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Ashley Seling is a Conscious Parenting Coach and a Certified Positive Discipline Educator. She's helped hundreds of moms become calm and confident in stressful parenting situations through her Tantrums to Tranquil method.  She's been working with Jenine and Heather to help them keep their sanity while raising their kids and running a business! 

In this episode, they cover the basics of parent coaching as well as how it works in conjunction with therapy.  This is Part 1 of Part 2.

Links:

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Follow Ashley on Instagram and Facebook, and learn how to work with her here.

Transcript:

Jenine Kenna: Hey, Ashley, Heather and I are so excited to have you here on the Kindhearted Badass Show.

Ashley Selling: Yay. I'm so happy to be here. Thanks for having me. 

Jenine Kenna: Thank you for joining us. So, all right. Tell us, because I am sure that plenty of the other bad-ass is out there listening to this or feeling the same way I did the first time I heard what you do and you are a parenting coach, right? 

Ashley Selling: Yes, I am a more specifically a conscious parenting coach or positive parenting coach.

Ashley Selling: And what that means is I really help parents make calm a reality in their home, like for real. And we take out a lot of the punitive punishments that we were probably raised with. So taking, taking the shame, blame and threats out of parenting so that there can be mutual respect between parent and child.

Ashley Selling: And that ultimately as a parenting coach is what I help parents achieve. 

Jenine Kenna: That is awesome. I love that so much because I definitely came from a background of yelling and spanking and. Timeouts and punished and grounding. And I try really hard not to do that with my kids, but it's crazy because so many people are like, you know, you should spank them.

Jenine Kenna: You know, they really need time out, you know, he really should be punished for that. And I'm like, yeah, no, I don't think so. So it's great to know that there are other people out there that have the same ideas as I do. And I'm certainly not trying to be all judgy on anybody else. But if you're somebody who feels uncomfortable with how this conversation has gone so far, I challenge you to keep listening and learn something.

Jenine Kenna: And if not, then 

Heather Compton: that's okay. 

Ashley Selling: Yeah, great point on that, because I think a lot of people from our generation, they were raised that way with the yelling and the spanking. So they might not know anything else. And if they don't it's okay. It's oftentimes spanking is used as a last resort because parents just don't know what the heck else to do.

Ashley Selling: So that's where I come in and show tools and things that people can use instead of spanking. Cause it, it doesn't feel good. Right? Like yelling and spanking as a parent or as a child, doesn't really feel good for anybody 

Heather Compton: involved. 

Jenine Kenna: Yeah. And that's exactly the lens that I've, I try and of course I'm not perfect.

Jenine Kenna: Nobody is like, we all screw up sometimes, but that, that is the lens I try to look for. Like, as I'm disciplining my children, I try to think like, does this feel good? Does it feel right? Because if it doesn't feel right for me, it probably doesn't feel right for them either. And then why are we doing 

Heather Compton: this right.

Heather Compton: Okay, but on the totally opposite end of that, I was a yeller. So Hey listeners, I tether I'm here today. I'm normally not here. Um, but Ashley is my personal parenting coach. I work one-on-one with her. And before working, when I was her, I was the yeller. I was this banker. I was all of the things that I was raised as not because it felt good, not because I was like, this feels great, but because I had nothing else to model after, and it becomes just, you do what you saw, right.

Heather Compton: You look at yourself and you're like, well, I'm not that screwed up. So maybe that actually does work because you don't know anything else. Absolutely. Absolutely. So if you are a yeller and a spanker guys, I was too don't. I think that your pieces of crap. 

Jenine Kenna: No, absolutely. I'm forgive me if I, if I said anything that made it sound that way, that is not the way I meant it.

Jenine Kenna: And I apologize because obviously Heather is my favorite. Well, one of my favorite people in the world, my favorite grown woman in the hall, I feel like we have to come with qualifiers because there's so many of our husbands and our kids might get upset if we had favorite people and 

Heather Compton: no more 

Jenine Kenna: speaking of husbands and kids, we're going to dive into all of the nitty-gritty of what all of this calm parenting coaching stuff is because I too am working with Ashley, although I just started.

Jenine Kenna: So we haven't even had our first session, but I am really excited. And just from your videos, I've learned so much already, but I'm digressing again. Ashley, tell us who you are as a person, besides being a parenting coach. Tell us all about Ashley's selling 

Heather Compton: and what it means to be here. 

Ashley Selling: Yeah. So I have two kids of my own.

Ashley Selling: They are four and six, almost five and seven. That's crazy to think about I'm from Southern California. And about three years ago moved to Northern Idaho with my family. And I love being outdoors. I try to be as adventurous as I can. Hiking, snowboarding, um, floating the river, playing in the lake boating days are my favorite.

Ashley Selling: And yeah, that's like my Mo outside of work is I like to be outside. And

Ashley Selling: I like to go playing with my kids and create, you know, fun memories, not just for my kids, but for myself so that I can feel fulfilled as a mom and as a person outside of my identity 

Heather Compton: as being a mom. 

Jenine Kenna: Yes. Yes. Oh my God. Anybody who's looking at any one of these episodes, any one of these podcasts or has ever interacted with me at all?

Jenine Kenna: Knows how much I love what you just said, because it is so important for us as moms and dads, dads too. But like, as parents to remember that we're people too, and what we want, what we need matters, not just what our kids want to need. So I love that. That was awesome. All right. So let's get back into it.

Jenine Kenna: Heather, can you tell us a little bit about, like, how was, what attracted you to Ashley? What made you be like, oh, I, I think, you know, a 

Heather Compton: parenting and coaches the right route 

Jenine Kenna: for me, because I know we, when we talked about it, like we were both like parenting coaching, um, you know, a little 

Heather Compton: skeptical, well, I didn't, uh, so Ashley and I met in a mastermind group, um, Mastermind groups.

Heather Compton: Obviously, if you know anything about kind of heard of bass are near and dear to my heart, we run them. We love them. They're are passionate about them. And I joined them because I love them. And so Ashley and I met in a mastermind group, a business mastermind group, and I had never really even heard of parenting coaching before I met her there.

Heather Compton: So I think like today, I really want you Ashley to kind of talk about that, that like parenting coaching is even a thing because I didn't really understand that there was help available to me. And how I ended up working with her is in, it was like six o'clock at night. My kids were screaming. I was trying to cook her dinner a really hard time in our household.

Heather Compton: In general, everybody was going wild. Ashley put an offer. I was standing there scrolling. Trying to like drown out the craziness around me and her offer popped up on my feed and I got my credit card and I swiped, I was like, I need some help. I was like, in a moment of desperation, I was like, just take my money and fix my life.

Heather Compton: Please, please help me with these children. And so it was truly like, I don't know what to do. This is crazy town up in here and this girl says she can help me. So please try to help me. And so that's how we started working together. And I joined her program called misbehavior make-over, which was like a three week group program.

Heather Compton: But after like 10 days or something, I was like, how can I just talk to you by myself? Because I have bigger problems in this program. I think, I don't know that this is going to do it for me. And so I signed up for one-on-one pretty quickly. Just because I know myself and I knew I needed extra help them that, but once they started working together, there have been calls where I've just showed up in tears, talking to her and been like, I have no idea what I'm doing.

Heather Compton: And then there are calls, you know, where I come and I'm like, I killed it this week. We did awesome. We made all this progress and it's, uh, it's just like everything else in life. It's like a up and down, up and down. So like the next Monday is going to not going to be one of those kill it ones. That's where we're at.

Heather Compton: We're in a rough season again right now. But I think the most amazing thing for me in hiring Ashley is that I feel like I have a safety net now. So I know when I'm having one of these weeks where I'm like, oh my God, I just, I can't do it. I'm never going to feed my children again because I just, can't not deal with this.

Heather Compton: I know I have somewhere to go for help with. Now which before I would have just kept ignoring it or kept yelling or kept punishing over not eating the food. And I would have never had any usable solutions. 

Ashley Selling: I love that you pointed out that you are in a moment of desperation because I often think that that's what it takes for people to say yes, to getting parenting support.

Ashley Selling: It doesn't have to be that way. There's certainly people that have reached out without being in that desperation point. But I think it takes that to know that there is help available. So you mentioned that you wanted to talk about that, that parenting help is even available. And I think when people struggle with their family relationships, their first go to is therapy.

Ashley Selling: I love therapy. I've been to therapy. I do therapy. I think it's great. However, it's so different than parent coaching. 

Ashley Selling: It's so different. Like you cannot compare therapy with parent coaching. 

Jenine Kenna: Hey badass Jenine here. And I just wanted to interrupt this episode for just a moment to make sure that you are hanging out with us over in our free Facebook group, the KindHearted Badass community. 

Jenine Kenna: You can find it by going to facebook.com/groups/khbcommunity. See you there! 

Jenine Kenna: Now let's get back to this awesome show.

Ashley Selling: It's so different. Like you cannot compare therapy with parent coaching. 

Heather Compton: Tell me how, how is it different?

Ashley Selling: from my own personal experience of going to therapy, it's very broad, right? 

Ashley Selling: And therapists are amazing holders of energy, of problems of situations that you need to get out. And I think when you're going to therapy that the purpose of therapy is to digress and really look at past history of why things might be happening.

Ashley Selling: And although I do do that in my parent coaching, it's also coupled with. Strategies, like we get down and dirty with all of the strategies. If something doesn't work, we are going to find what does work so that you can get closer to the outcome that you want. And I hope this isn't coming across that I'm bashing on therapy because I love therapy myself, but it's just different.

Ashley Selling: There's there's not the action oriented in therapy as there is in coaching overall. 

Heather Compton: Yeah, I agree. Cause I've had my children in therapy and I have been in therapy. And now obviously I'm your client, a coaching client. And there is a place for, for therapy for both the parent and the child. But I don't need therapy with my child.

Heather Compton: A lot of times it's just the therapist and the child working things out together. And I never even know what has happened in that session. And so. Those sessions feeling like I know exactly what I'm supposed to do. Exactly. You know? 

Jenine Kenna: Yeah, exactly. That's something I've seen, like just as in coaching, our Kindhearted Badass mastermind, uh, cohorts and in my own personal, uh, coaching sessions with my clients and like also comparing to my many years of therapy as well, and working with my own coach.

Jenine Kenna: It's like, that's something I learned too, is that, you know, cause this comes up all the time, like therapy is, it's very much about healing. Something that you are still working through from your past and where coaching is more about like actionable steps to help you achieve the goals that you want right now, or like in the foreseeable future.

Jenine Kenna: I think that's a, that's a really important distinction because I mean, they're both equally 

Heather Compton: wonderful and different. 

Ashley Selling: Right, right. And I think too, that. At least with my programs of what I offer, I take it a step further. And I do look at parenting triggers. I look at children's triggers. So Heather was mentioning misbehavior make-over misbehavior make-over is all about understanding a child's subconscious emotional needs, like what is really triggering a child to act out.

Ashley Selling: So I don't know if every parent coaches like that, but I do go a bit deeper to understand the emotional side, because I think some of that has to be cleared out before any true progress can be made. Right? Like if, if I'm parenting from a very unhealed place, I'm going to be parenting different versus I'm healing and working on my personal parenting triggers and parenting from that place as I'm healing myself.

Ashley Selling: So I definitely think like healing is an important aspect to parenting in general. And, um, that's just one thing that actually might be one of my absolute favorite things of what I do, because when I have gone to therapy myself, there isn't anything specifically focused on parenting specifically, right?

Ashley Selling: I mean maybe my life as a whole and as a child, but not specific to parenting. So. I think overall, like the biggest difference in therapy versus coaching is that no matter the type of coach, if you join kindhearted, bad-ass mastermind, you are focused on that one dream and getting coached to take actions, imperfect actions to get there.

Ashley Selling: And it's just the same in parent coaching. Like we're going to get down and we're going to get dirty and we're going to focus on your goals and also heal the things around your parenting that are keeping you stuck in the pattern 

Heather Compton: that you're stuck 

in. 

Jenine Kenna: Right? Yeah, I think, yeah. Coaching is definitely much more of a narrower scope of.

Jenine Kenna: What you're talking about. Yeah, absolutely. So 

Heather Compton: I got to say, like, while I 

Jenine Kenna: met you through Heather, of course, I came to you very much in the same way. Like I was like, oh, misbehavior make, I saw all the progress that Heather was making with you. And I know Heather's boys and I love them dearly. And I know obviously the struggles and the challenges that Heather faces, parenting them as we all have challenges and struggles with our children.

Jenine Kenna: And I was very well aware of mine. So she's like talk to Ashley when I was like my five and a half year old is still sleeping in my bedroom at a can't take it anymore. And she's tired and I'm tired and I don't know what to do. And we had spent, I had joined misbehavior make-over and then we had spent one night trying, she had done one night great in her room.

Jenine Kenna: And we tried a second night and. And it was an hour of crying. Me and my bedroom crying her in her bedroom, crying before I was finally like, this feels horrible. I'm not doing it anymore. And then you had messaged me the next day and it was like the stars aligned. And I was like, okay, let's just do the one-on-one I I'll, I'm working through misbehavior make-over I had just started watching the videos and about the triggers and they are amazing, like literally that night I was able to employ some of the, um, strategies that you talked about in your videos.

Jenine Kenna: And it was like, I mean, even my husband looked at me goes, how'd you do that? I was like, college is paying for herself all ready at our first session yet. That is how good Ashley is. So if anyone keep listening, because I promised by the end of the step, you will not be. 

Heather Compton: I love your, I 

Jenine Kenna: really, I think we all, all three of us, at least like, we really want to 

Heather Compton: make it more.

Heather Compton: Uh, what's the right 

Jenine Kenna: word, like ready, virtually available. Like more people should know that getting a 

Heather Compton: parenting coaches, it's totally, 

Jenine Kenna: first of all, that it even exists. And second of all, that it is a realistic viable option. And that you're not supposed to know how to do all of this stuff, especially if you know, like me and how they're you didn't necessarily come from like the picture perfect home, you know?

Jenine Kenna: So I think really important to help everybody see that there is help available. It's it's pretty easily accessible and it's okay to ask for help, 

Heather Compton: like it's normal, right? 

Ashley Selling: Yup. I think there's so much guilt that comes inevitably wrapped into motherhood and parenting, and it can feel really scary asking for help because 

Heather Compton: it's.

Heather Compton: Well, I should know how to do this. Yes. 

Ashley Selling: Especially for those like super ambitious moms or like people that are really achievement oriented. It's like, I should know how to do this. I can figure this out, but why, why struggling silence? When you can get a little bit of help and just like, bam, Janine, like you just said, we haven't even had our first session yet and you're already seeing some improvements.

Ashley Selling: Like 

Heather Compton: it was 

Jenine Kenna: like, all right. So I have to share the story now because I'm sure everybody listening is going like, well, what was it? Cause they want to know too. So it actually, is it all right if I share it with everybody? So, okay. So one of our, one of my biggest struggles is bedtime. Now Shay is 500. She's been sleeping and mine and David's bedroom.

Jenine Kenna: How about a year or so? I don't know when it started. I think it might've been one of the times I went to visit Heather in St. Louis and she was in our room and then I came back and I'm like, okay, stay in our room again. And then there was a thunderstorm and it was okay to stay in our room again. And next thing we know it's a year later, granted she's on her own mattress.

Jenine Kenna: At least she's not in our bed, but she's still in our room, which things anyway, bedtime has always been one of our biggest struggles, uh, and Shay at five and a half is thankfully perfectly capable of changing into her pajamas herself, but she doesn't want to, she likes to be the damsel in distress, especially when daddy's around and I need help and please help me and well sometimes resort to kicking and screaming and throwing herself on the floor.

Jenine Kenna: And this night it was just a couple of nights ago. I was like, she was arguing and she wouldn't put up pajamas on and I said, Hey. How has your fast, you can do it. And then tomorrow I'm going to see if you can beat your time. And I set the timer and 

Heather Compton: she was all about 

Jenine Kenna: it. And like I said, David was looking at me like, damn, that's amazing.

Jenine Kenna: And I'm like, why didn't I think of that? Because you're not supposed to know these things. If you don't know these things and it's, I'm so grateful for you 

Heather Compton: already. And we don't think about it because we're stuck. We're stuck in that. Just put your pajamas on, just put your freaking pajamas on like, as a parent, we're like, I don't, I don't get it.

Heather Compton: Why can't you just put the pajamas on? So like we're stuck in our own emotions because we're humans and then the kid is stuck in their own emotions. And then you're like everybody, that's just what you feel like, that's what we feel. And so if you don't have someone to come in and be like, who's not like in the moment and can give you a strategy.

Heather Compton: So you don't get to that place. Like you just get stuck. And there's. I just mean I, until someone comes and says, like, that's normal, there's nothing wrong with you. You're not a shitty mom because you get stuck in those moments and you don't know what to do because you're frustrated. Like you just think you suck at parenting.

Ashley Selling: Yeah. Yeah. That's the go-to thought like, oh, well I'm, if my child isn't listening to me, they can't even put on their freaking DJs. 

Heather Compton: Like 

Ashley Selling: I can't even 

Heather Compton: get my, get it put on their PJ's what the hell? 

Jenine Kenna: Yeah. What am I doing wrong? What is wrong with me? I'm the worst mom in the world. Now she's crying, I'm crying.

Jenine Kenna: And my husband's angry. My son is walking across that. My teenage son is welcome. Cross-selling what is going on in here? Because everybody's crying.

Jenine Kenna: Yes. Printer. And it's like, these are the most, they seem like the most simple, easy things. And. It's not that simple and that easy. And that's where Ashley comes in. So Ashley, I'm sure that Heather and I are not, you know, outliers by any stretch of the imagination. Can you share with us some of the things that you've come across, like repeatedly, or that you would say that this is something most parents struggle with 

Heather Compton: then?

Ashley Selling: Yeah, I think, you know, I'm always surprised by comments. So common situations, dinner time, sleeping arrangements. And I'm always so surprised at sleeping arrangements because it's, 

Heather Compton: it's 

Ashley Selling: like people are just suffering in silence over it. They're like, oh, this is just how life is now 

Heather Compton: my kids. 

Ashley Selling: And there's something wrong with you first.

Ashley Selling: And. It can be so much better. It can be so much better because you probably aren't getting the best sleep, your child, isn't getting the best sleep and, you know, ha that's something Heather and I were working on as well. So, and I just, I just wrapped up with another client. Like we spent six entire weeks only talking about sleep and, and getting her little one to sleep in their own bed.

Ashley Selling: So sleeping dinner times, morning routines, um, tantrum. Really the nitty gritty of managing tantrums. Parents not losing their cool in the middle of a tantrum. I'm like, I know, right. It takes 

Heather Compton: practice. It can be done. Cause that's what I came to Ashley for was tantrums. I call it hulking out my middle son.

Heather Compton: He would just like become the Hulk. And then he was just uncontrollable and just breaking things and wild and that. So that's what we worked on first. And we, I mean, we have made crazy progress in his behavior in, I don't know how long have we been together now? Three months, maybe a two and a half months.

Heather Compton: Um, and we've we worked on tantrums first. When we got that under control, we moved on to sleep. Now my five-year-old is no longer in my bed. So we've worked through that and now we're working on food and two and a half months, like those are three major things in our, and we don't have to down yet. We're still working on that, but those other two have pretty much been handled and we have like a good system around them now.

Heather Compton: And in two and a half months is a pretty short amount of time if you really think about it. Yeah. 

Ashley Selling: And I think too, um, something that people may not realize 

Heather Compton: is how much parenting 

Ashley Selling: affects other areas of our lives. So I take a pretty holistic approach to parenting in general, I think. And if, if we're feeling really unsatisfied with how we're parenting, that's, it's going to affect our health because we're stressed, we're anxious.

Ashley Selling: It's going to affect our marriage. I'm just going to say it. If we're not parenting the same way or in alignment with our spouse, that is going to cause tension. And it's all coming back down to parenting because there's no alignment. Um, it affects like our relationships. It affects our willingness to go out and hang out with other families because we're scared that our kid is going to go throw a tantrum and we're not going to know how to handle it.

Ashley Selling: And then that's going to be embarrassing as all get out. So just not going is the better answer than managing a tantrum in public because we're scared of that. So relationships help marriage, like it just parenting just affects everything in our lives. And I'm just so passionate about helping people see that so that they can make it better for themselves because it really, in the moment it might feel hard, but future, you will look back and say, wow, I'm so glad that I did that because now it's so much easier.

Ashley Selling: Like Heather, I know how much easier even when your middle son does Hoke out, like, you know exactly what you need to do 

Heather Compton: 99%. And I don't lose my own temper anymore about it. I don't spiral out of control about it. So even that's like the biggest takeaway I've had from working with Ashley is that regardless of what is happening with my children anymore, I know that I can stay regulated through it.

Heather Compton: So then it's not even if he does have one of those full, crazy hope tantrums, which doesn't happen very often anymore. Um, I know that it's not going to ruin my whole week. It's not going to like derail our entire household. We might need to deal with it for 20 minutes and then we'll go back to normal, which is not how it was before that his hoking out could have sent me in a spiral for three days.

Ashley Selling: And that overall affects your health, your happiness, like the level of performance performance might not be the best word, but that's, what's coming to mind in your business, like how you're just operating in life. That three 

Heather Compton: day 

Ashley Selling: spiral from one tantrum. 

Heather Compton: It's not worth it for anybody. 

Jenine Kenna: I wish I wish the people listening could see the zoom call right now.

Jenine Kenna: And as we're all sitting here as each one of us is talking and the other two are constantly nodding, like, yes, yes. You're talking. Yes. Yes it does. It's it's, you know, one of our tenants of being a Carhartt at bad-ass is that we believe in this integration, that every part of our lives are integrated with every other part.

Jenine Kenna: Like that whole work-life balance thing is, is not in sense. Like you can't separate the two, like at least Heather and I certainly can't like our businesses, our life, our best friend is our business 

Heather Compton: partner. Like our, our 

Jenine Kenna: business impacts our family. Our family impacts our business. Like there have been many times where one of us has called the other over the last couple of years and been like, 

Heather Compton: the kids just did this and I'm done.

And 

Jenine Kenna: I will talk to 

Heather Compton: you in two days because 

Jenine Kenna: I can't. And we're like, okay, And, and like, you know, I'm just so excited to hear. I can't, I'm just going to, I all right. Everybody who's listening. I promise we're recording this and like early, well, I guess mid may, I'm not sure 

Heather Compton: exactly 

Jenine Kenna: what date this is going to air, but we're recording and mid may.

Jenine Kenna: So Ashley and I will have our successions and I will, if maybe Ashley will come back on with us, if she that'd be great. So Lily we'll have an Ashley back on, in about two months or so. So we can give you an update on how my coaching went and how Heather is progressing with hers. 

Heather Compton: And there you go. I mean like, think about a Janine.

Heather Compton: How, how many times in the last two and a half months since I've been working with Ashley, have I had the good total meltdown about the kids and be like, I can not show up. Not once. It's true. Like I, and I used to be like, my kids are driving me crazy. I can't, I can't even get on this call with you right now because I'm freaked out and it just doesn't happen anymore because I am able to regulate myself around what's happening with my kids. 

Ashley Selling: That gives me chills. I'm so proud of you, Heather.

Jenine Kenna: And I can't wait for you to tell me that in six weeks,

Heather Compton: it really is. It's life changing. When you can like feel in control of yourself. I don't feel in control of my children. They're humans. I can't control them, but I feel in control of myself around what's happening with my children now. And that's all you can really ask for, I guess, cause truly I'm never going to be able to control my children.

Heather Compton: They're humans with their own brains, learn and do what they want to do. 

Ashley Selling: Yeah. And that is such a gold realization. Heather. I don't know if you realize that is a goal realization that you know, that because I see so many parents get caught in this pattern that they want to control their child's behavior and really what they're looking for isn't control of their child's behavior. It's control of their own emotions, the parent's own emotions, so that they're not overreacting to whatever crazy thing their kid is doing. Because let me tell you, my kids do crazy things. And as a parenting coach, like I have to be on my toes so that I can share my lessons that I learned with my own community.

Ashley Selling: But knowing that the goal is controlling ourselves, not our children. That is a huge breakthrough for anyone listening that's in any of these patterns that we're talking about, having that in truly embodying that realization, that the goal is controlling your own emotions versus controlling your child's actions that can improve your parenting alone.

Ashley Selling: If your wheel really willing to let go of that form of control and tune into how can I better control myself and regulate myself?