah.
This connects to something else that you teach, which is the MGI, the most generous interpretation. Talk about that and how that might relate to work.
Yeah, I've realized I have an allergy to ideas that don't have action. I've realized this actually at work, and just with psychology too. So this whole idea, people are good inside, how can you separate behavior from identity as a framework to then go into a conversation, all of it just feels too theoretical for me. And so I like to think, what is one tool I can use to action on that idea?
And it started, I think, through parenting, when I'd finish a day with my kids. I was going to bed when my kids were younger, I was like, "Wow, that day was just a disaster." And then I would hear myself start talking about my kid in a way where I always loved my kid, but I didn't realize till later, even through the language, I stopped liking my kid.
I was just listening to your Peter Deng episode, which was a lot about language, right? And how language then impacts thoughts. And I think a lot as a parent, but it's true as a leader: the story you tell yourself about your kid at night kind of becomes the parent you are the next morning. Probably the same is true: the story you tell yourself about your organization at night becomes the leader you are the next morning.
And I realized I was using what I later called this least generous interpretation. I think we all do that naturally. At least I do. Like I see my kid not listening and laughing if I'm trying to discipline, and my first thought is like, I think my kid's a sociopath. I don't know how I get there, my kid's 2 years old, but it happens so fast.
Okay? And I realized at night the only way to shift this and get into a Good Inside mindset was just to say to myself, what's the most generous interpretation of why, when I would say to my kid some version of, "Stop jumping on the couch. It's dangerous. You're near the glass table," he'd look at me and jump doubly hard on the couch. My least generous interpretation was that he's a sociopath. I already covered that one. My most generous interpretation, there's not one right answer. It might be this is a kid who's really oriented around kind of wanting to feel in control. And when that feels threatened, he doubles down. He is 0% people-pleasing, this third child of mine, zero. So the whole "I'm disappointed with you" is just not going to work with a kid like that.
And when I started using an MGI, a couple things happened. I realized I liked my kid again. And I think we don't talk about that enough as parents, that that's the thing that keeps us up at night. It's not their behavior, it's how we slowly stop liking them based on how we're describing them. And then I realized we're on the same team, and then I came up with a whole different range of interventions because I used a most generous interpretation. Right?
I think the same thing is true at work. Right? Someone, I don't know, is belaboring their point in a meeting when everyone else has gone on. And maybe the least generous interpretation, maybe it is what I was reacting to in your initial question, is oh, they're being a baby, or they're just vain. My most generous interpretation, I don't know, it could be a variety of things. Did they not feel heard the first time? That still doesn't make them going on forever, you know, acceptable. But if that's true, I might say to them in private, hey, something happens in meetings where I wonder if you don't always feel heard. And then you keep talking, and then honestly the rest of the room gets annoyed, which makes us tune you out more, which probably makes you belabor your point more. We're in a bad cycle. Can we work together on changing this? And now all of a sudden, instead of everyone complaining about that person, or whatever it is, and nothing changing, which is just horrible for culture and productivity, we have one conversation through an MGI lens and things start moving forward in a more productive way.
It's interesting how much of this comes back to just kind of assuming they are smart and are trying to do their best job and are good inside, and translating to, okay, in spite of that, here's something that is still going wrong, let's try to figure it out. There's kind of this idea of curiosity over judgment, trying to figure out what's missing.
And that, I mean, that's exactly it. And those are two things also that I think are in opposition, right? You inherently cannot be judgmental when you're curious, and when you're judgmental about something, you're inherently not curious about it. And I think it's assuming, you know, I say assume good inside, or assume MGI. Other people say assume positive intent. Whatever language hits your heart, I think, is the language. Everyone's different. MGI makes sense for me, but if someone has a different phrase, they should use that one. And then I think also assuming this person would want to work through this with me. And I think that's one of the things that we also miss a ton in our kids. The kids who hit, no matter what they say, they really don't like feeling out of control. A kid who's lying to your face, they don't want to lie to your face. They don't want to behave this way either. Again, which doesn't make the behavior okay, but it makes us soften a tiny bit and realize we're on the same team. And I think actually we all want the same outcome.
Wait, say more about that, because as a parent it doesn't feel like my kid doesn't want to, you know, when he's throwing a thing across the way or just resisting going in the car. I want to hear more about what's going on there.
Yeah. I mean, first of all, I'll start with the baseline, right? As a clinical psychologist, I was initially trained in this very reward, punishment, timeout, sticker chart mode. And to be honest, I loved it, because I have a very healthy left brain. And our left brains love logic and we love linearity. And as soon as you're a parent, you're like, there's no linearity or logic really. But our brain wants that to be a system. And it's kind of a system of punish the bad and you have less of the bad, and reward the good, and no one really says, well, how are we raising a human? Those are just behaviors. But our brain loves it. And that's what I started teaching to parents.
I did my private practice because it felt, you know, it felt clean. But it was at complete odds with everything I knew was helping all the adults in my practice change their lives. And that's actually what gave me insight into starting Good Inside. It's like, there's no way that what helps a 35-year-old rewire their brain and change for the better is in theoretical opposition with what a 2-year-old and 5-year-old need to become resilient and confident. That just doesn't make sense.
And I think we have these ideas about kids. Even, you know, something I hear a lot said to kids: "You're making a bad choice." You're a good person, you're making a bad choice. This is not about forgiving bad behavior. I'm pretty firm about that. But I just don't believe a four-year-old who's throwing is like, hold on. Should I throw this at my sister? Should I or should I not? I will choose not. I mean, think about us when we act out. I don't think most of us are in a decision-making place. We escalate.
And here's one of the big insights, besides people are good inside, that helped me form all of my other approaches: kids are born with all the feelings and none of the skills to manage feelings. Bad behavior at any age can basically be reduced to feelings that overpower skills. And yes, behavior is a problem, but behavior isn't the core problem. It's a manifestation of the problem. The actual problem is someone doesn't have the skill they need to manage something happening internally. And if they had that skill and could access it, the behavior would change. But that would be kind of the outcome, not the place of actual intervention.
And so when a kid hits, look, also when kids will say things like, "I don't care what you say," they're out of control. Maybe they're in a situation where, I don't know, they could be tired, but also they're angry that a sibling has a toy and they don't have skills to manage anger. They're jealous that someone is playing with something and they can't manage the jealousy. And when you look at bad behavior through the lens of feelings that overpower skills, you start to think like a coach. It always has struck me with kids that we
don't punish them into learning how to swim, which I know sounds funny, but if you paid for swim lessons and the person said, "You know what? I'm just not going to put up with this. This is inappropriate behavior." By the way, your kid has to learn to swim if they're going to function in life. So send them to their room and tell them to come back when they learn how to swim. It's absurd. It's obviously laughable.
I think swimming is very important, but an even more important life skill is learning how to manage your emotions. It is. And nobody learns new skills by being sent to their room. Nobody learns new skills by adding shame. All that does is increase the gap between feelings and skills. It's just totally counterproductive. The answer is we have to set boundaries. We have to be the people setting boundaries around out-of-control behavior. But then we actually have to teach our kids the skills they were missing, which levels up the skills. And that's how not only you change behavior short term, but you actually change behavior massively long term.
I'm actually in the middle of starting potty training with our kid and I'm taking this little online course and they call it potty learning, not potty training, for exactly that reason. You're not training them to do a thing. They just don't know how to do it. So, you just teach them like you're teaching them the alphabet. Just teach them all the little steps and what they need to learn.
You're not doing our potty learning course? Then I'm going to talk to you after.
Oh, I didn't know you had one. Okay. Marketing message isn't getting out there.
Switching immediately.
How do people find it? goodinside.com.
It's actually one of the things I feel very strongly about putting out for free because I think potty stuff is like one of the early lessons around body autonomy and skills, and the quickest way we kind of mess it up as parents is kind of trying to take over the process. And it could be so stressful. And I actually told my team while I go, I just think there should be a service. Like, so if you Google Good Inside potty, like you can have it for $0.
Oh, it's actually free already.
Yes, it's free.
I'm switching immediately.
Yes.
Is there a corollary to adult work environments in potty learning?
Yeah, there is. There always is. Well, okay. So, let's think about what the potty stuff is about for kids. When our kids are younger, they control two things in their entire life: what goes into their body and what comes out of their body. That's all. Now, obviously, hopefully we let them pick their clothes here and there, but like thematically, by the way, and they shouldn't be in charge of a ton more categories because they're two, right? But it's why those two areas can become so heated for families because we get so stressed, and when kids, especially if you don't have a people pleaser, okay? When kids even smell, "My parent is stepping into one of the only two domains that are mine," holy moly, will they do nutty things to push you back, right?
And so what's the general lesson? A human lesson is, what is it like for someone to have not that many areas of life that they're in control of? Number one, just think about that. Think about the first 10 minutes of your kid's day. We wake them up. We tell them what the weather is. We tell them, "No, you can't wear that." We tell them what's for breakfast. We, you know, tell them their shirt's on the wrong way. If my husband woke me up that way, I would be in a bad mood the rest of the day, okay? And I'd probably be looking for a million different areas to just grasp control of as a way of screaming to the world, like, I am my own person, right?
And so if we think about that in the workplace, well, first of all, temperamentally there are a subset of people. I call these the resilient rebels. They present as like strong-willed, defiant kids whose—I think we all walk around with a core fear that we end up acting out. Their core fear is the loss of control. They are very, very attuned to people kind of stepping into their domain, and if they smell it, they resist. Well, we have those as adults too. It's tricky to collaborate with them, and again, we need to have an expectation, but we might see that as, why do I ask someone to switch a meeting time and it feels like I took a knife to their heart the way they react, right?
Well, that theme might be coming up, and maybe we can go one level deeper and say, is this someone who in general—I'm making this up—but oh, someone got promoted before they did on their team, they just had a change in manager, they just had their vacation denied, whatever it was. Oh, is that actually what we're talking about, and it's manifesting as this difficulty changing meeting time, but actually there's other themes of control and independence at play.
Is maybe a lesson here clarifying, here's what you own on this team, on this project, here's things that you're going to drive, here's where I'm going to be really involved? Is that maybe a takeaway?
I think that is definitely a takeaway. I also just love naming your intention. That's always really helpful. "Hey, you know, I want to look over this project together because I want to get ahead of some things, and I think that's actually going to help you do the most independent work. That's why I want to go through it in such detail." Like, when you name the intention very, very clearly for someone, they're much more likely to interpret your behavior through the intention you just named, because your intention isn't to control them or make them feel small. But if that's also something they have a predilection for, it's even more important for those people to do the naming of the intention up front. And
There's also just a whole micromanaging element to this. This is why people in part hate micromanagement. Like, I want to be in control of something. Why get out of this?
Yeah. Which is a dance, you know? Exactly.
Yeah.
Okay. Something else that you teach that I find really helpful is this idea of becoming a sturdy parent, learning to be sturdy. That feels very related to being a good leader, just like learning how to deal with challenges. Talk about that from the kids context and then how it might be useful in work.
Yeah, I think that's the essence of what Good Inside does. Like, we help parents become sturdy leaders so they can raise sturdy, confident kids. And when I started this, I'd use that word a lot. People would say to me, "I've never heard anyone use that word. I know what it means." But I think about language, too. And I like language that helps me conjure up an image or a feeling. It takes it out of my brain. And I think the word sturdy, if you picture someone in your life, even if you haven't thought about them, like, who's the sturdy person I know, I bet you can kind of locate them. You see them and there's a feeling you have around them. And I think the best leaders we have are sturdy.
And so I'll start it with a metaphor because I actually think that brings it to life. And I think this is as true in parenting and in, you know, the workplace. So, picture being a passenger on a flight. It's really turbulent and you start screaming and everyone starts screaming. Okay? So, everyone's panicked in the flight and then you hear the announcement from the pilot. And I think there's three types of announcements you can have. The third one's going to be the sturdy one. The first two not as much.
So, the first one is some version of, "What are you freaking out about? Stop screaming. You're making this flight awful for everyone and you're distracting me. And stop making a big deal out of nothing." And that's kind of when we say those words to a kid: "Stop freaking out. You're ruining it for everyone," right? But the truth is, if you think about yourself in a flight and the pilot says that, you don't feel calmer. Number one, you're worried they don't notice the turbulence. Number two, you're a little disturbed that it just takes your screaming to make the pilot kind of lose it at you, right? And that actually makes you feel less safe, right? And so that's like in a meeting where people, I don't know, voice something that doesn't feel good and the leader essentially is like, "Stop complaining." You know,
that's not sturdy. The second version is often also not sturdy. And I think we've a little bit, at least in parenting, overcorrected to this, which is a pilot saying like, "I hear you screaming. You know what? I'm opening the cockpit door. Does anyone want to fly the plane? Because your screaming is making me anxious and I'm not really sure what to do. Maybe one of you want to do it." I think that's a massive overcorrection I've seen in parenting. And I just want to make it very clear that is not what we do at Good Inside, which is kind of, my kid is upset, and instead of just caring about their feelings, now their feelings dictate my decisions. That's terrifying for someone on a flight. If that's me, I'm not even scared of the turbulence anymore. I'm scared that this person is my supposed leader, right? That's also in a meeting when you complain about things and, you know, a leader might say, "Oh, okay, you know what? Okay, we'll just get consensus on this," when it's a decision that's a leadership decision, not a consensus decision, which some decisions are, but some decisions aren't because you are the only one who has certain information.
Now, to me, the third announcement that I want to hear when it's really turbulent is something like this: "I hear everyone screaming back there. That makes sense. And you haven't been on as many flights. You're right. It's very bumpy. And I know what I'm doing. This turbulence, though it scares you, it doesn't scare me. I'm actually going to get off this loudspeaker right now to go back to do my job. I'll see you when we land in Los Angeles." Now, even if the turbulence is the same, all of a sudden, I feel this deep breath because my worry is contained. This sturdy leader is able to see my emotional experience as real for me and not be overwhelmed by it themself. Those are the two distinct aspects of being a sturdy leader. I can see someone else's experience as real for them, but I can still hold on to my experience, and so I'm not overwhelmed by someone else.
So to a kid, it might be saying, look, let's say TV time is over. Okay? And my kid does not reward in my house when I say, "TV time is over. I'm turning off the TV." When my kids were younger, they didn't say, "You're right, Mom. That's a great decision." No. Okay. They freaked out because they wanted to watch another one. So a sturdy leader would say in that position, "I'm turning the TV off. That's my decision. I get that you're upset. I don't really like to end TV time either. I also know we'll get through it. Do your thing and then we'll transition to brushing teeth," and then I kind of wait it out, right?
Or in the workplace, someone's complaining about, I don't know, I'm making this up, but maybe it's some policy change, vacation change, number of days, you know, in the office, where you say, "Look, I want to share something that I know some people are going to have a reaction to. Here's the new policy." People stop tripping, complaining. "Look, I get it. This is a big change and you're right. This does make things hard in a certain way and I totally see that, and the way you're feeling makes sense, and here's some version of why we're doing it, and I know we're going to get through it, and I have faith in us to weather this turbulence," right? And I think in every situation, kids, you know, workplace, in-laws, whatever it is, that sturdy leadership, you know, always feels good.
This is a really good segue to something I definitely wanted to ask you about, which is this idea of boundaries, of how to set boundaries well, and how that relates to long-term resilience versus just kind of this idea of short-term happiness. I was just yesterday watching your advice on how to set boundaries with my kid because I struggle with it sometimes and I'm just like, what am I doing wrong? And it was extremely helpful. I started using your advice and I'm like, wow, he's doing exactly what I want him to do. So, there's a lot of power here. So talk about your advice to parents around boundaries and this idea of long-term resilience and then how that might translate.
Yeah. And so I think, related to being a sturdy leader, to make it more concrete, there's two jobs we have as a parent. I think they're the same two jobs we have as any sturdy leader in any environment. And that's setting boundaries, which are limits we set, certain decisions we make. Boundaries often relate to your position of authority, where you have some long-term goal in mind that someone else in the system just isn't as aware of, or a two-year-old isn't as capable of holding on to, which is why you're in the position of making a decision. So that's the boundaries. And the other side is validating kids' or someone else's experience while not being taken over by it. And I think we've moved so far in this direction of validating kids' experience. And I'll go on record saying validating kids' feelings is an incomplete parenting approach. That is half of our job. But it doesn't work if we're not doing the other half, which is setting boundaries, which is the skill I feel best about teaching people because I think it's what we're often lacking.
So my definition of boundaries, I do like because it's immediately usable and testable. Boundaries are what you tell someone else you will do. And it requires the other person to do nothing. Too often I hear people say, "My kid doesn't respect my boundaries. My colleague doesn't respect my boundaries." And with all due respect, I often think you have an incorrect definition of boundaries. I think you're probably making a request, which, by the way, we do a lot. There's nothing wrong with requests, but it's not a boundary. Because if you're setting what you call a boundary and you're really making a request, you're giving all of your power away to the other person, because you're saying the success of this important moment depends on my 2-year-old. What? I'm not going to give my power to my 2-year-old. And I always tell parents, I would bet on you any day over your kid. And it's not because I don't like your kid. I do like your kid. I just believe in you more.
And so a good example of this, let's say, is I have a kid, like I was describing before, who's not a people pleaser. And so I live in New York City. We live in a building with a lot of elevator buttons, where this kid, when he was younger, if he was left to his own devices, which had happened, he would press every elevator button. Every one. Okay. And with my other kids, one of them especially, I probably would have been able to make a request like, "Hey, when we go in the elevator later, it's really important not to press all the buttons. Other people wait for this elevator. It's rude," whatever it is. That's not a boundary, because I could say, did I tell my kid what I will do? No. Does it require my kid to do nothing? No. Okay.
A boundary would be saying, "When we go into the elevator, I'm going to stand between you and the buttons, sweetie, because I'm not going to let you press the buttons, because other people are waiting." And if you have a kid like my kid, they're going to lunge for it anyway. And then I would block my kid because I'm ready and I've done a workout. My muscles are ready. "I'm not going to let you do that." Now, my kid might get upset, which allows me to do the other part of my job: "Ugh, I know you wish you could press those buttons," or maybe just look kindly toward him and not say anything, but I'm going to still hold my boundary. And in this example, I think one of the places we get into trouble as a parent is we say, "Don't press the buttons. If you press the buttons, no dessert tonight," or whatever, we threaten. But all of that is a way of completely undermining our authority because I'm giving all of my power to my kid. I'm letting myself
get frustrated. Now I'm taking away dessert. And the honest truth, if we want to be honest about it, is at night I'm going to give my kid sorbet anyway and then make up something about how sorbet isn't dessert because it has fruit. All because I just didn't set a boundary in the first place. And I think over and over in parenting, maybe at work too, we're asking our kid to do our job for us because we just don't want to deal with the emotional fallout. But that's what I call job confusion, and it makes everyone frustrated.
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Let me actually ask you a parenting question while we're on this topic, because I'm trying to learn this boundaries thing better. So what's the correct way to, if they're not going to the car and I'm like, okay, I'm going to carry you to the car if you don't do this, I'm still requesting them to go there. Is there a way to phrase that where they don't need to do anything?
Well, so boundaries are something I will do, and they require my kid to do nothing. Yeah, we want to try. Look, we have to get in the car, and whatever, I try a game, I try a song. And then again, the intention matters. The reason I'm going to carry my kid to the car is actually I don't want to let myself then be late and then yell at my kid and be frustrated. Right. Like I'm doing it because I like my kid and I'm on the same team as them. So then I might say, "Look, it looks like it's hard for you to get to the car. I don't really want to do this, but I don't know. I'm going to turn around. I'm going to take a deep breath. And if by the time I turn around, you're still here, I'm going to pick you up. I'm going to carry you to the car. And even if you're crying and kicking and screaming, I'm still going to do that, sweetie. I know sometimes it's hard to leave the house. We do have to leave. Here comes my deep breath."
Now, what's really important, I don't want to understate, is I think somewhere in us, we think, "I'm going to do that and then I'm going to be rewarded by my kid for my good parenting." Like, I'm going to turn around and you're going to be like, "I'm ready now, Dad." That might happen in some households, but it actually won't reliably happen until you've actually set boundaries over and over, where it's not about taking advantage of you. They're just trying to learn the rules of the game, right? And so then I would pick up my kid. And by the way, depending on your kid's temperament, two out of the three of my kids would scream and cry. And then we tell ourselves, "Oh, I'm not a good parent. I messed that up."
No. Again, a pilot is going to make a decision in certain key moments not based on consensus. Like, let's say I'm flying to LA and it's really turbulent and the pilot says they have to make an emergency landing, and everyone's complaining and they're like, "What? Can't be that big of a deal. I don't know if that's a light. Did I have a big meeting in LA?" Can you imagine if the pilot was like, "Oh, Becky and Lenny are really upset about this. You know what, guys? Forget it. Forget it. Forget the emergency landing." What? Even if we were upset, we feel deeply, deeply safe that our leader is doing something they believe is right with the information they have available. So even if I'm complaining when I get off the plane in Kansas, wherever I'm landing midway, in the back of my head I'm so grateful.
And so I just want parents to know, when you set a true boundary, especially if it's new, your kid will tantrum and protest. But if you actually see that as a sign that you're successfully setting a boundary, instead of as a sign you did something wrong, your relationship with the tantrum changes. You're almost oddly, sickly grateful for a sign that you set a boundary. You're like, "Oh, this is actually..." I always say to myself, "This is going according to plan." And it makes the moment so much easier.
This advice you give about being the leader is really important, and I could see how it connects deeply to the work environment. I'm curious if there's more advice there. So the idea that I've been hearing is just that people want you to be their leader, both as a kid and in the work environment. They don't want you to be like, okay, what does everyone think? Let's vote. Talk about the insight there.
Yeah. First of all, I think like a lot of things, two things are true. There's definitely a time for consensus. There's a time for getting 100%. That's a really important part of leadership, too. But inherently, you're in a position of leadership because you have experience other people don't have. You have insight, you have judgment. You might just very literally have access to company information and data that other people don't have, right? And so you're not all working from the same set of information. And so there's definitely a time for consensus building. But at least in parenting, I think we've overcorrected. You know, I need to collect more data from the working world on whether we've overcorrected there. I think it feels really good for people to hear some version of: I took in everything you said. Your voices matter. And I want to share a decision I've made with all the information I have. It might not make sense to all of you at the time. You can come talk to me separately. And I have conviction that this is the next thing we're going to experiment with, whatever the decision is.
You know, I said this word earlier, and it's another word I say that maybe other people don't say. I'm always drawn to people I can locate. That's the word. I can locate you. I know what you feel. I know your POV. I personally love people I can locate, even if I really disagree with them, more than being around people who seem to mirror what I'm saying. I've actually learned a lot in a working environment. That's what I need, because I have a lot of strong ideas. So I love people who push back and have a POV. And I think especially at work, when there's so much going on, right, it could be so stressful. Having a leader you can locate, which means I have a POV, to be able to say, "This might not be what you want. I believe this is the best decision, and I believe we're a strong enough team to work toward that." I think that's very, very holding, not all the time, but in more situations than we might realize.
So the advice here is, even if it may not feel like your kid wants you to just tell them what to do, or your team wants to have opinions and have a big say, in reality the human brain seeks somebody to lead them.
I think that's exactly right, you know. And I think we can all think back on our life, and again, you rarely say thank you to these people, but if you think back on really hard moments, or, I don't know, if I was out of control at some party, and I was being mean to people, I was saying awful things, who knows, maybe someone's drunk. An act of love in that moment, at least if it was me, would be my husband picking me up and carrying me out. Kind of like, I'm not going to let you self-destruct. And if I was like, "No, I'm fine," I might even look back later and think, "Why? Why did you let me make that decision?"
I'll share a story, because some of this comes from it. I think about this teenager I was working with in private practice, and she came to me. I'm just doing a first session. "Okay, tell me what brings you here." She's like, "Well, you can see on my arms I'm cutting." I was like, "Okay, keep going." And I was like, "Well, how long have you been doing that?" She goes, "Two years." And I said, "You just said I'm the first therapist you've ever seen, so what's gone on in the last two years?" She was so snarky, and she goes, "Oh, well, my parents tried to send me to a therapist two years ago, but I said to them, 'Oh, so you think I'm the messed-up one in the family, and you can send me, and we're just going to lie the whole time and waste your money.'" My heart always races when I think about this moment. It's so visceral still. And something in me, I don't know, I was on my game that day, was like, "Becky, just be quiet. Don't say anything." And I don't know, 10, 15 seconds later, everything changed for her. She looked down, and then she looked up, and she just goes, "Can you believe they let me make that decision?"
She felt so betrayed and so not taken care of. And it just made me realize, at our worst moments, first of all, we speak, I think, our fears, not our wishes. Number one. And at our worst moments, we're not in a good place to make good decisions for ourselves. And we don't want to be punished. But sometimes it is an act of love.
And I tell this to people very explicitly when they're like, "I know my teenager needs to go to therapy, but they're refusing." And I'll give them an exact script. Here's what you're going to say. And it's some version of, "Look, I am going to drive you every Thursday to therapy. Whatever you do in the room, whether you lie, whether you're silent, that's not on me. But my number one job is making decisions that I think are good for you, even if you're not happy. That's how much I care about you. And this is one of those times." Every parent who told me they've done that, their kids on some level are like, I needed that.
And I think the equivalent in the workplace is there are moments when things are really turbulent, when people are saying different things because they're anxious, and they're looking for a leader to kind of say, "Hey, I've heard this all. Here's what I'm doing." You might even say, "I'm not going to lie to you. Do I have complete conviction that this is right? No. But I've put it all together, and this is what we're going with, and I feel good about this direction. We'll reassess in a month. Let's go do this, team." And I think everyone is kind of waiting in certain moments for someone to show up that way.
That was an awesome story. It makes me think about how people will take what they can get, and they'll be wondering, "Hey, wow, I'm getting away with all this. When will they realize?" Like someone working at a company where they're not working that hard: "I'll just get away with it as long as I can until they tell me that I can't."
Yeah. And you know, I just saw the show on Broadway called Punch. I don't know if it... It's this really interesting story about this guy, a true story that it's based on, where essentially he ended up punching someone at a bar, the guy falls and dies, but he ends up getting to know that person's parents after incarceration.
And one of the things that comes up, okay, because I think we tell ourselves people will take advantage, they'll take all the space you give them. I do tend to think about it in more of an MGI way, where what happened in this show is these parents, I mean, this guy killed their son, and the question they come to him with, because they end up meeting, is, "Well, tell us what you're going to do with your life here. What are you going to do with your life now?" And he ends up saying nobody had ever asked him that question. Nobody had believed in him. Nobody had ever believed he could do anything useful. It changed the course of his life. I mean, it's a crazy story, but I think about at work when someone, yeah, whatever it is we think they're getting away with, or kids. Sometimes I think kids are asking, "Is there an adult here? Is there an adult here who will help me, who sees that this is my form of acting out and being out of control, and will somebody help me?" And you know why kids act out more? It's not because they're taking advantage of you. It's because they feel that much more dysregulated, because they don't feel like there's an adult in the room who's willing to put a container on their shell-less egg to help them come back together and move forward in a better direction.
I think about people that don't have parents that are there and always seek someone as their partner that gives them that later. This connects really well with this idea of building resilience long-term versus short-term. And I think about in the work environment, just doing the hard thing, you will be better off, versus just letting things progress because it's hard to do. You think people will not want to hear bad news. Talk about that lesson and how that might translate.
I mean, one of the chapters in my book, and something that guides our whole parenting philosophy, is codified as resilience over happiness. And I don't know if you hear this, Lenny, but I used to hear this all the time, and I couldn't let this small talk moment go: "Don't you just want your kid to be happy? You just want your kid to be happy, right?" And I'd always ruin a perfectly harmless comment, and I was like, "No." And then again, we think in extremes: oh, you want your kid to be unhappy? No, I definitely don't want my kid to be unhappy.
But I think if we zoom out, especially in childhood, but I think I can make a parallel to work, too, optimizing for happiness in childhood is the quickest way to build anxiety and fragility in adulthood. Hard stop. Because in a kid's early years, what they're really learning is: what range of experiences am I able to cope with? In how many different situations can I find my capability? Can I feel like I can get something done? Can I get through something? Or do I believe that the only way to feel like myself is to bring every form of discomfort to zero and only find happiness?
The irony is, in adulthood, the thing that clouds out happiness often is our inability to manage disappointment, jealousy, right? Those things will always overpower happiness. And so happiness actually comes in adulthood from our ability to manage the widest range of difficult situations. That's what resilience is. It's our ability to handle the widest range of experiences. I'm not talking about toxic, okay? Just disappointment, jealousy, anger, feeling less than. These are just human experiences we have, and unintentionally something's happened over the generations where we're optimizing for kids' happiness, right? Our kids will say something like, "I'm the only one in my class who can't read." And we hop in with, "Oh, that's not true," or, "But you're so good at soccer, but you play chess, but you're doing this," as if I can't even tolerate my kid's upset feelings.
And I tell parents all the time, our kids can only learn to tolerate the feelings we tolerate in them. Nothing's scarier to a kid than when they're upset, if I can't tolerate their upset feelings. That makes them doubly upset, because it's like, "Oh, I guess this is unmanageable."
Which leads to adulthood where anything but comfortable and happy and doing a perfect job is actually experienced in your body as even worse because you spent that many years thinking those feelings were wrong. So what that means is when our kids are young and they go through hard experiences, those are our best opportunities to wire them for resilience and ironically for happiness later on, right? Because if I can support my kid, I'm not going to say, ugh, no big deal, but there's a lot between no big deal and let me call the school to make this all better for you. There's a whole world, that's the world I think we try to live in in Good Inside, where I can help my kids see they're capable of dealing with this. That's going to help them so much more over the years.
How do you think that translates to work? The way I think about it is just like it's okay to upset people. You're better off. I think it was Kim Scott from Radical Candor had this great story where she had someone she was working with. He was doing a bad job. She didn't want to upset him. She didn't give him any feedback. Nine months later it just didn't get any better, so she had to fire him, and he's like, why didn't you tell me that I wasn't doing what you wanted me to do? Like you could have told me somewhere along the way. And to us it feels like I don't want to hurt your feelings, but then it ends up hurting their feelings a lot worse, and that's a lot worse for them.
I think there's so many parallels. So the reason, one of the reasons I love talking about childhood is because that's when our brain is wiring. It's kind of when we form the blueprint, or my friend Miley calls it the factory settings, for the rest of our kids' lives, right? That's like the ultimate, you know, is to wire them with a default that works for them. But actually, you can think about work relationships the same way where of course people come, their brain's already wired. They're older, or you know, somewhat. But if you think about it as a building, like your first number of months with someone is you're building the foundation for the whole building, which is the relationship you're going to have. And the earlier you're just optimizing for comfort and happiness, the more fragile your building is going to be. And you're right. Then you get to 6 months and you're like, "Oh, this person isn't doing so well. I'm going to give them feedback." But in their mind, they're thinking, "I've never gotten a piece of, you know, constructively critical feedback since I've been here. So, I thought the nature of my relationship in this workplace was one of butterflies and rainbows all the time."
So, that doesn't mean day one I think you should sit someone down and say like, "Here's everything you're doing wrong." They're like, "I just started my job." There's obviously reasonableness, but yes, when we're thinking about a resilient work culture, we want people who can say this is hard and I can do hard things, not this is hard, so someone must be at fault and it should be easier. And I don't know anyone who would argue for the second culture. So, I think we should ask ourselves, well, what am I doing in the nature of my conversations with people that help me build toward that?
And I'll make it really concrete because I think so much of dealing with anxiety and struggle, not all of it, but I like a good formula, is this combination of I believe you and I believe in you. I think one of the ways we've majorly misunderstood anxiety, at any age, is we've been doing the I believe you part, but we've forgotten the I believe in you part. And they're both, again, really necessary together, which might sound like this.
Look, I believe you. This is a hard project. You're totally right. And you've never done something like this before. It makes sense. That's such a good phrase. It makes sense. You're nervous about it, right? Or something I say to my kids that I should say more at work: I'd be nervous if you weren't nervous. You have a big test. I'd be nervous if you weren't nervous. Of course, you're nervous. That makes total sense. I'd feel the same way. And the reason we think you can take on this project is because we know you can figure this out. By the way, I'm here to answer questions and help you along the way. But I just want to make sure you hear that from me. Yes, this is hard. And I also know you can work through this. And the way you're going to feel at the end, you're going to feel so proud of yourself. And I don't want to take away the project from you, because I kind of think I'm taking away that feeling. And that's going to be the feeling that propels you to do all the other amazing things you want to do here. And let's work toward that.
And that's actually, Lenny, something I used to say to my kids when they were your kids' age. Like I just distinctly remember this time one of my kids was whining about this puzzle. And he's like, "Do it for me. Finish it for me. You have to do it." Right? And of course the easiest thing to shut down the tantrum, it's like, "Fine. Here's how you do it." But it was a day I had a little more bandwidth. And I heard myself saying something that, I don't know, it felt like healing to me, too, honestly. I said, "Look, you're right. This is a hard puzzle. It makes sense you're frustrated. All of us feel frustrated when we want to do something and haven't figured it out yet. You're feeling this moment, right? Take a break. Take a breath. But I want to tell you why I'm not going to do this for you. There is no better feeling in the world than watching yourself work on something and make progress on something and maybe even complete something that you originally didn't think you could do. Like, there's literally no better feeling than that. And I will not take that feeling away from you." And I think in the workplace and definitely in parenting, we should be mindful of how often we take feelings of capability away from our kid. And I take that very seriously because I feel very passionate about building a world where kids become adults who feel capable. And I think we can do that in these small moments more often.
As you share these stories and examples, I'm just like, I wish I had Dr. Becky in my ear constantly giving me advice as I'm doing this stuff. And we'll talk about how people sort of can get that. But I'm actually really happy you talked about this I believe you lesson. I was going to bring it up. That was right next on my notes because I've used it with my wife actually and it is so good and so effective. And this is why I love your advice, is that it works not just for kids, it works for adults. Just like, I believe you. I believe you feel this even though I don't know why and I wouldn't feel that way, but just, I believe you. I like this "this makes sense" piece. I haven't thought about that. And then the I believe in you. That's interesting because I did talk about, like the way I remember phrasing this, this is like a moment I really remember, just like, you're smart, you'll figure this out. And then she just went back to me and she's like, "Wait, what did you just do there? That felt really good."
Well, if you think about, and I'm very visual, so if you think about someone struggling, picture them in like a hole, not like in an abyss, just like a little hole. Okay? And we're a relational species. Like at least, we'll see what happens with AI, but for now, we're a relational species. Okay? And so when we're really struggling, inherently the reason why we're struggling is we're in a hole and we can't see the way out of it. If we were in a hole and could see the way out, we wouldn't struggle. So the only reason something feels so hard is because you're kind of in a hole without visibility. So what do you need as a relational species? You need someone you trust to have one foot in the hole with you. You do. That's the I believe you part. So it might be saying to your kid, and those words are so powerful, I think deep down, Lenny, that's literally what we're all looking for as humans, is just to be believed. I believe you. You really don't want to go to soccer practice. You're no longer starting on the team. The first soccer practice after you lose your starting spot sucks. Totally sucks. I believe you. But if you think about them in that hole, they need you to have one foot out of the hole. They need one foot in, but they need one foot out. Because if we can't see a more capable version of our kid than they can access in that moment, we've collapsed into the hole with them, right?
And so the I believe in you would be: look, you're going to go to practice today. You are. I just want to be honest. It's not going to be fun. You're not going to want to be there the whole time. You're going to feel embarrassed. You're going to hate watching them run plays with you on the sideline. And you're going to come home having survived. I'm going to be there for a hug. I'm going to let you know I'm proud of you. Maybe I'm proudest of you that moment, even more than when you scored the goal last game, because that's the hard stuff that's going to help you in life, and we're going to get through it together.
And so I think for anyone listening, what's really powerful, I find, what's really powerful with anything is thinking what end of the spectrum am I on, because it always gives me insight into where I can grow. Is the I believe you part easier for me or is the I believe in you part easier for me? And there's no morality. Just knowing where you are is helpful. Do I like to say to people, come on, it's no big deal, you can do it? Okay, that's the I believe in you. Ooh, I wonder if I'd be more effective if I focus on the first, I believe you. Or do I lead as a parent, as a leader with I believe you, but do I sometimes go into the hole with someone? Oh, okay. It's the other part I'm going to play around with. And I think that gives us all something to action on.
This is such good advice. I got tingles as you were describing what you were telling your kid. So if there's anything you take away from this conversation, this is useful with kids, with partners, with, I think, in work too, just this idea of I believe you and that makes sense. And then somehow making it clear that I believe in you.
Yes. See a more capable version of them than they can see in the moment. Doing those two things at once is like, it's magic. I talk a good game. It's hard for me, too. Again, like these things are hard in practice, but at least, and I know you're like this, too, it's helpful to have a framework to come back to.
Just these words are so... and you don't have to say them exactly, but these specific ways of phrasing is actually really great. Okay, let's come back to how people can get your advice constantly. So a lot of people see your advice on TikTok and Instagram and just kind of in Twitter and all these places, just like, there's Dr. Becky giving me some awesome advice. Not a lot of people know you have an epic business and product and community. Talk about that, just what you've built there, what it is, what people should know.
So what started as, you know, I put up my first Instagram post on I think it was February 28th, 2020. So it was two weeks before New York City at least shut down, probably a lot of places in the US. And I didn't have some like premonition about COVID; the timing was just kind of nutty. And I even put up that post without any business in mind. I really, I felt so compelled by these ideas around what we've been talking about and how different they are from what we've been handed down to us as truth that the only way I can describe it is, sounds like awful and visceral, but it felt like I had to, like I was vomiting them out and I just needed somewhere to put them. And so when I look back I was like, why did I do that? I don't know. It was more like relief than intentional, you know, goal setting. And then New York City shut down. And then what happened was things just took fire. And what was really powerful, and I just kind of watched happen and tried to respond to, was the community that formed around it. What people wanted. I started doing these live workshops just because I had so much more to say than I could put into a carousel post. And the way people were connecting live, it still happens now in the live events. Like I think certain ideas I have or stories I tell can be really impactful to people. But if I had to choose between that versus what happens in our community, I would bet on the community every time. It's just amazing because I think these ideas tap into some value system or healing inside of ourselves and safe communities form around value systems.
And so what ended up happening from there is people were just telling us, they actually kind of incepted this idea, like, Dr. Becky, I feel like you're doing parent school. And I was like, what? They're like, I go to school for everything that I've ever cared about. And I always joke that a friend said, "Do you know how much money I spent on gardening school? Like I like my flowers, but I care about my children more, but I've spent more time and I've invested more in my tiny little garden or my cooking or my hobby. You know, certainly I've spent more learning about Greek history, which for most of us, no shade to Greece, doesn't actually impact our life that much anymore, than I have in parenting."
And I realized, and this is what our whole business is around, is I really feel like parenting is the last area in life that we glorify instinct alone, where we say, especially to women, this whole idea of maternal instinct. I don't know, this is probably a little controversial. I was like, wow, what a way to gaslight parents. Like, not to say there aren't some moments that are instinctual, but if I'm parenting by instinct, do you want to know what I'm gonna do when my kid has a tantrum or when my kid lies in my face? It's not going to be pretty. Like, I don't know if any of us feel like that's a good option.
I believe you. No, you would not do that.
Right. And instinct, by the way, what's instinct? It's everything we've learned until that point. And what feels natural in parenting is simply how we were parented. That's all that's going to be natural. And so I really, like, I started to get very angry with my community. We're like, why isn't there a better way? And by the way, with modern technology, shouldn't this be easy on your phone? Shouldn't you get access, not to make a moment perfect, but we all spiral after a hard moment. It's not the spiral that makes us have a bad week. It's the way we extend the spiral, from how we talk about ourselves and the bad patterns that last weeks. These are the things that add up to our and our kids' mental health. And I did, I started to get angry thinking there should just be a better option for parents to learn without shame, without the expectation of perfection, to have something in their pocket, to combine it with modern technology, now AI, so many different things, and to preserve the human interactive element.
So yeah, so that's what Good Inside is. You know, my co-founder and I are both psychologists. We've known each other forever. And we have a whole team where yes, there's the podcast and Instagram. And I always consider those like flags, like a strategy and a tip we hear. They're like flags. They're like things we try. But most of our struggle in parenting is we don't have a framework and an actual approach, which is the ground we would plant a flag into, which is why parenting feels like whack-a-mole where we're just like trying things, right? Even though we would never do that at work. We don't even do that with gardening or tennis. And so Good Inside and our app to me is like the most modern, you know, alive, personalized, technologically informed way of feeling like I have something in my pocket, and someone and a community in my pocket, that can just close the gap between how I kind of want to show up and how I do show up. None of us close the gap completely, but I do believe we deserve access to tools that can help us do that. And that's what Good Inside as a business is built around.
Just to give you a chance to plug what this is exactly, what do people get when they, say, download the app, sign up for the community?
What you get is, first of all, you get to just tell us what's going on with you, and we get to be the holder of that story and make sure we hit on the important themes. I really do believe I know kind of, not formula, that makes it too specific and like perfect, but we need to learn how to set boundaries. We needed to learn how to stay connected to our kid without murdering ourselves. By the way, I also think the thing that you get in the app, we have to learn better communication if we're in a partnership because that gets tricky. We have to learn how to repair. We have to understand why we get so activated in our nervous system. And we have to do it in a way that we could do, I don't know, 5 minutes here or there on the go. So that's exactly what we're set up to do.
If you can give us five minutes, we will give you something that's not just a tip. That is something I always combine, two things, understanding and action, right? Insight and something that you can actually do today, because I think that's how we can take a deep breath. Understanding gives us clarity and action gives us capability, and that's what we give parents. So you get that, we'll drip it to you. You tell us what's going on.
We also have an incredible AI chatbot experience that also, beyond helping you in the moment, can help you say, like, hey, this kind of thing that seems different, they're all kind of the same. Here's the common theme, here's what we suggest for you to kind of get ahead of things.
And then there are so many live events. I believe deeply that parenting is something where we have to connect to people. So I do, usually two or three live events in a month. We have coaches we've trained. So we've manualized a Good Inside approach. We have coaches who do support sessions. If you have a deeply feeling kid, you can come to as many of those in a month as you want. And there's always a parent to kind of connect.
And so I would say you get answers to your questions, you get deeper dives if that's for you and you have the time and you love to learn. And then you also have a very, very active expert-driven but also just parent community for the live connected help that I think we all need.
Amazing. I'm a happy member. I was actually just chatting with your AI chatbot, Dr. GG, is it?
Yes. GG. Exactly.
GG. So good. Okay. And where do people find you? goodinside.com.
Yes. So easy. We try to make it easy. goodinside.com.
Okay. I have another question I'm going to ask about this experience, but before that I'm going to take you to a couple recurring corners on this podcast. The first is AI corner. I'm curious if there's some way you found AI useful in your work, in your life.
So yes. So it actually connects to what I was saying before, how I've learned about myself. I'm kind of allergic to ideas without action. And people would always say to me, Dr. Becky, one of the reasons I love your parenting guidance is you both help me understand a situation more deeply than I find elsewhere, but you also help me translate it into this absurdly practical thing I can say or do. And it's interesting because what I've learned is, I'm so glad that's helpful for people, that actually is just the way I think, and I'm seeing that as I run my company also. And AI helps me close that gap.
So let's say I'm talking about the product and we're talking about a new onboarding flow and I have an idea. Currently I was playing around with Figma Make and I was like, oh my goodness, I can vomit my ideas. And I have so many ideas, not just about like, this is how I want to make someone feel, and I don't want it to sound like this, I want it to sound like this. I have so many ideas around my intention and the impact, and I don't like to have an idea that I can't fully see out. So I want to see the UX design or I want to see the whole email flow, and my team knows me well enough to know that's just how I think.
So they can get a totally new abandoned cart flow from me and they might be like, Becky, we don't like this. We wish you just told us the idea before you built this out. I don't do that for them. And I'm like, if you want to trash the whole thing, I don't care. I'm not attached to it. But AI has allowed me to take an idea and turn it into something I can visualize and that's more real in such a rapid way. And I'm just so excited about that.
That is super cool. It feels like this is what these apps are so useful for: people that are not designers, product managers, engineers, trying stuff out, prototyping, thinking through in real designs, not just sketches. Figma, that's cool. Proud podcast sponsor. Is that the one you find most useful?
You know, it's funny. I'm just laughing because Andrew Hogan, who does insights at Figma, he's been a big Good Inside member. He's always talking about it. And I said to him, if it would help at all, I want to make a video for just your team to tell them how obsessed I am with Figma Make. And he's like, go ahead. So if this fails, I'm going to become an affiliate or something for that.
But that is the one I'm playing around with. I'm also playing around with Replit, my team was just showing me that one, and Lovable. So I love playing around with any of those new tools. And then, whether it's Claude or ChatGPT, I find the way I can work rapidly to get my ideas into a place. And I show my team how I use it.
And I really do think the people who get the most out of prompting, there is a vomiting aspect I like. Tell me all your thoughts. And I think a lot of people, especially women, we've been conditioned to put everything into this neat, organized package before we present it to the world in general. And I find prompting is best when we do the complete opposite, right? And get it all out there. And then you can refine.
And that's one of the things I do with my team a lot. I'm like, I want to show you, just be in the room and I'll show you how I work through this with, let's say it's ChatGPT. And I think that's one of the ways I'm also helping my team get a lot more from AI, is showing them that kind of way of using it.
How big is your team, by the way? What's the Dr. Becky operation? What does that look like?
65.
65 people. That's incredible.
Yeah. And we're profitable.
And profitable. Have you raised money or is it bootstrapped?
We did raise money a couple years ago. We felt like, again, we have a very, very big vision for what we want to accomplish. I feel like at our core it's a set of ideas and stories and a way of making people feel that happens to be represented as the biggest part of our business now in a digital product, but there's just so many other things in a Disney-type ecosystem that I think can come out of IP and story and feeling and connection. And there's a lot of really other exciting things in 2026 and 2027 that will further build that ecosystem, and I feel like as a team we're set up to do that.
Oh man, we need to do a whole episode on just the whole operation. But yes, I guess just to cover the empire, there's the book, there's the podcast, there's the app, there's the community.
So yes, and my second children's book will come out next year. So I feel like that's our first entry into kind of more physical product. And my second children's book is about deeply feeling kids. Those kids are kind of my passion project within the passion project that is Good Inside. I think they're the most misunderstood kids in the world. They're labeled dramatic, oppositional. A lot of parents even tell me professionals tell them the issue is they don't punish them enough or they're not consistent.
Those kids don't fear a loss of control. Their core fear is being too much, and they can act that out and unfortunately get it confirmed by the world. And so my second children's book will be about deeply feeling kids, and if our app is like the companion for the parent, I feel like the connection moment and for a kid to see themselves in this book is the purpose of that.
Is that something people can pre-order yet or not yet?
Yes, they can pre-order. That's February 2026, and pre-orders, thank you, yes, help so much. And I'll be doing a little tour around it as well.
And what's it called, for people to look up on Amazon or wherever they want to buy?
It's called Leave Me Alone!: A Good Inside Story About Deeply Feeling Kids. And if you have one of these kids, the reason the title I think will resonate, and honestly a lot of people say, "Ooh, that gives me a lot of insight into my partner, someone at work," is around their fear of being too much. They tend to have big explosive feelings and push the people away they care about the most in the exact moments they actually need them, thereby confirming their fears. See, I really am too much, which exacerbates the cycle until they know how to change it. So "leave me alone" is something a deeply feeling kid will often scream in their room when they're completely out of control. And that's actually in some ways their deepest fear, not their wish. And so the title plays to that.
How cool. Okay, we'll definitely link to that in the show notes. You can look it up on your favorite bookseller. Dr. Becky, how fun was this? What a unique conversation. We touched topics on every level of humanity, I think. Before we get to our very exciting lightning round, is there anything else that you wanted to share? Anything else that you want to double down on?
Kind of. I think before we started recording, I was saying how excited I am. I really mean it. You're like a major celebrity to me, and my whole team knows it, of all the podcasts I've been on. And they're like, "You must be nervous for Lenny." I was like, "I am."
What I said to you is that I love your podcast because I just learn so much, right? As a psychologist CEO, obviously there's a lot for me to learn, and I've learned so much from you. And I really am addicted to learning. And the reason that's coming up for me now is I think about all the people who listen to your show who I think are like that, too. They're forever learners. They love to learn. And it's why they love your podcast, because you get so concrete and you follow the thread down the rabbit hole, and it helps us feel more capable at work.
And one of the things I found interesting is so many people who have that forever-learner growth mindset, whatever you want to call it, at work, we forget to access it with our kids. Like we say things like, "It is the way it is." I feel like people who listen to your podcast probably don't say that at work. That's why they're listening to this podcast. Maybe it doesn't have to be the way it is. Or, oh, I didn't know that before, but now I do, so I can try something new. And again, I'm never going to be perfect, perfect is creepy, but I can grow. I'm more addicted to growing and learning than being right.
And I guess I would just ask anyone listening, especially as a parent, to say, what if I just took that mentality home? Like, okay, I yelled at my kid. I didn't mess them up forever. Do I know how to repair? By the way, did I have a parent who actually repaired with me? Because if I didn't, no wonder it feels awkward. I'm kind of the first person in my whole lineage to give a true apology to my three-year-old. Of course that's going to feel hard. Or, yeah, I don't understand tantrums. Or, I don't really understand why my good kid is lying to me. But maybe I learn. I learn things at work all the time and I give myself credit.
And what if I took that way of being and just applied it to this other area? I think I'd both be more compassionate with myself, but I'd probably also feel better over time about how I was showing up. And I just think we forget to apply that because, again, parenting has been told as something that should just feel natural, when it doesn't, right? So if we think of it as a set of skills, it's actually very hopeful. Oh, I learn skills from Lenny all the time. I can do that in parenting, too.
That's such a beautiful message. What I feel is anytime I watch one of your clips and then do that thing and then it works, it's like, oh, that expands your mind. Oh, wow, there's so much more I could learn. I should go deeper on what the hell I'm doing. I don't know what I'm doing, you know? So that is a really important message, like, you can learn this skill. It's not something anyone just knows how to do.
Yeah. And I like giving people very concrete things. So a question recently that I've asked my kids that has led to amazing moments is some version of: if I could do one thing different this week to be a better parent to you, what would it be? I guess it's kind of like a 360-degree review, right? And sometimes your kid says the hurtful things.
"You cannot be on your phone as much," which, just get ready for it and just get ready to receive. Okay, thank you for telling me that. And I think the thing that stops us is we think our kid is going to say, quote, stupid things. "You could let me watch TV." The truth is, no matter what your kid says, it's a window into their world. And again, you can be the pilot who listens but doesn't open the cockpit door. Oh, what would it be like to watch all the TV you want? Oh, your friends watch more. I'm so glad you told me that. "Oh, does that mean I can watch TV?" Sweetie, that's not going to be one of the things I budge on, but maybe here's something we could do instead.
But just asking your kid that question and not expecting a profound answer. It makes me think, if anyone thought, what if my manager asked me that question? Wouldn't I immediately just feel better about my manager anyway, just from the asking of the question? And I think it's just something so actionable that every time I do it with my kids, I notice their behavior is kind of better for the rest of the week just from that. And I want to give something high impact to anybody who's made it this far in the episode.
I love that. That's like the reverse of this approach to this episode: from the work environment, what can you bring to your kids? And it's like, do a little 360. Ask, what feedback can you give me
on my performance review as a parent this week.
Exactly.
So good.
Okay. With that, Dr. Becky, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. I've got five questions for you. Are you ready?
Yes.
Here we go. What are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people?
I love The Power of Moments. I love The Messy Middle, and I got a lot from Creativity, Inc. as well.
Is there a recent movie or TV show you have really enjoyed?
I really liked Secrets We Keep, which was actually recommended to me by our product leader, on Netflix. And I really loved KPop Demon Hunters so much. I wrote a whole guide on it, because I think it's just such an opener for really good, deep, connected moments with our kids. And so those two come to mind.
Is there a product you recently discovered that you really like? Could be an app, could be clothing, could be a gadget.
I started doing Liberty puzzles. Some people have heard of Stave. This is Liberty. They're thick wooden puzzles where they're kind of hand-cut pieces. You never know what's an edge. Sometimes the colors that connect are kind of the end of one color and start of another. So they're tricky, but having this out at night, number one, I find puzzling is something where you have to monotask. You truly cannot multitask. And I find it so hard for me to monotask these days, even though it gives me such grounded energy. So that allows that. And it's something, yes, with my kids, but oddly enough, me and
my husband will find ourselves doing it together at night versus like being on the couch doing work. And I feel like we're in the same world working on something together. And it's been really fun for that as well.
My kid has been really into puzzles recently. We have this manora puzzle that we got and he's just every bedtime he wants to do it like four times.
Finishes it again. He speaks Spanish because his grandma speaks Spanish to him. So he's like unh love puzzles
and I love that he's just like break it apart. Okay, let's start from the beginning.
Amazing.
Yeah, puzzles are fun. Okay. Two more questions. Do you have a favorite life motto that you find useful in work or in life?
This feels hard because it is hard, not because I'm doing something wrong. I just think this is so true in parenting, at work. Like it's so interesting how often something is hard and we tell ourselves the story that we're stupid or we're not good at it and there's something so simple about reminding myself, no, like this feels hard because it is hard. Like I'm feeling this moment, right? It's just hard. And I find that I always feel my feet on the ground again when I tell myself that.
Great segue to our final question. So, you're building a product, building a company as a non-product person. What's something that surprised you about the experience of building a product and building a company?
It's funny. I'm hesitating only because I'm thinking of something and I'll say it, but I'm like, why did that surprise me? It should be so obvious. But I guess it's true that a company is just people. And before I started this company, I was in private practice, you know, seeing people for therapy. And I feel like those skills are remarkably useful as a leader of a company where there's so many things I can't do. You know, you're not gonna ask me to financially model or, you know, data analytics, but I feel like there's really strong people who can do that. But I believe that understanding people or just having the skill of attempting to understand people is a surprisingly but I guess also retrospectively obvious really good leadership skill.
Dr. Becky, this was incredible. It's such an honor to have you on. I just see you everywhere all the time. Have learned so much from you and what a treat to have you on this podcast. People are like what the hell is going on here? I learned a ton myself and I know people will too. Two final questions. Where can folks find you? Good Inside, your book. Anything else you want to share? And then just how can listeners be useful to you?
Oh yeah, just goodinside.com and you can find our product there. You can find all the books that I've written there. You can find our newsletter if you're just like curious to start, you know, start there. All of it's at goodinside.com. I really do love feedback. So if you're there, if you're thinking, hey, you know, I'm in your app and I wish you did this. I mean, your listeners are such a treasure trove of brilliant product marketing, you know, just thoughts that I can never have myself. And we're really trying to build something that makes a parent always exhale and feel a little more capable. And parents have the best information of how to do that. So being willing to share feedback and ideas, you know, anyone can reach out to me on DM or you know you can email officeside.com but that's a way to help. I love learning from other people.
Awesome. Dr. Becky, thank you so much for being here.
Thank you.
Bye everyone.
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