Map a Book With Me! Part II: The Transformation

Behind-the-Scenes of Good Inside by Dr. Becky Kennedy

This morning you received another email from me that I meant to go out in a few weeks… But accidentally hit “send” instead. Sigh. The life of a content creator. Anyway, here is the post that is meant for today, continuing on in our series!

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This time, it’s our foster daughter’s toys.

They are strewn all over the floor in her foster sister’s room. Blankets have been pulled off the ottoman out of their neat stack. Her baby doll, Strawberry, is in the crib. And the baby—the real baby—is crying in my husband’s arms downstairs, exhausted and ready for bed. 

We already had a conversation at dinner about picking up our messes and being respectful of other people’s spaces. We use dinner often as an opportunity to rehearse potentially tricky scenarios in advance and talk about expectations in a more neutral setting. 

We told her the plan: We’re going to go upstairs, pick up your toys, and then do bathtime while I put the baby down. She’d gone along with it at dinner and traipsed up the stairs gamely, until we reached the baby’s room, where she now decides to conduct a psychological experiment on me.

“Can you put your toys away, please?” I repeat. 

She avoids my eyes and smiles mischievously. 

“Come on,” I entreat her, thinking, What would Dr. Becky do? I adopt what I hope is a firm but warm tone that doesn’t betray the heat already building in my chest. 

“I’ll help. Here, I’ll fix the blankets. Can you take Strawberry back into your room?”

I refold the blankets and stack them neatly again while she stares at her hands, shifting her weight back and forth. I can hear the baby screaming downstairs.

“Come on. Where do your toys go?” I prompt her.

Her eyes flit up at me, curious to see what I will do next.

I try another tactic.

“Do they go… in the living room?” I tease playfully. She nods.

“No, silly! Do they go… in my office?” Again, she nods.

“No… Do they go… in the kitchen?” Now, she’s nodding and laughing, and I have a tic behind my right eye.

I cut the crap.

“They go in your room. Please go put them in your room right now so [the baby] can go to sleep.”

She’s just staring at me, trying to decide how serious I suddenly am.

And I am very, very serious.

“If you don’t put your toys away in your room right now, they’re mine.”

Uh oh. Threats. Definitely not Dr. Becky-approved. 

And yet, there it is, out in the air. I can’t take it back now. 

“One…”

I count slowly, breathing deep. Why am I counting? I hate counting. Would Dr. Becky be counting? Am I being responsive enough to her trauma right now? How do I know when something is a trauma response vs. normal six-year-old behavior? 

She doesn’t budge.

“Two…”

Come on, kid, I think. Don’t make me do this! 

“Three.”

A switch flips in my mind. I am resolved. This is happening. (Cue Hamilton in my head: OK, so we’re doing this.)

I grab an empty diaper box from the baby’s closet and start putting toys inside.

“NO!” she wails, grabbing my arm and trying to take the toys out of my hands.

“Nope, it’s too late,” I tell her. I start for the crib where Strawberry is still sleeping.

“NO, NO! I WANT STRAWBERRY!” she screams.

“Sorry, you didn’t put Strawberry away like I asked you to, and [the baby] needs to go to sleep in her crib.” 

She’s fighting me now, pulling at the box, hanging on my arms. 

“I’m going to put you in your room so I can clean up [the baby]’s room.” 

This scene ends with her sobbing on her bed, me putting the box of toys in our bedroom, and my husband taking over because I am officially flooded. 

“You put the baby to bed,” he says. “I’ll help her.” He gets to be good cop now. 

In the dark, I snuggle our baby and rock back and forth, comforting both of us. I lean my head back against the glider, close my eyes, and pray for transformation.

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I’m in the process of mapping out Dr. Becky Kennedy’s outstanding book, Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be, so that I can better understand and remember all of the incredible content within this book. So that I can be better and do better as a parent.

Last Friday, we found the audience, genre, and Big Idea, which provide the context for the mapping we are about to begin. 

Today, we’re talking about the Transformation Tale in the book. 

Step #2: The Transformation Tale

All books are about transformation in some way. This book is about my (the reader’s) transformation. 

For this exercise, I’m imagining myself as Dr. Becky’s book coach (I was not!), and I’m writing from my own experience as someone who is 100% the ideal reader for her book. If Dr. Becky and I were doing this transformation tale exercise together, this is how I’d expect it to go.

To know what the reader’s transformation will be, Dr. Becky first has to know what her reader’s current state is—where are they now? What do they want? What problems are they facing as parents? What are they trying that isn’t working? What is it costing them? 

Here’s what I imagine she’d say, and I see all of this in the Introduction to her book:

Parents want to be better parents. They’re facing challenging behaviors from their kids that trigger them, and they don’t know how to respond in a way that builds connection. They’re afraid of having a bad relationship with their kids, but the only playbook they’ve been taught is to respond with consequences and punishments, which brings their worst fears to fruition. They’re focusing on behaviors instead of trying to understand the emotions underneath the behaviors.

Worst of all, they doubt their own goodness and their kids’ goodness, thinking something must be wrong with them if they’re acting this way.

For those who have read this book or who consider themselves part of the ideal audience, what would you add to this description? 

Then, after we’ve thoroughly discussed the reader’s current state, we can imagine the desired transformation, what Dr. Becky wants the reader to gain from her book. Here’s what I imagine she might say:

Most importantly, parents should feel reassured about their own and their kids’ goodness. We are ALL fundamentally good inside. They should see inappropriate or undesirable behaviors as cries for help—as opportunities for connection. They will know how to talk to their kids to understand what’s really going on when they act out. In the heat of a stressful moment, they will know how to soothe themselves and their kids so that they can help guide them—with firm boundaries and loving direction—to better behavior. 

Best of all, they’ll experience more authentic moments of true connection and positive relationship with their kids and will never doubt their goodness.

If you’ve been wondering why the book is called Good Inside, now you can definitely understand where the title comes from and how integral it is to the book’s message! 

But we can’t stop here.

We know our starting point (the current state) and the destination (transformation). Now we have to map out a route to get there.

This can be the hardest part of mapping out someone else’s book, because we already see the exact route they took: the current Table of Contents and each of the resulting chapters. But often the route an author ends up taking is not exactly the one they started with.

We have to use our imagination most here to figure out how Dr. Becky might have arrived at the current Table of Contents. 

Most authors begin with the practical stuff they know they want to say. So I think, if she and I had had a conversation, it would have gone something like this:

Ariel: What questions do parents always ask you?

Dr. Becky: I know the book needs to talk about how to handle challenging behaviors like lying, talking back, not listening, defiance, whining, sleep issues, problems with food/eating, separation anxiety, tantrums… But there are two kinds of tantrums: emotional ones, and physical/violent tantrums. Even things like perfectionism and being excessively shy/afraid. A lot of parents worry about their kids’ social behavior, if it’s too aggressive or too hesitant.

Ariel: That’s great! What else?

Dr. Becky: Hmm… I have all of these phrases that I tell parents all the time, like “Two things are true” and “Behavior is a window.” Parents also really struggle with feeling guilty about how they’ve been responding to their kids, especially once they start to learn some of these better ways to respond. They need to understand that it’s never too late to change the way they’ve been parenting, and help them to reduce shame (their own and their kids’). Parents also need to prioritize taking care of themselves, because they can’t respond well to their kids’ dysregulation if they themselves are dysregulated.

As her ideal reader, this sounds like an amazing transformation to me.

All of these points should be documented in a brainstorm about the reader’s in-between, the nebulous middle stuff that needs to be part of the journey somewhere. It’s kind of like starting to plot out a road trip and saying, “I know we’ll need to stop at least three times for gas, then we’ll probably need a hotel one night, and I know my husband will want to stop at the Harley store on Route 153. And my daughter’s been asking us to go to Buccee’s.” 

Great! Just get all of the stuff you know needs to be included in the journey out on paper. Next time, we’ll talk about how all of this gets organized in a way that makes sense for the reader. 

Throughout this entire brainstorm/imagining process, I like to keep track of my thoughts on a paper split into three sections. Here’s the one I did for Good Inside while the six-year-old was coloring yesterday:

Again, when we’re trying to map out someone else’s book, we obviously have a bit of an advantage because we know what the end result of their thinking looks like. But I find that by asking myself, “What might the author have said at an earlier stage in the process?” I can anticipate what decisions they might have had to make—and what decisions I might have to make for a book of my own as well.

Stay tuned for Wednesday’s post about organizing the In-Between section of your Transformation Tale!

And if you’re curious about how the toy situation ended… don’t worry. After putting the baby to bed and calming myself down, I rejoined my husband and the six-year-old to finish bathtime and read stories. She seemed completely unphased by the episode and wanted to snuggle with me as usual. And she got her toys back the next day.

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Tips & Tidbits

Get Calm in the Choas Now!

My third book with Daniel Bauer (this one also with Glenn Robbins!) is out TOMORROW and it’s already an Amazon Bestseller! 🙂 Get Calm in the Choas now.

Being “All In” on Your Writing & Your Life

Probably one of my favorite podcast conversations EVER was this interview I did with Chris Harding and Will Wilkinson for their podcast, Thriving in Business and in Life.

Colleen Hoover

What’s the secret to Colleen Hoover’s success? You know I love a good analysis, and

Catherine Baab-Muguira

helps us understand why Colleen Hoover is the queen of the bestseller lists right now! Read the article here.

What’s Bringing Me Joy

Listening to our one-year-old foster daughter babble NON-STOP. Her voice has more inflection and she’s experimenting with different volumes and modulating her pitches in the middle of long vowels. It kind of sounds like singing. Her pediatrician told us she’s progressed from babbling to the stage right before she starts talking, and I cannot wait to know what’s going on inside her little mind!

Happy Monday, friends.