Perfect Is Creepy: What a Child Psychologist Knows About Leading Difficult Adults

Kennedy explains that Good Inside is known for parenting advice, but at its core it is a set of principles for understanding human beings: why we do what we do and how we behave inside particular systems. The family is the system she focuses on most, yet a workplace, a marriage or a holiday gathering is also a system. If a principle is sound, she argues, it can be applied to any of them.

Lenny raises a friend's rant that most corporate adults are 'babies in disguise': hungry for attention, protective of their budgets, upset when things don't go their way. Kennedy offers a gentler reading. All humans, whether one, five, 45 or 85, need the same things, and when those needs go unmet we all express ourselves in ineffective ways.

Kennedy defines repair as going back after a moment you aren't proud of, taking responsibility, acknowledging the impact and saying what you would do differently. What stops people, she says, is the false belief that the goal is to be perfect. She recalls learning in graduate school that secure attachment is not about getting it right all the time but about having an adult who repairs, and she found that hopeful because it is a skill she could actually get good at.

She gives a workplace version: telling a colleague you cut them off in a meeting, that your tone was harsh and that even though you disagreed, that was no excuse. Once trust and connection are re-established, she says, people cooperate better and conversations stop turning into long exercises in defensiveness. In her family and now at her company, the shorthand is "perfect is creepy".

Using a dinner-table taxes example, Kennedy shows the difference between telling her husband he has a listening problem and acknowledging that she has just sat down with a book and asking to tackle the task together. The second approach works because it treats her as a full person rather than an object for getting something done. Connection, she says, forms a bridge so two people can act in a shared interest, which makes it the foundation of cooperation and workplace productivity.

The first step is a mindset, because people feel intention rather than technique. If you start with small talk only to get someone to water your plants, it feels transactional and dirty. Real connection means being present for even 30 seconds with no agenda: describing what a child is building rather than quizzing them, or at work asking about someone's long weekend without counting the seconds until you can assign their tasks.

Kennedy admits that efficient people, herself included, find this hard because efficiency is rewarded at work and relationship mode can feel slow and 'low stim'. She says that low-stimulation feeling is probably a sign you are doing it right. Lenny adds that the most effective people he has worked with are the ones who really listen and never seem rushed.

Kennedy says that being 'good inside' does not excuse bad behavior. It requires separating behavior from identity, because most interpersonal trouble starts when we collapse the two. She physically holds one hand for identity and one for behavior and rephrases 'that person is lazy' as 'this is a good person who is late'.

The reason is defensiveness: when we feel someone is talking about our identity, we can't even discuss the behavior. Her model script for a chronically late employee opens with 'we're on the same team', affirms they are a good person who knows meetings should start on time, then asks what is going on at work or at home. She compares it to a good sports coach who benches a player but says 'I believe in you, let's get in the gym tomorrow'.

Kennedy says she dislikes ideas without actions, so she turned 'good inside' into a tool: the most generous interpretation, or MGI. It came from her own parenting, when she noticed that after a hard day she had stopped liking her child and that her private story ('he's a sociopath') shaped how she behaved the next morning. She argues the story a leader tells about their organization at night similarly shapes the leader they are the next day.

At work, someone belaboring a point in a meeting might be seen as vain, but a generous reading is that they didn't feel heard the first time. That leads to a different private conversation: noticing the cycle where they keep talking, others tune out and they talk more, and inviting them to change it together. Kennedy says you cannot be judgmental and curious at the same time, and that people can use 'assume positive intent' or any phrase that works for them.

Trained originally in reward, punishment and sticker charts, Kennedy found that the model was at odds with what helped the adults in her practice change. Her core insight is that children are born with all the feelings and none of the skills to manage them, and that bad behavior at any age is feelings overpowering skills. The behavior is the manifestation, so the real intervention is to build the missing skill.

She compares it to swim lessons: you wouldn't send a child to their room until they learned to swim. Nobody learns new skills through shame, which only widens the gap between feelings and skills. Leaders must still set boundaries around out-of-control behavior, but then teach what was missing, which changes behavior over the long term.

Potty learning gives her a workplace lesson about control. Toddlers control only what goes into and out of their bodies, so they resist when a parent steps into those domains. Adults have 'resilient rebels' too, people whose core fear is loss of control. If a small request provokes a huge reaction, ask whether something else, like a missed promotion or a new manager, is going on, and name your intention up front so they don't read your actions as control.

Kennedy explains that she uses the word 'sturdy' because it conjures an image and a feeling; most people can picture someone sturdy in their life. She illustrates it with turbulence on a flight. The first pilot snaps at passengers to stop screaming, which makes them feel less safe. The second hands over the cockpit, which she says is the over-correction she sees in parenting, where a child's feelings dictate the parent's decisions.

The third pilot says it makes sense that people are scared, that it is bumpy, that the turbulence doesn't scare him, and that he is going back to do his job. Sturdiness has two parts: seeing someone's experience as real for them, and holding your own experience without being overwhelmed by theirs. She applies the same structure to ending TV time with a child and to announcing a controversial office policy: acknowledge the reaction, explain why, and express faith that people will get through it.

Kennedy says a leader has two jobs: set boundaries and validate the other person's experience without being taken over by it. She believes validation alone is half a parenting approach. Her definition of a boundary is what you tell someone you will do, requiring nothing of them; anything else is a request, which is fine but hands power to the other person.

Her example is a child who presses every elevator button. A request would be 'please don't press them'; a boundary is standing between him and the buttons and blocking him, while empathizing with his disappointment. Threatening to remove dessert, she notes, usually gets abandoned, which undermines authority and leaves the child doing the adult's job, something she calls job confusion. The same applies to carrying a child to the car, where you say what you will do calmly and then do it.

Protest, she says, is not evidence you failed. A new boundary will provoke tears and tantrums, and you can treat that as a sign that things are going according to plan. She likens it to a pilot ordering an emergency landing: passengers may complain, but they feel safe because the leader acts on information they lack.

Kennedy acknowledges there is a time for consensus, but she says leaders are in their position because they have experience, judgment and information others lack. She thinks parenting has over-corrected toward collecting everyone's views, and suggests the working world has too. A useful pattern is: 'I took in everything you said, your voices matter, here is the decision I made with all the information I have'.

She is drawn to people she can 'locate': those with a clear point of view she can push against, rather than mirrors. A leader who can say 'this may not be what you want, but I believe it's the best decision' is holding in a stressful environment. She adds that leaders can be honest about uncertainty, for example by saying they aren't fully certain but will reassess in a month.

A teenage patient who had been cutting herself told Kennedy that when her parents suggested therapy, she refused, and then said, "Can you believe they let me make that decision?" Kennedy concludes that at our worst moments we speak our fears, not our wishes, and sometimes the loving act is to decide for the person. She scripts parents to say they will drive their teen to therapy every Thursday and that what happens in the room is not on them.

Kennedy says that optimizing for a child's happiness is the quickest route to adult anxiety and fragility. Children need to learn they can cope with a wide range of experiences, because adult happiness is often clouded by an inability to handle disappointment or jealousy. Kids can only learn to tolerate the feelings we tolerate in them, so rushing in with 'but you're good at soccer' signals that their upset is unmanageable.

Lenny recalls Kim Scott's story of a manager who avoided giving feedback for nine months and then had to fire the employee, who asked why nobody told him. Kennedy extends this to the early months of a working relationship, which she likens to a building's foundation; constant comfort makes it fragile. A resilient culture is one where people say 'this is hard and I can do hard things', not 'this is hard, so someone must be at fault'.

Her concrete formula is 'I believe you, and I believe in you'. She pictures a struggling person in a hole: they need someone to put one foot in the hole with them, which is 'I believe you', and keep one foot out, which is 'I believe in you'. She suggests noticing which half comes easier, because leaders tend to collapse into the hole or rush people with 'it's no big deal'. Lenny says he has used it with his wife and that it works for adults too.

Kennedy says she posted her first Instagram post on February 28, 2020, with no business in mind, and the community that formed around it became the real engine. Parents told her it felt like 'parent school', which made her question why we glorify instinct in parenting when instinct is simply how we were parented. Good Inside now includes a podcast, app, AI chatbot, live events, trained coaches and a community, and she says it is a profitable company of about 65 people that raised money a couple of years ago.

Personally, she uses AI to turn ideas into something visible. She plays with Figma Make, Replit and Lovable to mock up onboarding flows or emails, and uses Claude or ChatGPT by dumping all her thoughts in and refining. Her second children's book, aimed at deeply feeling kids, was due in February 2026.

Kennedy closes by noting that Lenny's audience are forever learners at work, yet many drop that mindset with their kids and say 'it is what it is'. She encourages people to ask whether they know how to repair, and whether they had a parent who repaired with them; if not, an awkward first apology is understandable. Treating parenting as a set of skills, she says, is actually hopeful.

Her actionable idea is to ask your children what one thing you could do differently this week to be a better parent. Whatever they say, even 'let me watch more TV', is a window into their world, and you can listen without opening the cockpit door. Lenny notes it is a reverse 360 review, and Kennedy says her kids' behavior tends to improve for the rest of the week.

In the lightning round she recommends The Power of Moments, Messy Middle and Creativity Inc., and cites Liberty puzzles as a favorite discovery. Her motto is 'this feels hard because it is hard, not because I'm doing something wrong'. Asked what surprised her about building a company, she says a company is just people, and that the skill of trying to understand people turned out to be a surprisingly good leadership skill.