RELATIONSHIP GOALS - CONNECTION AND FRIENDSHIP
Welcome to the Small Jar Podcast, where we moms of teens find the power to step off the emotional rollercoaster between motherhood and the empty nest. I'm your host, Jennifer Collins. Episode number 87.
Hello, my friends. I just celebrated a birthday. It was my 51st.
And the really nice thing about turning 51 is that I really didn't have as much mind drama about turning this age as I did last year when I turned 50. This is such a perfect illustration of how significant a role our minds play in determining how we feel about something. Because one could argue that 51 would be worse than 50 if I had a hard time with 50.
But to be honest, I was fairly ambivalent about turning 51. It was only last year when I felt like I was crossing a threshold into a new decade when I thought, wow, a whole new decade. I'm no longer in my 40s.
So just a reminder, as you think about your age or your weight or the number of friends you have, maybe the number of times your kid texts you back, all of these are just numbers, pieces of data. There literally is nothing good or bad about any of this data until we start to have thoughts about it. Now, one of the first arguments that comes up when I say something like this is, well, there are some things in life that are just bad.
For example, we could all agree that people shouldn't kill each other, that killing is bad. There are certain things in life that we think are terrible and we actually wouldn't want to feel better about people killing one another. So when I talk about there not being anything good or bad about a certain fact or piece of data until we have a thought about it, let's just acknowledge that we don't need to force ourselves to believe that anything in our life is good, not at all.
But the critical thing to realize when it comes to mindset work is that our thoughts can be a choice. And being able to take responsibility for the choices you make about the way you think about everything in your life is an incredibly powerful skill set. It's one that I focus on every single episode of this podcast, and it's a process that I teach in my coaching program as well.
You also have probably heard me talk about mindset work being a process of building a new relationship with yourself. What I mean by that is starting to view yourself as someone who is able to see themselves as separate from the way they view the world. Now this may sound like kind of woo woo, like what is she talking about? But if you listen carefully to the incredibly thoughtful spiritual leaders, whether it be Buddha, Byron Katie, Eckhart Tolle, or Abraham Hicks, they will all touch on this aspect of our mind as not being the truth.
I like the way Eckhart Tolle describes it best, that your thoughts come from your ego, which is separate from your true self. Tolle equates your mind to the ego, which means that your ego is the thinker, and that it's possible for us to step back as our true selves and watch the thinker, to watch our thoughts. To me, this is the essence of mind work.
Finding your true self and then being empowered to decide intentionally how you want to think about your life. You are not your mind. And so it follows that we can decide what we want to think about ourselves, about our kids, about our life, about everything.
And this starts with curiosity and building a greater understanding of ourselves, really our true selves, so that we can become the watcher of our minds to then curate our thoughts and become the masters of our emotional experience. Letting go of unproductive or limiting beliefs, sometimes even allowing painful but necessary and important beliefs, like how much we love someone, even when it hurts. But this process also involves creating more of the positive feelings we want in our life.
Now I know if all of this is new, it can sound like such a foreign concept to be able to have power over our minds and emotional experience. We're living in a culture where people regularly talk about feeling triggered or gaslit. In therapy, we explore how our past made us broken.
It's a regular part of our vocabulary to say he hurt me or she made me feel X or Y. We're all walking around with our hearts on our sleeves, waiting for people to either treat us right or stomp all over us. It's really such a disempowering message, if you think about it. And look, yes, I think we can also agree that some people do messed up, even cruel things.
There are people who we might all agree are generally bad people, even though those people still probably have mothers who love them. But for the rest of us, we're probably not going to have good thoughts about these quote unquote bad people. And if we encounter these people, it's very likely we'll experience some feelings.
Again, just because we might be able to master the skill of deciding on purpose what we want to think and how we want to feel doesn't mean that we'll only go through life thinking happy thoughts and feeling happy all the time. To me, that's not even the goal. To me, the goal is finding the power to be the protector of your own peace, to feel empowered to decide how you want to approach and show up in your life.
For me, with every passing year of my life, as I grow more into the ability to take responsibility for my emotional well-being, life becomes so incredibly fun. And again, that's not to say that I'm happy all the time. But when I'm not happy, or I should say not at peace, it's an opportunity to get curious, understand myself, and then decide again how I want to move forward.
So in this way, even the negative emotional experiences that I have become an opportunity for me to get stronger and become more powerful in my relationship with myself. For me, it is a daily practice to be very intentional about what I choose, specifically how I choose to take responsibility for my emotional well-being. So much of this work centers on the relationship we have with ourselves.
But last week, I started talking about other relationships, like the relationships we have with our team and the goal that we can often have as they grow up and even pull away to strengthen our relationship or reconnect with our kids. As humans, we need connection. Studies actually point to the importance of connection in our overall well-being.
You could even link this back to prehistoric times when being cast out of the clan would mean death without the protection and support of others. As humans, we have an inherent need to belong. So it makes perfect sense that when we feel disconnected with anyone in our life, or disconnected in general, it's a terrible feeling.
I think there's something really interesting about this time in our lives where our kids need us so much less day-to-day. But over the past 10 or 20 or even more years, we've been up to our necks managing the day-to-day life of raising our kids. Between the kids' activity schedules, driving them to and from practices, getting the supplies they need, managing the house, on top of work or volunteer obligations, very often connected to our kids' school, there hasn't been much time to seek out connection outside of this sphere of influence.
I remember the first friendships I made at Little Jim with my oldest, when he was only a few months old. I made friends with three other women, and our husbands actually became really close as well. We got together regularly for playdates, probably for the first five years of our kids' lives.
But then I sent my kids to a different school, and slowly we lost touch. I formed other friendships with friends of my boy's friends over the years. As my kids' friendships changed, so did my relationships with the moms.
I've also made incredible friends over my lifetime. But as things change, so do relationships. It's truly a special friendship that can withstand the test of time and distance.
Let's face it, there are many reasons why moms in midlife find building and maintaining friendships a challenge. One reason is simply that we've been so busy juggling the many balls of our life. It can be a challenge to carve out time for girls' night, no less find a date everyone's available.
For a while, it seems more convenient to socialize with the people on the PTA or the moms of the other kids on the team, because we're at the school or the game anyway. But then these obligations widen down as our kids grow up and leave the nest, and we find that we don't have these things in common anymore. It becomes harder to maintain these friendships.
Another reason maintaining friendships can be hard is that friends sometimes move away. I've had friends leave because of changes in their partner's career or simply because their children went to college and they found themselves free to move closer to their kids or take that new job. Some moved out of cities during the pandemic and decided not to move back.
The best friendships can still be maintained, even if one friend moves away, but it takes effort. And there's something about having a friend nearby that makes connections sometimes feel a bit easier. I think another big reason that friendships at this time of life are difficult is that when our kids hit the teen years, there's a lot that becomes difficult to talk about.
You may be blessed with that one friend who you can tell anything without fear of judgment. But even in these cases, do you ever feel like you'd be betraying your kids if you aired their dirty laundry with people outside of the family? You don't want anyone, particularly a good friend, to think badly about your child. But let's face it, we can also worry about what they might think about us.
Either the way they might think about the way we're parenting our child through the challenge, or what they might think of us that we've raised a kid who would do these things, whatever they are. Even if that's not true, even if the friend truly wouldn't judge us or our kid, it's terrifying to think that they might. Is it even worth the risk? Do we really want to admit that our child is already having sex or experimenting with drugs? Do we want to admit that our child is at home most nights and we worry they don't have friends? Last week, I talked about our own expectations of our teens, the judgments we have.
Look, if we're being really honest, we're judging our own kids. So it really isn't that big of a leap to assume that others would judge them and us as well. And meanwhile, high school can feel somewhat competitive.
How smart is that kid? What college are they applying to? Did they make varsity? Were they chosen for the school play? It's also a natural, instinctual part of human nature to engage in social competition for status. So do we really want to admit our kid's challenges or failures? We all know that mom who brags about her kid's intelligence and we collectively roll our eyes, but not many of us want to broadcast our kid's struggles. Finally, at this transition point in our lives, many of us take stock of what we want and who we are.
Sometimes this means we realize that certain relationships we have aren't working for us anymore. That could be our relationship with our spouse, maybe relationships with other family members or with friends. Maybe that friend or family member is too needy or negative and you realize it's time to set boundaries.
Or maybe you've grown out of or moved past what your group of friends typically does, whether that be going out drinking or meeting up to watch kids games, except now your kid has graduated. Our priorities can shift and sometimes that means friendships shift as well. The point is all of this can feel really isolating, especially when what we see on social media suggests that everyone else has a bestie and we imagine that they never feel isolated or lonely.
But here's the truth, you can never truly know what it's like to be in another woman's shoes. And as they say, the grass isn't greener over there. I've coached women who have strong friendships and I've coached women who feel like they don't have any real friends.
And every single one of us feels at times that we're isolated, disconnected or lonely. I'm sure you've heard that saying you can feel lonely in a crowd and perfectly happy being alone. Loneliness is truly a subjective experience.
More specifically, it's a feeling that's a reflection of what we're thinking about our circumstances. I'll be honest that over the years I've struggled in the area of friendship. I'm definitely an introvert, so I prefer one friend or a small group of friends to big groups.
I can't stand talking on the phone, I'd rather talk face-to-face. But I'll also admit that I often prioritize family and work or personal commitments over making time with friends. That said, I've made some incredible friends over my 51 years and I'm grateful that the best friends that have blessed my life are still friends.
The type of friends like sisters that you can connect with after months of not talking and pick right up where you left off. These women are amazing and I would go to the ends of the earth for them. But the majority of these women live far from me and so I don't get to see or connect with them regularly.
So the question is, with these fantastic friends scattered across the U.S., why would I think that I struggle with friendships? And this, my friends, is the point. Whether you have one person and you talk once a year or five people you talk to every day, your relationship with these people is literally just your thoughts about them. Are these friends best friends? Just okay friends? Or merely acquaintances? Do you call them work friends or just those moms on the PTA? It's funny, it's like friend is a title someone has to earn.
Like in order for me to believe I have friends, there must be some kind of criteria I have in my mind. Here's a fun exercise. Write the names of all of the people who you would consider friends.
What's great about your connection with this person and what's wrong with it or what's missing? I can bet that you can find something good and bad for everyone on the list. No judgment here, just interesting to notice how our minds have thoughts about each one of our connections that judges there's something not quite good enough about the friend or the way you and she interact. And what about all those people whose names you wouldn't write down with whom you interact on a fairly regular basis? That neighbor, the work colleague who gives you a birthday card every year, the woman at tennis who seems nice but you haven't ever talked about meeting outside of playing tennis.
What about that woman who you always really liked and always promised to make dinner plans with but never got around to it? What about that lovely woman at the store you always go to? Or the volunteer organization that you don't go to because the meetings are at night and you just feel too tired to make the effort at the end of the day? It's actually crazy when you think about how many people you connect with on a daily basis that you probably don't yet think of as friends. I had this crazy experience in college. I actually spent the summer working in Hamburg and I was living in the guest house of a work colleague of my father's.
It was a nice setup, but the family was away for the summer so I was alone on the property with another student living in the house with me. Except for the problem was the student was Japanese and he spoke no English and only very little German. So we lived in this little guest house for two months and only exchanged friendly nods and bows.
We generally stayed out of each other's way. In retrospect, I hope I wasn't a terrible roommate. I wouldn't have called him a friend because we couldn't even communicate.
But on the day I left, I packed up my bags and got ready to walk the mile and a half to the train station that would take me to the airport. This young man, Yasunori was his name, saw that my bags were packed and he insisted with much gesturing and nodding that he help me take my bag to the train. I'd accumulated a lot of stuff so this generosity was huge and it wasn't a short walk.
But we spent the whole trip laughing and smiling. Two friends who had spent a summer together side by side without a real connection until that beautiful morning. And here I am 30 years later still remembering it.
How many of these connections are we missing because we're so caught up in our daily lives that we don't pick up our heads to notice how much other people want to welcome us into their lives? We are literally depriving ourselves of that feeling of connection and friendship when we discount or don't even consider the broad range of opportunities we have in our lives to create these feelings. Another big area that keeps us from appreciating and feeling connection with people we have in our life is expectations. This is something I talked a lot about in the last episode as I was exploring the relationships we want to have with our teens.
Do you realize how often you are hurt by your own expectations of your friends and family? The bottom line is that other people just aren't very good at meeting our expectations. And it's not that they're bad people or even that they don't love us and want us to be happy. It's simply that they can't read our minds and know exactly what we need and want at any given moment.
When I say it like that, that other people aren't mind readers, it's like of course people can't read my mind obviously. But we kind of think they should though right? I mean seriously most of us go through life feeling so justified in our expectations. Like we don't even question the laundry list of things that we expect other people to do and say and how we want them to show up for us.
We don't realize that we've set the bar so high for everyone in our life. And when people let us down because they haven't met or exceeded the bar we've set for them, we tell them that they've hurt us or that we don't feel appreciated. But the truth is we're hurting ourselves with all of these expectations.
You know one of the things I really enjoyed about my birthday was that I truly had zero expectations of anyone. And let me be clear, that doesn't mean that I gave up on everybody. That doesn't mean that I said to myself they're not going to do anything anyway so I'm just going to lower my expectations.
That's not at all what I'm talking about. When I talk about not having expectations, what I mean is that I let everyone show up in my life as exactly who they are. I don't know that I did a great job of that last year for my birthday.
I'll be honest, as I mentioned last year, turning 50 felt like a big deal. And as my birthday approached, I noticed that I felt disappointed. What became clear to me as I got curious was that I thought 50 was a big deal.
And so I had expectations that other people in my life would also think celebrating my birthday was a big deal. Maybe I even thought I deserved to be celebrated. I noticed last year feeling disappointed in connection with different relationships in my life because I expected them to be available to celebrate me and they didn't meet my expectations.
But let me be clear, nothing they did was wrong. No one did anything to hurt me. They were just living their lives and every single person in my life celebrated me in way that felt right to them.
But because I had these expectations, there were some people in my life that fell short, and that was my fault. I'm the one who had these expectations of other people, and the fact that I would be hurt or disappointed because of how anyone did or didn't show up related to my birthday is literally just my own internal comparison of reality versus my expectations. So this year, it was so fun to have let go of all of that.
First, because I completely took responsibility for how my brain judged the actions of others as not good enough. And I realized that was all about me and not about them. I took total responsibility for my disappointment.
And this year I let everyone be who they were. And so what fun to get that call and the text and the multiple flower deliveries, messages on social media, even a surprise visit from my mom, and a special dinner with my son at college. What an absolute gift to be able to appreciate all of it without any judgment about what should be happening.
All of it was perfect exactly as it was. My friends, think about how much time we waste waiting for other people to make us feel loved, make us feel connected, and how much time we spend feeling lonely and blaming other people or our lack of friends or some other circumstances for making us feel lonely and disconnected. All of these feelings are ours to create.
But if you feel lonely or disconnected, I also want you to know there's nothing wrong with you. But if you would like to create more connection in your life, it's time to get curious. What are you thinking that's making you feel lonely and disconnected? Is it that the friends you currently have aren't quite meeting the mark? Have your priorities shifted? Are you realizing that those friendships aren't a good fit? That the truth is that that woman bores you to tears or is so needy you just can't stand being with her? Or alternatively, are you setting such high expectations of these friends that it would be impossible for them to meet them? Maybe you realize that you've invested a lot of your time and your kids in your career and you've neglected friendships.
Get curious. Is this something you really want to change? What's stopping you from making a change? From creating new connections? Reaching out to that acquaintance or reconnecting with that old friend? As I've said many times, mindset work isn't about being happy all the time. It's about learning how to use your emotional pain as a teacher.
I'd even say that there are some times when I feel lonely. Maybe because my boys are out of town and I'm home alone and I decide not to make plans, so I feel lonely. And guess what? It makes perfect sense.
I feel lonely and nothing's gone wrong. I also know that if I feel lonely, I can always decide to make plans. But sometimes the truth really is that I'd rather feel a little lonely than make the effort to make plans and go out.
So powerful to be curious and then get really honest with myself. So when it comes to the goal of creating connection, the bottom line is that the most important person in your life to be connected to is you. And that's not at all to suggest that the relationships with other people aren't valuable and important.
But there is a big difference between needing other people to fill a void in your life and appreciating the value people add to your life. Other people can't make you feel loved and connected without your permission. And so no matter what you feel or want to feel, know that it is a gift only you can give yourself.
This is absolutely the best gift I gave myself for my 51st birthday. And that gift keeps helping me evolve into that next version of myself. So whether your goals are connection with your teens, creating connections with other people in your life, career goals, or just finding purpose, all of this starts with you becoming the woman who knows she has the power to create her own emotional experience.
And this is the work we do in my coaching program, Mom 2.0. No matter what you want to feel or create in your life, this is a gift only you can give yourself.
Until next time, friends.
If you enjoyed this podcast, please leave a review and check out our coaching program, Mom 2.0, at www.thesmalljar.com. You have more power than you think, my friend.
