Identity, Belonging and Resilience

Welcome to the Where Parents Talk podcast. We help grow better parents through science.

Evidence and the lived experience of other parents. Learn how to better navigate the mental and physical health of your tween teen or young adult through proven expert advice.

Here's your host, Leanne Castellino.

Welcome to Where Parents Talk. My name is Leanne Castellino. Our guest today is a former lawyer, fitness trainer, and entrepreneur.

Sherri Lead is also a life coach, a friendship coach, an author, and a mother of 2. Her upcoming fourth book is called Table for 51 Lessons Learned from Sharing Meals Across America. Sherry joins us today from Bellevue, Washington.

Thank you so much for taking the time.

Oh, you bet. This is perfect. It's a good way to start my day. It's early over here.

Well, and we're really delighted to speak to you because to say that your life journey has been a deeply transformative one is in many ways an understatement. By that, I mean you were abandoned as a baby. You were adopted.

You overcome breast cancer, breast cancer survivor, to the point that you're now a life coach and an author. How have these experiences, Sherry, shaped your parenting philosophy?

Wow. Interesting. So as you mentioned, I was adopted and I had been abandoned. I was found in a cardboard box in Seoul, South Korea.

And I actually, my former husband and I, we adopted our daughter from China and have a biological child as well. But these experiences I've had, firstly, adoption.

And having an adopted child has shaped not only only my own identity and understanding my adoption experience, but also my ability to connect with my daughter and appreciate also the differences that my son experienced as a young, as a baby versus my daughter and seeing those differences between maybe a biological, biologically born child to the parents versus an adopted child and their experience. And then of course, everything else with cancer. My favorite quote after I had breast cancer became actually immediately.

If today were the last day of my life, would I be doing what I'm doing now? And that's changed, that's affected everything I do, including parenting.

It's so interesting because the themes of resilience, identity and belonging really rise to the top when we talk about all the different aspects of your life that you've just noted. How has your lived experience with these particular themes influenced how you've gone about raising your children?

It's what I want to tell my kids and I, hopefully they observe this from me is every time a door closes or every time you run into an obstacle to detach for a moment and look at that obstacle as an opportunity.

There have been so many times in my life that I constantly think that the universe is taking care of me or God, you know, whoever your higher power is, continues to take care of me.

Because every single obstacle, when I've been able to detach from that for just a moment and kind of advise myself like I would my own best friend, as if I were my own best friend, opportunity beyond what I could have imagined appears. And that's what I try to model for my kids and remind them too. And fortunately I'm able to give them examples from my own life.

I say, okay, I don't need any more examples now, but it helps, you know, they see it in real time.

Well, and you know, on that note, I mean, I think what you're talking about too is having an exceptional amount of self awareness and self discipline. Because when we're talking about resilience, especially in today's world, it's a buzzword. We hear it all the time.

There are lots of parents who really struggle to impart that on their kids because they struggle with it themselves.

So when you think about all the challenges you've experienced and overcome, and you think about the resilience that it has taken that you have had to displ, what's been at the root of that, what has allowed you to be resilient?

That's a really good question. And I ended up becoming a life coach.

And now I actually say reinvention coach because there have been so many times in my life that I've reinvented myself because of the curveballs that life has thrown. I was in a catastrophic car accident actually in my 20s and had to learn to walk again.

Um, so there have been different things that life has thrown me where I've reinvented, including going through the ending of a marriage after 27 years and reinventing after that. So I've been asked, you know, what is it? How do you find opportunity when everything looks, looks like a mess? And honestly, I don't have a choice.

I don't, you know, the only choice we have a lot of times is to live in that mess or just live in happiness. And that same quote comes up. If today were the last day of my life, would I be doing what I'm doing now?

And honestly, living in happiness is what I choose.

I have a pair of plastic, like kids plastic rose colored glasses that I keep in my kitchen, in my bedroom as a reminder that you see what you're looking for. And so when I get get to that, you know, gosh, this is horrible. I try to pick up Those rose colored glasses.

Along those lines, when you think about parents who perhaps haven't had their own lived experience as examples for their kids to display resilience, what would you say to those parents about how they can teach their kids resilience?

If, for example, they hyper parent or they helicopter parent, which is a lot of parents these days, what can they look to do in their parenting style that may help impart resilience on those children?

What I get a lot, you know, what we do as parents, we're so good, we try to teach our kids to make friends. And here's an example of resilience. And as a friendship expert, I do a lot about making friends, but I also talk about when friendships end.

So one thing that we can do as parents is help teach our kids also with this idea of resilience, how to end relationships. Because that happens throughout, throughout our lives. And I guarantee you everybody has been through stuff.

I don't think there's one parent that hasn't been through something where they haven't had to be resilient.

It may take a while to think about it because a lot of times when we're going through our mess, we just keep on going on and forge forward and we don't take a moment to think back and think, okay, that loss of a job, it actually got me to a better job. That house I didn't qualify for, I actually ended up in a bare neighborhood. The relationship that broke up wasn't great anyway.

It led me to something better. So when we could think back to those moments in our life, we have so many examples to give to our kids.

But what it comes down to is asking your kids, okay, this is tough. This is really tough acknowledging it and saying, what are our options here? What are our opportunities here?

And if we do that as a practice, it gets into our minds as a habit to naturally think, okay, something really bad is going on here. That must mean there's opportunity. So our brain starts getting wired to naturally think that what is the opportunity here?

Absolutely.

And I guess in many families, in many households, the world we live in today with the distraction, the digital connection, the idea of connection, the idea of a sense of belonging, are concepts that are challenged more greatly than probably in all of history because of, because of all the distractions. So how can we overcome that as parents?

Yeah, it's, you know, especially I worry about this next generation where, you know, we had, we have school sometimes where we're working with some classes virtually in work now. We, a lot of works are hybrid or if not all virtually, how do people connect?

And it's going to take work with parents to make those actual intentional face to face so our kids don't grow up thinking FaceTime means just the phone FaceTime.

FaceTime is actually face to face because as we get more into AI, the one thing that AI cannot replicate is that human connection, that one on one connection. Last year I traveled to all 50 states. I'm not sure if you're aware of this.

And I shared a meal with a stranger, a woman that I lost contact with decades ago. And it was that face to face connection that I realized.

And actually sitting across and sharing a meal with each person that brought us, it brought us together that any text or phone call or email could not do. And we established these friendships.

So being able to teach our children and model this for them that they need to go out there and have this face to face communication with their friends, with their neighbors, and even, you know, we tell our kids not to talk to strangers, but how to open up conversations instead teaching them how to open up conversations even with strangers with the idea of also safety in mind.

On the note of communication.

Your kids are in their early 20s and I'm curious as to, you know, while you were going through these various life challenges that we've outlined, what kind of communications tactics did you use with them at the different ages and stages and levels of development that they were at as you, their parent, were trying to navigate these challenges.

So my children are very different from each other in their communication style. My older child, she's on the spectrum and so communicating with her is a little bit different than my younger child who isn't neurodivergent.

But I want to give you an example of what I did when I was going through breast cancer. They are both in high school and they didn't, you know, it was hard for them to talk to me about what I was going through.

And as a mom, you know, I was in my 40s and as a mom going through cancer, it's also, it was hard for me too to, to, to explain to my kids what I was feeling. So I actually, and this is what I did, it's not going to work for everyone else.

I would post things on Facebook because I knew they were reading that.

Like I, and I actually print my Facebook at the end of every year with the idea that maybe my kids at some time will want to look to see what did mom think at this time in her life. But I posted and I would post pictures like, you know, Either a doctor's appointment. This is, you know, sort of a diary.

And not ridiculously dramatic or ridiculously too personal, but enough to be able to check in with my kids so that they knew how I was doing when they're at that teenage age. That was hard to ask me questions. Yeah. And at different times, actually, with my daughter. Now you're reminding me of something.

My daughter and I, we had a little bit more of a difficulty in communicating. And so I would write her letters sometimes because for her, if I, If I got upset, she shuts down and she, you know, she's not able to respond.

And so for her, she was. It was easier for her to respond if she was able to take some time to think about it. So we came to an agreement that.

And this is before a lot of texts was going on when my kids were that age. And this was my. Probably when she was in middle school.

But I'd write her a letter and I'd say, okay, I'm going to write you a letter, and you have until the next day to respond to me, and you can respond to me in a letter. And that actually worked really well. And we would. We had a notebook that we read these letters in.

So it's an ongoing notebook that we still have this day. And it's kind of. It's a great memory of our relationship back then when it was a little bit more contentious.

One of the other pieces that is so, you know, important in your story, and we kind of alluded to it earlier, is the sense of belonging, Peace. As a parent today of two young adults and what you see going out in the world. How would you characterize.

Why a sense of belonging as a child within a family unit, et cetera, et cetera. Why is that important? Important and even more critical as we move forward.

Well, it's, you know, it's your identity in the world. It's your self confidence. It's, it's. And this is something I struggled with, and I noticed we all do. Right.

But my daughter and I being adopted, I noticed this is. This has been a big piece for her her entire life. And it's. It's been a big piece for me, too. Always trying to find this sense of belonging.

Both my daughter and I actually don't know our original birth dates. And that's a piece of biology.

And it's hard to, when you don't know who you are or where your place is in the world, to proceed with confidence and confidence. The definition of confidence being that no matter what life throws Our way, we can handle it. And as parents, man, that's what we want our kids.

We want our kids to know that no matter what life throws their way, they can handle it.

And if they don't have that sense of belonging, meaning they don't know where their place is in the world, it's really hard for them to have that confidence, to be able to look for opportunity when life throws them those curveballs that we were talking about earlier.

Let's pivot to the different careers that you've had, because that is such a fascinating story in and of itself. You moved from a career in law to life coaching and also being an author.

And one of the things that you talk about is moving away from external expectations towards finding your passion. How did you know to do that? And why do you think that's important, especially for parents in terms of how they're raising kids?

Yeah, it's so competitive now with kids and schools, and it's really easy to get caught up in that grind. And I notice this even now when you ask another parent, what is your child doing now?

And if your child's at an Ivy League school and, you know, captain other sports team, parents are really quick to say that. Parents, I hear them sometimes saying, well, my child is trying to figure it out.

And it's almost as if they're apologizing for their child who's going a different route. And so, first of all, I think we as parents need to be aware of that.

If we find ourselves making excuses sort of for our children because they aren't on this high, you know, this pedestal that we tend to put certain kids on and they're going a different path, we need to check ourselves because our kids are going to pick that up too.

If we're saying things like, oh, well, they're trying to figure it out, or when sports is a big one, even when kids are younger, if your child doesn't play sports, a lot of parents will start explaining why. There's no need to explain. Your child's fine just the way they are.

And one of the things that I like to tell my coaching clients is that the word weird, and I've told my kids this too. Weird. The root of weird is W Y R D, which means fate or destiny. And I also like to match that up or say it's synonymous with uniqueness.

And so when you embrace your uniqueness, the world opens up to you. And as you mentioned, when I was able to let go of the expectations because I was. I was riddled with fear. Of judgment.

I grew up in a house that you could do. You weren't supposed to do any wrong. It's a very religious house. But religion was used as. As a more of a disciplinary tactic than.

Than the actual relationship perhaps between, you know, you and your God. And so there's a lot of judgment that I was raised with.

So I really had to fight that idea of being able to do what felt went right to me and embrace my uniqueness.

But once I embrace my uniqueness, the world opened up to me and I'm so much happier now than I was when I was practicing law or doing something that maybe externally looked more successful, at least by career title.

So what was the tipping point then for you, Sherry, that you took you from being a trial lawyer, which you were doing for well over a decade, I should add, to pivoting over to, you know, life coaching and being an author.

Quite honestly, it's one of those things where it's the curveballs too. So when we adopted our daughter, we did not know that she. She had some special needs. And it. My former husband was an attorney or is an attorney also.

We both of us weren't getting their full work week in. So we decided that I stayed home as almost by necessity as opposed to well planned out plan for us.

We weren't planning on being a one one income family, but if that hadn't happened, I wouldn't have been able to really understand who I was and what my passions were. So I stayed home for a while. I became a fitness coach. I was staying home, which gave me some business knowledge.

And I met incredible women in that process and realized that this ability to coach people, and not just physically coach them, but also coach them through their challenges. And I had this ability to ask questions, which in part I may have learned from practicing law. I was a litigator.

And so everything kind of was setting me up to where I'm at now.

I didn't start writing till after 50 and now I'm a professional speaker, writer, reinvention, coach, and all of this, this is my passion, what I'm doing now. But this could have happened. And this also happened after breast cancer when I decided, okay, it's time for me to do something.

My kids are old enough, I could go into a business and work full time. What is it that I want to do?

And because of my experience with cancer and people ask me how I was able to handle it in the way that they observed me handling it, I realized, okay, I can help other people. Not knowing what coaching was, but that brought me into this realm.

So it's been doors closing or, or, you know, almost tragic events that brought me to something greater than I could have imagined.

It's so interesting because your rich body of lived experience and, and such different experiences, you know, we've, we've outlined, like, when you're with your coaching clients, as you are as a life coach and a friendship coach, what trends are you noticing, particularly among parents who might be your clients, in terms of some of the pain points that they're experiencing in the world we live in today? And I asked the question because of the unique challenges that parents today face, that parents have never faced in the history of the world.

Any trends that you're seeing that have struck you?

One of the biggest ones for parents is that we get so upset a lot of times when we think our kids are not doing what they need to do to survive and to make it.

And it's the biggest thing is to remind parents, and I have to remind myself this a lot, but especially with my daughter who's on a different path than I went on, that it's their own journey. And their journey is so different than ours, especially. It is a different world than we grew up in. Now they have different challenges.

They have more access to things, and at the same time, they have less access to the opportunities maybe to socialize with one another freely, as we did. And so to remind parents that their child's journey is their own.

And when the angst happens, because my kid's not doing this and they're not going through that, the same type of system I did, or they're not making friends the way I did in high school or middle school, or they don't want to throw a birthday party. They need to have a birthday party, but they don't want to. I don't get it. They're not going to have friends.

Just take a step back and say, okay, is that your child that you're worried about, or is that what you're worried about? Because that was your journey and that wouldn't have worked for you. And understand that your child's own journey really helps detach from them.

To step back and look at it from an outside view and go, okay, that kid's going to be okay. And to learn from your child too.

Yes, absolutely.

And I think sometimes, you know, just listening and observing as opposed to offering advice, stepping in, leaning in, which all parents do, because we want the best for our kids. It is a challenge, right, for.

For many parents today, when you see what's going on in the world, how, you know, unstable and unpredictable things are, the fight or flight or the desire to protect kicks in. And how, like, how can a parent be more self aware of allowing that child to follow their own path?

Well, that's what, when I work with my coaching clients, I tell them, when you feel that angst or this, you know, constant gain, upset at something, use that as your buzzer to just say, okay. Let me ask myself, take a step back, is this true? For example, my daughter doesn't drive. And for me I thought, oh, you know, she's older now.

I've accepted that at age 15, 16, when my friends kids are getting their licenses.

One, there was that competition piece, I think, or as parent feeling, somehow I failed because my kids, they're taking pictures on social media of their kids having their licenses and I'm not doing that. And people are asking me, oh, does she have her license yet? And one, I needed to detach my own ego from that. It didn't. It kind of ridiculous.

But you get caught up in that as a parent, as a mom, and realizing, you know, this as an example, you know, I thought, okay, if she doesn't drive, how's she going to get groceries? How is she going to take care of her kids? Get to work, it's not safe.

And all these ideas in my head of everything that isn't true, you know, I had this future that was so bleak in my head that was absolutely not true. So I had to detach, ask myself, okay, is this true? No, it's not true. A lot of people don't drive.

She, you know, the whole city of New York doesn't drive. I mean, you know, people do fine and they navigate and this is, you know, now this is a different world than I grew up in as well.

They had, now you have Uber Lyft. There's so many other options. And yeah, and it doesn't.

And so these things I was telling myself, gave myself so round up with and pressuring my daughter to try driver's ed and all these different things really was my own journey and what I thought life would look like for me if I didn't do it.

Absolutely.

One of the things that we've talked about that is so important in your story is your being able to find your passion and being able to find it through, you know, pretty radical pivots you can call it along your journey. What tactics did you use to help support your kids in finding their passion?

Well, they're in their 20s, so I believe they are still finding it.

And I kind of joke with them because as I said, I became a writer and everything at 50 and I said, well, I hope it doesn't take you till 50, but if it does, a lot of it is don't worry about what for me, I tell them, don't worry about what's going to make money.

I personally went into law by default and looking for the career that sounded good, that would make money because if that's the focus, you can get really good at it. And you don't want to get good at something you hate and be stuck there.

So when you make your decisions, if you really like that, that thing, you know, my daughter's art, artistic, for instance, my son's into science.

If you really like it, you'll be good at it and it'll feel good and it won't feel like a job and you'll make money, you'll be fine, you'll be able to live it once you find what really resonates with you and you'll be happy. And that's the most important part. So don't, don't fall into getting really good at something you hate.

It's really great advice and it's such a succinct way to remember it. Right. I think we all, regardless of age, it's a really good reminder for all of us. I want to pivot over to your latest book, Sherry.

Tell us what the impetus was for table 51.

Yeah. So I had never traveled the US before I was adopted by Japanese American parents.

They were born in the Seattle area, so they were us born, but they were, there's a generation between us, so they're the age of my peers, grandparents, and they were interned in internment camps during World War II because of their Japanese heritage. So I grew up with the idea that I couldn't travel the US because that was an adopted belief from my parents experience.

And we stayed to the West Coast. So on a personal level, I wanted to rewrite that belief and believe I was welcome everywhere. So I wanted to travel all 50 states.

I did most of this by myself. So I thought, okay, I better do it now. You know, there's a lot of luggage to carry. And I thought, okay, what makes places important?

It's not necessarily the monuments, although those are nice, but it's the people. The people bring something to a place. And so I came up with this idea that I was going to share a meal with a woman.

A woman I either absolutely didn't know, a stranger or someone I had briefly met or lost contact with decades ago. And so I embarked on first trying to find all the women. They turned out to be diverse in every way.

Once I got the women, my only requirement was that they communicate with me so that when I showed up, they didn't stand me up. But other than that, I ended up in big cities, small towns, just a really rich, diverse tapestry of the U.S.

What would you say were your key takeaways in terms of your own personal learning through this journey? And then, of course, writing the book, it was huge.

So when I started out, I was looking for connection, you know, on a bigger scale. We had come out of the pandemic, and there's a lot of racial and political strife in our country.

So we became people that were not only in our physical bubbles, but also in our mental and emotional bubbles.

So I wanted to also be able to sit down with someone, it didn't matter their politics, their race, their economic levels, education levels, and believe that we could connect over shared sharing a meal with one another. So I was looking for connection in the beginning. What I found in my travels is it was the differences that made us so interesting.

And these women, they started, you know, they. It's almost like I had the same teacher that kept on appearing with a different body, different face, different voice.

And this conversation is almost as if it continued all the way through this one place. I went to Ohio. I landed, and it was probably the worst experience into a city that I ever had gotten into.

I accidentally landed during a supremacy rally, a racial white supremacy rally. And I terrible at direction. So I pictured myself actually driving in, but it felt very uncomfortable to me.

I was actually shaking when I got to my hotel room. I wasn't expecting that. The next day, though, I met this woman from that same city, born and raised. She and I hit it off like that.

We were best friends from the moment of go. And that just told me I can't, you know, judge a place by the. By my first experience or just a few people that I saw in that area.

What would you like parents to take away from this book, Shari?

I'd like parents to just the simple. The simple hour of sitting down and sharing a meal or inviting somebody over.

And that could be another, you know, maybe your friend, your child has a best friend and you've never met the parent before, invite that parent over just to share a simple meal or. And the thing about sharing a meal and it could be a neighbor, you know, or a community member and care.

And kids learn and they watch and they see you doing this, and they maybe start modeling this and doing this.

So as they get older, in this world where we are disconnected because of this great technology we have, they learn to invite people to sit down and share a meal. Because the magic that happens when you sit down and share a meal, you have oxytocin is released, you know, and that.

And that's your bonding hormone, serotonin, dopamine, your happiness hormones. Our mirror neurons kick in. So we start becoming in sync. Our bodies go into rest and digest mode so that we relax and we're not.

We're not so stressed and we could communicate with one another. This is an evolutionary practice that was done, you know, for, for generations where we used to sit down with our.

Our neighbors and our children and have this sort of community that we built around food, and we've lost that. So I'd love for parents to just do this simple act of inviting their neighbors friends over.

And it doesn't have to be something elaborate just to sit down and share a meal and teach our kids to do that too.

It's such a wonderful, simple way of reconnecting and re energizing and underscoring the belonging that we talked about. Such an interesting journey you've had. Shari Leid. Thank you so much for joining us, Sherry. Life coach, friendship coach, Author of Table 451.

Really appreciate your time and your insight today.

I appreciate our conversation. Thank you. To learn more about today's podcast, guest and topic, as well as other parenting themes, visit whereparentstalk.com.