I felt honored to be interviewed by Anamarie Seidel, co-author with her husband Cory, of the upcoming book, “What You Don’t Fix … Your Kids Inherit.”

Thank you Anamarie for making me think! The premise of this book is as the title suggests: we need to commit to personal growth during our lifetime if we want to break the cycle of passing on to our children stuff that we don’t want them to receive. If we choose to leave ourselves alone, we perpetuate the habits, beliefs and attitudes that our past experiences have created. We become driven by unconscious forces. Regardless of the nature/nuture components of these forces, I believe we can change.

To make these changes we first have to focus on who we are. We cannot ignore our past because this gives it a power that it shouldn’t have. I’m a big fan of Grey’s Anatomy. It’s my “curl up in bed, late at night with a cup of coffee” pleasure! I was pleasantly surprised some months ago when a therapist gave advice to one of the characters suffering with post traumatic stress disorder. It went something like, “You cannot get to where you want to be unless you know where you are coming from.” In other words, our focus on our past is essential for understanding ourselves but what we do with that understanding is what will define us. We need to free ourselves of the past and its influence on our behavior by facing it.

An open mind is key. Without it, we will miss opportunities to grow. I would rather try something and find it absolutely useless than potentially miss out on a gem. Becoming a parent makes our need for personal growth a priority (not that we shouldn’t be doing it for ourselves alone). We need to be able to choose how to parent and the only way to do this is if we become conscious parents.

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Marsha Jacobson is author of "Boom... Boom... Boom...: A Story to Raise Your Child's Emotional Intelligence". She is a regular contributor of mychildfeels.com and you can visit her website at marshajacobson.com.