In this interview with Annamarie Seidel, Leslie covers the seven laws in the context of parenting, and shares additional details around the Legos story from her book Hidden Treasures: Heavens Astonishing Help with Your Money Matters (free at www.hiddentreasuresbook.com). She also expounds on her math symbols analogy, and explains how her path as a speaker and author really began when she was 12.
Leslie gets candid about getting to the end of her resources and needing to use credit against her better judgment. She shares how she teaches her kids the principles, and how to change the vibration in your family. You’ll also learn how to teach kids to control their moods.
The Visual Aid that Changed Everything mentioned on the podcast can be found here, and more details about the parenting principles mentioned on the call will be released in an upcoming podcast.
TRANSCRIPT:
ANNOUNCER: Welcome to the Rare Faith podcast where the solution to every problem is only an idea away. And where the same activity, with just a little more awareness, always yields better results. Award-winning best-selling author, Leslie Householder, brings some of her best information to this inspiring series of life-changing episodes that you won’t want to miss. Show notes for this episode can be found at ARarekindofFaith.com.
ANNAMARIE: I just wanted to express my deepest gratitude to you for writing ‘The Jackrabbit Factor,’ because that’s what got me started on this amazing path that I’m on of writing a book and working with Bob Proctor. So thank you for what you were doing. And I know you were just following your path as well so that’s really cool and exciting. And it makes life so exciting when you cannot go to sleep and you can’t wait to get back up.
LESLIE: Yeah it’s your fuel for sure.
ANNAMARIE: Yeah exactly. So I want to be respectful of your time. How long do we have? A half an hour? Or an hour?
LESLIE: Let’s, let’s go half an hour and if nobody’s exploded then we’ll keep going.
ANNAMARIE: Okay. Sounds great. So today we are interviewing Leslie Householder who has written ‘The Jackrabbit Factor.’ So Leslie tell me, who is Leslie Householder?
LESLIE: Okay. Leslie Householder is first a wife and mother of seven. That is the reason I do everything that I do is because of my family. And I have such a passion and a desire to be with them so much and to develop their talents and to build our relationships and everything that it began my quest for finding the way to have the life of freedom that I was after. And it started my whole path. So, you know, I’m all American just, just passionate about life and all that there is to learn. I’m convinced that there is no way we can learn it all while we’re here, so I’m just trying to get it all in while I can.
ANNAMARIE: Yeah. Oh, I totally understand that now. Especially having lived an experience of not doing any personal development and then moving on to that path of just…
LESLIE: Waking up.
ANNAMARIE: Exactly. Exactly. So tell me what your journey has been in terms of personal growth. At what point did you start? And where were your kids in the mix of that? Did you start for your children? Or…
LESLIE: Okay. I look back, probably that path began when I was 12. My family lived overseas and one summer we couldn’t afford to go all the way back to the United States so… No. Actually let me backup a little bit. One, the summer that we could afford to go back to the United States they put me in a summer camp that was two weeks long. That was all about fun and activities. But every day we sat for maybe two or three lectures given by people who were really excellent at motivating youth to becoming all that they can be.
And I remember as I sat there I thought, ‘Man this is… I feel something here’.
As a 12 year old I liked how it felt and I decided, you know, ‘one day that’s what I want to do. I want to help people feel the way I feel right now.’
And I didn’t know how that would happen or what my message would be necessarily. But then when I married and we wanted to, we wanted me to be able to stay home with the kids when they came. and we were looking for a way to be able to afford that kind of a luxury. We had some friends who were doing better than we were and they recommended that we attend seminars with them. And so we, we started going to these seminars. And we were going probably about once a month to different speakers who had a message on personal development, on goal setting, on sales training, just a variety of things that were giving us the kind of education that you don’t get in a regular school system. And honestly it was what kept me going. I was discouraged about our situation. I was discouraged about having to work even though the children were coming. And I was convinced, actually I had somebody else say that you know there the father was a full-time dad too and I thought, ‘well as long as we can have anything we want why not let both try to be home with the family not just me.’ And I think it was just the seed that was planted at that time that kind of spoiled me. I was not going to be satisfied with anything less and it put us on this path of personal development. We attended probably more than a hundred seminars over the next seven years and life didn’t necessarily change much. We were just as strapped as ever at the end of that but each time something was growing inside of us and you know you do enough of that and at some point it has to spill over and it has to start showing up in your life. I’m absolutely convinced of that.
ANNAMARIE: And then what was the turn? I mean this is kind of silly because I’ve read so much of your background it’s like I know what the turning point was.
LESLIE: Yeah, I…
ANNAMARIE: Go ahead and tell me.
LESLIE: Yeah, well I know people listening to this don’t always know. So well, I had come to the point of just being fed up with the roller coaster ride that it was: feeling good coming away from the event, and you know hitting rock bottom again within a couple of weeks, and then just climbing hands and knees like in a drought to the next one just so that we could get uplifted again. And you know it was getting tiring and we were so, we had spent a lot of money on these over and above groceries and you know I was in a depression to the point of calling the police on a kid who broke my broom and this is where my mindset was. You know. Just frustrated.
And so I told my husband, “All right honey this is it. I’ll go to this next one coming up but after that I am done. If something big doesn’t change here I can’t justify it anymore. I’m just gonna have to learn how to be happy and satisfied with this, with destitution. You know we’re gonna have to find a way.”
And we attended that one. And it’s kind of funny because I had said this would be my last one and while I was there I was distracted I guess I just wasn’t hungry enough because I wasn’t paying attention. I don’t know. I may have been fuming over how much money we’d spent to get there. I was worrying about the kids. I don’t know what was going on but once it was over everybody was in a buzz about what they’d just learned. And I’d never seen anything like it in seven years.
I’m like, “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. What I, what did I miss?”
And I turned to him, “What did he say?”
And the speaker had just spent like two hours or more developing an idea. And what was he going to say? You know you can’t just hand someone the information. You have to experience the process as well and I was just mad at myself.
I’m like, ‘I can’t believe this.’
And three months later everybody’s still talking about that seminar. I’m like, ‘Oh my word I missed it.’
And so gratefully the host decided to bring the same speaker back for a full three days instead of just a two to four hour intro. And I said alright this is the last one, my second ultimatum. But this time I decided I was going to absolutely be ready and on the edge of my seat with my pen in hand and just ready to get it all. I wasn’t going to let it skip by me this time. And about halfway through something struck my husband in a different way as well and we looked at each other and we’re like, ‘Oh my word. That’s all it is?’
And all of a sudden all those years of seminars and all the little nuggets that we’d been gathering kind of got boiled down into one very simple but beautiful package of truth.
And we’re like, ‘that’s all it is?’
And in three months with that new awareness we tripled our income.
ANNAMARIE: Wow.
LESLIE: In three months. And it was like that breakthrough that everybody looks for you know. It’s and I, I look at it like one of those combination locks that has the dials on it and you have to line the numbers up. And I saw that every one of those seminars every book that we read every audio we listened to was like putting one of those dials into place. Just putting one of them into place doesn’t always unlock the lock. But once it’s in place it never has to be put in place again it’s there and you don’t know how many dials are on the lock that’s keeping you in bondage but one by one they could get put in place. And one day it springs open and you think that that last dial was the key. When in reality it was all of them leading up to it.
ANNAMARIE: Yeah
LESLIE: I’m so convinced of that.
ANNAMARIE: Yeah. So what was the thing that you thought, ‘Oh my gosh this is so simple.’
LESLIE: That was the stick man concept that we learned from Bob Proctor that I teach so often now. and what that is it’s symbolic representation of how our mind works on how the universe works and how we work together and the reason it was so powerful is because you know, Annamarie, if I were to ask you what is the sum of seventy-two million three hundred sixty-four thousand four hundred fifty-four point oh nine and six hundred and forty-three million two hundred forty-seven thousand two hundred seventeen point nine five?
ANNAMARIE: I don’t know.
LESLIE: Is it a hard problem?
ANNAMARIE: It would seem like it would be.
LESLIE: But really is an addition problem difficult?
ANNAMARIE: It’s not when you put it down on paper. You’re right. It’s very simple.
LESLIE: It’s very simple when it’s put on paper and if I put it on paper am I going to write out s-e-v-e-n and m-i-l-l-i-o-n?
ANNAMARIE: No.
LESLIE: No. What am I gonna do?
ANNAMARIE: You’re going to write out the numbers.
LESLIE: I’m gonna use symbols?
ANNAMARIE: Yeah.
LESLIE: And what I realized is that all those years we were listening to all these seminars and reading all these books and that is a lot of verbiage around how success works. It’s like a long drawn-out arithmetic problem. It’s so simple but when it’s so wordy it gets lost.
ANNAMARIE: Right.
LESLIE: You can’t wrap your brain around it enough to be actionable with it.
ANNAMARIE: Well and they say that you only absorb like 5% of what you hear anyway.
LESLIE: Good luck. You know 5% of that math problem you’d get a 5 or a 7 out of it you know what I mean.
ANNAMARIE: Yeah.
LESLIE: So what this concept did for us, this visual representation, this visual aid, it boiled everything down into symbols and my brain could handle it. And all of a sudden I was looking at how this Law of Attraction thing works and how that how this fear, what fear real is really is. And I was able to see it in symbolic form. And when it was in symbolic form I thought I can do that. And and you know how you feel about a problem has everything to do with how well you will succeed at it. And so all of a sudden these challenges that came our way were reduced to their simplest form and we could think of them in such easy terms, such simple terms. It wasn’t, I had, I didn’t have to pore through my notes and remind myself of a million things that I’d learned over seven years.
ANNAMARIE: Right.
LESLIE: It was right there on one page. It’s powerful and it’s just a matter of sticking to your goal long enough to come across these principles that can help so much.
ANNAMARIE: Yeah. Yeah. Just don’t, don’t stop. Don’t stop looking. At what point did you teach the stick man to your children?
LESLIE: Ah you know I’m not sure. I started, there… I remember one of the first times that we were able to teach this to my eight-year-old. I may have used the symbol, it’s been so long I can’t remember it. That was eight years ago. But I did teach him how I, I taught him the Law of Perpetual Transmutation.
ANNAMARIE: Um and how did you teach him that?
LESLIE: I explained that everything in our life, everything in our physical world began with an idea. It began as a thought. And he really really wanted several sets of the expensive LEGO sets that were you know the specialized parrots and pirates and you know the kind that’s not just blocks and wheels but he wanted all these specialized sets and I couldn’t justify the expense it was like $50 a box or something and it was crazy.
ANNAMARIE: Still are. Now they’re $100.
LESLIE: I know. I grew up with Legos. But I’d never seen anything like what they have now and I loved Legos. So we had these simple sets of blocks and wheels from the 1970s that he was playing with and he really wanted the better kind.
And I said, “You know what?”
And, and honestly part of me was fearing and doubting that I would teach him this principle and it might not work for him. Which is ridiculous because it works no matter what. But my fear was kind of getting in the way. But I made sure I didn’t convey that as best as I could.
And I just said, “Okay Jacob look if you want these blocks or these blocks, fancy LEGO sets what you need to do is, I want you to write it down. Put it on paper. We’re gonna stick it on the fridge. And what you do is you just picture yourself having it. Imagine how it’s going to feel and allow yourself to plant the seed in your mind. Everything begins with a seed. It’s not up to us to know how it’s going to happen but it is up to us to plant the seed and visualize it and feel as though it’s real and then get to get to work see what you can do to maybe earn the money that would pay for them or just start moving your feet.”
And you know he didn’t know where they were going to come from and I didn’t know where they were going to come from but I had convinced him that this process works. I mean the younger the children are the less scrutiny they put on over stuff like this right?
ANNAMARIE: Well because they don’t know how to scrutinize it.
LESLIE: They don’t know that it might not work. And that’s their advantage. And so anyway it was a few months later maybe not even that long within a few weeks I think. My husband, my husband and I we were searching the online auctions for a really good deal. You know?
ANNAMARIE: Yeah.
LESLIE: Maybe we, you know, because we wanted it to work for him really bad too but we could not afford it. Just to put it out put out the money. And so we’re searching for the different ways you can get ‘em.
And one day my husband’s at work and he is sitting there and a lady comes up to him and she says, “You know what my son has kind of grown out of his Legos. Do you have anybody in your family that would like some?”
And his eyes get big and he says, “Well, yeah. You know, what have you got?”
And she says, “Well, you know we’ve got all kinds of sets and everything and we’ve still got the booklets and the manuals on how to use them. and and and I’ve got some family members. Let me get back with you.”
So by the time she had talked to all of her family members who also had Legos they were getting rid of they had pulled together a big chest full of Legos that was about four feet wide three feet deep and about four feet tall.
ANNAMARIE: Whoa buzz oh
LESLIE: Of Legos and sets and all the manuals and everything and in like mint condition. It was more than a thousand dollars worth of Legos.
ANNAMARIE: Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh.
LESLIE: And so we came home and we boxed ‘em up into four little box, not little, four big boxes and wrapped them and put them under the Christmas tree. And you should have seen his face when he opened just one box.
ANNAMARIE: Oh my gosh.
LESLIE: One. He opened one box and there were the pirates and the parrots and the alligators and the sails and everything and the ladders. And, and he, his eyes were huge. He was so excited. And then he opened the second box and the same reaction. And by the third box he fell to the floor. He was flat on the floor with amazement. And then there was the fourth box and it just, it just showed him, and it showed us
ANNAMARIE: Yeah
LESLIE: that it, that it still works, you know. And we had done it with different things. We’d done it to change our income, and but every day and even now every time it happens, and it’s been a decade since I’ve started seeing this really work, it’s been up that long, and every time I’m still just amazed but not surprised.
ANNAMARIE: Yeah. Yeah. I can totally relate to that. We’ve had experiences with that with my kids.
The reason I asked you about teaching your children the stickman is because, you know, when I started learning with Bob Proctor and that just totally hit me, I think for like you seeing that stickman, I was like, ‘oh my gosh.’ It just shifted everything and made it all make sense. So then when I came home and started teaching my children and I probably spent a good nine months talking with them in different ways.
And then my husband, in one of the conversations, he goes, “Here wait. Let me just draw you a little picture…
LESLIE: huh…
ANNAMARIE: …for the stick man.”
And she’s like, “Man, I wish you guys had done that a whole long time ago because everything would have made a whole lot more sense.”
LESLIE: Oh. You know what. Hello, I probably should do that with my 14 year old right now. (laughter) I’m just, this is so funny, I’m thinking about how many lectures I’ve given him in the last week to help him get on the tennis team. Duh. Okay.
ANNAMARIE: There you go.
LESLIE: Okay. I have to say the thing that made all the difference, right? Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yep.
ANNAMARIE: I think we, you know because it seems like I don’t know, maybe it seems like it’s a, it’s a simple symbol like you say but there’s a lot to it.
LESLIE: There’s so much power in it. Yeah. And it’s easy to disregard it as unimportant because it is so simple but it’s…
ANNAMARIE: think that kids might not quite grasp it and…
LESLIE: Yeah. Well maybe they would grasp it a little easier than my lectures.
ANNAMARIE: Yeah. I’m with you there. okay yeah
LESLIE: Okay. Yeah. I’m always learning.
ANNAMARIE: So what do you think that your strengths are as an individual and a parent?
LESLIE: You know I think probably problem-solving. I’m starting to notice this about myself and in a way that I’m more aware of it than ever before. I remember I went to college for math in, math major. And it was during my senior year that my advisor pointed out that all things that we do in math, unless you go be an engineer or whatever, the whole point of math is to teach problem solving. And that the mathematics is just a model. It’s a place to practice problem solving. But in life you use the same principles to overcome your challenges, and that stuck with me. But I’m realizing that anytime anybody comes to me with a situation, or if I’m faced with a situation, I’m learning to go very quickly to, ‘Okay now what? Okay, so what? Okay what are we going to do?’ Because life is so short to sit and wallow. It’s, there’s, there’s too little time to stew or concern yourself over, ‘oh no’. You know. I mean we’ve been given the tools to overcome all things. And you know the stick man being a big, a big piece of that but if I’m stuck and I don’t have an answer to a problem and I’m feeling these wallowing kind of feelings, I’m more quickly going right to ‘okay well I know what to do about this. What do I want? Picture it. Feel it. Expect it. Go to work. Done.’
You know?
ANNAMARIE: Yeah and the more you do it the better you get.
LESLIE: I think so. And you know, I will say this though, that the more you do it and the more you see it work, it does not make your challenges any easier. It’s just that the challenges that come, you’re equal to.
ANNAMARIE: Right.
LESLIE: And every one of them will stretch you just as much as the last one did, even though the last one is more elementary. Every one of them is going to stretch you. That’s why you look at these gurus; that you think ‘they have it all.’ Their challenges are no less difficult than the ones they had ten years ago but they’re just equal to them.
ANNAMARIE: Yeah. Yeah. And, and they are bigger. They do get bigger. (laughter)
LESLIE: They do but, you know what, I don’t think I would have it any other way. But…
ANNAMARIE: Yeah. Because that’s what makes, I mean when grasped all of this, that’s what makes life very interesting. Especially when you…
LESLIE: And it’s where the joy comes from. The conquering. Yeah, you know.
And even after discovering the principles, and seeing them work in such a huge way, and making such a difference in our family life, there was probably about a three or four, at least three years span of time where it felt like the laws were suspended on my behalf. It felt like everything was absolutely opposite of what I had come to know to be true. And it made me question in different ways and ask new questions and seek deeper understanding of those principles because I knew they were true but why weren’t they working for me now. You know. And then after that spell I had to, I had to go through this test of getting to the end of all I could do, again; getting to the end of all my resources, again; getting to the end of all my understanding, again; and keep my mindset healthy to the end of it. That was my test. And at the very end, and I’ll share: This is what’s so cool is at the end of it, it was right around our anniversary and we had very little money left and this was after even going to credit to keep things going while we tried to figure things out – which is so against my grain…
ANNAMARIE: Right.
LESLIE: …to want to do that. But you know sometimes when you’re trying to accomplish something you’ve got to draw on all resources. I mean how committed are you? You know. To the dream, or are you just… it’s different than going to credit for the luxury. Or going to credit for groceries, you know. It’s kind of different than that but at the end of all of it we had just a little teeny bit left and we, it was our anniversary and we decided, we made a choice, we made a conscious decision. ‘You know what? We are not going to go to fear. Alright, so what if we lose the house? So what if we lose everything? So what if we have to start over again? We are doing what we know we’re supposed to be doing and we’re just going to go to the end and expect that either something’s going to happen at the end that’ll, you know, rescue us or not but we know we’re doing what we’re supposed to be doing.’ And we had more peace of mind, in that moment, than when we had ever had with piles and piles of money in the bank. And I’ve learned that peace of mind does not come from money in the bank. It comes from a decision.
ANNAMARIE: Oh wow.
LESLIE: And, and living your path. That’s where the peace of mind comes from. And so, anyway, we went on our anniversary. And we decided, you know what, instead of being in fear we’re just going to go to our favorite restaurant. We’re celebrating all these years together. We’re going to go to our favorite restaurant and we’re going to spend the money. And we’ll face tomorrow when it comes, you know. We went with this, with this attitude of enthusiasm and expectation over our future and knowing that we’re serving people with what we do. And as we finished dinner, we had a wonderful time, and we paid the bill and we left. And as we were leaving, we’re out in the parking lot, the waiter comes running after us. He comes out the door with paper in his hand and he gives us our receipt back and he says, “You know the manager said that because it was your anniversary the meal’s on us.”
ANNAMARIE: Oh wow.
LESLIE: And we just looked at each other and we grinned and we thought you know we know we’re doing the right thing.
ANNAMARIE: Yeah
LESLIE: We know, we know we’re doing the right thing by following our dreams. And our dreams are put in our hearts for a reason. And I am convinced that it is because God has something for us all to do.
ANNAMARIE: Yeah.
LESLIE: And when we, when we trust that, and when we follow it, he supports it.
ANNAMARIE: Yeah, okay. So what I want to do is move on a little bit here and since you are practicing the principles as well and especially passing these on to your children because I realized that when I started working with Bob it was like, ‘Oh my gosh! There is so much to know and it is my job to give this gift to my children so that they don’t have to be spending thousands of dollars when they’re older.’
LESLIE: Right. Right.
ANNAMARIE: ‘And they’re not going to learn it in school.’ So suddenly I had a big purpose. It was like, ‘Wow’. So how are… What I want to go through is all the different laws; since you are really good at those and have done – I just I am so impressed by the all of the research that you did in Heaven’s Treasures it’s just, it blows me away every time I listen to it, is go through and what I’m specifically looking for is like the lego story. Of stories where you have had something transfer, you know a transformational teaching moment with your kids and how that sort of came about with each of the laws. So you, we’ve covered the Law of Perpetual Transmutation. So how are you teaching the Law of Relativity to your children?
LESLIE: Well you know I think it’s just a matter of pointing things out when they notice them themselves. Sometimes they listen more if it comes from their own experience first. And one example of that is; you know I try to give my children as much freedom as possible. I don’t want them to feel trapped. I want them to grow up with an expectation that freedom is normal. And expect it in their life that they should they should strive for that. I mean I don’t know where this country is going but I want them to stand for freedom. You know one thing, that my one son came home.
He says, “Mom I just realized how much freedom you really give us.”
He hadn’t recognized it until he had spent some time with his friends and found out. And he’s a, he’s a teenager. He has one friend whose parents won’t let him cross the main road.
ANNAMARIE: Oh, whoa.
LESLIE: And that right there is the Law of Relativity. He thought what we had was normal until he was able to compare it to something more restrictive.
And you know as they recognize how you can look at one thing from two different points of view with this Law of Relativity. You know the idea is that when they bring home a grade that they’re not very proud of, I can help them switch their mindset on it because it is what it is. I mean we can either beat ourselves up till the cows come home. Or we can say, ‘You know what thank heavens it’s not a C.’ You know a B is great when you compare it to a C
ANNAMARIE: Ya
LESLIE: Or you got a D. Now I’m not, I don’t like celebrating D’s but depending on the child if they’ve been struggling to pass a test we’re going to celebrate the D.
ANNAMARIE: Right.
LESLIE: The whole idea is to keep them feeling good. Keep them feeling good. Now it’s been, it’s been hard. You know I expect A’s out of my children. And for the last four years especially my teenagers when they were bringing home D’s or C’s and I knew they could do A’s. I knew it it was all I could do to say, ‘Man I’m so glad you passed.’ and I’m here just cringing inside.
ANNAMARIE: Right
LESLIE: But I’m trying to use the Law of Relativity to keep them feeling good. And I tell you this last date, this last year it’s really started to pay off because now they’re pulling A’s because they expect it of themselves. And they felt good all along the way growing to that capacity.
ANNAMARIE: I have a child. My daughter is very, can be very hard on herself because she’s a straight A student. and so when she’s gotten a grade on something I can see her wanting to beat herself up about it.
So I’ve asked her I’m like, “Did you do the very best that you could when you were taking that test?”
She’ll say either, “yes.” Or “no.”
And if she did then I mean for both of them I’ve always said, “Well that’s all I can ask of you is that you did the very best you could that day. Because that’s all it’s reflective of, it’s how well you did that day.”
And if she didn’t do her best because she didn’t study or whatever she knows it instantly and it’s like, “oh nope. no I didn’t. I didn’t take care of that one.”
LESLIE: Yeah.
ANNAMARIE: Yeah. Oh cool. Okay. So the Law of Vibration and Attraction. I know this is such a big deal. We’re hearing about it everywhere but one of the big things that we’re realizing is that, you know, the Law of Attraction is secondary to the Law of Vibration. And if you don’t know how to change your vibration…
LESLIE: You’re not going to like what you attract.
ANNAMARIE: Exactly. How are you helping your kids experience that?
LESLIE: Man. It’s such an everyday thing it’s kind of hard to put my finger on one scenario except I have one child who just radiates good vibration. Everywhere he goes it’s his nature. I mean you see his baby picture and you see it in his baby picture he came with it you know. He just came with this amazing vibration. And I see how he is flocked with friends. I think there’s such a connection between cause and effect as well because you know vibration comes from the thoughts you choose and the feelings you allow to be generated in your heart. And it begins with gratitude.
You know that my kids have learned that they get better results when they stay in gratitude. I mean that’s a no-brainer. When you have a grateful child they get more privileges and they can pick up on my vibration. They know when I’m mad even when I want to try to hide it.
ANNAMARIE: Yeah.
LESLIE: They know it. And it’s funny because we’ll be on a family outing in the van together and if something has set my husband and I off, maybe the kids have done something that annoyed us, and they can tell that we’re on edge, and they can tell we might be getting angry, they know instantly that is going to affect the results they have in their life. You know. That’s going to affect whether or not they get the ice cream on the way home or whatever.
ANNAMARIE: Right.
LESLIE: Okay, so the first thing that happens is the car goes quiet because they don’t like us to be angry, you know. Of course. And we don’t like to be angry and so the car goes quiet and someone will inevitably remember, “Thank you, Mom and Dad for taking us.”
Well I mean it just comes out of the blue and someone always always goes there first. And with that you can tell that my husband and I, you know you have to respond to the gratitude, “You’re welcome.” And all of a sudden we’ve softened. And they’re seeing how, in our family, gratitude changes the vibration in our family.
So, if you can imagine what does gratitude change with your vibration in your life and what kind of blessings God can send. That’s, that’s the parallel that I see.
ANNAMARIE: Now, how have you taught them to be verbally thankful like that?
LESLIE: How have we taught them that? We tell them to say thank you. We tell them outright when they’re throwing a tantrum.
And we have to remind them, “You know what we didn’t have to take you with us to the store today. We didn’t have to take you with us and you’re throwing a tantrum that you didn’t get that, you know on the shelf. I think next time maybe we’ll just leave you home.”
And they say, “well boo.”
And we say, “No. Look, stop right now and tell us thank you for taking you.”
So we have to just point it out. Teach them. Train them to say thank you. And it might not be felt the first several times. Or for a few years it may not even be heartfelt. But speaking it can often create those feelings and be the seed for creating things. You know you say it and it can become it.
ANNAMARIE: That’s a good tip. That’s a very good tip. I think I need to pick up on that one. Because I have a few that like to throw a lot of temper tantrums so that’s good.
The Law of Polarity. You know some of these, it’s like they don’t show up nearly as much. They’re not as good of opportunities to teach but you know, and if there’s nothing that comes to you that’s quite alright.
LESLIE: Well you know polarity has been a topic with my kids. When things have gone really horrible, they’ve had a bad day, then I like to say, “You know what, there is this Law of Polarity thing that says you can count on this – that because this was really, really horrible there is something amazing that can come from this. Let’s look for it.” You know and it just becomes a conversation. And I’ve got one daughter who now when something’s really, really bad she’ll say, she’ll start looking for ‘well where’s the good? If something is this bad there’s got to be something good.’
And if you can just train your kids to be aware that there are both in existence. And that it exists.
I mean the story they love, the story of the two little boys that go to the Christmas tree and one of them sees all this manure everywhere.
He’s like, “What is this? What kind of a Christmas is this? All this poop everywhere. This is awful. This is the most horrible Christmas I’ve ever had.”
And just crying and whining and…
The other one, he’s romping in it. He’s tossing it around. He’s having so much fun.
And the mother says, “What on earth are you doing?”
He says, “Well with all this poop around here somewhere there’s got to be a pony.” (Laughter)
My kids love that story. And so sometimes we’ll bring that up and remind them that you know there’s just a lot of poop around so let’s go find what there is good. Lets just find it.
ANNAMARIE: That’s a great story too. Okay, the Law of Rhythm.
LESLIE: The Law of Rhythm is alive and well at our house. (Laughter) And a lot of it comes from they see what my husband and I are working on. And there are some times that we’re working on a project so, so hard and heavy that everything else in the household falls apart. And we call it ‘a temporary season of imbalance.’ And it’s the seasons where my kids have to, if they want to eat, they’ve got to go make their own food. And which by the way Law of Polarity, they’re learning how to cook.
Ya know there’s always a good on the other side of it. But the laundry piles up and they can’t find their clothing. Well if they want it bad enough they’ll go figure out how to do it themselves. You know. So it’s, a neighbor, may come to our house and they may not have a clue what we’re doing and we can look pretty scary sometimes with the way our household is run but it’s ‘a temporary season of imbalance.’ And we have come to be at peace with it because of this one story that I learned. When you’re on your way to a goal in the middle things get messy. It’s just the way it is. In the middle of a life-saving surgery it would appear that a murder has occurred in the room.
ANNAMARIE: Right.
LESLIE: And so when the house looks like that I just say, “Okay this is our murder. But pretty soon they’re going to get buttoned up, it’s going to get buttoned and it’ll be saving someone’s life.”
So that’s the Law of Rhythm. We’ve just come to accept the flow of good and bad and trusting that nothing bad is permanent. And back to the bad day, all my kids if they’ve got a bad day, they know a good one’s coming. And that is such a gift to teach your children that because it seems so obvious sometimes but for a child it’s not obvious. When things are bad they wonder if that’s the condition of their life from here forward.
ANNAMARIE: Right. Because they just don’t, especially as the younger ones, don’t understand the concept of time.
LESLIE: Yeah.
ANNA: Yeah.
LESLIE: Yeah. So you teach them to look forward to the better day coming. It’s good that you’re having a bad day because otherwise you wouldn’t know what a good day was.
ANNAMARIE: Right.
LESLIE: We can be grateful for this day.
ANNAMARIE: Right.
LESLIE: And most often it’s just a conversation. You know they pick up on these principles through conversations and how you respond to your own challenges.
ANNAMARIE: Right. Exactly. Oh, well you make me feel so much better about the fact that my laundry piles up.
LESLIE: Yeah. No forget that. You know I’ve, I have decided that the Beverly Cleaver image that we were fed 50 years ago oh did my psyche such a disservice.
ANNAMARIE: Yeah. I, I agree.
LESLIE: Yah, it is the ideal. It is the ideal, but perfection is not today. There have been times where we’ve had a maid come in but I saw how lazy it made my kids. I’m like, ‘No. There is… we’re going to create an environment that’s uncomfortable for them so that they can discover how they can contribute.’
The older they get the more they do. And you know I don’t even have time to do a hand over hand to teach the younger ones how to do chores really well. But I tell you if they’re hungry they’ll figure out how to start making themselves a sandwich.
ANNAMARIE: They sure do. And they make a big ol’ mess when they’re doing it. But they’ve made it.
LESLIE: Yeah. I have released my guilt over all of that. I just,
ANNAMARIE: I totally relate. Hey so we are almost done. The Law of Cause and Effect is such a big one.
LESLIE: You know probably the best principle or the best whatever I can say on cause and effect comes from something that I’m not perfectly good at. But it’s so important to me and it’s been so powerful when I have been good at it that I think it’s worth sharing. And that is that traditionally I think parents tend to apply cause and effect principles to teach their kids to behave.
But I had one friend of mine who were absolute experts at this and the way they used cause and effect was when a child, they used a chart of different characteristics of a person, of different qualities that we should have like responsibility or attitude or you know they had about five of them. And you pick which ones are most important to you and your family that you want your children to adopt. And you have the list on their paper of these different qualities and those qualities can come off like with a Velcro strip or something. And so when a child does something and it shows that they were not responsible you go and you say, “Oh, I’m so sad that you chose not to be responsible.”
You take the responsibility piece off their paper and then periodically, and it’s good if you can do something every day or at least once a week, you say, “Okay everybody if your… if your paper is complete; everybody whose paper is complete we’re going to go do this fun thing or we’re going to have this wonderful treat.”
And if they come and say, “oh I want the treat.”
Say, “Oh let’s go check your paper.”
And if responsibility is not up there then they can’t participate and that’s a cause and effect. Now how do they get it back up there? Well, it’s the process of making things right.
“All right if you want your possibility piece back up let’s do something here where you can show me that you are responsible and you can have that back there in a heartbeat.”
ANNAMARIE: Yeah.
LESLIE: And so if they know that it’s not punishment; its absence of reward. Does that makes sense?
ANNAMARIE: Yep.
LESLIE: It’s… it’s not punishment. It’s not go to the corner. It’s not the spanking. It’s whatever, and believe me we’ve done it. We’ve tried all of them and we still do a variety of each depending on each child and the circumstance. But the overall concept, ‘that if you do not show this particular characteristic then you are incomplete.’
ANNAMARIE: yeah
LESLIE: Like the paper is incomplete, you’re incomplete. And we need to make it right. If you did this thing wrong let’s go through the steps of making it right. So often it’s, you know people will go it’s, a time out and just spending five minutes in the corner doesn’t make something right.
ANNAMARIE: Yeah
LESLIE: If it’s made wrong they’ve got to show the responsibility of actually putting it together. And for the older children you don’t make them do it. You just let them, let them be incomplete for as long as they can stand it.
ANNAMARIE: Yeah.
LESLIE: You know, when they miss out on enough stuff then it becomes their idea to go make it right.
ANNAMARIE: Right. So have you started this chart?
LESLIE: The reason I kind of hesitate, that I’m not really so great at it is I did this chart when my oldest was oh probably ten and my young you know and I had a new baby and everything in between, and it worked like magic. And I do have a recording of the teacher who taught me this principle. I have the recording at my website so if I can point people to that later. It’s a free recording. But after that we moved. And after the move I never quite got back in the groove of it because we had moved. yeah and we’re still, we’ve been here five years and we’re still unpacking and organizing so it you know.
ANNAMARIE: I can relate to that. I’ve been here eight years and I still have boxes that I haven’t…
LESLIE: Yeah. Yeah. So I can tell you that it works like magic. And we still use the principle even though we don’t have the charts up. You know. So, but it’s a wonderful way to teach the kids responsibility, and empowerment, and it’s all on a positive spin.
ANNAMARIE: Yeah.
LESLIE: You know.
ANNAMARIE: Exactly. Okay. Last one, Law of Gender.
LESLIE: Yeah. a Law of Gender I think we call it gender and gestation. It’s kind of a two of them together.
ANNAMARIE: Yeah, I like gestation better.
LESLIE: Yeah.
ANNAMARIEL: It makes more sense.
LESLIE: It does. It does. And you know it’s teaching patience. The kids have seen my husband and I set goals and have them come true so much longer than was expected, that by our example I think is their best experience with gestation. We talked with them for years about bringing dad home from work and for a kid two months is an eternity.
ANNAMARIE: Right. Right.
LESLIE: Oh and so we were talking to them about this for probably four years before it happened. And so I think teaching kids the gestation period, it’s a hard thing to do but if you’re living it; and if you’re talking about it; and if you’re coming through; and if you’re holding out till your goals are achieved; and then pointing out to them ‘look aren’t we glad that this didn’t happen back when we thought it should have because look how it would have been different.’ and put a positive spin on the delay. Then it can help them have more patience in their own goals.
ANNAMARIE: Yeah. Ah that’s great. Well, I mean, I could go on I have a bazillion more questions but you know we’ve gone a little over 30 minutes here and
LESLIE: Nobody’s exploded.
ANNAMARIE: I could talk to you for hours. Do you have a few more minutes? Can I ask a few more questions?
LESLIE: Yeah, Anna, that’s fine.
ANNAMARIE: Thanks. Perfect. There’s hundreds, hundreds of self-help books on the shelves and many of them are really not good, so how would you guide parents with young children to find quality information to help them build their parenting skills?
LESLIE: You know here’s my default answer to how do you do anything and it’s this one included, you’ve got to know what you want for your family. What are your family goals? What are your objectives? What are you trying to accomplish? And you can be entitled to that inspiration or those hunches that lead you to the right material for your family because it is absolutely not cookie cutter for everybody.
Everybody is so different, in such a different place in their life that you’ve got to be intuitive about what you pick up. But how do you enlist that intuition? You do it by identifying your objective, very clearly and putting it on paper. And then taking the time to imagine your family life the way you want it to be as though it were real and feel it. Feel it for even just two seconds. Just feel it. And it takes energy to do that.
And most people will dismiss this piece as, ‘Yeah, yeah I get it. Now what do I really do?’ No, this is what you really do. You do that and right there you are changing your vibration. By doing that to be in harmony with the results and the and the answers in those books that you’re looking for you will be led to the right books if you do that. Period. It’s that simple.
ANNAMARIE: Yeah.
LESLIE: And you’ll know that it’s custom for your family because it’s you.
ANNAMARIE: Exactly. And I’ve experienced that with this whole path that I’ve been on. It’s like, you know, of the hundreds of emails I get every day of which one’s actually piqued my interest. And where they lead me, so…
LESLIE: Yeah.
ANNAMARIE: Quite fun. I have one big one that I want to ask you because this is so, such a big concept. Some people let themselves and their mood be controlled by everything that happens around them. So, how do you teach your children about their attitude and how much power they have to control it?
LESLIE: Again it’s conversation. But more than that it’s living it yourself. I think too many parents are so concerned about making sure their kids are doing everything right but they are not exercising those muscles in their own life. And that’s where it’s got to begin. But the attitude, you know, it’s a natural reaction for a parent to deny privileges to the child with the stinky attitude. And I think it’s also important to realize that even though they can be learning these principles as children, to be able to understand them is going to require experience. They’re going to have to experience the pain and the lessons and everything on their own. You can talk to them all day long. You can show them the stickman, even, all day long but they won’t really get it until they have experiences. So I think as parents it’s our role to just help them interpret their experiences properly.
So that when something bad happens they don’t interpret that as, ‘oh I must be a horrible person.’
I think the parent, it’s our job to just help them translate every experience they have in terms of these laws. And over time it’ll become a part of them and they’ll have the tools they need to succeed in life. But I also think that as parents we can’t get discouraged if they don’t become these prodigy, law perfect children before they leave the home. It’s a life-long process and I can say that, because I know how much I’ve learned just in the last ten years since I thought I learned them the first time.
ANNAMARIE: Yeah.
LESLIE: It’s life-long. And just being supportive and encouraging and always putting the positive spin on what they interpret.
ANNAMARIE: You think that it is helpful to verbally say which law is actually happening for the child?
LESLIE: Oh I think that would be a tremendous valuable thing to do. I don’t always do that but my older kids who have, I mean I have an eleven year old who is in my home study course. She’s studying the Family Time and Money Freedom program.
ANNA: That is amazing. That’s fabulous.
LESLIE: Well and that was her idea and she wanted to pay for it herself.
ANNAMARIE: Wow!
LESLIE: So I know something’s going right. Right? You know something is working. Yes. ‘Cause if you teach them the term for what they’re experiencing or for what they’re identifying, then down the road it can just be, “Hey, polarity honey. Polarity.”
Done. The whole lecture is one word.
ANNAMARIE: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And they just get it. I’m finding that that’s very, very helpful for me as well with my four kids.
Oh Leslie, you are amazing. Thank you. Thank you. That’s the way we will wrap it up. Thank you so much.
LESLIE: Thanks for taking the time.
[Music]
ANNOUNCER: This concludes today’s episode of The Rare Faith podcast. You’ve been listening to Leslie Householder, author of The Jackrabbit Factor, Portal to Genius, and Hidden Treasures: Heaven’s Astonishing Help with Your Money Matters. All three books can be downloaded free at ARareKindofFaith.com. So tell your friends and join Leslie again next time as she goes even deeper into the principles that will help you change your life.
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