THE FIX-IT MINDSET TYPE
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 96.
Hello, my friends, and welcome to the series on Mindset Trap Types as they apply to us moms navigating life with teens and the transition from motherhood to the empty nest, what I call the empty nest straddle. As I've been doing this work on mindset traps, I've noticed with my clients that many of us can struggle with particular mindset traps that tend to mutually reinforce each other. As I further dive into this work, I've been segmenting these sets of mindset traps into what I call mindset trap types.
Now I want to be clear with these types that these are not meant to be labels or diagnoses. For example, last week I covered the worry mindset, and if that conversation felt relevant to you, I don't want you to start calling yourself the type of person who worries. This isn't at all about who you are.
This is simply about understanding the types of mindset traps, the thought errors, that our subconscious mind can fall into in a well-intentioned effort to keep us safe and comfortable. All of us humans fall into these mindset traps. We do, our kids do, our partners and our friends do.
But I think because we're at this point in our lives as moms where so much is in flux, so much feels increasingly out of our control, that we can find ourselves becoming more susceptible to particular types of traps. And as I said, these traps can mutually reinforce each other in powerful but counterproductive ways. Thinking about the conversation last week around the worry mindset, you can easily see how catastrophizing fear of the unknown and all or nothing thinking can all work together to exacerbate feelings of worry and anxiety.
Not only are these mindset traps interrelated and mutually reinforcing, but the way you understand and overcome them within each of these type categories is similar. So this is why I thought it would be helpful to categorize them in this way. So today I want to cover what I'm calling the fix-it mindset type.
Now, these types are really meant to help you gain a broader perspective of these categories of mindset traps. If you're just starting out with this work, you might find it helpful to take my mindset trap type quiz, which you can find on my website, www.thesmalljar.com. What I've found with the hundreds of responses I've received in just the first few weeks is that many of you, like me, fall into some combination of the different mindset trap types, which makes perfect sense given how prevalent these traps can be. So what I recommend is after you take the quiz, you can start by diving into the type or category that most relates to your particular type.
But then as you gain understanding of that first type, then you can move on to explore the others. I should also say that I've categorized the mindset traps into five different types or categories. There's the worry mindset, the fix-it mindset, the validation seeking mindset, the judgment mindset, and the managed mindset.
Now, over the next few weeks, I'll be covering each of these mindset trap types in more detail. So with the worry mindset that I covered last week, I talked about the series of mindset traps that tend to cause anxiety for us. Today, as I talk about the fix-it mindset, we'll explore the traps that create guilt, frustration, and again, more anxiety.
Now, as a reminder, the reason you feel any emotion is because of the way you think about your life. I get that this can feel like an oversimplification, maybe even a woo-woo way of trying to get you to manifest a happier life. And I want to promise you, there is nothing woo-woo about this.
It's also not about manifesting. Look, you get to blame your emotions on the way other people behave or how things aren't turning out the way you want. It's totally understandable.
Sometimes things don't go our way. In our lives with teens, things may often not go the way we'd like them to go. Believe me, I get it.
I don't even think it's useful to try and convince ourselves that we're happy about something when that's just not the truth. What I'm talking about is not just about being happy. Although, of course, we'd all love more happiness.
Actually, what I want to help you see is that when you choose to take responsibility for how your mind creates your emotions, then you tap into a new level of power that you've likely never experienced before. Think about it. If other people and things outside of you, the circumstances of your life, are responsible for how you feel, then you are literally at the mercy of all of those things.
You're dependent on everyone doing and saying the right thing all the time. You're at the mercy of everything going right and smoothly and exactly how you hoped or expected them to go. And that works as long as you surround yourself with people that do exactly what you want them to do and everything else in your life meets your expectations.
But that's also just not life. And so where we find ourselves as moms, with teenagers, and as we approach the transition to the empty nest, is that a lot stops going the way we want it to go. Our teens start testing boundaries, acting out, shutting us out, or facing challenges over which we have absolutely no control.
Time also seems to speed by. We're getting older. Our hormones are all over the place.
We could be dealing with aging parents or other health or mental health challenges in our families. Our kids are contemplating their next chapter, and that could be scary or exciting or some combination of both. And as our kids take this big leap into their adult lives, we're forced into a transition as well.
Now, there's some among us who will be ready, if only because we're done dealing with the drama and ready to have a little more peace and quiet at home. But there are others of us who dread the emptiness because of what we feel we're losing, the close connection we have with our teens at home, the role and the purpose of being a mom, the sense of meaning and satisfaction we've had in our lives because of the effort and sacrifice we've put into being a mom. Everything can feel like it's changing.
And while for each of us this might look very different, the constant is that there are very likely going to be parts of this transition during this emptiness straddle that are challenging for all of us. So if you're at the mercy of everything going right so that you can maintain a feeling of peace and happiness in your life, then this moment in your life is not going to feel particularly comfortable. And let's just clarify, this moment, the emptiness straddle, isn't just a point in time.
It's a 10 to 15 year span of life that could last from the time when our first child becomes a tween to the time when our last child graduates college or is settled into their adult lives, supporting themselves financially and emotionally. Honestly, my friends, I've coached grandmothers still in the emptiness straddle. So the opportunity here is for you to start taking responsibility for the way your mind creates your emotions.
In other words, the way your perspective, that tinted pair of sunglasses through which you view the world, actually creates your emotions and then determines how you respond or react, the way you show up in your life, and the quality of the results you create for yourself in your life. Now, if you've ever worked with a therapist, they're going to work with you on your mindset from the perspective of your past, the way you were brought up and perhaps trauma that you might've experienced. And for some of us, this is important work.
If there's something you experienced in your past that's holding you back, it can be invaluable to process and begin to heal from that trauma. And of course, all of our experiences and our upbringing does influence how we perceive or think about our lives. This is inevitable.
But even if you have experienced trauma in your past, or no matter how terrible your upbringing was, or how difficult a marriage you might've had, no matter what your past experience has been, it's interesting to consider that this experience is now in the past. Even events that happened yesterday are in the past. The only reason you feel anything about these experiences right now is because of the way you're thinking about them right now.
So all this just say, well, I think it can be valuable to understand how your past has influenced you in positive and potentially negative ways. You still get to choose right now in this moment, how you want to move forward, how you want to think about this past. And I found that this is one of the biggest differences between life coaching and therapy.
Ask yourself, are you in a place where you need to heal from the past, or are you ready to take responsibility for how your past and your current perspective about your past may be holding you back from your future? So as I talked about last week, your mind is a powerful supercomputer that is processing information about the world around you every moment and evaluating what it sees and experiences against what your brain has decided are its preferences and expectations. Consider this for a moment. Your mind has created expectations about everything.
I have expectations about how light the sky will be when I wake up each morning, one of the reasons why the daylight savings time change can seem so jarring. I have expectations about my weight, how I will sleep. I have expectations of my kids, and I might need days to share all of those expectations with you.
I have expectations of my husband, of everyone in my life, including people I don't even know. I have expectations around everything and everyone I encounter, including and especially myself. And my friend, you have all of these expectations too, although you may not have ever explicitly thought of them this way.
Now, what is an expectation? It's a strong belief that something will happen or be the case in the future. Our mind is literally trying to predict the future, trying to give us some sense of predictability, comfort in knowing what lies ahead, even though the future is inherently unknown and unpredictable. So here we are with these expectations, these beliefs about what will happen or be the case in the future.
And then the future happens, becomes our present moment, and our brains evaluate the current reality versus what we expected to happen. Now, what percentage of the time are your expectations accurate? In other words, how often are your expectations exact predictions of what actually ended up happening? Well, of course, it depends on what we're talking about. Some predictions are much more likely to happen than others.
I expect the sun to rise every morning, and so far I've never been disappointed, thank goodness. But when it comes to human behavior, things are much less predictable. It's actually kind of interesting that when it comes to expectations related to other people, that we're somehow very often let down in ways that take us utterly by surprise.
Think about what defines your expectations of other people in your life. Some of this is influenced by your values, the way you expect to be treated by other people, or quite frankly, the way you behave and how you expect some sort of reciprocal treatment. Sometimes your expectations are governed by how this other person typically is, so we expect consistent behavior from them, but then you can surprised when they act in a way that isn't consistent with their typical behavior.
Other times, we know how someone is in our life. For example, that mother-in-law, or our boss, or someone in your life that's just difficult, but somehow their behavior can still surprise you. How often has that happened to you, where you find yourself totally pissed off by something someone does? But if you're honest with yourself, this isn't the first time you've seen this behavior.
So why is it that you're surprised? Notice this is a different question than why are you accepting this behavior? The question is more, why did you expect something different? When it comes to disappointed expectations, there's also just life. Life happens. Things don't turn out the way you hoped.
Your child doesn't make the team or get into the college they really wanted to go to. Your kids face big and small disappointments all of the time. You or someone you love might get injured or have some medical diagnosis.
Your kid could get fired. Your spouse could get laid off. Maybe we get laid off or don't get chosen for an opportunity we're pursuing.
We work towards goals and things don't turn out the way we hoped they would, the way we really expected them to. So whether we're talking about other people or just life in general, sometimes the reality is simply something we don't want. What are those things for you right now? Could you make a list of all the things in your life right now that you don't want? And look, this could even seem counterintuitive if you're used to trying to focus on the positive, to look on the bright side and focus on the things for which you're grateful.
But here's the thing, whether or not you make a list of those things in your life that aren't meeting your expectations, that list is in your head. You can either face it head on and really explore for yourself why these things are a problem, or you can shove them down and ignore them. My advice, take a chance and face this list of unmet expectations head on.
You might just learn something about yourself in the process. So it's interesting to notice that when you make up the list of unmet expectations, and here are a few possible examples, maybe it's something about the way your teen is behaving. Maybe it's some way that your teen is struggling, maybe with or with someone they're dating.
Maybe a coach or a teacher isn't supporting your teen in the way you would like them to. Maybe you have family or friends who are letting you down. You could be contemplating what comes next for you once your kids leave home.
But you can't help wish that you did something different in the past so that you didn't feel quite so untethered as you think about letting go in the future. Maybe there are ways that you yourself are letting yourself down, whether this has to do with goals you have for yourself or certain behaviors you want to stop or start doing. There are so many ways in life to find that our expectations just aren't being met.
And my point in inviting you to consider this list is not to depress you. We all have this list. I have this list.
I absolutely have expectations of other people that aren't met. I have expectations of myself that I don't meet all the time. But the way I approach these unmet expectations today versus the way I approached them four or five years ago is utterly transformed.
And I'm going to explain how. Now when someone is prone to fall into the mindset traps that I put into the category of the fix-it mindset type, when faced with a situation where their expectations are not met, they'll tend to feel emotions including anger, frustration, guilt, maybe even shame, deep disappointment, and even anxiety. Now similar to what I discussed in the context of the worry mindset, your primal brain, the amygdala, senses this discrepancy in expectations versus reality.
And because your immediate thought is, this is not what I want, your amygdala detects a threat to your safety and comfort and activates the fight-or-flight response. So now that you have cortisol and adrenaline coursing through your body, this contributes to the vibrations in your body you feel as a result of the emotion you're experiencing, whether that be anger, disappointment, shame, or anxiety. Now to clarify, just because your brain activates the fight-or-flight response does not mean there's real danger.
In this day and age when we're not fighting for survival on a daily basis, our brains are now scanning our environment to find threats to our emotional safety and well-being. And included in this is the loss of some feeling we expected to feel. Think about it, if you expect your teenager to be civil or even kind to you, when they meet this expectation, you think, great, I'm glad to be with you, and you feel content and at peace, maybe even happy and connected.
But when they're not kind or in any way civil, but you'd hoped or expected them to be, well, now there's a problem. You're thinking, I don't deserve to be treated this way, or you shouldn't be acting this way. And now those positive feelings you subconsciously expected to feel, even if those feelings were simply being at peace or content, now these feelings have been disrupted and replaced by feelings of anger and rejection.
So the danger your subconscious mind is responding to is a disruption in your peace or well-being. So far, in many ways, this discussion parallels what we discussed last week with the worry mindset type. Your brain perceives danger in the current circumstance because it senses either uncertainty or the possible loss of a positive feeling and physically reacts.
We experience a negative emotion. In the case of the worry mindset, that emotion is typically fear or anxiety in response to the brain creating a narrative around the future consequences of what's happening right now. Often, I would say, when people are stuck in a worry mindset, they tend to be mired in helplessness.
This doesn't necessarily mean we do nothing, but that emotion of anxiety often tends to result in us taking action that feels a bit desperate. I think of all of the times I've been stuck in anxiety over something and I tend to nag and bring up the same things over and over. Anxiety has the tendency to keep us spinning.
We can spend more of our energy thinking about the problem than doing anything. And this can be particularly true if everything we try to do to fix the problem isn't working. We're left in this spiral of powerlessness where we take desperate action that doesn't seem to work and then we're left with our worry and anxiety and how this will have consequences in the future.
When it comes to the fix-it mindset, again, our brain perceives danger. We either see something that doesn't meet our expectations or something we don't want in our lives. This could be anything from someone's behavior or words that they say to us to some actual outcome or threat of an outcome we don't want.
Seeing our kids' grades fall or evidence that they're doing something that we think isn't right. Now, in some of these cases, we might feel anxiety as well. But when it comes to the mindset traps related to the fix-it mindset, often we experience guilt, maybe even shame or anger and frustration.
And the way you feel about any particular situation is entirely based on the way you think about it. Generally speaking, when we're driven by the fix-it mindset, we sense a problem and we take responsibility for fixing it. The worry mindset, I think, tends to make us feel a general lack of control.
While in the fix-it mindset, we're under the illusion that we are in control or that by taking control, we can fix whatever's wrong, ultimately so that we can feel better and let go of whatever negative emotion we're feeling. There are four particular mindset traps that I categorize into the fix-it mindset. These are the illusion of control, personalization, confirmation bias, and emotional reasoning.
It's so interesting because in the worry mindset, our minds create anxiety in an effort to avoid some future or alternative pain. But in the fix-it mindset, our brains create pain. And because they think that the cause of that pain is outside of us, we need to change the situation or the other person in order to let go of the pain.
Think about it. We create the very pain that we're trying to fix by changing the world. Let me share a bit more about this as I introduce each of these individual mindset traps.
So I mentioned the fix-it mindset traps tend to cause guilt, shame, anger and frustration, and sometimes also anxiety. The thought error or mindset trap that causes you to feel guilt or shame is personalization. In my podcast on this topic, I actually call it mom guilt because it's such a common trap that we fall into that I think you likely know exactly what I mean when I say mom guilt.
So personalization means that the way you interpret a situation involves you thinking you're to blame for whatever's happening in your life that you don't want. And when it's a trap, we're typically blaming ourselves or taking things personally when these things have little or nothing to do with us. We do this with everything related to our kids, don't we? They run into trouble, we can think we should have done something more to help them avoid it.
We can feel guilty when our teens or anyone else in our lives is mad at us for something. We can feel guilty about our choices if we think they'll negatively impact other people in some way, even if the choice we make is actually the right choice for us. We can also feel guilty if we're not in a position to help fix our kids' pain or difficult situation, even if we know the situation has nothing to do with us, isn't in any way our fault.
We can feel guilty that we're not in a help. So what does this have to do with the fix-it mindset? Well, think about it. If we're to blame, then we have to be the ones to take responsibility and fix the situation.
If someone we love is hurting and we feel guilty that we can't help, we might still spin in trying to find ways to help. In this trap, we blame ourselves or take a situation personally and then we think we have to be the ones to change or to take action to make the situation better. Really, as a way to take away the pain of the situation, we want to fix it.
But notice, we have created the guilt or shame with our minds, and now we think we need to change or do something in order to be able to let go of our own guilt, the guilt we created in our minds. Now, I've been in this situation. I know it's hard to let go of the guilt, that feeling of responsibility we feel for protecting our kids, for helping them be successful.
I've said so many times in the past that as long as I live, I will always do whatever I can to help my boys be safe, happy, and successful. I don't know that this feeling of responsibility fueled by love ever goes away. But there is a big difference between taking action from love and taking action from guilt or shame.
Not only does guilt and shame feel terrible, but these emotions are simply not productive. You either end up going overboard in your effort to fix the situation, or you could become overly dependent on making things okay, just so you can feel better. It can become more about you and your need to fix it than about the person you're trying to help.
Another mindset trap I've put into the fix-it mindset type is the illusion of control. This is essentially when we think we have more control over other people or situations than we actually do. Again, in our lives with teens, we want so much for them.
The question is, how much control do you have over any of it? Their safety? Their happiness? Their success? It's so hard for us moms to accept that we are actually powerless to control the trajectory of our kids' lives. But have you ever stopped to think about how much time and energy you put into trying to make your teens okay, just so you can feel okay? On the one hand, of course, you love your kids. You want to help them in any way you can.
But how comfortable are you letting go of control and being honest with yourself that there may be nothing for you to do here? Nothing for you to fix? Confirmation bias is one of those mindset traps that I think adds fuel to the fire. And really, it plays a role with all of the mindset trap types. Confirmation bias involves paying particular attention to the facts or circumstances that reinforce what you already believe.
So if you sense danger, something you don't want or like, your brain is going to zero in on the facts that support your belief that something's wrong. Consider how this simple trap can exacerbate your feelings of guilt, anger, or anxiety. Now the next mindset trap in the fix-it mindset trap is emotional reasoning.
And I bring this again into the conversation because we can be so convinced that whatever we feel is the truth that we use our feelings as further evidence that there's a problem. I feel guilty, therefore I must have done something wrong. I'm angry, therefore that thing the person did was wrong.
My friend, your mental perception or interpretation of whatever is happening in your life comes first, before the emotion. The thought you have about the situation creates the emotion. So the next time you feel guilty, instead of taking that emotion at face value as the truth, ask yourself, what am I thinking about this situation that's making me feel guilty, rather than why does the situation make me feel guilty? Notice the subtle difference.
Stepping back for a minute, I think that in the fix-it mindset traps, we tend to get a sense of power from our perception that there is a role for us to play. That we can actually fix the situation so that everyone can feel better, including ourselves. Someone hurt your child, you want to fix it.
Something doesn't go your teen's way, you want to fix it. If your teen is mad at you or starts treating you in ways you don't want, maybe you think it's your fault. So now you believe you need to parent better or listen more or nag less.
Surely there's something you can do to make this better, right? And here's where it might get confusing, because sometimes as a parent, there is a role for us to play. I'm not in the habit as a mom or as a woman in my life in general, of standing by and doing nothing. But your emotions play a critical role in determining the quality of your actions, and therefore the quality of the results you get.
So if you're taking action from guilt, shame, frustration, anger, or anxiety, ask yourself how effective is the action you're taking? Are you taking the same actions that you would be if you were making decisions from a place of calm and confidence, a careful evaluation of the options and the role you have to play? The answer when you're wrapped up in the fix-it mindset is often no. We can find ourselves people-pleasing, actually being that controlling mom we so desperately don't want our kids to accuse us of being. We can take action in a way that communicates to our teen that we don't trust that they can figure it out on their own.
We can find ourselves looking desperate, out of control. I know, I've been there. In a perfect world, our kids would never be in pain or disappointed.
People in our life would never get mad at us or be disappointed in us. Things would always go our way. Our expectations would always be met.
But again, this is simply not life. And as I said at the beginning, we have expectations. Whether you realize it or not, you do.
But you're not a mind reader. You're not some mystic who can predict the future. So inevitably, your expectations aren't met.
And so it's perfectly natural for you to feel disappointed, even angry or frustrated, or guilty, maybe even shame, when things don't go the way you truly hope they would. These are simply feelings that you feel in response to the way you're thinking about the situation. So rather than trying to fix the world to meet your expectations, what if you learned how to understand your mind, even how to manage your mind, so that when the world doesn't go your way, it actually doesn't throw you for a loop every single time? If this conversation resonates with you, I invite you to dive in deeper and learn about the Fix It mindset.
Understand how you actually create the same pain that you're trying to fix. I found with these traps that there tends to be particular areas of our life that we find we take responsibility for in unnecessary ways. And when we can see this for what it is, you can free yourself of so much pain.
So here's my invitation. If you haven't already, go to my website to take the Mindset Trap Type Quiz. If you score high for the Fix It mindset, take a listen to the companion Small Job Podcast episodes on the illusion of control, personalization, confirmation bias, and emotional reasoning.
The solution to your pain isn't to change the world so you can feel better. The solution is to understand how you're creating your own pain and take responsibility for that. The way you perceive your life isn't something you necessarily have to fix, but it's something that you can understand and gain mastery over so that you can decide to create peace instead.
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.
