#99 Daniela Blanchet on shaping ontologies of connectedness through expat parenting
“I think the way you model this ontological parenting style is just getting curious. It’s asking more questions than telling [children]. We all are going to tell our kids certain things, lead them and guide them on what we do and what we don’t do in society. But there’s finding that balance of discovering through accompanying versus bossing around. For me, that’s huge, and I think that there’s just so much to be learned and gained inside of that model in parenting.”
If we lived in a world that embraced diversity in upbringing, cultural values and ways of knowing, how much more resilient would our societies be to change? How then can ontological coaching help overcome hyper-fixation on the “rights” and “wrongs” of nurturing younger generations to instead seeing parenting as a process that helps children experience the authenticity of the self?
Daniela Blanchet is a Certified Ontological Coach, speaker, and founder of MomToo Coaching, where she helps expat moms and internationally mobile women navigate identity shifts, belonging, and major life transitions. Today, she combines her personal experience as as a Third Culture Kid, expatriate, and mother of three with her professional background in leadership development, education, and coaching to help women build resilience, reconnect with themselves, and create a sense of home wherever life takes them. This episode is an invitation for expat parents to organise for re-innovating societies to become resilient to exponential change by celebrating diversity and teaching younger generations how to lean into coherence to find belonging and place.
What will be covered:
Ontological coaching - focusing on mind, body and emotions to help find coherence
Not a way to give advice but encouraging deep listening to help clients discover for themselves what is missing in their coherence
Uses a socratic method of providing practical steps to self-discovering gaps in coherence
Being in coherence is experiencing the most authentic version of yourself as dimensions are aligned
Not about perfection in parenting but being aware of shifts in coherence with change in cultures
Embodying growth mindset sustainably through focusing on the process over goal
Belonging (based on Brenee Brown’s work): leaning into coherence to find belonging in the world
Coherence as intuition and feeling - holding space for beyond-intellectual processing in community, seeing emotions as linguistic tools to get to know what is as parents
Episode resources:
Take Daniela’s Why Do You Feel So “Off” Since Moving Abroad? quiz
Brene Brown’s book: https://brenebrown.com/book/braving-the-wilderness/
Read the Stanford guide for the growth mindset: https://ctl.stanford.edu/students/growth-mindset
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Mind Full of Everything is a podcast calling for the radical healing of the self and community to outgrow the broken dominant culture of radical individualism and disconnection from our place as interdependent beings, so that we can collectively re-envision a safer, healthier and equitable world. Each episode takes a healing-centric approach to explore the embodied ways in which we can collectively restore and transform our journeys as stewards of community and earth through conversations with writers, researchers, coaches and educators, as well as reflection episodes with the host Agrita Dandriyal on her journey navigating the world as a deeply conscious, culturally-rooted and relational being. Learn more here.
