Erica is a few weeks into the school year, navigating a new schedule with two kids in sports five days a week and not enough time to go home in between. In the middle of that chaos, her youngest daughter, seven years old and a spicy ADHDer, got moved up from the beginner jujitsu class to the 7 to 13 age group and completely fell apart in the car on the way to her first class.
What started as a parenting story turns into one of the more useful reframes Erica has offered on the show. She walks through the heart to heart she had with her daughter in that car, about the gap between deciding to grow and actually feeling ready, and why that in between stage is supposed to feel awful. Erica connects it back to her own biggest leaps, a home birth, starting a business eight months pregnant, running that business through her mom's death, and makes the case that bravery was never about feeling confident. It was about doing the thing scared anyway.
The episode closes with a funny, honest twist: the exact thing her daughter was most afraid of actually happened a few classes later, and what it looked like to get through it anyway.
Erica describes the exact image of growth: a tiny two or three inch window of time between deciding to do something hard and actually feeling momentum, where your inner voice is doing everything it can to talk you out of it.
Conversations in the Dark podcast, Erica Vander Sande, do it scared, parenting an ADHD child, kids and sports anxiety, growth mindset for moms, overcoming fear of failure, raising confident daughters, entrepreneur bravery, jujitsu for kids
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