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Have you ever finished a conversation with someone you love and felt like something did not quite land, even though the words went back and forth and your intentions were good? In this episode, I talk about why the people closest to us sometimes go quiet, what we are actually doing when we think we are listening, and the difference between listening to respond and listening to understand. I share what Carl Rogers and John Gottman discovered about being truly heard, and I give you three simple places to begin practicing a different kind of listening, the kind that keeps a family close through every season. This is learnable. It is a skill, not a personality trait, and you can start today.

If you'd like to get the show notes for this episode, head to:

https://leighgermann.com

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Trust is one of those words we use constantly without ever defining it. In this episode, I break trust down into something simple and buildable: your words and your actions matching, over and over, until your kids come to expect it. I walk through why a vague "maybe later" can register as a broken promise, how we accidentally set traps for ourselves by attaching things we were always going to do to conditions we were never going to hold, and how to hold a line without any punishment in it. I also get into what a trustworthy person actually looks like, why the Two Jobs of Parenting are the architecture underneath trust, what to do when you're the one who dropped the ball, and how to start rebuilding when the person you trust least is yourself. Wherever you're starting from, and whatever age your kids are, it's never too late.

If you'd like to get the show notes for this episode, head to:

https://leighgermann.com

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If you have a child who decides things are ruined before they've even started, you already know that reassurance doesn't work. The more you insist he's doing fine, the harder he argues that he isn't. In this episode I explain why that happens, and why our instinct to talk a discouraged child out of his feelings so often backfires. Then I walk through three research-backed practices that build genuine, lasting confidence, along with what to do in the heat of the moment when your child is already spiraling and nothing you say seems to help. These are small, everyday shifts, and they add up to a child who learns to meet disappointment with resilience instead of despair.

If you'd like to get the show notes for this episode, head to:

https://leighgermann.com