Inner Leadership & The Work of Parenthood

Parenting has been one of my greatest teachers, not because it demands perfection, but because it asks something deeper of me:
inner leadership.
The more years I spend raising my children, the more I realize that almost everything in life eventually comes down to this. The ability to turn toward my own inner world, to meet myself honestly, and to lead myself with steadiness… this is the thread I want to run beneath every choice I make as a mother.

There are days when I feel like I’m falling short. Not in the surface-level ways we often talk about; missing a deadline, fumbling a task, disappointing someone at work. Those failures barely touch the ground for me compared to the fear of failing my children. There is a magnitude to that fear that lives in my bones. If I fail at a business or a project or a plan… I can recover. But failing my kids? That feels like the one responsibility that carries a different kind of weight.

I know people preach not to live for your children or let motherhood define your worth.
But if I’m honest, if everything else in my life faded away and I could say that I was a good mother—someone who truly did her best, with devotion and integrity—I would feel deeply fulfilled. That alone would make my life feel meaningful.

And yet… even with this depth of love, or maybe because of it, I sometimes feel like I’m not enough. Like I’m missing something important. Like I’m stumbling in the most sacred place.

When I really look at those moments—when I peel back the layers—I can see the distortion. It’s as if a strange lens slips over my eyes, warping the way I see myself and my role as a mother. I start imagining that I can prevent every hurt, preempt every disappointment, smooth every jagged edge in their lives. I start believing I can—and should—control their path.

But when I sit with that honestly, I always find the same truth:
Those fears aren’t actually about my kids.
They’re about me.
About the unresolved places in me that still ache. The old wounds that whisper warnings. The moments from my own childhood where pain caught me off guard and I learned to contort myself to stay safe.

And without realizing it, I begin projecting my past into their future.

A student recently gave a perfect metaphor for this. She said it’s like being a sweeper in curling, frantically brushing the ice to clear a perfect path for the stone. That’s what it feels like when my fear takes over: compulsively trying to smooth their way so they don’t hit any bumps, so they don’t feel what I once felt, so their journey looks clean and controlled.

But that isn’t mothering.
It isn’t leadership.
And it isn’t love.

It is fear—unprocessed, unnamed, disguised as devotion.

My job is not to sweep the ice. My job is to walk beside them with enough inner steadiness to let them meet their world honestly. Their challenges. Their disappointments. Their humanity. Because the truth is: life will shape them. Life should shape them. And if I’m trying to engineer their path so they never fall, then I’m not raising resilient humans—I’m raising reflections of my unresolved past.

The real work—the work I keep returning to—is learning to lead myself.

When I notice that my child’s awkward moment with a friend activates terror in me…
When a small disappointment in their day feels like a threat to their entire future…
When a grade, a teacher, a flu, a fleeting struggle sends my body into panic…
I have learned to pause and ask:

What part of me is afraid?
And what does she remember?

Every time I follow that thread inward, I find myself—not my child—at the center of the fear.
My shame. My disappointments. My old stories of achievement and perfection. My belief that failure has catastrophic consequences. My younger self who once believed that the only way to stay safe was to perform well, stay ahead, or stay small.

When I hold her with compassion… my children become clearer to me.
They stop being reflections of my past and return to being themselves—whole, separate, sovereign.

The more I do my own work, the more grounded I become in parenting. When I remember that I can survive my own struggles and rise from them with more wisdom than before, I can finally let my children have theirs. I don’t rush to fix what is not mine. I don’t hover over their path with a broom. I don’t catastrophize their feelings. I don’t collapse when they struggle.

I lead myself.
And in doing so… I learn how to lead them.

This, I’m realizing, is the real heart of parenthood—especially in our generation. We are raising children in a world that is loud, fast, and complex. And the instinct is to respond by tightening, controlling, doing more, giving more, forcing more. But the deeper truth is often the opposite:

When parenting feels overwhelming, it is usually not because I need to lead my children better.
It is because I need to lead myself better.

I need my own clarity.
I need my own grounding.
I need my own emotional steadiness.
I need my own truth.
I need my own self-compassion.

I need to be able to see through my fear so I can actually see them.

Parenthood keeps bringing me back to this:
If I want my children to trust themselves, I must learn to trust myself.
If I want them to meet life with courage, I must meet my own fears with tenderness.
If I want them to know who they are, I must keep returning to who I am.

Inner leadership is not a separate task from parenting.
It is the very foundation of it.

The longer I walk this path, the more I understand that self-leadership isn’t a trait we simply have.
It’s something we learn.
Something we practice.
Something we return to with devotion, especially when we feel overwhelmed or afraid.
I am still learning it myself. Again and again.

These skills have helped me understand my own operating system in a way I never could before: the automatic reactions, the protections, the places where fear used to lead without my awareness. They’ve opened me to parts of myself I didn’t know were available. They’ve shown me that I am not fixed and I am not flawed; I can grow and shift and relate to myself with far more compassion and sovereignty than I ever believed possible.

And even though we call this “coach training,” what we teach reaches into every corner of a person’s life. Most of life is relationship: with ourselves, with our children, with the people we love, with the communities we belong to. These skills cultivate a kind of relational mastery that makes all of that clearer, steadier, and more aligned. In truth, this is human training.

And this is the work at the center of the Mind Rebel Academy:
the quiet, powerful art of leading ourselves with clarity, compassion, and truth.
The kind of leadership that ripples into everything we touch.

P.S. If something in this work is calling to you, not just as a skillset but as a way of being in your life and relationships, our next round of training is now enrolling. Simply reply to this email, and we can set up a time to talk about whether this is the right next step for you.