Empowering Kids to Tackle Challenges with Confidence – Featuring Brad Dalton

All right, welcome back. No problem, parents. Today's topic is all about empowering our kids rather than feeling sorry for them and why that makes all the difference in the world. Research shows that when kids are encouraged to face and overcome their challenges, they develop resilience and confidence that will last them a lifetime. And my guest today is Brad Dalton. He's a dedicated coach, an educator, and a TEDx speaker with over two decades of experience helping young people tap into their potential. Brad shares his personal story about a pivotal mindset shift he made when his son was diagnosed with autism. Rather than seeing it as a limitation, Brad chose to focus on empowering his son to approach life with resilience.

His story is a reminder of the strength that we can build in our kids when we confidently support them through life's hurdles. So let's jump into this conversation with Brad and learn about some practical ways to raise kids who can handle life's ups and downs with courage. Hey there, parents. Welcome back to the No Problem Parenting Podcast. I'm your host, Jackie Finneman, the founder of No Problem Parenting and NoProblemParents.com. I believe any parenting problem can be turned into a no problem, and it all begins with a shift in mindset. We tackle real parenting challenges, and we provide practical solutions at work. If you're dealing with behavior issues, setting boundaries, or you're just feeling stuck, No Problem Parenting is here for you. And today, I'm excited to announce our new network. It's called The Nest.

Whether you're in that nesting phase, ready to welcome your child home, or you're ready to launch your child out of the nest and you're becoming an empty nester, The Nest is for you. This network is currently being offered to parents who have worked with us one-on-one in coaching and or who have completed our Becoming a No Problem Parent training. Officially, The Nest will open in January of 2025, which you can get in at a discounted rate if you act now. There's a link in the show notes to become a No Problem Parent or head over to noproblemparents.com, grab your free download of the 60 ways to respond to your kids without losing your cool and get on our email list where we share more about exclusive access to our twice monthly power hour calls, which includes hands-on resources. And we're bringing experts in on a variety of topics. Join our growing network of confident, empowered parents. Visit NoProblemParents.com and get started today.

Hey, Brad, welcome to the show. I'm so excited to be here. And I love your mission. I love what you're about. Definitely my kind of juice. Well, I think we are preaching from the same podium for sure. You're a seasoned coach, an educator and an advocate for youth development.

and you just have a ton of experience spanning over two decades, you've dedicated your career to empowering young minds through creating mental resilience, personal growth, and positive leadership. So let's just jump into our conversation, Brad, and kind of talk about these invaluable insights for nurturing the resilience of our youth. Again, I can't say it enough how we need to be not feeling sorry for our kids, but empowering them to be confident, capable, leaders of their own, right? So let's talk about resilience. How do you define resilience?

I think we are cut from the same cloth there. I don't think, I mean, my thing is positive leadership. And I don't think it's a Pollyanna thing. I don't think it's ignoring what's real.

I don't think it's a running away from struggle thing. I think resilience and the whole idea of becoming the best version of yourself is leaning into struggle, embracing friction, taking on those challenges, and understanding that success isn't a destination. Success is not something that you're not going to get orange wedges for this like you would after a soccer game as a little guy. You're not going to get a trophy for this. It's not an achievement. Resilience and success and everything that's worth having in life, it's part of your journey. And man, it's kind of a loaded question. But resilience to me is leaning into friction, leaning into struggle, embracing adversity, loving non-typical. And yeah, I mean, I guess that's where I would go with that one.

Well, and so in your TEDx talk, which by the way, I have watched, I don't even know, three or four times. Highly recommend any parent go check that out. We'll have a link in the show notes. But you talk about we have a what problem. Yes. Can you say a little bit more about that without giving it all away maybe? But I mean, it's really quite insightful. Yeah. We have a massive what problem.

It's a what epidemic. We are so caught up into chasing things and destinations and outcomes that we forget who we are. We're totally unaware of who we are. We're unaware of who we could be.

And what's sad is we're largely unaware of it. I mean, 85% of the world's unaware that they're unaware. So if you have a listener that's tuning in right now, odds are that's you. That's you.

85% of the world. That doesn't make you a bad person. I know that there's certain areas of my life. I'm sure you're the same way that I'm unaware that I'm unaware. I don't know that I don't know. We all have gaps in our life. And the problem, one of the problems I see with how we view success and how we parent and how we coach and how we lead and how we teach and all these things is that we are so fixated on getting a 1600 on our SAT. We're so fixated on being first team all conference. We're so fixated on our kid getting some certificate that somehow says that they're awesome now. And I'm not saying any of those things, those things are all awesome. I would, I would have loved, I mean, those things are incredible.

Usually those things come from busting your tail and doing a lot of right things. So I'm all, I love those things, but why can't we get more caught up in the habits and the behaviors and all the things that go into becoming the kind of person that gets those achievements, that gets those destinations, that gets that 1600 SAT, that gets that scholarship. Why can't we get caught up in that? Because if we get caught up in that, now we're enjoying the journey.

We're not pressing. We're not pressing for some number. We're not pressing to just fill up a roster sheet. We're not pressing to hoist hardware.

we are honing in on things that allow us to enjoy the journey. I can think of countless times in my life, even as an adult, where I got something that I should have been so excited about. Should have been like everyone else has given each other hugs. Everyone's just jumping up and down and I'm sitting down and exhaling. There's literally been times in my life where I've gotten some massive achievement where all I could do was exhale. And I think parents feel that a lot.

I think parents are constantly putting pressure on themselves to chase outcomes for their kiddos, whom they love more than anything on this planet. And man, if we would just focus on chasing behaviors that lead to the identity we want, we all bring these kiddos into the world. You and I both have kids. There's nothing that means more to me than my kids. Nothing.

I would give up all my limbs and then some for my kiddo to be happy. But there's so much more that goes into it and kind of come in full circle. I think if we chase less what and focus more on who, our lives would be so much different. And we'd enjoy it.

And we'd experience success. And we'd allow our kids to learn a little bit more. And how do we help our kiddo develop their who versus their what? And instead of it just being all about like what they do, helping to introduce to them how they figure out who they are and what they hope to become.

Being a positive guy, I'm a firm believer. You got to catch them doing good. Catch them doing good. You understand or you feel like you understand what you want their identity to be.

This is who you would like them to become. And these are the characteristics. This is the character you would like them to possess as they get older and they move on and one day become independent and all that jazz. So you got to catch them doing those things.

And I believe it was Carol Dweck that wrote Mindset. And it's a great book, phenomenal book. And you got to promote it. you not only have to promote it, but you have to live it. You have to live with a growth mindset.

If you live with a fixed mindset, you're going to, you know, those kiddos, they look up to us. They take on our personalities. They take on our work habits. They take on, you know, are you a glass full or a glass half empty? They notice things. They pick up on things. So one, I would catch them doing good. Two, I would, I mean, at the end of the day, confidence. We want them to be confident. The relaxed, confident person wins in life. They win big interviews. They win big games. They have great relationships. We want all those things for our kiddos. So when I think of confidence, I would think of BFS, B, body language. We want them to have great body language. There was a study out of Stanford years ago that talked about how the first time, first encounter, first time interview, first time relationship, first time conversation, first time anything, only 7% of what the person in the table across from you or anybody across from you observing you, only 7% of what they're taking in is actually the content coming out of your mouth. That means eye contact. That means the way you're doing what you're doing,

how you're saying what you're saying. Do you seem interested? Do you seem disinterested? Because if you seem disinterested, why should they be interested? F, focus. Being where your feet are.

There was a study out of Harvard where 46.9% of the people in our world are actually thinking about something they're not actually doing every day. 46.9% of the time, you're thinking about something that you're not actually even doing right now. We're not where our feet are. We're not making the big time where it's at. So, and then S, self-talk. You're the most important voice you're going to hear today. Maybe if you learn to listen to the outside noise less and positively talk to yourself a little bit more, you might learn that your I can muscle is a little more important than your IQ muscle. And so, yeah, BFS. I love that, your I can muscle. That's awesome.

And, you know, sometimes people will think looking in the mirror and telling yourself the things you believe about yourself or the things you want to believe about yourself, but you've got that stinking thinking negative thoughts that creep in. But actually saying those things in the mirror, looking at yourself in the eye, it does work. And if you're doing that consistently, it can really help lift you up on a regular basis.

You've been an educator and a coach for many years and before your kiddos were born even, right? And then it was at the time that your son was three, one of your sons was three, and you got the news that he was on the autism spectrum. And that was just kind of a blow to you. Tell us a little bit more about that and really kind of maybe how your mindset shifted after learning about the diagnosis.

Right. Awesome question. So my wife and I were both college athletes. We're both super outgoing, very personable.

We're both educators. and so we'd been around a lot of fantastic kiddos that were on the autism spectrum. My wife specifically works with a lot of special needs kiddos with her job and she still does to this day and I had done the same and nothing but great relationships, loved it. But with that, you know things and frankly, it's a little bit different. It hit a little different when my own son was diagnosed with it. I call it the 15-minute sucker punch to the gut. When we got the diagnosis, it was so hard. It was so hard to swallow. I mean, I call it 15 minutes. I didn't live that far away from home after the diagnosis. But when you're going 25 in a 35, it'll take you a little bit longer. And I got home, I sat in my driveway and, you know, eye swelling and hands trembling and mind racing and just scrambling for the next thought, second by second, minute by minute. I was just, and I finally just came to the point where I said to myself in the driveway, this is ridiculous.

This isn't best serving him. This isn't going to create the best version of me. Feeling sorry for all of us isn't going to help any of us. What have I got to do in the next 15 years to give him the best life possible? And from there, moving forward, that became a mission. And like you and I kind of talked off air, the mission was to help give him the best life possible, period. What I didn't know was that in the process of creating the best version of him with all the trials and tribulations and struggles and absolute blindside moments, it would also help create the best version of me.

I would not be who I am. I wouldn't have written a bestseller or been on a TEDx or any of these things had it not been for that little bundle of awesome. And so it just became a deal where I had to create a lot of non-negotiables. And we honed in on who we wanted him to become, who we felt he could become. And when I say who we want him to become, I'm talking about character. I'm talking about the who, like the reservoir of awesome that was beginning on the inside, not external validation, not there's never been. And that's another thing. And I might be getting off track here, but people ask me about still to this day, like, what's he going to do next? What's next?

and when he got the diagnosis and i and i have nothing wrong with goals i have nothing wrong with people that are goal conscious but what i encourage you to do is be more growth conscious maybe less to-do lists and more to be lists because who we become that's the juice and so we don't even know how we're going to discipline him two weeks from now you know when he was three like because he was so sharp and so smart.

It's like he was this, he was this dude that would just like adapt to us. Like discipline that worked today may not work two weeks from now. And like, he was a headbanger when he was three, he'd bang it. He'd get overstimulated, bang his head on the floor, did all kinds of behaviors.

I mean, who would have thought you'd had the, I never thought about having to teach my kid how to play. There were so many things that we had to go through. We didn't know what a month from now was going to look like. So it's been that way for ever since he was three.

We just like, where's he going to be? I don't know, but we're going to dominate today. Where's he going to be? I don't know, but we're going to crush it today.

We're going to crush it this week. And that's how it's been ever since. And I applied it to my own life. And I can tell you, I'm so much happier.

It's incredible. I've had Carissa Carell on the show. She is the founder of Jack's Basket. Her son Jack was born with Down syndrome.

and the way the news was delivered to them as she was recovering. And a nurse, you know, walked up to her husband to ask him if he knew what trisomy 18 was, if he knew what Down syndrome was, if he was aware. And just like being blindsided. And then the idea that it was the news was given to them with this kind of air of sympathy, like, you know, well, just enjoy your baby.

and they have made it their mission to make sure that every baby born with Down syndrome is welcomed and celebrated. I get goosebumps even talking about it. And I think that's a lot of what you're saying to the mindset around, I mean, these are children, they are uniquely made and are brought into this world with something to offer. And the mission of Jack's Basket is all about you make me better. And I hear that, I'm bringing that up because that's what I'm hearing you say that while you and your wife had this mission of whatever we can do to help our child become who he is meant to be, was also about stepping back a minute and going, look at what he's teaching us and how he's helping us become who we were meant to be. So I celebrate that you were able to take in the fear of the diagnosis and the unknown, but much like Carissa and I talked about in our episode together, any parent, there is so much unknown. None of us know the future of our child, how things are going to work out for them, what things are going to look like. And so just letting go of some of that control and the fear around that, you can't take all fear away from parenting, but there are certain self-inflicted fears when we're trying to control the outcome.

And I love that you say just be in the now, be in today. What are we going to do? You know, one foot in front of the other, one experience at a time. You have been a coach, and I think we could do a whole other episode, and maybe I'll have you back on and we can talk about that.

But in your extensive experience as a coach and an educator, what are some of the challenges that young athletes and students encounter today despite the diagnoses? And how can parents really support our kids in overcoming adversities, both in sports and academics? A lot of parents, they're chasing things. You're chasing things.

You're putting all this pressure on yourself, and then you're probably putting pressure on your kiddo. and the kiddo's not enjoying it. They love you more than anything. They want to make you happy, but you also want them to be happy.

Our reservoir of awesome stems from the inside out and we want this to be sustainable, right? And the most sustainable form of success is love. So, I mean, everyone's looking for acceptance. Everyone's looking for belonging.

Everyone's looking for connections everywhere in every place. kids, adults, sports, education, you name it. Most people are seeking that. And more than anything, your kiddos just want you to love them and support them. And what you want is to see them happy.

That's what you say you want them to. I mean, I've heard it. I've heard a lot of parents say they just want their kid to be happy, but really they're not really living the word they're preaching. They're wanting things. They're wanting outcomes. They're putting so much pressure on their kiddo to get a 1600 on their SAT, to go to an Ivy League school, to do all these things.

And their kid's only 10. What you want is a phenomenal human being. What you want is someone that's going to treat the waitress or the waiter like a million bucks. What you want is someone that opens the door for people. What you want is someone, when the pencil hits the floor, it's like a race to get to the floor because they want to make that person feel good and they pick up the pencil. These are the things that you want. None of them have a number on it. None of them have a number on it. Would you like to see your kiddo put three balls in the back of the net in soccer? Who wouldn't want that? Who wouldn't want that? Who wouldn't want to look to their left and right? And see everyone cheering for your kiddo. Who wouldn't want to see their kid rounding the bases after a home run? Who wouldn't want to see like their kids with a lot of friends?

Yeah, we all want those things. But what we want is to develop kiddos that live life like a champ, that play life like a champ, that work like a champ, that we want positive warriors. That's what we want. And so, you know, to get change in life, we got to embody the change ourselves.

If we don't embody the change, nothing changes. If we do, potentially everything changes. And I'll just give you one. I had a conversation with someone that I, I coached this guy over 20 years ago and we hadn't talked in years.

He tracked me down through my Instagram account, said, Hey coach, can we do lunch? And so I was like, yeah. And keep in mind, this guy wasn't hitting, like he wasn't like a first team all-conference kind of guy. He was just a great kid who worked his tail off.

And anyway, we met up just two weeks ago, and I was just excited to see him. And we meet, we talk for about five minutes, and we're about five minutes in, and he said, Hey, coach, I just want to, I wanted to have lunch because I wanted to thank you. I said, Oh, man, that means so much. He said, but hold on, I want to tell you, there's a lot of reasons why, but I want to, I want to tell you why there was a conversation you had with me.

And this kid was in high school when I, when I worked with him and it was when I was a high school baseball coach. And he said, there was a day where we're doing, they were called executions. And it was this really grueling, tough drill, like tough, tough physically. But I liked it because it was tough mentally.

You really figured out who you were and who your teammates were. And it was tough. And he was struggling. I mean, struggle was real with this guy.

And at one point, he turned to me and he said he couldn't do it. And he told me I had some choice words for him. And I made him finish it. And the shortest version I can give you, he did finish it.

And then at the end of practice, I pulled him aside. And this is him telling the story, not me. I said, coach, you looked me right in the eye. He said I never want to hear the words. I can't come out of your mouth again You can do hard things And then I I said a few other things but he said coach You taught me that I can do hard things that day That I am not just enough. I am more than enough and I want to tell you coach You've gotten me through my marriage You've gotten me through a failed business You've gotten me oh, I'm almost starting to get emotional talking about it. You've made me a better parent.

And I'm like, as he's telling me this, my eyes are swelling. And this is my kind of the moral of this story. Like I said, I'm getting goosebumps and ready to swell up just talking about it. What if I had lowered my standards that day? What if I got soft? What if I didn't let him struggle a little bit? What if I wasn't cool with a little inconvenience? What if I got soft? What if I lowered my standards that day for him? Because we all know as parents, it is so hard to see your kids struggle. When your kid struggles, you hurt five times more than them.

It just, it hurts so much. And I remember that drill every year. We did it once a year and it It was so hard to see people struggle. But again, what if I lowered my standards?

What would have happened with this guy? I mean, would he have learned his lesson eventually? Five years, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years later? Would he have ever learned his lesson?

Would there ever been someone else who cared enough to let him struggle a little bit? That's a great story. And I think there's a lot in there that we as parents can learn from as well, because I think sometimes, too, when our kids come home and they're drained or they didn't like the response they got from a coach or a teacher. It's our inclination sometimes to rescue our kids and then want to go talk to the coach or talk to the teacher and say, hey, quit being so hard on him or targeting him, whatever. I learned years ago the 48-hour rule. So after a game or a practice or something that's heated like that, you wait 48 hours before responding or doing what you think you should do in the moment, which is either reaching out to the coach or chewing your kid out for something. Wait 48 hours, get your poop in a group, get yourself in check before you respond.

And because oftentimes you're going to respond as that mama bear or daddy bear and maybe overreact out of protection, right, for your kiddo. But yeah, I love that, not lowering the standard. And kids need that. I think they crave it. When we can push them past the limits that they think they have or the limits they put on themselves, man, does that raise confidence and resilience and empowers them. Man, I just, yeah. So I can picture that whole scenario and it can be super hard. I just also want to point out how, you know, you're talking about parents like teachers and coaches and approaching people on concerns and potential things that are hurting and just issues.

we can also create the best version of those people by pointing out, I mean, look what this guy did for me. He reached out to me after 20 plus years and look how it made me feel. Do you not think that I, I mean, I'm already on this path, but do you think that if we let teachers and coaches and people that are, you know, heading up things that our kiddos are doing, clubs, whatever it is for you, do you think that if we pointed out things like this, that they might be more prone to doing it more often, to having those kind of behaviors, to repeating actions that are desirable for us, not just for our own kiddos, but for other kiddos.

I mean, we say we want these things. These things don't just happen overnight for leaders either. Like it's a muscle and it has to be used. And the gratitude muscle is also a muscle that if we use it more often, people want that.

People crave that. People want to hear that they're seen. People want to be seen. And so when you let them know that you see them working, when you see these things happen, it could be a 20-second voice text.

It could be a card that took you literally 60 seconds. It could have had three sentences, and you licked it, sealed it, sent it. I mean, these are the kind of things we want these things. We say we want these things.

Well, what are we doing to reproduce these things? Yeah, good point. It's a very good point. Brad, you have several resources for parents.

You have the TEDx Talk. You have your book, The DNA of a Winner. And then you also have a podcast called The Best Self Podcast. So just real quick, give us a summary of each of those things and what you hope parents can gain from each of those resources.

Sure. Well, the DNA of a winner, I've had pictures and posts sent to me of families reading it together, and I've had senior citizens read it. It's an easy read. It just covers a lot of the same stuff we're talking about today, how to create the best version of you, how to create the best version of others, how to create a culture that's positive and productive.

And the Best Self podcast is along the same lines. it the the idea is to help provide tools and ideas and thoughts and actions that could lead to the desired identity that you mean we all want and the TEDx talk was pretty awesome I think that it'll definitely resonate with your audience my my coaching program is the positive warrior program. And I take on six new clients a month. So the door is always open for anyone that's looking to create a better version of themselves. So great. The Positive Warrior Network, you started that in 2019. And like you said, you take six new clients each month.

Best way to get a hold of you is probably through LinkedIn. Yeah, that'll work. Brad Dalton on LinkedIn. I'm going to have a link in the show notes to make it nice and easy for the listeners today as well. Self-development is huge. And I think we can partner with parents to help them become, like I say, the confident leaders our kids crave us to be so that we can be creating those confident, capable kids. Before we wrap up, I just would like to ask, if there was one thing that you could tell yourself as a new parent that you wish you would have known early on in your parenting, what would the message be to yourself as a young new parent now that you have grown children and you know what you know and you've been through what you've been through? Well, that's a tough one. I mean, two things come to mind. One, your best is good enough. So often we put pressure on ourselves, comparing ourselves to other parents, to our parents, to other people, external things. And at the end of the day, you're human. You're going to make mistakes. You're going to make mistakes. How could you possibly expect to be great at something And you've never done before in many cases, especially if this is your first kiddo.

And if you've had multiple kiddos, you know that they're usually not the same. They're usually different types of kiddos. So you can throw the playbook out the window with some cases. That was the case with us.

We had an older son, thought we had this parenting thing down. And then, you know, then we have a kid on the autism spectrum, which is a completely different animal. so and then two i would be aggressively patient be aggressively boy those two words together yeah well you you gotta punch your punch the gas on patience because you're going to be tired and you're going to be worn down and at times you're not going to have the answers and you're going to want to get impulsive and and maybe do you know have thoughts action words conversations that don't best serve you if you could be slow to speak and quick to listen in the journey to being aggressively patient. I guess that's how I would maybe put it.

Oh, I absolutely love that. That would best serve you. I absolutely love that. I teach about the pause, and it's one of the most simple, free things that we have access to as a parent, as a person, is to just pause for six seconds before responding. And sometimes you can pause longer than that. But if you can, at least in those moments when you just feel like you have to respond right away, or you have to do something, you pause for six seconds, you can shift from the back part of your brain, that reactionary brain to the logic part of your brain and decide what you need to say or not say how you need to respond or not if you even need to respond at all. So I absolutely love that aggressive patience. That is I've never heard it coined that way, but I'm, I'm stealing that one. I think that's awesome.

Brad, you are just a wealth of, of knowledge and support and experience and compassion. I'm so grateful that you've taken time to be on the show with me today. All the links are going to be in the show notes, parents for you to go check out Brad's resources. Thanks for being here.

You bet. Thanks for having me. I had so much fun. All right, parents, that's it for today. Thanks for listening to the no problem parenting podcast.

remember with the right tools and a confident mindset, every parenting challenge, every parenting problem can be turned into a no problem. If you're ready to lead your family with clarity and confidence, consider joining us in the nest. Kicking off in January of 2025, our power hour calls, our resource library and supportive network are designed to help you handle any parenting challenge. Early bird pricing is available now. So learn more at noproblemparents.com and let's keep building that confident, no problem parenting mindset one step at a time.