When one of our teens, who shall remain nameless, was 15, my husband Mark and I got a surprising email from another parent we’ll call Maureen. Our teen had decided to go to a concert with Maureen’s daughter, Maddie, and she was writing to let us know that she would be driving.

The problem was that our daughter hadn’t bothered to tell us about her plans with Maddie—because the concert conflicted with an important dinner with our huge extended family.

It wasn’t that our daughter didn’t want to go to the family dinner. She did. She loves her cousins and genuinely looks forward to seeing them. It was that she desperately wanted to go to the concert, too. How could she choose?

“You don’t GET to choose!” was my knee-jerk reaction. Still, she pushed it. “Absolutely not!” I cried. “Family comes before friends! Family is the most important thing!”

Our teenager dug in. The conversation was over on our end, but she didn’t let it go; we heard through Maureen that she’d told Maddie that she was still coming, no matter what we said. We told Maureen that there was no chance (in hell) that she’d be going to that concert, but “thank you so much” anyway.

When our daughter heard that we’d overruled her again through Maureen, she was livid. “It’s MY LIFE,” she seethed. “You can make me go to dinner, but you can’t make me have fun.” And with that, she quietly left the room. Mark and and I looked at each other, wide-eyed. She had a point.

Why teens need control

Our teenager had just fired us as her management team, this time for good. She had had it with our bossy and controlling ways.

Years ago, Mike Riera, author of Uncommon Sense for Parents of Teenagers and an educator I respect a lot, had warned me that this would happen. But, honestly, I just couldn’t imagine it at the time. I thought that I’d always get to manage my children’s lives, at least while they were living under my roof. I’m good at managing my family. I should be promoted when my kids get older, I used to think, not fired.

But once kids reach adolescence, they need to start managing their own lives, and they do tend to fire us as their managers. Parents who are too controlling—those who don’t step down from their manager roles—breed rebellion. Many kids with micromanaging parents will politely agree to the harsh limits their parents set with a “yes, sir” or “yes, ma’am” attitude, but then will break those rules the first chance they get. They do this not because they are bad kids, but because they need to regain a sense of control over their own lives.

This cannot be overstated: Healthy, self-disciplined, motivated teenagers have a strong sense of control over their lives. A mountain of research demonstrates that agency is one of the most important contributors to both success and happiness. Believing that we can influence our own lives (through our own efforts) predicts practically all of the positive outcomes that we want for our children: better health and longevity, lower use of drugs and alcohol, lower stress, higher emotional well-being, greater intrinsic motivation and self-discipline, improved academic performance, and even greater career success.

Even teens who don’t have a rebellious streak and who won’t lie or hide their behavior suffer when parents micromanage them. Those kids tend to expend emotional energy resisting advice from their parents that is clearly in their best interest, simply to regain a sense of control.

Giving freedom within limits

The answer, according to neuropsychologist William Stixrud and teen coach Ned Johnson, authors of The Self-Driven Child, is to hand the decision-making reins over to our teens. You read that right: By adolescence, we parents need to (take a deep breath and) let them make their own decisions about their lives.

Letting our teens become the decision-makers doesn’t mean that we become permissive, indulgent, or disengaged parents. Fifty years of research has consistently shown that “authoritative” parenting is good for teens’ health and well-being. Authoritative parents set and consistently enforce clear limits, andthey are warm and engaged in their kids’ lives. Authoritative parenting helps kids develop self-control—making them less likely to have problems with drugs, alcohol, or teen pregnancy. Teenagers with authoritative parents do better in school, have greater self-confidence, and have more friends.

So how in the world are we supposed to be authoritative parents once we’ve been fired as our kids’ managers, and once we are letting them make their own decisions? There are two equal parts to parenting-without-managing:

Part One: We establish age-appropriate family rules—like time limits on technology use and expectations about drug and alcohol use—in a supportive, involved way. We don’t dictate the rules; we discuss them. This way, our teens have a safe space to operate in without becoming overwhelmed by everything they need to do and learn.

Part Two: We hand over all further decision-making to our kids. They are free to operate autonomously within the limits that we’ve set. (Yes, it can be a challenge to decide what deserves a rule, and what can be left up to a teen—and exactly when we start handing over decision-making. I will offer more guidance in a future article.)

Decision-making is an incredibly important skill that teens must develop before they can be truly independent. When we require that they make their own decisions—instead of just making them for them, as Mark and I did when we insisted our daughter come to family dinner—we give them really valuable practice. They learn to look within themselves to understand their often-conflicting motivations and feelings. They learn to consider their own values, and the values of their family. They gain experience making decisions and then feeling accountable for the consequences of their decisions.

There’s really good news here: Teens who are given both limits and the freedom to make their own decisions tend to be self-driven and self-disciplined. This means that they’ll tell themselves “no” before we have to—and I probably don’t need to point out that that makes parenting a heck of a lot more fun.

Letting teens make mistakes

But what if teens don’t know what they don’t know? And what if they don’t want what we want for them, or if they really don’t know what is best for them? What if we know they will make the wrong decision?

Taking decision-making power away from them won’t help them become good decision-makers, nor is it a particularly good way to influence them. This is in part because, to paraphrase Stixrud and Johnson:

1. We can’t make our teens want something they don’t want.
2. We can’t make them not want something they do want.

And so it’s true: Sometimes our kids will make really bad decisions. Decision-making can be challenging, and it’s unrealistic to think they’ll do it perfectly. Adolescence is a period of time when kids have their learner’s permit for life, when (in ideal circumstances) they still have built-in support when they make mistakes. Which, again, they will. Often, human beings need to really struggle in order to learn and grow. And this means they’ll need to make their own mistakes, sometimes big ones.

If it will help them make an informed decision, we can neutrally offer our opinion. This is hard for me. We have to practice nonchalance. And then we (take a deep breath and) say: “It’s your call.”

Of course, we don’t need to enthusiastically (or financially) support all of our kids’ decisions. We can still mention when we feel uneasy with a decision they’re making, so long as we are sharing our feelings and not our judgments. This might mean that we say something like, “It makes me feel sad to see you so tired and anxious. I’m worried that the cost of taking such a heavy course load might be too high. But it’s your call.”

When we allow kids to make their own decisions, they don’t waste their limited energy resisting us just so that they can feel a modicum of control over their own lives. Suddenly, they stop seeming so irrational and teenagery—opposing things that are in their own best interest—and they start acting like the mature young adults they are becoming.

This is ultimately what happened with the family dinner/concert conflict: I apologized for my knee-jerk reaction, and told my daughter that while we really hoped she would be at our family dinner, it was her call. If she decided not to come to the dinner, we asked her to communicate her decision to the rest of the family herself. If she was going to make her own decisions, she could also practice taking accountability for them.

Once the choice was truly hers, our daughter decided not to go to the concert. And she actually seemed happy about her decision. She came to the family dinner, and she had fun.

Last week, I lead a workshop for 20 top female executives from around the world — it was a great pleasure and a great honor.

We worked on the issues that are holding them back at work, as well as the things that are keeping them from enjoying the lives they’ve worked so hard to create. Not surprisingly, there are many structural and cultural aspects of their workplaces (male domination, for example) thwarting their careers and their lives.

Here’s the thing: These brilliant executives didn’t really need strategies for changing their workplaces. They needed strategies for cultivating courage, given the difficulty of the work ahead of them.

Isn’t that what we all need? Courage to live lives where we can fulfill our greatest potential at work and at home? Where we can fulfill our potential for joy?

Here is my question for you: What are you afraid of? Where is your fear holding you back? If we are to live and work from our sweet spot — that place of great strength, but also great ease — we need courage. Courage to be authentic, to take risks, to be different.

Here are my three favorite tactics for building bravery:

1. Manipulate your thoughts.
Our thoughts profoundly influence what we feel and what we do. When we think about times when we’ve done poorly at something, we are likely to feel insecure and weak, upping the odds that we’ll actually do something insecure and weak.

That said, trying to control what we don’t think about doesn’t work. (Consider the old experiment where researchers tell their subjects not to think of a white bear: Most people immediately start thinking about a white bear.) In other words, it doesn’t work to say to yourself, “I have to stop being afraid.”

Instead, take a two-pronged approach to thinking brave thoughts. First, pay attention. If you notice yourself having a thought that undermines your attempts at bravery, simply label it as such: “Oh, there’s a fearful thought.” For example, say you are trying to get yourself to ask a question at a conference, but you are too afraid to raise your hand, and you notice yourself imaging that the presenter thinks you are dumb. Say to yourself, That is a thought that will make me feel afraid to ask my question, and take a deep breath. Noticing your not-brave thoughts can give you the distance you need to not act according to that thought and the feeling it produces.

Second, actively fill your mind with courageous thoughts. Consider times when you’ve been brave before. Focus on how people just like you have done what you are mustering the courage to do. Think about how the last time you did it, it wasn’t that hard. Think about how you’ll regret it if you don’t do it. Think about how the worst-case scenario is something you can deal with. Remind yourself of your long-term goals.

2. Consider that your fear isn’t legitimate.
Sometimes fear is more about excitement and thrill and passion than it is a warning that you are about to do something dangerous. As Maria Shriver writes in And One More Thing Before You Go, often “anxiety is a glimpse of your own daring… part of your agitation is just excitement about what you’re getting ready to accomplish. Whatever you’re afraid of — that is the very thing you should try to do.”

I love Harvard-trained sociologist and life-coach Martha Beck’s advice about how to know whether or not your fear is holding you back. Legitimate fear, she says, tends to make us want to get the heck out of whatever situation we are in. I once lived in a really nice neighborhood, but I had a really scary neighbor. Every time he’d stop to chat with me, friendly and normal-seeming as he was, the hair on my neck would stand up, and my heart would start racing and thudding in my chest. It was all I could to do not run and hide from him. It turns out that my fear was legitimate: After I moved, I found out that he was fresh out of a maximum security prison for violent sex crimes.

Not-helpful fear, on the other hand, makes us hesitate rather than bolt. We are afraid of looking stupid, and so we don’t ask a burning question. We fear failing, and so we don’t even try. Years ago, I was terribly afraid to make a desperately desired career change. I wasn’t happy, but my current job brought me a lot of security. What if I couldn’t make it in my new field? I waffled — hesitated — for more than a year before making the leap into a new profession. My fear was unfounded. I was immediately far happier and just as successful as I had been in my old job. I wished I’d had the courage to make the change sooner.

The key is knowing the difference between legitimate and not-helpful fear. Do you have the desire to get the heck out of whatever situation is making you fearful? If so, your fear is likely legitimate. Run like the wind, my friend.

But if your fear is making you hesitate, consider that your fear is unfounded. Take a deep breath, and make the leap.

3. Make specific plans for the obstacles that you might face.
This is an important technique not just for being more courageous, but also for being more successful in your endeavors.

Ask yourself: What obstacles are you likely to encounter? People who plan for how they’re going to react to different obstacles tend to be able to meet their goals more successfully; in other words, scary challenges don’t stop them, especially when they formulate “If X, then Y” plans for each potential difficulty. For example, say you’d like to stop working weekends but are afraid that your team will start to question your dedication. Here is what an “If X, Then Y” plan might look like:

“IF my team grumbles or pushes-back because I’m not working on the weekends anymore,

THEN I will forward them Leslie Perlow’s Harvard Business Review article about how ‘Predictable Time Off’ improves both work quality AND quality of life, even in client-oriented businesses.”

It is important to remember that the hard things we have to do or say are actually rarely what make us uncomfortable. It is the fear we feel that makes us uneasy. Fear is the thing that in truth makes actions hard, not the action that we think we are afraid of. Not doing something because we are afraid is actually not the easy way out in the long run. Though it might seem counterintuitive, it is finding the courage to try, or push ahead, or speak up, or make a change that will help us live and work from our sweet spot.

Ironically, when we do the hard thing, ultimately we find more ease.

What is your favorite way to cultivate courage? Inspire others in the comments here.

Want more tips for being brave? Please join me for a rejuvenating weekend retreat fromNovember 1 to 3, 2019 at 1440 Multiversity, a beautiful 75-acre campus nestled in the California redwoods near Santa Cruz. Register or learn more here.

Photo courtesy of Ashton Pal via Flickr. 

Being constantly connected to our work and smartphones makes us feel vaguely stressed and anxious. It prevents us from focusing and thinking deeply, and from spending time on the things that bring us lasting joy. It’s good to take a break.

But taking a break can be hard to do, because our smartphones and social media and email are designed to be addicting. (If you think you aren’t addicted, I challenge you to take this quiz.) It doesn’t work for most people to just will themselves not to check their phones or their email.¹ Below are a few strategies to put some distance between yourself and the things that are stealing your attention.

1. Get an old-fashioned alarm clock and banish all devices from your bedroom. Your bed and bedroom are not for working (or checking social media, or watching Netflix). They are for sleeping and resting and connecting with your partner if you have one. Don’t let your phone, and potentially your work, be the last thing you do before you go to bed and the first thing you do when you wake up.

Say goodnight to your phone and computer at least one hour before you’d like to be asleep. Do this so that you are able to sleep deeply and wake up rested. Charge your phone outside of your bedroom, and set it to automatically go into do not disturb mode an hour before your ideal bedtime.² Set your computer up to automatically shut itself down at the same time every night.

2. Get a good book to read before bed. It’s important to replace the time you would have been on your phone with something that will capture your interest, but not keep you awake.

3. Plan and schedule two or three specific times to check your email — strategically — per day. Block off enough time to get all the way to the bottom of your inbox in one way or another. If you need five hours (or three hours, or twenty minutes) a day to deal with your email, fine, but make sure you’ve actually blocked off those five specific hours on your calendar (or three hours, or twenty minutes) every day. Now do the same thing for checking social media, if you want to do that every day, and for checking and responding to your texts.

 Download a Take a Break from Your Phone & Email Cheat Sheet PDF here

Set up an app like “Inbox When Ready” to deliver email only during your scheduled times. You’ll still be able to access your email (in case you need to retrieve a file or something), but you won’t be tempted to check for new emails until your scheduled time…because you’ll know that there are no new emails. This is like methadone for email addicts, because it takes all the reward out of checking.

4. Turn off all your alerts. Every. Single. One. Unless you are actively checking your email/texts/social media during one of your scheduled times, you don’t need to know what communication is coming in. So turn off all notifications for your text messages, email, and all of your social media feeds on your desktop, laptop, tablet, and smartphone. Vibrate counts; turn it off. Breathe. Even if, through the strength of your ironclad will, you are able to resist reading a message that comes in, if you see or hear or feel a message notification, your brain has still been interrupted by that alert. Even a millisecond attention hijack like this will make you less focused, less able to resist other temptations, and more irritable.

5. Reorganize your phone so that it is less addictive. This will help you stick to your scheduled checking, and will help you not get sucked in when you don’t want to be on your phone. Move all the most addictive apps (like social media and email — and anything you check compulsively or on a whim when you see it) off the homepage. Put them in folders on back pages so that you have to search in order to launch them. Don’t worry, they’re still there. They just won’t be constantly seducing you with their siren songs.

6. Tell your people what you are up to. Tell your friends, family, and coworkers that you’re going to be checking your email and messages strategically, at pre-scheduled times during the day. That way, when you don’t respond to their messages, they will know it isn’t personal.

Give people a way to get ahold of you if something urgent comes up. This is more for you than for them, so you don’t worry about what emergency you are missing out on. Finally, and this is the most important one, ask your people to help hold you accountable. Consider this a form of crowd-sourced willpower.

7. Practice bringing your attention back to the present moment. This is what the famous Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer termed being “mindful” more than 25 years ago. To Langer, mindfulness is the “simple act of actively noticing things,” and she’s shown that it results in increased health, intelligence, and happiness. So wherever you are, whatever you are doing, look around and really notice things: What is different in your environment? In the people you are with? In your own body?

8. Feel what you are feeling. Without email, social media, and messages as your constant companion, you’ll find yourself doing things like standing in line at the grocery store…just standing…staring into space. Perhaps dying to check your phone. This may be uncomfortable at first. Resist the temptation to numb this discomfort by, say, eating that whole box of cookies you’ve got in your cart.

Why? Because when we numb unpleasant feelings, we numb everything that we are feeling. So to honestly feel the positive things in life — to truly feel love, or joy, or profound gratitude — we must also let ourselves feel fear, and grief, and frustration.

If you are feeling anxious or excited or bored, let yourself FEEL that emotion. Surf your emotions like waves.

Where in your body does the feeling live? Is it in the pit of your stomach? In your throat? What, really, does it feel like? Does it have a shape, or a texture, or a color?

Breathe. You are strong enough to handle the feelings that come your way.

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 Download a Take a Break from Your Phone & Email Cheat Sheet PDF here

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¹ If you want to learn why, read Catherine Price’s excellent little guide called How to Break up with Your Phone.
² I actually turn my ringer ON at night when I put it in the charger. That way if one of my kids wants to get ahold of me in the middle of the night, they can call twice and “break through” the do not disturb mode.

Recently, I went to high school Back-to-School night with my first husband, Mike, and we ran into a colleague of his I’d never met before. “This is Christine,” Mike said brightly, and then he hesitated. “My, um, my…ex-wife.”

As soon as we walked away, he apologized. “I’m so sorry for introducing you as my ex-wife. It’s such an ugly term. I should have just said you were Molly’s mom, but he doesn’t know Molly, so I wasn’t sure what to say.” We have been divorced for ten years; we’ve both been re-married for five. I harbor no ill feeling about being called Mike’s ex-wife, but I was touched by his sensitivity and kindness. At the end of the evening, he even opened my car door for me.

Mike is just such a nice guy. We get along so well now that you’d never know that our relationship was once high-conflict, marred by anger and criticism.

I have hundreds of old narratives about what went wrong in our marriage, but I’ve never been quite sure which one is true, which one to believe. The narrative that haunts me the most is the one in which our divorce was my fault. I was too critical of Mike; I provoked too much conflict. I should have seen that my complaints about him were actually things I didn’t like about myself. I should have accepted that romance would inevitably fade, and, at the same time, I should have worked harder to keep the romance alive.

This narrative is laced with the fear that I behaved selfishly, and, as a consequence, I’ve harmed my kids irreparably. It inspires shame and regret, launching me down a slippery slope of self-criticism that leaves me feeling like I’m not good enough.

I’ve been thinking about this all week. September 10th was Rosh Hashanah, the first day of the Jewish New Year. My husband, Mark, who for the record is just as nice a guy as Mike, is Jewish, and I go with his family to services at their temple. For ten days after Rosh Hashanah, Jews show sorrow and regret for wrong done in the previous year.

I must have some catching up to do, because when I was reflecting on my regrets about this past year, I felt sorrow for mistakes I made a decade ago. It’s not that I regret my divorce; I don’t. I do believe it was the right thing for our family. But I could see clearly what I would do differently now, given the chance. It was time to let go of some old regrets.

Over the last 10 days, I moved through a few steps that have each been helpful.

1. Forgiving myself

Yesterday was the “Day of Atonement,” and it brought me some peace. I’d been reading about self-forgiveness, and Rick Hanson’s recommendations unlocked something in me. He advises us to acknowledge the facts surrounding the circumstances or behavior we regret, including those that are hard to face. I let myself remember the divorce, and all the people that it affected, both then and now.

Then, I thought about my mistakes. But Hanson recommends distinguishing between our moral failings and simple unskillfulness. This step was a huge revelation to me. As I look back on my failed marriage, I see a mess of unskillfulness. Even things that might be perceived by others as immoral—to some people, divorce itself is immoral—seemed to me to stem from my own lack of certain emotional skills.

It turns out that the list of things I’d do differently wasn’t that long. Ten years ago, I simply didn’t have the skills I needed to keep my marriage together. There is an innocence there that is easy to forgive.

2. Taking accountability

This sort of self-reflection can be really productive. It’s important to take accountability for our mistakes and our failings, and to repair the hurt we cause other people. How else can we do better?

Seeing that I behaved unskillfully allows me to take responsibility for mistakes that I made, rather than clinging to my judgments and justifications. At the same time, it helps me not let my mistakes define who I am. I am more than my missteps and bad habits.

It also gives me somewhere to go: I can practice now the skills I needed then. This approach helps me respond when well-meaning people—observing how well Mike and I now parent together—wonder out loud if we ever regret getting divorced. We are different people now than we were then. Getting divorced gave us ample opportunity to practice more skillful ways of relating to one another.

3. Practicing acceptance

Here’s something I’ve learned the hard way: Acceptance is the precursor to atonement. I’ve finally surrendered resistance to my divorce and my unskillfulness, as well as the sorrow that I’ve felt about it all.

I’ve also, finally, found peace in accepting that there is a lot I don’t know. I don’t know if the marriage would have worked if I’d been more skillful. It’s easier to think that there is no way it would have, so it doesn’t matter what we did and didn’t do. For ten years, I’ve been constructing narratives that make my memories more black-and-white than they really are. These narratives provide me with certainty that I did the right thing. But only until they don’t.

“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one”
―Voltaire

Certainty can be temporarily reassuring, but it can also turn on us, revealing its opposite. One minute I’m sure that my marriage with Mike would never have worked; the next I’m sure it could have, because look how well we get along now.

Accepting uncertainty is such an underwhelming alternative to feeling certain that you did the right thing, even if feeling right doesn’t last. But, ultimately, uncertainty is the lesser of two ills; as Voltaire wrote, “Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one.”

I do know one thing for certain, though: If I’d made different choices ten years ago, I would not have the life I have now. It’s a life that I love, one where I’m happy and fulfilled. I love Mark and his big, loud Jewish family. I love our marriage, even when it’s hard. I can’t imagine life without my amazing stepchildren, whom I love and adore beyond reason. I know my daughters can’t imagine life without their stepsiblings and stepparents. It’s a life that I would never consciously give up. But, ironically, it’s one that I was giving up, unconsciously, every time I harbored those old fears and sorrows.

Accepting the past and all its messiness has allowed me to let go of what I’d actually already lost. Already I’m better able to shift my gaze away from the past, to focus my attention on the present. The past, and my stories about the past, no longer feel relevant. There is no emotional hook. This, I’ve come to believe, is atonement.