EMBRACING MINDSET TRAPS
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 91.
Hello, my friends. I am just back from a fabulous but short weekend in Florida, where we celebrated my husband for a big milestone birthday. The best part of the weekend was that we were together, all four of us, our little family.
And yes, even my son from college joined us. He's actually in the midst of midterms and a number of significant commitments, but he surprised my husband by flying down early Sunday morning so that we could spend 24 hours together. So much about this was perfect.
But over the past week, there have been so many opportunities for me to fall into all of the mindset traps I've been talking about in this series over the past few months. As I was finalizing all of the logistics for our trip, I had reached out to my son, and if I'm honest, I reached out every day because I was hoping to connect with him on a few things at the time of his flight on Sunday. I needed his help with part of the gift we were giving to his father.
It wasn't a long list, but text after text went unanswered. How often do you find your own texts getting ignored and then you make it mean something? Well, that's what was happening to me. I also had the opportunity to let the information confirm what I was already thinking, in this case that my son was on the fence about whether or not he could come down.
I found myself trying to read my son's mind from afar. In the absence of any communication, my mind was filling in the blanks. I was imagining him getting my text and then actively ignoring me, or just forgetting about the text altogether.
I was aware that my mind also had the option to think that if my son didn't make it work and come down to Florida, the weekend would be a total letdown. All or nothing. And I wasn't just falling into mindset traps about things going on with my son.
For my husband's birthday, I also wanted to compile a long video with messages from friends and family. What I compiled actually ended up being 30 minutes long. But when I reached out to people, I admittedly didn't give everyone much notice.
But then I found myself wondering why I hadn't heard back from certain people. I had labels in my mind about who in my husband's life was quote-unquote special and therefore really had to be represented in this video. And that label made me feel additional pressure to get these people's attention.
And when I say I stalked, I wouldn't be exaggerating. I would have blamed myself if anyone was missing. And then I ordered t-shirts for the weekend that ended up not getting shipped in time for me to bring them down to Florida with me.
Now, my husband had zero expectation about t-shirts. And at the end of the day, t-shirts obviously aren't a big deal. But I was excited for them because I had designed them with a picture of his beloved dog.
And if I'm honest, I didn't want my husband to be disappointed that we, or specifically I, hadn't made enough of an effort to celebrate him. This was a big birthday. And to be honest, my husband isn't that type of guy at all.
Honestly, he had zero expectations. When my son in college told him he had a gig this weekend and really wanted to come down to Florida but was torn, my husband told him to go to the gig. He said, we can celebrate any time, bud.
I'm so proud of you for putting this new band together and getting a gig. He truly wouldn't have wanted my son to miss it. So it wasn't my husband's expectations that I was living up to.
They were all mine. I wanted it all to be perfect. Not for perfection's sake, but so I wouldn't have to feel the pain of disappointment or worse, guilt that I hadn't done everything I could to let this man know how much I love him.
Was I looking for a validation? Of course. Had I heard about other friends' plans to celebrate their husbands or partners for similar milestones and I thought a quick trip to Florida and some t-shirts might fall short of the mark, for sure I was falling into the comparison trap. But above all else, the trap I was falling into was the trap where I thought I could control any of this.
My husband's feelings, my son's actions, the friends who didn't get my texts or emails or just felt stumped to have to come up with some meaningful and engaging birthday message to a dear friend in less than 60 seconds. The truth is, I can't control any of those things. But this is what we do as moms, as women, right? We want to celebrate the ones that we love.
We want everyone to feel appreciated and know how hard we tried to make them happy. But in the meantime, we put ourselves through so much unnecessary negative emotion, frustration and anger, anxiety, hurt, resentment, guilt, and disappointment. All of these feelings were available to me, even in this relatively simple and undramatic example of my life over the past week.
But although I observed my mind navigating all of these traps, all of these thoughts, I didn't waste any time wallowing in these negative emotions. If I noticed myself falling into any of these traps, I was immediately reminded to check in. What's going on here, my friend? Why is this a problem? As I've been sharing this work on mindset traps, I've noticed with my clients that what we can tend to do when we learn about these various traps and the messages start to resonate, like, oh, I notice I'm seeking validation, or, oh my God, am I in fact a perfectionist? It's so tempting to want to diagnose ourselves.
Because guess what? If we can diagnose the problem, then we can fix it, right? Hopefully, this is starting to sound familiar because it's an underlying motivation of all of these traps. The motivation to fix, to be more comfortable, certain, and safe, to feel better, to make life easier. And by the way, these intrinsic motivations have literally allowed our species to evolve.
Humankind is continually finding solutions, solutions to problems we didn't even know we had. Each one of us, in our corner of the world, solving the problems within our world, whether that be curing cancer, caring for loved ones, or just feeling better ourselves. I can't imagine a world in which we weren't motivated to make life better.
And could you imagine a life without the motivation to be happy, to find peace, to ease our discomfort? I imagine it would be similar to the feeling of being in a deep depression. The pain of that emotion can swallow all other motivation. Is this what life would look like for all of us if we didn't have the desire to make the most out of our lives? I think it's really important for us to consider this, because as we think about these mindset traps as a problem we need to solve, we can miss the opportunity to actually unwind ourselves from the traps.
As you heard from my description of the birthday festivities over the past week, we're often not just dealing with one trap, but rather an intersection of many, if not all, of the traps, mutually reinforcing each other, one leading to another, or all of them coalescing in an overwhelming soup of negative emotion. All that said, often exposure to mindset work can give us tools to begin to find freedom or relief from being stuck in negative patterns. And when you experience the kind of relief and peace that comes from having these aha moments about yourself and your life, it can tap into our motivation to find more of that, more peace, more happiness, more connection to ourselves and the ability to be present in our lives.
Of course we want this. And mindset work is the way to get there more consistently. But these tools are also the kind of thing that you can actually use against yourself.
Now we fall into these mindset traps subconsciously, but mindset work teaches you how to bring the subconscious to the conscious. Studies actually show that 95% of your thoughts are subconscious, meaning they're operating in the background, fueling our emotions and actions without us being aware of them. This is precisely why it's so easy for us to blame our emotional state on the circumstances of our lives, because we're not consciously aware of the thoughts we have about those circumstances.
It seems obvious that the reason I would be frustrated that my son didn't text me back was because he wasn't doing something he should have been doing. It was his fault. He made me feel frustrated.
Or it might be clear that I would feel anxious that the logistics surrounding the birthday weekend were up in the air and the birthday gifts were difficult to pull together. It was the friends not sending the video, the t-shirt company that couldn't get their act together. Our lives would be so much easier if everyone would just text us back, send us what we asked for, and get us our deliveries on time.
Really, is that so much to ask? Except here's the thing, it is. Because the rest of the world isn't sitting around thinking about us, or more specifically, thinking about our expectations of them. Could you imagine my son at college seeing a text from me and thinking, I better text her right back because I know she's starting to get hurt and insecure if it takes me too long to get back to her? As much as it might even be true, would I ever want my son to think that of me? Wouldn't I rather him think that I'm so happy he's involved and engaged in his life at school, that I know he loves me, and that he doesn't need to prove it to me by texting me immediately? Wouldn't I rather him think that I trust him, that he told me he was coming and that he was going to stick to his word, or tell me if he couldn't? Even as I say this, there's no doubt in my mind that this is true.
So why did I feel the need to text my son daily to remind him to respond? He did, by the way. On Friday night, in the middle of a show where he was performing, he texted, apologizing for just then getting back to me. And he obviously made the effort to come down.
So if I had really been agitated by this whole thing, it would have been a complete waste of emotions. The truth is, even those who love us dearly are operating from their own perspective, their lens of how they're viewing their lives, and also their perspective on what they are thinking our expectations are. All of this is up for interpretation.
People aren't mind readers, although we can fall into the trap of thinking that we are. And how exhausting would it be for all of us to be solely focused on meeting everyone else's expectations of us? There's a word for that, my friends, and that's being a people pleaser, which almost always ends up leading to resentment. So the truth is, we don't really want to be ruled by other people's expectations of us, and in turn, we don't really want others to be ruled by ours, of them.
But on a subconscious level, this is the pressure we put on other people and the circumstances of our lives in general. We want it all to line up with what we want, so we're never hurt or disappointed or angry. The hard truth is, we want to control the world so we can feel better, but we're also powerless to control the world.
And this is ultimately why so many of us are miserable. Start paying attention to this as you observe other people. Notice how often people are pissed off or hurt simply because other people don't do what they want them to do.
We might all agree that people should be nice and polite and respectful, that people should do what they say they're going to do, but all of this is subjective. And I've noticed in my life that even when I think someone is falling way short of my expectations of what they should be doing, in my humble opinion, even then, I've noticed that these same people are often doing the best that they can in their own mind, driven by their own motivations and insecurities, falling into their own mindset traps. Kind of interesting to consider how we might view the differently if we literally gave everyone we encountered the benefit of the doubt, that we are all on this earth doing the literal best we can, even if that doesn't look like much on the outside to others.
Okay, we can't control other people, we can't control the immediate circumstances of our lives, like the weather or health diagnoses, our weight, whether or not the plane's on time, all of this not in our control. But we have thoughts about all of it. And as we've been exploring in this series of the 14 mindset traps, because our primitive brains are motivated to seek pleasure and comfort, to avoid pain and to make our lives easy and efficient, the thoughts we have about our lives are often skewed with that perspective.
How can I find safety? Avoid emotional pain? How can I feel better? How can I be more certain? Literally, our subconscious minds are scanning the horizons of our lives, automatically asking these questions, seeking answers. How can I find safety and avoid emotional pain? Again, using the simple example of my trip and the birthday weekend, what feelings did my brain want to avoid? Guilt? Disappointment? Hurt? Frustration? Notice, these are my feelings, the ones my brain wanted me to avoid. Do we want to avoid having other people experience negative emotion when we think there's something we can do to prevent that? Of course.
But ultimately, it all comes back to the impact on us. If I thought there was a risk that my husband would be disappointed, then the impact on me would be that I would feel guilt, my own disappointment. And how was it that my brain thought I could feel better, more certain? Well, if my son responded, then I could stop feeling anxious and hurt.
If I knew for certain my son was coming, again, I could know that I wouldn't feel guilt or disappointment about that aspect of the birthday weekend. In fact, in my mind, my son coming as a surprise was possibly the biggest gift I could give my husband. Forget the t-shirts.
Seeing the look on my husband's face when my son walked up to him, unexpectedly, priceless. Then later, when I had the opportunity to watch my husband's face when we watched the videos from family and friends, reaching back to childhood and each and every stage and phase of his life, extraordinary. I had in my mind as I planned these details, what I hoped for my husband.
And so, of course, I wanted to experience the joy of having accomplished this and avoid the pain of having failed. So much pressure. Now, again, I'm purposely using this relatively simple example of the birthday weekend to show you how fraught these fairly simple and everyday situations can be with mindset traps.
Now, in your life, how much have you found yourself weighted down with uncertainty and anxiety, frustration, and guilt over relatively minor situations? Now, extrapolate that out to the big stuff. Those situations that are hard to interpret any other way than terrible, awful, and painful. A teen rejecting you.
Someone you love actually saying the words, I hate you. A child struggling with school or friends. Loss.
Now, as you learn about these mindset traps and observe the truth of how your mind interprets the circumstances of your own life in a way that creates your pain, it's reasonable for you to see the possibility that if you can just get out of these traps, then you can feel better. It's more nuanced than thinking happy thoughts, which we all probably agree isn't reasonable all the time. Instead, overcoming mindset traps offers the possibility that my brain is engaging in an error, call it a thought error, a mind glitch, that if we can just reboot or fix the code in our minds, that we could break free from the trap and find more peace and freedom from all this negative emotion.
I want to offer that this is the wrong way to look at it. Your mind is not a problem to solve, but rather a masterpiece to discover. Notice what happens when you think that you're a self-validating, catastrophizing perfectionist who's trying to control the world and takes responsibility for all of it.
Might as well add labeling to the list. On this journey of self-awareness, as you gain the skill of bringing your subconscious mind into the light, you start to notice not only patterns of thinking that you may not entirely like, but you start to see how these limiting beliefs are fueling your negative, painful emotions and causing you to show up in your life in ways that you don't like. You start to see how it's actually you creating your own pain and causing you to be who you don't want to be.
And this awareness can feel a bit uncomfortable. And I just want to sit with that for a moment. It can feel painful to think that you are someone who needs external validation, that there's something wrong with you that you have this need.
You compare yourself to others, assuming that they don't suffer from this deficiency. If you identify with the label people pleaser and see how this has caused you to feel resentment, it can seem like the solution is to pull in the opposite direction, to start putting up boundaries and practice saying no. If you think you're a perfectionist, then you might tell yourself you need to learn to let go.
Notice how in these examples, the solution, the fix, seems like it should be to do the opposite thing or just to stop doing a thing, to push against it, to reject a way of being. But these solutions are focused on actions, learning how to respond in a different way. And this for sure is a strategy.
But the challenge is that if you're only focused on doing something different, then you're not addressing the actual trap, the actual cause of your behavior in the first place. Because our behavior, the way we show up in our lives, is all driven by our minds, by our interpretation of the circumstances of our lives. So if you don't address the driver, the root cause of the mindset trap, you're going to be clenching your fists and trying to force yourself to change in a way that doesn't feel authentic.
It's almost impossible to let go of validation seeking if you haven't explored why you're looking for your kids or your spouse to make you feel appreciated. And I'm not talking about processing past trauma or analyzing how your parents have raised you. I'm talking about the subconscious thoughts you're having about yourself right now that make you think you are dependent on others to generate positive emotion.
Similarly, it would be difficult to let go, pun intended, of perfectionism if you haven't explored the thoughts that are causing you to want to create safety in your life by meeting high standards. Again, I'm not talking about how your parents raised you to be a high achiever, and that's why you have a hard time letting go. This isn't about therapy.
This isn't about there being anything wrong with you, in fact. This is about you taking responsibility for the way your mind interprets your life and creates your emotions. When you're focused on action, on trying to change your behavior, usually from a place of self-judgment, thinking there's something wrong with you that you have to fix, this often keeps you blinded to the mindset traps that are creating results that you don't want in the first place.
Let me share an example, again based on this birthday weekend. So let's say that as I worked on observing my mind over the past week and noticed feelings of frustration, hurt, and anxiety, and I checked in. Let's say I was able to pinpoint the traps I was falling into.
Mind reading, confirmation bias, all or nothing thinking, labeling, emotional reasoning, personalization, perfectionism, validation seeking, comparison trap, control illusion, pretty much all of them. What was that, nine or ten? Just this simple birthday week example, and I'm sure I could find evidence for the other four or five. So one option would be for me to observe that I was falling into these traps and call it a problem.
I would notice that these traps were causing me to try to control my son and to obsess about assembling my husband's gifts and planning logistics. Definitely not a place I wanted to be. I certainly wouldn't want my son to think I was controlling or anyone to know that I'm a validation seeking perfectionist.
Just to point out, calling myself names is just falling into more mindset traps, labeling, overgeneralization, more perfectionism. It's a downward spiral of judgment. So rather than calling myself names or even overgeneralizing to start saying things like I have a problem with letting go of control or I am someone who needs external validation, all of this is layering thought and judgment onto the awareness you've uncovered.
You could even say it's a way of covering up the awareness. It's kind of like if someone asks you what's wrong and then you tell them and they respond, well, you shouldn't be upset about that. The judgment has the effect of shutting down curiosity, of closing the door you opened when you started observing your mind and being willing to ask yourself, what's wrong, my friend? So as you explore all of this mindset trap work, I want to invite you to practice compassion along with curiosity.
Compassion. What does that look like? I want to invite you to think about these mindset traps as not problems but solutions. Your subconscious, maybe even at times your conscious mind, engages in these mindset traps, these ways of thinking, because your mind is trying to solve a problem for you.
Your mind is trying to keep you safe, to help you avoid pain, to seek pleasure, comfort, and ease. These traps are solving a problem. So notice the circular challenge, that if you think a mindset trap is a problem, then you try to solve it, but the trap is also trying to solve a problem.
So you're caught between both wanting to solve one problem while also wanting to solve the opposite or a different problem. Let's take perfectionism. The true goal of this trap is to keep you safe.
So if you tell yourself perfectionism is a problem, that you have to let go, your subconscious mind is going to fight you, because it's not safe to let go. What about validation seeking? Well this trap is geared to help us feel positive emotion. So when we tell ourselves to stop seeking validation, the message our subconscious brain can receive is, so what? Now I don't get to feel loved and appreciated? Now you're taking away these feelings that are so meaningful to me? So rather than solving the problem of mindset traps, I want to invite you to start thinking instead about embracing these mindset traps, opening yourself up to them.
What do they have to teach you? When you think of these ways of thinking as problems, the self-judgment and even overwhelm of noticing all of these thoughts, feelings, and ways of acting as something you don't want, it can feel terrible. We think we're doing it wrong. But what if your mind is perfect just the way it is, doing exactly what it should be doing? What if you could truly embrace the beauty of the motivational triad? That at your core, you just want to be safe, comfortable, happy, at peace.
Of course you do. I'd like to think about this motivational triad as coming from a place inside of me where I am young and vulnerable. I imagine the open, vulnerable, trusting, loving faces of my boys when they were little.
They just wanted to be safe, to be happy and comfortable. If they needed a little love, a little validation, wouldn't I want to give it to them? If they wanted to feel safe, wouldn't I do everything in my power to help them feel that? I wonder if you can look at yourself with this same unconditional love. Rather than judging and shutting down your need for safety and comfort, could it be possible for you to love yourself through it? Instead of judging yourself as broken and needing to be fixed, can you instead open yourself to understanding the connection between how you view your life and what you truly want? This is everything.
The difference between hurt, guilt and frustration, and peace, empathy and love. As I said over the past week, I noticed glimmers of these negative emotions and I checked in with myself. I've done the work and I understand where these feelings are coming from.
I see the traps for what they are. Not a problem, but a solution. And instead of either getting caught in the traps or hurting myself more by trying to force myself out of the traps, I'm able to make peace with all of it.
And then the traps let me go. This is the power of my coaching program, Mom 2.0. The goal is not to fix you. You are not broken.
Your mind is not a problem to solve, but a masterpiece unfolding. An opportunity for you to understand your mind, to learn about its mindset traps, so that you're always able to decide on purpose how you want to feel and show up in your life. And you do this by making peace with your mind so that the traps let you go.
Embrace your mindset traps. 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.
