Coco,

Today, we'd like you to meet Julie.

Julie is one of the many parents we've had the privilege of coaching. 

When Julie began coaching, she was struggling to understand her teenage daughter with ADHD. She loved her deeply and wanted to help her. But so much of her behavior looked willful.

And honestly, that conclusion made sense.

When our kids are capable of doing something sometimes, it's easy to believe they should be able to do it all the time. When they don't, it can look like they don't want to.

One of the ideas Julie began exploring in coaching was:

Kids do well if they can.

What if, instead of asking, Why won't she? Julie began asking:

What's getting in her way?

It sounds like a simple shift.

It wasn't.

Almost every afternoon, Julie would pick her daughter up from school and, seemingly out of nowhere, her daughter would lay into her.

Criticizing her. Insulting her. Berating her.

Julie would understandably get hooked. She'd defend herself or react to the disrespect; her daughter would react in kind, and suddenly they were at war.

Day after day, the same pattern.

It's one thing to believe kids do well if they can when you're calmly talking about parenting. It's another when you're trapped in a car with a teenager saying hurtful things to you.

This is where Julie began doing the deep internal work.

Coaching gave her a place to step outside the conflict and look at the pattern from a little more distance. Instead of asking, How do I get her to stop talking to me this way? Julie began considering:

What if this isn't really about me?

She didn't know what else was going on. But she was willing to try something different. When her daughter lashed out, Julie practiced taking a breath. She tried not to take the bait, validated what she could, and stayed as regulated as possible.

Most importantly, she resisted the urge to immediately correct, lecture, or defend herself.

Not because it was okay for her daughter to treat her that way, but because Julie was trying to stay curious about what might be underneath it.

And she kept doing it.

For weeks.

She didn't do it perfectly. She got hooked sometimes. But she came back to it and tried again.

Then one afternoon, her daughter got into the car after school and, instead of attacking her mom, she broke down in tears.

She told Julie she was being bullied at school, that she'd been afraid to tell anyone, and then apologized for the way she'd been treating her mom.

Suddenly, it all made sense.

There was something underneath the behavior.

Her daughter was hurting. She had been carrying something at school that she didn't know how to talk about, and that pain had been spilling out with her mom.

Julie had worked hard to stop meeting her daughter's intensity with her own.

And now, her daughter let her in.

Julie contacted the school and got her daughter the support she needed, and the after-school blowups stopped. That alone was huge.

But the biggest transformation was Julie's view of her daughter.

What had looked like willful, hurtful behavior suddenly looked very different. 

Kids do well if they can was no longer just an idea. It became the lens through which Julie began to see her daughter.

And in Julie's own words:

"This changed the adversarial dynamic so we can connect with one another better."

This is one of the reasons coaching can be so powerful.

When we're living inside a problem, we're not neutral observers. We're worried. We're frustrated. Our feelings get hurt. And we're carrying the history of everything that's happened before.

Coaching gives us a place to step outside the struggle—to slow things down, notice patterns, question our assumptions, and have someone reflect what they're seeing without judgment.

Maybe you're living your own version of Julie's car ride.

If you recognize yourself in Julie's story, you don't need to try harder.

You need a place to step outside the struggle and see your situation, or your child, differently.

We've been there. We understand. And we can help. Let's talk and see what we can uncover together.

[Schedule a Complimentary Discovery Call]

Warmly,

Coco & Vicky

Julie is a pseudonym used to protect our client's privacy. Her story and words are shared with permission.