As far as dealing with self-doubt goes, the answer itself is simple but the process is difficult. You have to be slightl

litary. I can’t count the number of times he said these words to me when I was a kid. Regardless of the warnings, like a lot of people, I still spend an extreme amount of time in my head either ruminating over past decisions or worrying about future ones.

It’s not a perfect system, and my kids still act like monsters, but I can see them thinking through their actions more closely now. Yesterday, my youngest was needling at her brother’s last nerve, and my oldest kiddo walked over to her and said, “Hey, how would you feel if he kept jumping on your legs and yelling your name really loud?” She was too young to rational this, but in a parenting win for me, I was proud to see that my oldest, my eye-rolling, knows-everything-about-everything-Mr-attitude tween, was trying to teach his little sister the lessons that I have been trying to teach him.

I recently started a new job, and I’m in that phase where I’m constantly bombarded with new and unfamiliar concepts, from company vocabulary to industry know-how. The learning curve is steep. At every meeting, I take furious notes, trying to soak in as much information as possible.

Thinking about doing the thing never removes the fear of doing the thing, only doing the thing does. The more you intellectualize, the more you hesitate, the harder it is to do it. I hate that ‘just do it’ is the answer, but it’s the truth.

I can’t tell you how many talks, books, audios, etc, I’ve played on a loop over and over and over again. There was a point in my life where I had headphones in my ear the vast majority of the day, listening to something positive.

But the thing is, there was nothing right to say at that moment. My kid needed to take steps toward accountability and not depend on me to permit him to skirt the growing problem. I genuinely was sick and tired of intervening in my children’s drama, and it was time for me to correct my lazy parenting and hold them answerable for their own crappy choices.

And so I came up with a framework to capture these different notes and thoughts in a way that allows me to easily return to them later on. I call it the Four Mind Banks system.

When my kids act out, I tell them that they need to change their behavior, not say the right words to appease the offended. But that isn’t enough; they have to sit with me and talk through how they will change their behavior. I listen. They have to talk about how their actions made another person feel. I listen. They have to tell me how they would feel if someone acted out similarly toward them. I listen.

For a while, I tried the bullet journal system of note-taking, in which you use icons to label the nature of every single bullet point you write down. While it’s a creative way to mark your thoughts, I found that it becomes difficult to quickly label all the different patterns when you’re faced with heaps of new information. People talk fast. Slides move from one to the next at lightning speed. You don’t have time for labels — you’re simply trying to keep up.

You brainwash yourself, have these conversations in your head trying to convince yourself that you’re somehow different, and then you do the work. You do the work because the work is the only antidote to fear.

How it works: Create four “mind banks” in your notes. You can either divide a sheet of paper into four quadrants or divide your notebook into four sections. (If you go with the latter, it helps to add tabs to your notebook so you can swiftly switch from section to section.) Every note you take goes into one of the banks:

“I do not accept your apology, but I will accept changed behavior, now tell me what you plan to do.” These are the words that I find myself saying lately. The idle apologies that are more performative than teachable moments are no longer acceptable here, and my kids know it.

“But Mom! You’re supposed to accept my apology because you’re the MOM, Mom!” His confusion that I stepped out of this dance said it all. I was part of the problem, and I was refusing to do my part.

There are many naysayers and people who will try to pull you back into the barrel. Don’t share your dreams with them out loud and find ways to counteract the negativity in the world.

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As far as dealing with self-doubt goes, the answer itself is simple but the process is difficult. You have to be slightl

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