I'm a parent... get me out of here!
Parent whisperer Darren Curtis lives on the outskirts of Reading in the village of Tilehurst. He has been married to Tracy for almost 20 years – and she is also his business partner and a professional life coach. They have two teenage boys, Danny,
18, and Bailey, 17. Darren is the author of I’m a parent, get me
out of here! as well as working as a psychological youth coach
and mentor with children of all ages. The book gives real life examples of what works and what doesn’t work when communicating with the little people in your life. Read on
to find out more...
'I work part time as an associate to the education departments – services supporting behaviour – as a psychological youth coach and mentor to mainly
11 to 18 year olds, but sometimes working with primary school children. I am the author of I’m a parent, get me out of here! Before I kill my teenager! and I run work/life balance training in companies, I’m a keynote speaker about the importance of work/life balance in business and we’ve produced a modular online training package for crazy busy people who haven’t got time to come
to a one day event. I trust you can see the irony there!
'Before I did all these things, I was extremely stressed working for a large company and feeling like a very small and helpless cog in a large machine. After our children were born only 10 and a half months apart, my wife was diagnosed with suffering from severe and debilitating depression, which continued for years with no real end in sight. Doctors seemed to just give her ever increasing amounts of personality-numbing drugs, which meant all she wanted to do was sleep. And when a psychiatrist suggested she have electric shock therapy, I suddenly realised that traditional medicine was at best extremely limited and those we were seeking answers from didn’t really seem to have a clue – they were literally practicing medicine. So my wife and I decided to seek to find a solution ourselves and started to study Neuro Linguistic Programming, followed by Life Coaching, followed by Hypnosis. We sought out and trained with some of the leading behavioural and identity change experts in the world, travelling as far as California to train with Anthony Robbins.
'Considering I couldn’t wait to leave school, I’ve actually become a lifelong learner and I only work with teachers/mentors that I like and who make learning fun/interesting. I trained as a life coach and then a youth coach with the UK college of life coaching. I am a master practitioner of Neuro Linguistic Programming. I trained with the founder of the NLP institute in California, Tim Halbom for Hypnosis and advanced language patterns. I completed Anthony Robbins Life Mastery University and Advanced level personality profiling. And more recently, I’ve completed a phenomenal course called Broadband Consciousness with Richard Wilkins and Liz Ivory and it was off the scale.
'I get asked to work with groups or individuals for varying reasons from a youngster who’s telling his teachers and parents that everything is ok, but their grades have dropped drastically, ADHD, youngsters who are being bullied (it may be worth mentioning here that I have a 100% success rate with youngsters being bullied, after I finish working with them, they do not get bullied anymore without having to involve the bully). I also coach at the Youth Leadership Summit in Kent and the Global Youth Leadership Summit in San Diego each year, where 250 teenagers are taught the latest leadership skills by some of the best trainers in their given subject.
'My book, I’m a Parent get me out of here! Before I kill my teenager!, but it’s for parents of all aged children. In fact, you don’t even need to be a parent to read it. Many people with depression and anxiety have said it has helped them to understand their internal dialogue and given them some much-needed
coping strategies.
'I suppose I started writing my book after I’d been coaching at the Global Youth Leadership Summit at the University of San Diego California in 2008. When I was scribbling notes about the transformations I had witnessed with the youngsters
I had worked with the previous week, and what I’d personally experienced during the event, I realised I had something important to convey to parents when the truth of sentences I was writing made me cry.
'As parents, we pass a script onto our children without even realising it, things that may make them feel guilty, stupid, worthless, and so on. We are constantly using hypnotic language patterns without even realising it and they have a profound effect on our children and how they feel about themselves and the world around them as they grow up.
'When you're born, you are a little vessel of pure potential, then over the
years you develop a script. We are handed pages of a script every day, from
the moment we are born, from our parents, extended family, friends, teachers, siblings, carers, etc. Some of the pages of the script are the stories we've been told about our lives – "you were born with the cord around your neck", "you almost killed us both when you were born", "you've been trouble since the day you were born", "you cried too often", "you were always very clingy", "you're too sensitive", "you're weird". Then there are the parts of the script that are other peoples beliefs about life, things like "money doesn't grow on trees", "life's hard", "life's not supposed to be fair", "nothing comes easy in this life". All of this identity, the stories and the rules about life – which have all come from other people – becomes a voice inside our head. You have one, I have one, we all have a voice inside our head, "the script". So you love your child, but you don't like their script. Next time you have a negative emotion about yourself or someone else, let's say you feel angry, frustrated or sad, ask yourself "what would I choose to feel right now?" – I presume the answer would be something like calm, happy or relaxed, something more positive. So my question to you is "who is choosing to feel angry, frustrated or sad then?" – it's your script. It's telling you a story, it's reminding you of all the rules of life (which were passed onto you by someone else). An argument is basically two peoples scripts clashing. A war is two countries scripts clashing. When we get along with one another, we are being ourselves. When you're coming from your heart, you're being your true self. When you're in your head, you are generally in your script, over-thinking, over-analysing, worrying – worrying about a negative what if, the problem is, most of us think we are our scripts, but we're not. Always ask yourself "what would I choose to feel right now?" – a good start would be "I'm ok" and "it'll be ok".My script is saying “they won’t understand this”. But I’m going to choose to ignore it and trust that those of you who are interested in understanding it, will.
'The book gives real-life examples of what works and what doesn’t work
when communicating with the little people in your life. In fact, it works for all relationships. The sooner parents implement what’s in the book, the easier the teenage years will be. If you already have a teenager, it’s not too late, but let’s face it, if what you’re doing/saying at the moment isn’t working, then it’s time to try something different, right?
'The stuff in the book is what I call uncommon sense, you’ll read it and say “that makes sense”, so it’s common sense, but it’s uncommon in so far as only a few people actually use it and they’re the parents who have a smile on their faces, like they know something that you don’t.
'My top piece of advice is appreciate what you already have. In case you find that difficult, I think this example by Richard Wilkins sums it up nicely:
“Everyone seems to want to win the lottery, but if I were to ask you if you’d prefer to win the lottery or not be dead, you’d choose to not be dead, right?
So when you wake up tomorrow morning, you’ve just told me that you already have something worth more than winning the lottery. Appreciate it, appreciate what you already have, because many people won’t get the privilege of waking up tomorrow morning."
'And finally, I admire people who make others feel good. There are some musical artists like Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters and actors like Morgan Freeman, Will Smith, Jim Carrey and the late actor Robin Williams (although,
as we now know, he struggled to make himself feel good). Oh, and I also
believe in angels.'
For more info, visit
Darren is about to launch a new work/life balance website with a link to their e-learning programme. If you would like to know more, let Darren know and he will send it to you once it’s live.
