A child psychologist’s guide to working with difficult adults | Dr. Becky Kennedy

Most adults in the corporate environment are really just babies in disguise.

All humans need the same things, whether we're one or five or forty-five or eighty-five. When you look at bad behavior, the actual problem is someone doesn't have the skill they need to manage something happening internally.

Love your advice. It works not just for kids, it works for adults.

Our whole parenting philosophy is resilience over happiness. When we're thinking about a resilient work culture, we want people who can say, "This is hard, and I can do hard things."

You teach kids are good inside, no matter their behavior. Is that useful in work?

The idea of being good inside inherently requires us to separate behavior and identity. We infer a lot from people's behavior. Someone's late to work a lot, "Oh, that person's lazy." The quickest way to have an unproductive conversation is to lose sight of the fact that someone's good inside.

I definitely wanted to ask you about this idea of boundaries.

Boundaries are what you tell someone else you will do, and it requires the other person to do nothing. Making a request, it's not a boundary.

Is there a corollary to adult work environments in potty learning? [upbeat music] Today, my guest is Dr. Becky Kennedy, a clinical psychologist, author, and CEO of one of the most popular parenting books, podcasts, communities, and apps called Good Inside. Why would I have a parenting expert on this podcast? Because if you think about it, many of the people that we work with in the workplace act a lot more like babies than adults, and I'm half joking, but I'm half not. Think about coworkers that got really mad when they had to share their stuff, that always need to be the center of attention, that get really upset about not getting their way, that need other people to fix things for them. These are just a few examples, and there is a lot that we can learn about how to effectively deal with people at work from a parenting expert like Dr. Becky. I have never heard a conversation like this anywhere that bridges the gap between parenting advice and leadership advice, and you will leave this conversation both a better leader and a better parent. We talk about the power of repair, the importance of building long-term resilience versus short-term happiness, why your goal as a leader is to become sturdy, the power of curiosity over judgment, a framework Dr. Becky calls the most generous interpretation. Also, a ton of really specific phrases that work really well with kids and adults who you're having a hard time with, and so much more. I am so honored to have Dr. Becky on this podcast, and I hope you have as much fun listening to this conversation as I had recording it. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. That helps tremendously. And if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of a ton of incredible products, including a year free of Devin, Lovable, Replit, Bolt, n8n, Linear, Superhuman, Descript, Whisperflow, Gamma, Perplexity, Warp, Granola, Magic Pattern, Drake, Cast, Chapia, dMob, PostHog, and Stripe Atlas. Head on over to lennysnewsletter.com and click Product Pass. With that, I bring you Dr. Becky, after a short word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Merge. Product leaders hate building integrations. They're messy, they're slow to build, they're a huge drain on your roadmap, and they're definitely not why you got into product in the first place. Lucky for you, Merge is obsessed with integrations. With a single API, B2B SaaS companies embed Merge into their product and ship two hundred and twenty-plus customer-facing integrations in weeks, not quarters. Think of Merge like Plaid, but for everything B2B SaaS. Companies like Mistral AI, Ramp, and Drata use Merge to connect their customers' accounting, HR, ticketing, CRM, and file storage systems to power everything from automatic onboarding to AI-ready data pipelines. Even better, Merge now supports the secure deployment of connectors to AI agents with a new product, so that you can safely power AI workflows with real customer data. If your product needs customer data from dozens of systems, Merge is the fastest, safest way to get it. Book and attend a meeting at merge.dev/lenny, and they'll send you a fifty-dollar Amazon gift card. That's merge.dev/lenny. Who says hiring has to be fair? Every founder and hiring manager I've been speaking with these days is feeling the same pressure: hire the best people as fast as possible. But recruiting is time-consuming, alignment is hard, and competition for great talent keeps getting tighter. That's why teams like Eleven Labs, Brex, Replit, Deal, and five thousand other organizations use Metaview, the AI company giving high-performance teams a real unfair advantage in hiring. They give you a suite of AI agents that behave like recruiting coworkers. They find candidates for you based on your exact criteria, take interview notes automatically, gather insights across your hiring process, and help you identify the best candidates in your pipeline. AI handles the recruiting toil and gives you a real source of truth. That means hours saved per hire and a team focused on what matters most: winning the right candidates. Don't let your competitors outhire you. Metaview customers close roles thirty percent faster. Try Metaview today for free and get an extra month of sourcing at metaview.ai/lenny. That's M-E-T-A view.ai/lenny. [upbeat music] Dr. Becky, thank you so much for being here, and welcome to the podcast.