Blog – Page 26 – Dr. Paul Jenkins

Jan 16

How Do You Handle Aggressive Child Behavior Toward A Parent?

By DrPaul M-Power

Vicki: Paul and I are going to take on the topic How to Handle An Aggressive Child Toward a Parent with an acronym. The word is CHILL. Calm your own emotional response, model what that calmness looks like for them. Paul: That's such a powerful learning tool. What you show them is huge. Vicki: You know, it's so funny but a lot of times you have to just kind of think about your face. "Is my face calm? Okay, I'm going to calm." Let down your shoulders, that sort of thing. So, get good at calming your own self. Maybe even taking a big breath letting it out. Paul: You know I had Nicholeen Peck come and do a couple of episodes of Live On Purpose TV on YouTube. You can look those up in the playlist on our channel. I love the way Nicholeen puts this. Calm voice, calm…

Jan 15

How To Defend Yourself Against Gaslighting

By DrPaul M-Power

One of our viewers recently asked, "Dr. Paul, how do you defend yourself against gaslighting?" I didn't even know what that was to start with. I'll define it for you and give you some clear steps so that you don't get stuck. The term gas lighting comes from a movie that was created back in the 40’s where a man was manipulating this woman in some very subtle psychological ways. Every time that he did certain things, he would adjust the intensity of the gaslights. So that's where the term comes from. Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation where the perpetrator of the manipulation is trying to get the other person to feel like they are crazy or to doubt their own sanity or judgment or perceptions. Sounds fun, right? It's not fun. When you are on the receiving end of the gaslighting, you start to wonder if you…

Jan 14

Best Books for Entrepreneurs

By DrPaul M-Power

In much of my coaching, I get to work with entrepreneurs. People like you who want to make a difference. Today, I'll cover my tips for the top 10 books for entrepreneurs. You might know I have written a book, Pathological Positivity. I'm not going to put it on the list because it was too hard to narrow it down anyway. Honestly, it starts with your mindset and my book deals with that. If you want to read it, I will help you to get it by giving it to you for free, if you will just pay the shipping. Go to drpauljenkins.com. This book tells you more about my journey and how I learned about everything that I share here on the channel. I want to share that with you, so, I will throw that out first. This, I think is the starting place for changing your mindset about…

Jan 13

6 Strategies To Control My Temper With My Child

By DrPaul M-Power

People Before ProblemsRelationships Before RulesValues Before ValuablesMaking Memories Before MessesBabies Before BusinessHumor Before Hassle Paul: It's not the first time we've taken this one on, Vicki. How often does this come up for us? Vicki: All the time, I think. Paul: We get requests. We get comments. We get people asking all the time "How do I control my temper?" Vicki: Yes. Because parenting is such an emotionally charged and important thing we do and so when we lose our temper, well, nobody really wants to do that. They don't want to be the parent with a bad temper. So, let's give parents some steps. Paul: People before problems. One of my colleagues told me recently, "Paul, every problem that we face is a problem with thinking," Vicki: Okay. Paul: Now, he's a psychologist so of course he's going to go that direction. But you know what? As I've thought…

Jan 10

How to Get Toddler to Stop Hitting

By DrPaul M-Power

Lori Petro has a channel on YouTube called, Teach Through Love, and she is doing some really great things with parenting. Lori is a mom and a blogger who takes questions from her audience like we do at Live On Purpose TV. Lori has a video up about how to get toddlers to stop hitting. I've got some ideas about that as well and I love what Lori said in her video about how hitting is age typical. Now I'm going to say age typical rather than age appropriate which is another term that you'll hear sometimes. It's an age typical behavior for toddlers, they do it, it's common. Now that doesn't mean that it's adaptive or it's what we want so obviously we are going to do some things to see if we can get that to stop. If you keep in mind that it's age typical though, it's…

Jan 08

How to Deal with a Stubborn Child

By DrPaul M-Power

I love getting requests from our YouTube viewers on topics to cover and this topic came from one of our viewers. How to deal with a stubborn child? I have 5 positive parenting tips to help you with a stubborn child. The number one tip number is stay calm. Don't allow the child's mood to control yours. Keep breathing. It's really important for us as parents to be in charge of our own emotional stuff. Kids are really not very good at regulating emotion, especially young kids and they get tipped over by the smallest things. When we control our emotions we are in a more powerful position as a parent. The quickest way to get there is to make sure that you keep breathing. I know you breathe all the time. There is a little trick to breathing that helps us to regulate our own emotion. Breathe in through…

Jan 06

How to Calm Down a Hyper Child

By DrPaul M-Power

Many parents have asked me for tricks to calm down a hyper child. I don’t have any tricks, but I've got five specific ideas that I think are going to help. The first tip is not going to surprise you at all. You get to be the example of calm and peaceful and centered and mindful. Is that too much pressure? What you do speaks so much louder than what you say. Find ways to show up as that calm parent. I am sure you have noticed that when our kids get a little out of control sometimes that tips us over also. Most of the comments I get on my YouTube channel ask how do I stay calm when my kids are out of control? I will put a link down below to one of the videos in case you want to check it out or any others on…

Jan 05

How To Help A Teenager With Anxiety

By DrPaul M-Power

Paul: Vicki, we've had a lot of parents asking us how to help a teenager with anxiety. So, let's jump into that today. We've done a number of videos on our channel at Live On Purpose TV on YouTube about anxiety and what causes it. The short version, your brain loves you. It's true. Your brain does not want you to be in danger or to experience any kind of threat because well that wouldn't be good for your brain. So, it tries to take care of you. And the way that it does that is through the fight-or-flight response. This fight-or-flight response is what we subjectively experience as anxiety. It's where the feelings come from. This is a normal thing that your brain does. And it happens to everybody. Kids, teenagers, adults, everybody has this mechanism built-in. So, maybe the first thing is let's normalize the experience a little…

Jan 04

How to Parent a Child with ADHD

By DrPaul M-Power

ADHD tends to be a very complicated constellation of symptoms. There's no blood test that we can give to examine whether your child has ADHD. It's really a diagnosis that is based on symptoms and what we observe in children. The funny thing is when you look through the system list, all of them are things that most children do at least occasionally to some level. So, when we make a diagnosis of ADHD, it's because many of these symptoms are appearing at a level that is higher than we would expect from most kids. Having said that, I think we over diagnose of it in our society, and there are cases that we miss. But either way it's a challenging constellation of behaviors. Now, this article is not intended to be diagnostic. If you are a parent of a child with ADHD or if you suspect that or if…

Jan 03

How to Deal With Toxic Family Members

By DrPaul M-Power

Toxic. That brings to mind poisonous, right? Time to call poison control? I went on the internet and did a little search for how to deal with poison or toxin. As we talk about toxic family members, I think that there's some overlap here that might be helpful. 3 different strategies or approaches. So, let's just say that you've been exposed to something toxic. Sometimes, when we're out hiking we might brush up against some stinging nettle or some poison ivy. Those are toxic plants and they cause a sting. At this first level of intervention, let's talk about how to rinse, cleanse and dilute or diffuse. This is what you would want to do if you run across some stinging nettle. For example, you want to rinse it off or somehow cleanse the exposed area to minimize the initial effects of the toxic exposure. In a relationship setting, the…