A Discussion on Thinking Traps with Suzie Foger

 

Suzie is the Founder of Empowernting, a coaching company dedicated to empowering parents through compassionate guidance and practical resources that foster strong family connections. She believes in creating a supportive community where parents gain the awareness, knowledge, tools, and confidence to navigate the joys and challenges of parenthood, ultimately nurturing happy and thriving children.

Suzie is a certified Positive Discipline Parenting Educator, Certified Child Life Specialist, and Certified Sleep Consultant. She currently serves as a School Counselor for children from infancy to eighth grade, where she coaches teachers, parents, and students. Suzie holds a Master’s degree in Child Life and School Counseling. Her mission is to help parents feel confident in their parenting decisions, especially amidst the overwhelming flood of information parents face today.

 

 

Links:

Website: Empowernting
Instagram: @empowernting

 

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Transcript: 

Intro: Welcome to Becoming a Sleep Consultant! I’m your host Jayne Havens, a certified sleep consultant and founder of both Snooze Fest by Jayne Havens and Center for Pediatric Sleep Management.

On this podcast, I’ll be discussing the business side of sleep consulting. You’ll have an insider’s view on launching, growing, and even scaling a sleep consulting business. This is not a podcast about sleep training. This is a podcast about business building and entrepreneurship.

Suzie is the Founder of Empowernting, a coaching company dedicated to empowering parents through compassionate guidance and practical resources that foster strong family connections. She believes in creating a supportive community where parents gain the awareness, knowledge, tools, and confidence to navigate the joys and challenges of parenthood, ultimately nurturing happy and thriving children.

Suzie is a Certified Positive Discipline Parenting Educator, Certified Child Life Specialist, and Certified Sleep Consultant. She currently serves as a School Counselor for children from infancy to eighth grade, where she coaches teachers, parents, and students. Suzie holds a Master’s degree in Child Life and School Counseling. Her mission is to help parents feel confident in their parenting decisions, especially amidst the overwhelming flood of information parents face today.

Jayne Havens: Suzie, welcome to the Becoming a Sleep Consultant Podcast. I’m so excited to have this conversation with you today.

Suzie Foger: I’m super excited. I’ve been preparing and preparing, so I hope we’re going to be able to help some people.

Jayne Havens: Absolutely! Before we get started, tell us a little bit about yourself. What do you do professionally, and why did you decide to get certified to work as a sleep consultant?

Suzie Foger: Professionally, right now, I am a school counselor. I work at a private school where I support teachers and students and families. I’m constantly coaching adults on how to help children. I really wanted to broaden the people that I could help, and so I started a parent and coaching company. I was realizing more and more, even as a parent myself, I can have all the knowledge in the world. I can know exactly what I should be doing.

But if I’m tired, I’m not doing any of it. And if I’m tired, I’m angry, I’m grouchy, I’m grumpy, and the whole household is that. And it never feels good. From a basic need standpoint, I realized that it was so important for me to get a sleep consulting certificate so I can help parents from the basic need standpoint, and then you can do the higher-level work.

Jayne Havens: Makes so much sense. It makes so much sense. I actually work a lot; I collaborate a lot with a therapist who supports moms who are struggling with postpartum anxiety and depression. She refers a fair amount of business my way. She always says to me that she actually can’t do her job as a therapist until I do my job as a sleep consultant. So I think that sounds a lot like what you had going on, right? Like you couldn’t properly coach these parents to make meaningful changes in their homes until everybody was getting a full night of sleep.

When we were brainstorming ideas for this podcast episode, I think it was your idea to discuss the topic of thinking traps. I’m actually really excited for this conversation because I don’t really know if I know a lot about thinking traps. So tell us, what are thinking traps? What is that?

Suzie Foger: So you probably know more than you think you do. I think if you have awareness of your thoughts, if you’re able to kind of like take a step back and be aware of your thoughts, then you know what I’m going to talk about. Really, thinking traps are conclusions that our minds make, because there’s so much information that we need to synthesize and make sense of on a daily basis that our brains will just kind of like take shortcuts. Because it’s too much information, so let’s make a shortcut.

Oftentimes, those shortcuts are helpful, right? Let’s say, if you’re walking down a dark alley, and there’s a big human walking towards you in a trench coat and a hat and sunglasses, and it’s nighttime, you might walk away. Our brains kind of help us oftentimes when they come up with conclusions. But sometimes, the conclusions they come up with are not helpful. They’re not actually effective, and they don’t help us to reach our goal, or they impede on our relationships with ourself or with other people. And so if we can catch those traps, then we can help us to further our goals.

Jayne Havens: Okay. And so when I think about these thinking traps as an entrepreneur — actually, we have a Facebook group for students and grads, our Center for Pediatric Sleep Management Facebook group. Actually, I think somebody posted — it was either yesterday or today — I think her own thinking trap. Right? I think it was something about — for what it’s worth, she hasn’t even finished the course. She’s been through like a third of the course. She posted in the group that she was worried about finding clients. She was worried about getting her business off the ground, and maybe she just shouldn’t do this or whatever.

Suzie Foger: Right. I saw that post.

Jayne Havens: That’s the thinking trap, right?

Suzie Foger: Yes, yes, 100%. We’ll talk about four of the main kinds that generally will pop up in our minds.

Jayne Havens: So tell me what are those. What are the four categories?

Suzie Foger: The first one is black and white thinking. So that’s really when you kind of are like, “Oh, I’m never going to be able to do this.” A little bit, that’s what she was thinking, right? Like, “I’ll never be able to start this business. How could I do it? I’ll never be able to. Look at all these people who have started these crazy businesses.”

This is what she was saying. She was going on different websites and looking at how beautiful the websites were and how incredible. She was like, “Never going to be me.” So a lot of times, we come up with a thought, “Never going to be me, so I guess I’ll just give up.” And if her goal, though, is to start a business and a company, that’s not a helpful thought.

Another one is catastrophizing. “This is going to be the worst day. This podcast that I’m going to do with Jayne, it’s going to be terrible. It’s going to be terrible. I’m so nervous. It’s going to be awful.” Right? It becomes a domino effect.

Jayne Havens: Spiral.

Suzie Foger: Yeah, you can totally spiral into this catastrophizing world, and a huge catastrophe is going to occur. It can be really big, or it can just be that it’s going to be terrible. Basically, I think I can tell the future.

The third kind would be labeling. So this is like because of one thing, I’m now going to label myself or others in a negative way. I’ll give you actually an example that I had this summer. When I was creating this and when I saw your post and when I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is actually something that would be great for the other people in our group,” I couldn’t figure out my own daughter’s sleep. She was like four-ish months. I couldn’t get it.

We were at our vacation house, and it was summer. I just couldn’t figure it out. I was a little sleep deprived, and I couldn’t get it together. I reached out on our group. As I pressed send, I was like, “People are going to think I’m stupid, and I am an idiot. I’m an idiot.” I just decided I’m bad at this. How can I have a sleep consulting company? I’m bad at my own child. That doesn’t make sense at all. But thank God I know about this stuff. I was like, “Well, let’s take a step back.” And we’ll talk a little bit more about how do you take it a step back and how do you re-approach these things.

The last one is mind reading. This is when we assume what someone else is thinking, feeling or deciding, and it’s always, obviously, they’re thinking terribly about us. So in the example, it could have been like,” They’re just going to think I’m an idiot.” Meanwhile, they maybe had a million, bajillion other thoughts because we have so many thoughts in the day. So those are the four main ones. We have black and white thinking, catastrophizing, labeling, and mind reading.

Jayne Havens: And so when people are stuck in these thinking traps, I want to really look at this through the lens of an entrepreneur because that’s really what this podcast is all about. I think a lot of people who listen to this podcast, either they’re already sleep consultants — I’m sure they can identify with a lot of what you just shared — or maybe they’re thinking about becoming a sleep consultant, and they’re having all of these thoughts. Even before they’ve even gotten started, they’re having all of these. You’re calling them thinking traps. What comes to my mind is limiting beliefs, right?

Suzie Foger: Yeah.

Jayne Havens: I think there’s overlap there, right?

Suzie Foger: They kind of have different terms, different frameworks. In cognitive behavioral therapy, they’re cognitive distortions. In DBT, their thinking traps. There’s like all different, yeah.

Jayne Havens: Okay. There’s a lot of ways to say the same thing. I think that, I always say that you can either let your thoughts paralyze you or propel you, right? Your thoughts either stop you in your tracks and they ruin your plans, or you really spring into action. So how do you get to the place where you’re the type of person that can get yourself out of these thinking traps and really into a productive process where you can grow and thrive?

Suzie Foger: First things first is you have to be able to identify them. What I mean by that is being aware that you’re stuck, that kind of like you’re moving, moving, moving, and then you just stop. Right? Personally, for myself, after I did the course, I think I waited and waited and waited until I was like, “Okay. I’ll help you.” Clearly, I had to get through some thoughts that I needed to stop. But if you can’t be aware that there’s an obstacle, then you’re never going to get to the next part. So the first part is to just practice—

Jayne Havens: Can I interrupt you for a second?

Suzie Foger: Yeah.

Jayne Havens: I also think it’s like there could be an obstacle, but it’s not the obstacle that you think. Right?

Suzie Foger: Yeah.

Jayne Havens: Okay. Because I have conversations with people every single day about, you know, people are interested. Let’s just use this as an example. People are interested in becoming sleep consultants. They have a talk with me, and their obstacle is that they don’t know if they’re going to be able to find any clients. I don’t know. That’s what they say. But really, the obstacle might actually be that they don’t know who to have a conversation with, or they don’t know where to be showing up. The actual obstacle is not the one that’s in their mind.

Suzie Foger: Yeah, I might even go deeper to say they’re just not confident in their ability to try something new.

Jayne Havens: Right. So the obstacle is the lack of confidence, but they’re disguising it as not knowing something. That can be learned.

Suzie Foger: Right. Exactly. Exactly. So, yeah, so the first is really to practice that mindful muscle where we just kind of like notice things and put words to what we notice. Then from there, you can kind of see that, oh, I have this goal to get a business up and running, and I haven’t done anything for it in four weeks. You need to recognize that you’re not moving. Then you have to say, “Okay. What thoughts am I having right now?”

I would even recommend, like, do you remember when we were in grade school and it’d be like free write for five minutes before homeroom would start, and you’d have to just kind of like write anything you were thinking, put your pen to the paper and don’t lift it. I would really recommend doing that.

Just all the thoughts that you have about the business, write them down. Write them down. Write them down. Write them down to see what comes out. No judgment. You’re not allowed to judge your thoughts. You’re not allowed to judge anything. This is a fact-finding operation, right? You’re just writing things, writing what you’re observing, what you’re noticing coming up and not judging it at all. Then you can notice, okay, do I have any traps here? Are there any thoughts that I’m thinking are fact? Because that’s what actually happens. We believe that our thoughts are facts when, really, we can change our thoughts. You might notice you wrote “never,” or you might notice I wrote “can’t.”

Jayne Havens: Can’t. Can’t is a good one.

Suzie Foger: Can’t. Can’t do it. What? Of course, we can do it with some help, right? Worst, terrible. Those are our black and whites. Then are we telling the future? I’m not going to be able to find clients. How do you know?

Jayne Havens: How do you know?

Suzie Foger: Do you have a crystal ball we’ve never seen before. That’s just not a fact. That’s a thought. Are you assuming something about someone else? Are you deciding something about yourself based off of one interaction, based off of 17, based off of 100? Because I would really argue that even if it’s based off of 100, even if you failed 100 times, there was always a moment where you are learning. And so maybe the 101st time is going to be the time where you’re going to be really impactful. So that’s the notice part. We’re going to stop, observe our thoughts, write them down. Notice them. Do we have any traps going on? Any thoughts that were deciding our facts?

Now is the time where you do the hardest part, which is flip your mind. And there are some questions that you can ask yourself to help get there. The first, is it true, for a fact, that what you wrote is true? And if the answer is no, then you know that you need to move on to reframing.

The other thing you can ask: How else could I look at this? Could there be another possibility? Could there be another explanation? I don’t want to discount the fact that, again, because we’re really smart and our minds come to conclusions, sometimes there’s validity in those conclusions, right? Let’s say, I really messed up with a parent interaction. Like really. Like I totally bombed it. I was not in my right mind. I gave the wrong information, whatever it was. And I now say, “Wow. I was terrible. I can’t move forward. I can’t recover from this,” maybe, let’s just say. I was the worst in that moment.

Jayne Havens: In that moment. I love that, in that moment.

Suzie Foger: In that moment, yeah, I was the worst. I can’t get clients. Maybe that’s true right now. And I can think of steps to try to learn how to. I just don’t want to discount the fact. I’m not saying that all of our thoughts are egregiously wrong. It’s just that we can look at them a little differently. We can use growth mindset language. Adding a “yet” at the end of things always is helpful.

Jayne Havens: Or an “and,” right? I always find the word “and” to be very helpful. My business is feeling really hard, and I’m still working to figure it out or whatever.

Suzie Foger: Or I had a slow month this month.

Jayne Havens: And next month may look different, hopefully will.

Suzie Foger: Yeah, and the month before, I was super busy. And there are new ways where I can create connections. There’s so many. That’s the biggest piece of what other possibilities could there be. How else? What other conclusions can I come to here? It’s not easy. It takes a lot of practice. Because it’s easier to select for the negative than for the positive. There’s more emotional connection to the negative than to the positive. So sometimes we have to really pull from that.

I had a couple of phrases that I kind of thought could be helpful. Like, “I can’t figure out this child. I’m not a good sleep consultant.” Very common. I won’t say a common thought, but maybe it’s a common experience, a common interaction. Like, “Oh, this one was tricky.” I would say just that, “Oh, this child is tricky, and I’m learning so much.” Or, “This child is tricky, and I’m realizing I need to beef up. I should go watch Jayne’s video again.” Right? So really taking the hardships and making them opportunities.

Again, you’re going to stop. Notice that something’s up. Write down your thoughts. See where you can find any fallacies, any traps. You’re going to validate yourself and others where you can. You’re going to accept that you had this thought. It’s no big deal. It makes sense, right? The reason why that acceptance and validation piece is so important is because it limits our emotional connection to it.

Because when we feel understood, the different parts of our brain get activated. Our prefrontal cortex, where we really think more consequentially and we think long term and we’re able to learn and acquire new stuff, that gets more activated. And we’re able to kind of say, “Okay. Now that I feel understood and the other person feels understood, we can come up with different possibilities and different ways to look at this.” You might think about using “and.” You might think about using “yet.” You might think about reframing it that provides you an opportunity to come up with next steps.

The last kind of tip is also to remember, what are you prioritizing right now? Are you prioritizing growing your business, or are you prioritizing giving up? Are you prioritizing your business, or are you prioritizing your reputation with this one person? Yes, reputation is important. And if we get too stuck on a negative interaction, we’re never going to the value of growing a business.

Jayne Havens: Yeah, I think there’s just so much mindset work that goes into growing a successful business, and this is something that we actually train on inside of CPSM. But I think that there’s never enough learning on this. And, really, if I can put sort of the people who are successful and the people who are less successful in two different buckets, from my view, I think a lot of it does boil down to mindset. I really do believe that if you are capable of achieving something, you will. It might take you longer than projected.

I always tell people like, if you think that you can do it, you will. It might not happen on your projected timeline. It might take you longer than you anticipate. There may be ups and downs and swirls around. But if you believe that you’re capable of figuring something out, you will figure it out. And if you decide, today, tomorrow, next week, ever, that you cannot do something, then you’re giving yourself an out to just stop working on it. Right?

Suzie Foger: Right.

Jayne Havens: And that’s it. That’s the end. So many people do that. It’s so finite. It’s so definitive. You say I can’t do this, or this is too hard and, literally, your brain believes you. And that’s the end. That’s the end of the story. I see it all day. Really, if I look at our graduate pool of people who have completed the course, people who believe in themselves are doing the thing, and people who don’t are not. It literally is that simple. I think there’s also some people skills and some committing to learning the material and gaining a master of your craft, all of that stuff. But I really do think the number one thing is your mindset and your beliefs.

I think that this plays in so similarly with our clients. When our clients show up, when parents show up and they say, “I know my son can do this. I know he’s capable,” they will position themselves to be successful. They will position their child to be successful, and we will have a positive outcome. I have other parents tell me that their baby isn’t ready. This could be a nine-month-old baby that is totally ready.

Suzie Foger: The baby said. He said he wasn’t ready.

Jayne Havens: He said he wasn’t ready. He told me he wasn’t ready. But parents will say that to me. Or even just like on those first discovery calls — I’m sure you hear this — I always write it down when parents say to me, “Elliot won’t go to sleep without a parent sitting there,” or, “Elliot can’t fall asleep unless I’m scratching his back.” Those words are not true, and I always point that out to them. That’s the very first thing I point out. I say, “I just want to bring to your attention that you’ve said a couple of things that just aren’t true. I know that you feel that they’re true. They feel really true, but they’re not.” I point them out.

Every single time, they say, “You’re right, you’re right.” I think a big part of the work that we do as sleep consultants is we help parents to reframe their own thoughts and to shift into a more positive mindset. I think that that’s the value, hopefully, of the CPSM community with regard to all of us as entrepreneurs. It’s like sometimes you need some help.

Sometimes you need somebody saying to you that your thoughts are not actually based in any sort of reality, which is what I had to say to that sweet person who was having trouble inside of our CPSM community. I said to her this morning, “I think we need to work on your mindset here.” This is just a mindset shift. That’s all it is. You’re saying things that are not true, and you just think that they’re true. I get that. But let’s work on that together.

Suzie Foger: Yeah, 100%. There’s so much similarity between growing a business and growing a human.

Jayne Havens: Yes.

Suzie Foger: Because so much of ourselves are in both of them, you know. And so our emotions and our thoughts are so intermingled in those things. I just want to say that, oftentimes, I notice with people that I work with, once I give them the vocabulary of the thought traps, then they’re able to be like, “Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.” They almost feel more empowered because they know it’s a thing. They totally get this. Okay. I think in black and white a lot. I need to—

Jayne Havens: That’s the awareness piece that you were talking about. It’s like, first, you have to admit that you have a problem, right? The first thing you do is you label it and you say, “This is what I’m doing. I know that this is not working to my advantage, and I’m working on changing that.” Right?

Suzie Foger: Yeah.

Jayne Havens: That’s the first step. As you said, just being aware of the fact that you are either saying things or thinking things that are not entirely based in truth and reality.

Suzie Foger: Yeah, and then sometimes the bravery to go against what your thought is. Like this summer when I was having trouble with my daughter, I wasn’t sleeping. I was so emotionally invested in her case; I couldn’t give myself space from it. So for me to be like, it’s this time and I don’t know. I have to make the decision, and I have to figure it out. I really need a nap, but I can’t nap because she’s not.

It was so crazy that I was like, “Why am I not asking for help? I have so many people that could help me right now, and I’m not asking for help. That doesn’t make any sense.” I finally just had to be like, “They might think I’m bad at this, and I don’t care. Because my priority is to get my child sleep and then to get myself sleep, and then I can figure it out, you know.

Jayne Havens: Yeah, I think this is so helpful. I hope that, for everybody listening, if you’re trying to grow a successful business and you feel stuck, really, if everybody would just take a moment and reflect on your own thoughts and beliefs that are swirling around in your brain.

Then for the people who aren’t necessarily struggling with their own thoughts but are up against families who are having these really intrusive thoughts that are not productive to their own success, I think if we as sleep consultants can help our clients identify these thoughts and shift the perspective and help them to realize that their baby can’t sleep independently yet, or they had a bad night last night, and now we’re going to make some changes, and hopefully the next night is going to be better, is really, really valuable.

Suzie Foger: I wanted to just recommend to consultants when speaking with parents just some language that I found helpful is for things like, “Do you mind if I restate that in a different way?”

Jayne Havens: Oh, okay.

Suzie Foger: “Does that sound like a possibility?” Like when you were saying it sounds like you’re saying he can’t sleep, “Do you mind if I restate that? He has some trouble sleeping independently, and we want to help him learn. Is that right?” Or, “Is it possible that you’re thinking X, Y and Z? Do you mind if I go a little deeper? For some parents, it sounds like it’s really painful for you to hear him cry. That makes total sense. It’s our innate desire to help our children when they’re in pain, which usually means crying. They’re not in pain. They’re frustrated. So let’s look at this a different way. Is there another possibility?”

Those are all kind of taglines that are kind of helpful to see if the door is even open for you to give the help in reframing. Sometimes it also helps just a little bit of education for parents that our thoughts, feelings and behaviors are all connected. So if we can kind of like shift it, then everything else can come into place.

Jayne Havens: I appreciate that. Let us know where we can learn more from you.

Suzie Foger: Yeah, my website is empowernting.com. Empower and parenting together. My Instagram handle is the same. I focus a lot on the step before, on that mindfulness piece, that awareness piece, understanding how our own thoughts and feelings and behaviors impact our children’s thoughts and feelings and behaviors. I found that there was so much information of what to do, how to do. Like what to do when your kid is having a tantrum? Give choices. Do this. Take three deep breaths. I just felt like before you can even pull on what to do, you need to, yourself, there’s a lot to talk about being regulated. You need to be regulated.

Being mindful is really the best way to keep yourself in check. So I start there and then grow bigger into what you can do to help your child.

Jayne Havens: Love it. Thank you so much for taking the time to educate all of us today, and we’ll have to do it again soon. Thanks.

Suzie Foger: Thanks.

Outro: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Becoming a Sleep Consultant Podcast. If you enjoyed today’s episode, it would mean so much to me if you would rate, review, and subscribe. When you rate, review, and subscribe, this helps the podcast reach a greater audience. I am so grateful for your support.

If you would like to learn more about how you can become a certified sleep consultant, head over to my Facebook Group, Becoming a Sleep Consultant or to my website thecpsm.com. Thanks so much, and I hope you will tune in for the next episode.