MIDLIFE MOMS — REDISCOVERING WHO YOU ARE AS YOUR TEEN GROWS UP - PART I | EP. 6
Welcome to The Small Jar, a podcast where we explore how to intentionally design the life that you want in the space between motherhood and the empty nest. I'm your host, Jennifer Collins. Episode number six.
Hello, friends. My son got his driver's permit today. Another huge milestone reached for him.
It's beautiful and heartbreaking at the same time. One more step toward freedom for him and one more step I have to take in letting go. As I've watched my boys become young men and strive to reach bigger and bigger goals, I'm increasingly struck by how natural it is for them to just decide to do something new and then go after it.
It definitely wasn't always this way. When they were younger, I would have the bright idea to introduce them to soccer, then MMA, that after a particularly challenging school break. Sometimes they hated the activity right from the start.
And other times they started strong and eventually got bored of it. Either way, at some point they would just start whining about going to practice and I would always eventually give up the fight. I was sick of negotiating and I felt like I was paying money for all of us to be miserable.
But as my sons got older and I stopped forcing activities on them, they started finding their own passions and I didn't have to negotiate with them to pursue them anymore. My boys' motivations aren't always 100% in line with my motivations for them, but I've noticed that if they want something badly enough, they work hard to make it happen. This simplicity, this simple focus and having the time and space to pursue one's dreams feels like a luxury.
They are young and their only responsibilities are to go to school and to be good citizens in our home and the world. They're very lucky in that when they work, they have the luxury of working to earn their own money, not because they have to support our family. At school, they're encouraged to learn new things every day.
They're focused on college. They have dreams that are tangible and the only thing standing in between them and their dreams is how hard they're willing to work for them. Throughout my own life, I've always thought of myself as someone who's very goal-oriented.
I think what I like most about pursuing goals is that I like feeling a sense of accomplishment when I've achieved them. My goals aren't always lofty. I get an oddly satisfying sense of accomplishment from making my bed in the morning.
I love making the bed and spraying lavender on the sheets. It's such a small thing, but it gives me a lovely sense of pleasure. We're wired to seek pleasure and accomplishment.
Our brains actually release dopamine when we accomplish things. It's our body's way of encouraging us to do more of what keeps us thriving. When we eat, when we spend time with others, have sex, when we accomplish large and small goals, our bodies actually reward us with this pleasure hormone.
We feel the pleasure and our brains make a mental note that we should do more of that thing, whatever it is in the future. So whether we are intentional about it or not, our bodies chemically encourage our species survival and forward momentum. Whether we have big or small goals, we're motivated to fulfill what Maslow called a hierarchy of needs.
I described this in an earlier podcast, but to recap, at the most basic level, we look to satisfy our need for food, water, shelter, and rest. Biologically, our bodies give us positive feedback in the form of dopamine when we meet these needs. The next layer of need is for safety, security, and health.
The third tier is a need for love, belonging, and friendship. Then comes the need for self-esteem and feelings of accomplishment. At the top of the tier is achieving self-actualization or reaching one's full potential.
So of course, if someone's struggling to meet the needs of food and shelter, they're not going to be worried about reaching their full potential. But for those of us lucky enough to have a roof over our heads and have enough food to eat, our goals will then begin to form around love and connection, building our self-esteem, and feeling the pride of accomplishment. Notice we are motivated to realize feelings.
The reason we do anything is for a feeling, love, connection, self-esteem, and pride. These are not tangible things, but rather emotions that we feel. And even more specifically, these are emotions that we each individually feel as sensations in our bodies.
Love, connection, self-esteem, and pride. Think of what these emotions feel like for you and your body, and how you're motivated to achieve these emotions in your own life. For much of my career before I found coaching, I've helped companies and nonprofits advance their vision for what success looks like.
Think of it as the organizational equivalent of reaching your full potential. Early on, I worked with public and private companies to raise money. The heart of this process was helping the organization communicate who they were and why the investor should care.
We would develop lengthy marketing documents describing everything about the organization. But interestingly, the nuts and bolts of what the company did, the how, was a relatively small part of the equation. Even more important in the marketing process was the who.
Who are the players? And what does the organization stand for? What's their vision? What does success look like for the customer and the investor? We would often position the company in comparison to any number of competitors, which at first glance did very similar things to the companies we represented. The how of what they were selling would often be very similar. So it was the vision of the who, who the company was, that motivated investors to support the company.
We painted a picture of who the organization was and why that made them the inevitable winners in the road to success. On 9-11, I found myself on a plane from Newark to San Francisco. It wasn't until we landed mid-flight that I realized the simple fact that I had chosen to fly Continental instead of American Airlines meant I was alive.
This wake-up call led me to take stock of what I wanted for my life, and I decided not only to move in with my boyfriend, but I quit the job that had me commuting monthly back and forth to San Francisco and decided to go back to school for nonprofit management. When I began to work with nonprofits, the skills I had learned in the for-profit world translated easily. Instead of painting a vision of success to inspire investors to purchase stocks or bonds, I began to help nonprofits articulate their strategic vision to inspire individuals to make donations to support the cause.
It was very similar to the marketing process for public companies. As we developed the nonprofit's vision, we would describe who the organization was and why donors should care. We would describe the transformation that would be possible in the world if the nonprofit had the funding to support its vision for the future.
The vision we would paint would involve describing what success for the clients of the nonprofit looked like. Donors would be inspired by the who, who would be impacted, who the organization could become, and they would make a gift. In both the nonprofit and the for-profit world, if we had only described the nuts and bolts of the how, meaning we sell these widgets, we offer this service, we're going to purchase a thousand computers or hire a hundred salespeople, investors and donors wouldn't care.
They would think, so what? They would want to know what will happen as a result of the investments you are going to make with my money. What is the impact you will make in the world? Who will benefit? How will you make their lives better? This is the heart of why people invest in a particular organization. They want to believe in the who that will succeed in creating a particular impact in the world, a vision of success.
Now as a life coach, it's one of my favorite questions to ask my clients, who do you want to be? What is your vision for the future? What are your dreams? It's interesting that more often than not, my clients don't know. They don't have this vision for themselves beyond getting through the day to day. Look, I understand why.
A number of years ago, I also found myself without a vision for my future. I have a family that I love. I had a job.
I had a home, friends. The boxes were checked and I felt grateful for these things, but I also didn't feel any sense of forward momentum. In fact, I felt stuck.
One day I found myself feeling jealous of the fact that my sons had the luxury of trying new things, learning new things, music lessons, sports, new skills, acquiring knowledge. I saw them growing and exploring interests and felt this sense of loss. I realized my jealousy stemmed from a hidden belief that exploring new horizons was not a path that was available to me in that moment.
I truly believe that my role was limited to being a mom and supporting my family. It didn't seem conceivable to me that I could envision more for my life. On the one hand, it wasn't a problem.
Being a mother, earning money in my job, the things I was doing in my life were important, but for me, I felt I was missing a greater vision for my life. When I thought back, I realized that when I was young, I also had the luxury of dreaming big, but that those original dreams had been fulfilled. Marriage, check.
Children, check. Home, check. Career, check.
I loved being a mother, but I realized that my children need me less and less as time went on. I began to wonder what was holding me back from exploring new dreams. So what holds us back? The first is knowing how to go about achieving your goal, and it would seem that this is one of the most important things to know, knowing how to do something.
And while it is useful, believe it or not, it's one of the least important parts of realizing success, and here's why. Someone can tell you exactly what to do, step by step, hour by hour, but that alone will not guarantee you will be successful. Let's take the example of weight loss.
If you were someone who has ever wanted to lose weight, how many diets have you tried? Seriously, how many different strategies have you experimented with? The global diet and weight loss industry is valued at $255 billion. $255 billion. As a society, we clearly value companies selling us the how of weight loss.
There are a billion different strategies. Eat this, don't eat that, try intermittent fasting, have two meals a day, eat six small meals, keto, counting calories, tracking macros. It's exhausting.
And this is literally just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the trillions of ways we can lose weight. And I think I've tried at least 50% of these strategies, at least. And I've been gaining and losing the same 20 pounds for my entire life up until a few years ago.
If it was just a matter of knowing the how, it would seem to me that all of us would have found a fail-safe solution by now. Sometimes we blame the how for our lack of results. Like, I just can't cut carbs, or I can't wait until noon to have my first meal.
This or that strategy just won't work for me. And there is merit to this. Not every strategy will work for everyone in the same way.
So it's valuable to try different things until something works. But after a while, once we've tried a lot of different things, we begin to think it's not just a problem with the strategy, but it's a problem with us. There's something wrong with me that I can't lose weight, or that I can't keep off the weight and I just gain it back.
Weight loss is a helpful example because while it may not be true for all of us, many of us have spent some part of our lives considering our weight and wanting it to be different. So if this is true for you, you've likely stacked up quite a bit of evidence for what diets work for you and what diets don't. And depressingly, many of us have quite a few more examples of the weight loss strategies that don't work.
And even when we have found something that works, it often feels temporary. Six months, a year later, we find the weight we have lost has found us again. So if the how doesn't create the success, and we have a long list of hows that don't seem to work for us, we are left with the belief that it's us.
I'm the one who can't lose weight. I've struggled with weight all my life. I don't have motivation to stay on a diet.
I like food too much to be deprived all the time. We offer these reasons like it's the news. It's just a fact that I don't have motivation.
It's a fact that weight loss is a struggle. It's a fact that I have two choices. I can either lose weight and be miserable, or I can be happy and not lose weight.
We've had these thoughts for so long they become our identity without us even realizing it. When we believe I'm just not the kind of person who can achieve this goal, I feel helpless. What's the point of trying when it's not going to work again? And if I do try, in the back of my mind I'm waiting for the first sign of failure, the first glimmer of evidence to support my identity of someone who can't lose weight.
It almost feels safer to believe that there is something wrong with us. If we can blame it on who we are, and if we believe this identity is not in our control, it's just something we're born with or lacking in us, then can we really even expect ourselves to be successful? Maybe we should just give up ahead of time rather than commit to the hard work only to end up failing anyway. Let's cut out the middleman and limit our expectations, enjoy our life, disappointed but not deprived.
It's a place many of us get to, whether it's weight loss, getting to the gym, breaking a habit, or bigger goals like starting a new career, getting a job, meeting a new man, writing a book, launching a business. When the who of who we are does not meet our vision of what will be required of us to achieve our dreams, we decide to fail ahead of time. Give up and live our comfortable lives because we're fine.
There's nothing wrong with where I am right now. I don't need to be a size 10. Who cares if I have muscle? I'd rather enjoy my chocolate or my wine than be miserable without it.
I don't have time to find a job or a man. It seems like a lot of work. I'm not qualified.
I've spent too long out of the job market. I'm not sure I'll find someone with whom I'm compatible. Who would want to buy my book or my products or my services anyway? Who am I to think that I have what it takes to achieve this dream? So much easier to give up than risk failure and disappointment.
And look, there's nothing wrong comfortable. And there's nothing wrong with us that our minds automatically go to the negative. It's our brain's way of keeping us safe.
It's literally how our brains are wired, to keep us from harm, to minimize expenditure of energy. We don't naturally want to seek out rejection, disappointment, and failure. The question we have to ask ourselves is, is my vision of my dream worth the trade-off? Achieving our dreams, whether it's weight loss, personal connection, or professional accomplishment, whatever it is for you, achieving big goals will require some level of discomfort.
But achieving them will give us a much bigger emotional reward. Joy, happiness, pride, accomplishment, love. When we keep our lives small, we stay in comfort, and may be cheating ourselves of the bigger sense of joy and pride that comes from accomplishing bigger goals.
Like I said, I love making my bed in the morning and feel a hit of dopamine, a small acknowledgement that I feel accomplished when my life is tidy. But that doesn't compare to the sense of pride and accomplishment I could feel when pursuing something bigger. I found that I had been limiting myself to the small joys of a tidy home, a cared-for family, my daily glass of wine, all beautiful, worthy things.
But as I watched my boys strive for bigger and greater things, I asked myself, why not me? And when I got started, my vision for what I wanted my life to look like was not grand. In fact, what I really wanted in the beginning was just not to have to drink a glass or two of wine every night when I got home. Seriously, that was it.
I could envision how free I would feel without the guilt and the shame of drinking to relieve stress at the end of the day, when I didn't really want to. But I didn't believe I was the kind of person who could achieve it. I also didn't want to be the kind of person who could never have a drink.
I was stuck between wanting a drink and not wanting to drink, and convinced that my choice was either to feel comfortable in drinking or uncomfortable in not drinking. Both options felt terrible, and for a long time, it was easier to stay comfortable. I had a similar relationship with weight loss.
I wanted to lose 15 pounds, again, not a huge impossible goal, but it seemed impossible to me. I had 40 plus years of experience of not being successful. And while I would be able to lose some weight on diets in the beginning, the weight never stayed off.
So here I was, with an identity of someone who wasn't willing to experience what I thought would be the discomfort of giving up wine forever or committing to a diet long enough to see real results. The how of it wasn't a problem. Want to stop drinking? Just stop.
Want to lose weight? Be in a calorie deficit. Don't eat as much. I mean, when it comes down to it, the how can be just this simple.
But the how wasn't enough to get me the success I was looking for. Going back to the discussion related to marketing companies and non-profits, the reason investors or donors would give their hard-earned money to an organization is because they believed in the organization. That this was the organization, among a field of other organizations that did something very similar, that engaged in the same how.
That this was the organization that could achieve the impact that they promised. They believed in the who. When it comes to our own individual goals, there aren't millions of donors and investors to pitch our vision to.
There's just us. We are the only one who can believe in the who for ourselves. No one else can believe in us hard enough for it to make any difference.
So the key to achieving, or even to start going after, our impossible goals, no matter how big or small, is that we believe in the who before the how. Take a moment and envision a goal, any goal. Close your eyes and imagine the version of yourself who has already achieved this goal.
Stay here and imagine every detail about her. Specifically, what has she achieved? What does she believe about herself? What does she believe is possible for her? How does she feel now that she's achieved her impossible goal? What uncomfortable emotion is she willing to feel? What does she do when she doesn't feel like taking action? What does she think about the how or what it took for her to achieve her goal? Really spend some time with this and think about the future you who has already achieved your goal, whatever it is. If it's weight loss, if you were to lose the weight you want to lose, how would you feel? What would you believe about yourself? If you were to find a new partner, what do you think you would feel that is different from how you feel now? Loved? Connected? If you built a business, who do you think you would become in the process? Confident? Powerful? Accomplished? If you could see yourself happier, what emotion would you not feel as often? Worry? Anxiety? Sadness? Think about your own goal and compare the vision of you having achieved your goal with you in the present moment.
How are these two versions of yourself different? I find that we so often wish our lives were different, maybe even in just a small way, but we focus on what's wrong or what's missing and don't spend any time in the vision of it, in considering what it would even be like to be that version of yourself, because our minds tell us it's impossible or that we've tried and failed before because it seems out of reach for us. Maybe it's just easier not to spend too much time thinking about the dream, but what is your vision of how your life would change if you could accomplish that first goal? Losing weight? Meeting a man? Getting to the gym? Writing a book? Being happier? What would be different for you if that dream were done? Open your mind to the possibility of it. It doesn't matter if you don't know how to do it yet.
It doesn't matter that you've never done it before. Next week, I'll be taking this even further as we explore what's really holding us back from our dreams, but I leave you with this to ponder in the meantime. Believe in the who before the how.
Until next time, friends. Welcome to The Small Jar, a podcast where we explore how to intentionally design the life that you want in the space between motherhood and the empty nest. I'm your host, Jennifer Collins.
