How Parents Impact Success and Relationships
Kavita J Patel is a renowned relationship coach and expert on how parents impact success. She has studied ancient eastern philosophy for 20 years and combines those practices with her studies and experiences in family systems and human behavior to create her own transformational process called The Parent Work™. She shares that our relationships with lovers, spouses, kids, money, and our bodies, are all affected by things that happened between our parents and us or those that raised us in our childhood. We talk about:
- How parents impact your decisions, and your relationships at home and at work
- The 3 questions you can ask your parents for more insight
- How focusing on your relationship with your parents and your kids can help you move through the fears and blocks that are holding you back in your business
“Often, we aren’t conscious of how what we’re feeling today with something in our business or in our personal life is connected to something that we experienced with our parents when we’re 9, 10, 11 years old but there’s always some connection. When you discovered that connection, there’s actually a way through that block in a way that really supports you in getting more of what you want in your life.”
Connect with Kavita
- Kavita J. Patel’s Website (take the 4 Love Types Quiz!)
- Kavita on Instagram
Accelerate lasting success through harmony of mind, body, soul, and business
Transcript
JM: Hi, Kavita. How are you?
KP: I’m good. I’m so excited to be here.
JM: It’s so good to talk to you. I’m so glad to reconnect. You and I met when we had the same business coach, we’re going through the same program together. I got to meet you a few times when we all got together from, gosh, it was women from all over the world and all over the country. But I have wanted to reconnect and do this interview with you for a while because I had the opportunity to watch you work with another woman that was in our group over lunch, the day that I met you, and I was like, “Oh, my gosh. Who is this woman? She is amazing, like amazing.” With that, tell us a little bit about what you do.
KP: I am a relationship coach and what I have spent the last decade doing was working with women, I’ve been working with couples as well, but mostly women that are in relationships, that are married, that are single, and supporting them around what is it that’s keeping us blocked in love. I believe that everybody has something that they’re blocked in their life and it usually stems from something that we had in our childhood, experienced or translated, that is actually living itself out today.
A lot of what I talk about is what are the roots to why you are feeling blocked in love but it also expands into any area of your life and business like where you’re blocked, emotionally blocked, and how it stems back to your childhood, specifically your parents and what you translated from there. Often, we aren’t conscious of how what we’re feeling today with something in our business or in our personal life is connected to something that we experienced with our parents when we’re 9, 10, 11 years old but there’s always some connection. When you discovered that connection, there’s actually a way through that block in a way that really supports you in getting more of what you want in your life.
JM: I find this really fascinating because one of the things that I talked to my clients pretty frequently is how you’re not a different person from nine to five, you’re the same person at work as you are and a friendship as you are out in the world in your off time and a lot of times, the dysfunction that my clients see in their businesses are just sort of the general dysfunction that we have from trauma, fear, life experiences, childhood and we get into some really interesting, wide-ranging conversations.
I think you have been on the forefront in really understanding that so much of whatever we are manifesting as adults comes from childhood experience. How did you do start to formulate your work? What have you observed in the people that you’ve worked with that made you realize like, “Wow, a lot of this really is coming from those parental relationships”?
KP: A bit of my journey started of course from a personal place where I was actually having trouble in my marriage and we had, just in like one sentence, me and my husband went through a breakup before we even got married. We got back together—he broke up with me—and then two years into marriage, we were kind of right back where we started and things are falling apart again.
Now this time, we’re married, we’ve joined families but it was stakes were higher, let’s just put it that way. I had to admit to myself because I thought of myself as a smart woman and independent woman, aware, self-aware but I couldn’t figure out what it was that was happening in my relationship and how I was showing up in the relationship that was causing it to become what it had become, which is me being unhappy and him being unhappy. Of course, it’s not all on me, every relationship is 50/50 but I really had a wake up call one day when my husband said, “I don’t know if I can do this anymore.” I really had to sit down and look at what was my part in what was happening in this relationship. That’s when I started to get my own support at that time. Never in my wildest dreams that I think that the answer to my relationship problems stemmed from my relationship with my parents, but it did. That’s when I first started to like discover the roots of what’s happening in our love life.
But then, over the last decade, I’ve now worked with thousands of people, in the first year of being an entrepreneur alone, I had spoken to around 250 people and it just kept coming up where I saw where the roots of what someone was experiencing, whether it be in their love life, with money, with their purpose, or in their business. Some root to that was because of something they experienced with their parents when they were younger and they just needed some help to make that connection and to see like, “Why am I feeling this way right now?” because it can often feel like you can’t put your finger on it or you’ve tried a bunch of things and you know you’re self-aware but somehow, something isn’t shifting.
I’m just kind of one of those people that ever since I was very little have been drawn to what is at the kind of origin of things, like how do we heal things from a very deep place and not something just on the surface. I’m wired to see people in life in this way.
In my own experience, when I started to see the connections between how I wasn’t really letting my husband into my heart fully and how that was connected to the way that I witnessed or observed my mom and my dad together in marriage and I saw that I remembered like when I was younger, I saw how much my mom was dependent on my dad, really that was my transition. It’s actually not very true but that was my transition at the time because she needed him to help her make decisions that time, thus, she would defer to him a lot. She chose to be a stay-at-home mom and she was a pharmacist but chose to be with us. Through these ways that I saw her be dependent and I saw how that wasn’t serving their relationship or how they would often argue or fight about things, I attributed it to that so I decided at very young age, “I’m going to be independent, I’m not going to be dependent on anyone,” and then therefore, subconsciously you think I will avoid pain and hurt and I will avoid getting into a relationship like my parents.
JM: Haha to all of that, doesn’t work out how we planned.
KP: Yeah, exactly. Meanwhile, I had recreated everything that my parents had done in their relationship.
JM: Isn’t that amazing? It’s really crazy and it’s interesting that you bring up the example of independence. It’s funny, you have me thinking now, I really have to go back and look at the dynamics between my parents. They divorced when I was 12 so you can imagine how that dynamic was before my teen years and early adulthood, it was rough. But what I grew up with into my early adult years was having to be very independent because they struggled so much to be together or work together. There’s no co-parenting happening and I also brought that, for different reasons, into my marriage as well and we finally had a point in therapy where he was like, “I just want you to ask me for help,” and I realized, “Oh, my God. What am I doing that suddenly this has become such a big deal that me asking for help has become symbolic of the trust and how solid our relationship is,” it’s unbelievable. Anyway I just thought that was an interesting example so you basically recreated what you were trying to avoid.
KP: Yeah, that’s right. I did and I did it all unconsciously and I had no idea that’s exactly what I had done and yet I was in it. To your point, through making somebody’s connections, I talk a lot about having really conscious conversations with our parents and there are some conversations with my parents completely altered the direction of my relationship and I have to say like I went to a lot of seminars and workshops and got coaches to help and there was something missing through that I couldn’t quite put my finger on which is like I made all these connections in my childhood but nothing was really changing in my life and in my relationship.
Things started to change when I kind of started to make some connections for myself and having conversations with my parents with different kinds of conversations [inaudible 00:09:47] and allowing them to support me in a way that I hadn’t allowed them to, which actually opened up my relationship. You just mentioned support, that was exactly what I wasn’t allowing him either although I was asking for a lot of things but I wasn’t allowing myself to get vulnerable. I just ask for support around like putting the [jar of salt some honey 00:10:13] but in an authentic way. But that wasn’t enough, that wasn’t actually what was needed in my relationship.
Now we’ve been together for 11 years and we have a foundation to our relationship that feels unbreakable but that’s because of all the work that I’ve done—and he’s done some—so I will say to those people that feel like you have to have two people doing the work, I’m not saying that is untrue, but often you, just really shifting yourself, can transform an entire relationship on itself.
JM: Absolutely, I agree. I think that is a really important point that you make that it does take two in all relationships but you, shifting something within yourself can shift the entire situation. I think that’s a very, very good reminder. Obviously, people need to call you if they need to talk about some of these situations, but was that scary for you to go to your parents? What advice do you have? I think back to the times that I tackled situations that came up, I’m like a perpetual therapy person, I always like processing, it’s like an onion, I go back for a few minutes at a time when I’m ready to process kind of the next level and for me it was always very intimidating to go to my parents. I felt like for a long time, I wasn’t getting what I needed from them and that I wanted subsequently to not need anything from anyone.
Going to them was really hard because for me it was, “Will they be angry? Will they be upset? Will they understand my feelings and where I’m coming from? Will they still not be able to give me what I’m asking for?” What was that like for you to go to your parents and have that conversation? Did you have any of those feelings? What would you suggest somebody else that feels like, “Hey, I really need to go have a conversation with my mom and/or my dad about some things?”
KP: No, it’s terrifying, it’s absolutely terrifying. The reason it’s terrifying is because it’s literally like your parents are the most influential relationship in your life. It is the one that has shaped you, it is the one that has you wanting the things you want and not wanting the things that you don’t want. We have a lot of experiences with our parents and evidence to being right about how we think about them, like we really believe like my mom was dependent on my dad and weak, that was my version of my mom. I have a version of my dad too but I’m just giving you an example of what literally I believed and I believed that I had to kind of help my mom be happy. To then go and have a conversation where I allowed her to be my mom for the first time—and I’ll get into what I mean by that on a second—in decades, it was hard because you have to actually drop into that vulnerable state and allow yourself to be the daughter or the son. When you do, the way that they meet you in that is pretty phenomenal.
I’ve worked with all kinds of families. I worked with people that were even abused or molested by their parents to, “I have great relationship with my parents.” Even people with great relationship with their parents, it still has an impact on you. It doesn’t matter if it was great and perfect or if it was something that was the worst ever, it still has had an impact on the way that you see and relate to your life, yourself, and others.
It was terrifying but I had these specific tools and I’ll get into the most important one in just second. That really helped in order to get into the right emotional space to have the conversation, to know that they can then meet you where you need. I’ve seen most often than not, the parents can meet you in where you need them to meet you, they just never knew that’s what you needed and it’s not their way to relate or love in that way so their default is their default. We’ve never been able to communicate to them like how we really needed because we are [inaudible 00:14:59] and even now, how we needed it or wanted it.
We’ve even protected ourselves because of feeling hurt or pain through them, protected ourselves by not going there anymore or again. There are lots of ways that we protect ourselves but once I was able to kind of allow myself to be in what I call the child space, so the number one way to start to get yourself emotionally craft for these conversations is what we call not parenting your parents anymore. You have children, I have a son, he’s 10 months old and I haven’t watched this yet happen but every child goes through this moment where they go from psychologically being dependent on their parents and physically where they feel like, “My parents are god and they can’t be anything but perfect,” to then suddenly saying that they’re flawed or that they are hurt, needy, upset, frustrated, depressed, or any of those things, they see that and they now recognize it as they’re not perfect and then internally, our brain translates that into, “Oh, my God, that’s no longer safe to rely on these people because they’re not perfect.”
JM: Or you’re going to have some reaction to this action, news, or conversation. We’re going through that now. It’s been a whole new world watching it unfold again with my son who’s a preteen. He just turned 12 and we are having those conversations now about the appropriate ways to let us know that he does not need us anymore. That’s been like the top of his list of topics to discuss lately so it is really interesting to see your kids become independent and what they learned—I love that you call it versions of your parents too—from us in our interactions with each other.
KP: Yeah, exactly. You’re seeing and experiencing it right now so we go from that space that we’re like, “Oh, okay, I got to secure myself,” and then we start to parent our parents like we think we know more than them suddenly.
JM: Sounds very familiar.
KP: Right. We’ve done this and then we’ll watch our children do this to us. But we suddenly think that we know more than them and then from that moment onwards, we literally have spent out most of our energy trying to change our parents, trying to make them different, whether it be on our heads or vocally and spend a lot of time wanting to be different than them or like them. All of that is still on the realm of parenting your parents.
It’s literally a process that I’d say people drew to identify when they’re parenting their parents, when they want their parents to get them more, trying to prove a point to their parents and all of that is from the space of ego and actually drop into ourselves and our childlike space which actually, much of it all be like that’s too vulnerable, you don’t have control when you’re in that space, you need to be taken advantage of by your parents once again, [inaudible 00:18:38] all those things but when you’re in that childlike space, do you remember when your kids are like toddlers and they just wanted, I call it kind of asking for the juice, they want a juice and you didn’t want to give it to them because dinner is about to happen or it’s too much juice for the day like you’re like, “No,” and they immediately want, they want what they want, they don’t knock back down.
JM: They’re not like, “Oh, you’re right about that, it is almost dinner time,” no, I haven’t gotten that response yet. “You’re right, there is too much sugar in this juice.”
KP: Yes, exactly and they won’t give up. They’re not afraid of like how you’re going to feel, they keep going and they throw a tantrum. They’re not like, “Oh, my God, momma’s going to be upset at me,” they just do it. They’re like little leaders. Actually, what I help people do is come back to that space of leading with their parents so they can actually heal that little girl or boy inside of themselves.
JM:That’s amazing. I know that your method is the parent work, is that kind of what the parent work embodies is going through that process?
KP: Yeah, exactly.
JM: When you’re working with clients, are you working with them through that process? I mean, do you meet with parents too?
KP: I can meet with parents, but mostly I like to empower my clients to have those conversations because it’s their parents and they should be able to say anything. When I think about my son—I may be a little bit more aware or conscious because I’m on this path for sure, I’m not discounting that—but if my son came to me with anything, as a parent, I would want to give him whatever that is. I’m sure sometimes, as he gets older, it’s going to clash with what my belief system might be that he wants. That’s going to be the challenge to navigate that space. But the point is that what I like to tell everybody is you would not exist unless you were loved.
JM: Right, in some way by someone.
KP: Yeah, by someone, that’s right. It doesn’t have to be your parents, it can be grandparents, it can be adoptive parents, it can be any of those versions that [inaudible 00:21:04].
JM: I was going to ask you about that. How does that work? Is it essentially you’re looking at whoever spent the majority of time raising you so if you don’t have sort of that conventional biological mother-father relationship?
KP: Yes, exactly. Let’s say you were raised by just your mom and you didn’t even know your dad, there may be stories that you’ve heard about your dad or maybe there’s nothing but then our brain still fills in some sort of story about our dad.
JM: We still have some story.
KP: Yeah, exactly. We’re working off of that. Let’s say you were raised by—like your parents divorced when you were two—so you were also raised by your step-parent, they do also have a big impact on the way that you translated things so we do look at our relationships with step-parents especially before the age of five or six, if they were a critical role in your life. Even adoptive parents have worked with adopted children too and even if they’re adopted a little bit later in life, there is still an impact, so we look at that.
JM: That’s so interesting.
KP: [inaudible 00:22:18] thing is that you are loved, you’re absolutely loved to the amount that it takes three to child. To every sickness, to everyday birth, to every moment you are up at night, to every little thing, it requires love for that being to survive.
JM: It really is pretty staggering when you think about it in those terms. My children have been my greatest challenge, I mean really, my greatest achievement, but also my greatest challenge, I mean especially like if you get [inaudible 00:22:51] I feel beaten down by the preteen in the house. I think oftentimes too—and this is what we’re trying to explain to him now at this age also and I don’t know if this is right or wrong so feel free to jump in with your expertise—but now it’s like everything is a debate. You think about when they’re young and it’s constantly cleaning the mop, the loads of laundry that never end, they need food, and you’re awake all night and going to the doctor’s appointments but now it’s like the problem’s kind of become more debating every point and it really does get exhausting after a while once these little people really start to become their own people.
I just think it’s so interesting that you bring up the point that somebody cared for you to get to this point in your life, I think even for people who had to be very independent or maybe didn’t have the village of nurturing people around us that often help us along the way, but it really does require so much love and attention for us to get to the point that we can even have these kinds of conversations. If you’re at a place in your life where you’re even questioning this or exploring this, you had to have some love somewhere.
KP: Yeah, absolutely. What you’re talking about with your teen is like they go from physically needing to emotionally needing. That’s a hard transition for everyone and it’s hard because I believe they’re just kind of poking at all the ways that were still unresolved with their own parents.
JM: Oh, my God, isn’t that true? It’s so true.
KP: Yeah. Our kids are pushing us to evolve ourselves and heal what isn’t healed with our own parents, whether your parents are alive or dead, they’re pushing us to expand our ability to hold emotions because we’ve all, in some way, been told by our parents or family that these emotions are too much or having this emotion isn’t going to serve you in life or in some way we’ve been shut down emotionally, nobody hasn’t and so they’re really challenging you to expand that. Most of the time, that’s what they’re asking for but that’s not what they’re saying.
JM: Right, they’re not going to ask for it that way.
KP: Yeah, they’re challenging you in topics and things they want but they’re not really…
JM: Brushing their teeth.
KP: Yeah, exactly.
JM: That’s really interesting. I love that you bring up that our kids push us to heal the things that we have not healed with our own parents. I think sometimes the way they verbalize what they need, it’s like they’re not always verbalizing it articulately or appropriately but at the same time I think for me, if I could go through my life being more conscious of my internal process and my emotional response to the poking and the prodding from the kids in terms of, “What does that mean for me that I’m having that reaction?” gosh, it’s like if we could get them to be a little bit more consciously aware of how they are asking for things, stating, or framing things and if we could get a little bit more conscious about what our emotional response to that means, I can see how that would be so powerful in a parent-child relationship.
We have talked like this very high level about why this is such an incredibly important topic, take me now to the more practical application. You talk about resolving emotional blocks and fears, you talk about how it’s useful in business, can you tell us a little bit more about how this kind of work lends itself to kind of more of those practical matters, what are the results that you see or the outcomes that you see for people when they do this work?
KP: The outcomes are being able to be less triggered whether with your boss, whether it’s with clients, whether it’s [inaudible 00:27:04] vendors, to stay in that grounded place, to move through problems in a quicker way, and even feeling what other people’s emotions that get into everything business, I feel like that we do, everybody’s got an emotional reaction, so how do you actually navigate those bases and get what it is that you want at the end of it in a way that is authentic and honest and real. If you’re feeling blocked around money or you feel like you’ve made a lap but you’ve plateaued, that stems from the way that you saw money and the way that you saw its use and related to within your family and your parents like that’s also part of it.
Sometimes we can make it pretty far and be pretty successful around money until we had a plateau and usually that plateau is telling us something around what we experienced in our childhood. Even if they are not, if you’re at the very beginning of your business and it’s feeling like money is in that flow where it’s hard to ask for what you’re worth or hard to get clients, there’s that part that you have to physically go out and do and go out and however you end up doing in networking events or whatnot.
But then there’s that whole emotional realm that comes up when you ask for somebody’s number or want to keep in touch or ask them to be a client or get on a sales conversation or even when you ask for a sale, all of that is an emotional response. When we actually can look at what’s coming up for you in those moments, connect it back to where it came from and move through it from there, you can start asking for what you are worth, you can start easily asking for sales conversations, or working through things with vendors, and [inaudible 00:29:00] people here so I’m trying to just hit up all the different kinds of ways of doing business.
If you feel like you’re struggling with your purpose, sometimes you might be struggling with that at beginning of your business or maybe you’re struggling with that after being and doing what you’ve been doing for decades and that also stems from our parents and what we saw around the way that they related to work, purpose, passion, and how they saw work in general. If this is all related to what we’re feeling stuck around in our lives, anywhere that you are feeling stuck in business, there’s some root there to the way that you saw something or translated something within your childhood.
JM: That is so fascinating to me because I think so many times, I think it’s just human nature. We look at our current circumstances or our current situation and you might think back a little bit to the beginning of a relationship or the last couple of years but I think to go all the way back, to really transform what we believe now—I have to tell you so, just as a quick side note, speaking, I’m going all the way back, I recently had to contend with some things in my life where I realized that I didn’t even understand that I had a default setting and that I was just thinking about the world in a particular way and thinking about my relationships or my business in a particular way. It’s very interesting because I imagine that so much of that comes from your childhood and those relationships, parents are god, you look at their attitudes and beliefs and that is the world that informs our worldview. It’s so interesting because I hadn’t thought about it so specifically about going back to those relationships.
For me it wasn’t even exploring where that came from, it was just first having the aha moment that’s what is for me like that is how I’ve defined my own experience. It’s fascinating to me to think about going all the way back and then you think about how in business, you’re carrying those issues into the work relationships. Many, many women entrepreneurs have a hard time with the sales process and fearing rejection and it’s just interesting how you talk about all of these scenarios and how they can tie back to that.
Speaking of the challenges that you have helped your clients overcome, you and I have talked a little bit about some of the challenges that we have experienced in growing our own businesses, what are some of the things that you have had to overcome? Because I think, interestingly, when somebody is a coach, a consultant, or a mentor—this has happened in some of the conversations I’ve had with psychologists and therapists—as soon as you become elevated as this person who can help other people troubleshoot the stuff in their lives, they think you don’t have any of those problems, like he was the, [“Finding your own life,” 00:32:03] and I’m like, “Oh, no, I have so much stuff, you wouldn’t believe it, so much, we could talk for days,” what are some of the challenges that you have had to overcome as you became an adult, as you embarked on this line of work and as you’ve grown this business?
KP: I’ll even share with you something a little fresh. I think in the last couple of years, it’s been the emotional journey of looking at my work and saying, “Oh, does this still bring me joy in the way that I used to?” and everything I talked about today absolutely does, but it was over the last year to I really gotten through a process of looking at that and asking myself, “Does it?” because some pieces of the business weren’t actually feeling that way to me anymore, they weren’t exciting, they were feeling like I know it in and out then I’ve masteries around it—mastery is an ongoing thing, I absolutely believe that—but I have a certain level of mastery around it but not exciting anymore. It’s not lighting me up in the way that I used to.
Admitting that is hard especially when you’ve built a part of your business around something. Really, that’s been my journey over the last couple of years of saying, “Actually, this is the work that I love,” which is The Parent Work. I’ve been doing The Parent Work for the last decade but in ways with the wrapping of working mostly like when I first started out, I was working with single women, helping them find love, and I still do that but it doesn’t light me up in the way it used to. Admitting that to myself was really hard. Then it really seem that what was lighting me up was working with people around this significant relationship in our life around the parents at how that’s connected to everything in their life and how they relate to everything in their life and so kind of landing on that. It was still a painful process as much as it sounds like I’ve got it figured out as I say it right now, it’s still a painful process.
JM: Sometimes I think it’s harder because you know how much processing you need to go through when you start to identify those issues for yourself. I think sometimes we work with clients especially initially, it’s like kind of scratching the surface and you tiptoe into the conversation and it’s like, “Okay, now we need to talk about what this is and how to deal with it,” but I know for me it’s, “I will catch myself in an old pattern of thinking or an old habit or an old way of dealing with relationships,” and I think in some ways, people think you have it all figured out but honestly, it’s almost like you are more aware of how much work there is to do around it.
KP: Yes, exactly. That’s absolutely right. I’ve been doing like a ton of work around it with my parents and after having a son and now becoming a mother and what that means, there is even more to it, especially the woman entrepreneur becoming a mother, it changes everything. It even how you see life, it changes what feels purposeful, so yeah, that’s just one of many, many struggles.
JM: I know. It’s not for the faint of heart, is it?
KP: No, it’s not. But I’m sure you feel the same way. I wouldn’t want it any other way because it’s almost like the roller coaster ride of being an entrepreneur has allowed me to rise to the occasion in a way that I want in my life, like I want to feel challenged, I want to flow, I want to evolve, so I put myself into positions where I’m going to move through that and that doesn’t mean like I’m struggling all the time.
JM: Outside my comfort zone.
KP: Yeah, exactly, exactly, but it is uncomfortable a lot. But I feel like I’m alive when I’m there so I’d rather have that.
JM: I love that, I love that. I love that you also feel that it causes you to rise to the occasion, I really love that. Tell me, if you’ve got a couple of things that you kind of learned as those lessons we learn again and again or advice that you would love to give or secrets that you’ve got that you want to share with other women entrepreneurs, what are some of those tips that you would share with them?
KP: I actually would share three questions with everybody that they could think about, journal about, or even ask their parents if that’s something that’s possible for you. They are really powerful questions so don’t disregard the simplicity of them because they can actually show you something that you didn’t see for yourself and make you conscious of something that’s pretty significant.
One question is if you were to talk to your mom or dad about a tradition of this way, it’s just asking, “What is it that your mom experienced in her relationship with her mom and dad—so your grandmother and grandfather—when she was younger, whether it be hard or whether it be amazing or beautiful, just what are some experiences that she had with her mother and father and how that shaped her?” You can ask the same question to your dad, what his experience with his mom and dad and how that shaped who he is today, what was it like for him to be around his mom and around his dad when he was younger and how has that made him into the person he is today? You’re going to [inaudible 00:38:11] to your parents about both of their parents, is that making sense?
JM: Absolutely. I’m sure that opens up some really interesting conversation, it’s a great question.
KP: Yeah, and the second question is, “What did your mom or dad see or experience in their parent’s relationship?” so what did they see in the relationship of their parents? What did they like or dislike about it? That’s another question. The third one is, “What was their role in a family?” You can literally answer all these questions for yourself. Not only can you use it with them but you should also answer this for yourself, I mean that will show you something as well. What was their role in the family? Were they the middle child and felt like black sheep or the youngest [inaudible 00:39:05] all the time or the oldest felt responsible for everybody? What was the role in the family? Answering this for yourself and then asking them how their experience was will be really interesting for you to see what kind of setting in the unconscious part of you that you can kind of bring out and make yourself aware of it.
JM: Those questions are amazing and I think it’s so interesting when you ask those open-ended questions because I think that whatever kind of comes to them in that moment and if you’re asking these questions of you, whatever is coming to you in that moment, I think is probably so related and applicable to something that you’re dealing with now and I can totally see how it helps you to kind of drop into that place where maybe it will help to inform where you are today in your relationships, where you are today in your business, those are great questions.
KP: Yeah, good.
JM: Awesome, thank you so, so much for your time today. I know people are going to want to reach out to you after they hear this interview so how can they find you?
KP: There are two ways, one is you can go to kavitajpatel.com. There’s actually a quiz on my site right there that’s free and it’s called the 4 Love Types Quiz. If you take it, you’ll see your relationship with your mom and dad and how that’s impacted you in the way you relate to those closest to you. It’s an awesome quiz to take, five minutes to take and you’ll see kind of what type you are and how that’s impacting your closest relationships. Then if you are interested in diving into this work with yourself, I highly recommend you reach out to my team at support@kavitajpatel.com and I would be happy to talk to you more about your specific situation.
JM: Awesome, we’ll make sure that information is in the show notes as well so if you don’t have a pen handy or if you’re washing the dishes, whatever you’re doing while you’re listening, make sure that you head over to the website and you can find that information in the show notes. I will be heading over to your site to check out that quiz very soon, it sounds really interesting and like a lot of insight that you can get in exchange for a five-minute quiz. But you can head over to our site to find that information if you go to brandwithcatalyst.com and just click the blog and podcast tab. You can also contact me and my team there if you’ve got any questions or would like to reach out.
Thank you, Kavita. I appreciate you so much. I appreciate your time and your insight. This is really a fascinating conversation.
KP: Thanks, Jen, for having me.