Beyond Busy

My guest today is Sarah Ockwell-Smith, one of the world's leading parenting experts, having written 13 books and sold half a million copies. Her philosophy of gentle parenting is hugely influential in the motherhood WhatsApp groups of Great Britain and her latest book ‘How To Be a Calm Parent’ has as much to tell us about how to look after ourselves, as it does about how to look after our kids. In this episode we talk about how to be calm, self-kindness and why being a busy parent isn't actually something to be proud of. Sarah mentions seven principles of being a calm parent in her book. I asked her about the first one, which is everybody can be a calm parent or a calmer parent:The number of parents I meet who believe that you're calm or you're not, they kind of view calmness as a fixed trait. So they'll look and think, "well, other people are calm". I'm not calm. It's kind of not worth me trying. So they're very much in the fixed mindset that calmness is something you have or you don't have. And if they don'