We were lucky to catch up with Ashley Patek recently and have shared our conversation below.

Ashley, appreciate you joining us today. So, naming is such a challenge. How did you come up with the name of your brand?

Goodness, I thought choosing names for my children was full of endless possibilities, but when it came to naming my conscious parenting business, my head was swirling. How do you choose a name that accurately embodies all the many emotions, joys, and challenges of raising children, while also acknowledging the invitation to reparent yourself in the process? My words seemed to fall flat.

While working with my somatic business coach, we did several embodiment practices, which helped me answer this profound question: What do most parents (and arguably most people) want? This time, the words flowed effortlessly like a peaceful stream. Instead of coming from the mind, the words poured from my heart. I responded, “We want to be doing better. Better than we did 5 years ago, 5 months ago, 5 minutes ago. We are all here doing the best we can with the goal of doing better.”

I giggle now as I think about how I gushed on. My coach sat there smiling and listening. “Doing better isn’t about shaming our parents or past lineage; it’s about our evolution. But also, Doing Better isn’t about perfect parenting (as if that existed anyways). It’s about conscious parenting, which invites us to unearth our conditioned patterns, regulate our nervous system, and free ourselves from our projections to teach and guide our children. I just feel like when we are doing better for ourselves, we are doing better for our kids, ya know?”

“I know,” she said. “I totally know.”

And thus the name was born. Doing Better Conscious Parenting.

Ashley, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I once read that wherever your heartache lies so too does your passion. Like a jigsaw puzzle that the universe delivered piece by piece, I began to learn where my pain and purpose lived.

As a new bubbly and eager college grad, I wanted to do what I believe most want to do when they start out in the healthcare world – make a difference and help people. I spent many years doing occupational therapy in various therapeutic settings including schools, hospitals, rehabs, nursing homes, and more. I thought, “This is it. My purpose.”

But somewhere along the way, it felt like traditional healthcare was changing. I was changing too. I became a holistic lifestyle coach and I saw such a clearer, more expansive picture of the human experience. There were obviously physical layers, but also emotional and energetic layers too. I began asking questions, looking beneath symptoms, and uncovering root causes. I imagined this truer, more beautiful system that empowered patients to not only understand their bodies but to be active participants in their healing. I thought, “This is it. My purpose.”

During this time, I was also entering Motherhood. I know I am supposed to say that I dreamed of this moment, but I was pretty convinced that this role wasn’t for me. My past experience told me that loving someone also meant losing them. In some ways, my fear became true. I delivered our daughter at 28 weeks, but I never got to bring her home. She was born beautiful, silent, and still. I sank into the depths of myself. I have always been a talker and so I found myself sharing openly about our experience. Could I be alone? It turns out, I wasn’t.

When everything burns to the ground, it creates new soil to rebuild. I slowly began reorganizing myself, knowing that my pain was also my teacher. When you’re sent to the basement of your being, there lies an invitation to embrace personal growth and discover more of who you truly are.

I went on to have two healthy home births – both fierce little life warriors. Being a parent is like taking a stroll on the self-growth super highway. Who am I? When I feel triggered by this thing my child does, what does that tell me about myself? Why does this make sense for me?

This led me to ask, “How can I combine all the things I love – OT, holistic health, and parenting?” I became the Content Director for a corporation that made play-based tools to teach children about their emotions. During this time, I became a parenting coach, working with families one-on-one to navigate all that comes with everyday parenting. Most of the clients I worked with had goals of fixing their child’s behaviors or felt concerned about milestones. I knew taking a behavior-centric approach would only address the symptoms causing dis-ease in the family.

I imagined this truer, more beautiful system that empowered parents to not only understand themselves and their children but to have tools to uncover the root cause. Over time, I made this incredibly potent revelation: Parenting our children is an invitation to reparent ourselves.

As I invited clients to embrace a parent-centric model of parenting, moving from curiosity instead of control, they reported lasting positive changes within their homes. Because I wanted a more solid foundation in this work, I became an Empathic Witnessing Practitioner, which is a trauma-informed, somatic experience of witnessing your inner child.

Last year, I became an entrepreneur, starting my coaching business: Doing Better Conscious Parenting. Doing Better recognizes that there are 3 layers to conscious parenting: who you are, who your child is, and discipline tools.

I offer private coaching for parents who want to make big changes within their home; Voxer coaching for busy parents stuck in a tricky parenting phase, Empathic Witnessing sessions for those seeking deep reparative work with their inner child, and a slew of parenting and reparenting workshops.

My work is deeply based on nervous system science, attachment theory, child development, internal family systems, mindfulness, emotional regulation, trauma-informed inner child healing, and more.

I see myself as a child advocate – both for the ones we are raising and the one within. This is my heartache and passion, and I am ready to share it with the world.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

We are a species oriented by evolution. As children, we learn how to make our first family systems work for us because we depend on them for survival. To do this, we automatically and unconsciously grow the parts of us that our system wants, minimize the parts they don’t, and become coded with a belief system about who we are and how we have to operate to be safe, loved, and accepted.

Cut to adulthood. Many of us enter relationships (romantic, parental, business, friendly, etc) and see the other person from the lens of our programming, unintentionally creating stories about who they are and how they should operate. We unconsciously feel threatened by their emotions, traits, and behaviors, not fully recognizing that any barrier we have today is directly tied to the attachment lessons we learned when we were young.

Our bodies take over and we yell, lecture, fix, people-please, control, and resort to automatic protective mechanisms even when we don’t want to. Most of us think we are flawed or that we don’t make sense. I have learned that this is a sold lie.

Here are some truths I’ve created over the years after unlearning some limiting beliefs about myself, understanding my conditioning, and reclaiming my truer self.

1. You make sense. I make sense.
2. We influence other people. We don’t control them.
3. The antidote to control in any relationship (including Self) is connection.

How do you keep in touch with clients and foster brand loyalty?

Connection is key when fostering any relationship. It feels important to me to set emotional and energetic boundaries when working with clients, but also, to invest in their stories, challenges, and successes. People want to feel seen and heard. They don’t want to feel sold to. In my experience, when you run your business with ethical standards (as opposed to fear-based tactics), you attract more authentic client connections. They show up not because they made an impulse decision or felt shamed into subscribing. They show up because you believe in them and they trust you.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.parentsdoingbetter.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ashleypatek_parentcoach/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/754520742632506

Image Credits
Heidi Drexler