EP 33: Building Meaningful Conversations with your Children with Sonja Ecklund
I had such a great time talking to Sonja. She is a Board Certified Health and Wellness Coach, a yoga teacher, and a lifelong friend. Her wisdom and commitment to being exactly who continually inspire me.
Mindfulness, gratitude, and modeling healthy behavior. Access coaching tools and techniques to build good conversations with your children and engage in your personal well-being.
Sonja is a National Board Certified Health and Wellness Coach who created her own set of digital tools and designs to help people form healthy habits centered around personal growth, self-awareness, and accountability. Her materials include a financial workbook, a living minimally e-book, as well as organization and mindfulness templates for setting goals and scheduling.
Her first goal as a wellness coach is to identify practices for understanding self-awareness. Growing up, she often craved the depth of relationships that her peers didn’t and quickly realized that mindfulness often felt like the missing component.
“How can I help an individual better understand themselves? Because once we understand ourselves, it changes everything about the way we interact with the world around us and the people in our lives.”
Sonja taught herself to become comfortable with the full spectrum of human emotion, and continues to engage with her own well-being and embrace her emotions as tools to help better understand herself. She explained that by looking at something as new and helpful information, it helps remove the judgement from it.
These tools can be carried over into parenting as Sonja emphasized the importance of parents modeling healthy behavior for their children. She highlighted some key takeaways for parents to have quality conversations with their kids, such as asking open-ended questions and getting curious during conversations with your child. Actively listening, affirming, and creating space for your child leads to a deeper and more open relationship, and ultimately builds up their self-awareness.
“When we can invite our kids to continue talking, we learn so much more from them.”
As a parent, it can be easy to self-project our own stress onto our children, especially when our child is having a meltdown. Sonja explained the best way to combat that is by responding with empathy, first to yourself and then to your child. By showing compassion to yourself you end up having more compassion for your child as well.
She also encourages parents to pursue their own emotions, and recognize them when they are having a moment. A challenge she gives people during the week: take a compliment, accept it, and then move forward relishing it in. Sonja’s commitment to healthy emotions is an ongoing commitment to herself, one that led her to create the 365 gratitude-a-day poster, which is a fantastic reminder to celebrate the little moments daily and a perfect way to see what a positive impact that makes yearly.
Though Sonja has no problem showing her most authentic self, she does dedicate her time to developing a healthy work / life balance. Because of her passion for work, she avoids burnout by separating her own identity from her work, a practice that is often aligned with parenting.
“It’s really easy to lose yourself in the job of taking care of your kids, and when they do something disappointing to you, it’s hard to not take that on and feel like it’s your responsibility or your fault.”
As a solution, she advocates the importance of self-care, which can be as small as pausing and taking a deep breath. She has also found delight in keeping a list of fun facts or stories about yourself as a way to remind yourself just how unique you are, and as a bonus, those stories can turn into more great conversations with your kids!
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